Who's The Revolutionary? Who's Threatened The Violence? You, or Obama and His Leftist Radicals?

Obama is the one pursuing the radical course of action, which is why he is forever talking about healthcare, trying to defend his reforms and persuade doubters even after it's passed! He is the rebel. It is he who wants to destroy the American post-war way of healthcare. It is his party which has attempted to pervert the American constitution. It is he who means death to private health enterprise. It is he who means to expose millions to the risks of losing private coverage. It is he who will preside over the demise of Medicare benefits for seniors who need them most. Thwarting him and defeating him would mean a return, a rolling back, to the old constitutional order, a defense and preservation of life. It would be a healthy reaction, no violence and no innovation, to bring his program to an end and reverse it. His failure would be a shot heard round the world.

The following may be found here:

“A Revolution Not Made But Prevented”

Russell Kirk

WAS THE AMERICAN War of Independence a revolution? In the view of Edmund Burke and of the Whigs generally, it was not the sort of political and social overturn that the word “revolution” has come to signify nowadays. Rather, it paralleled that alteration of government in Britain which accompanied the accession of William and Mary to the throne, and which is styled, somewhat confusingly, “The Glorious Revolution of 1688.”

The most learned editor of Burke’s works, E. J. Payne, summarizes Burke’s account of the events of 1688-89 as “a revolution not made but prevented.” Let us see how that theory may be applicable to North American events nine decades later.

We need first to examine definitions of that ambiguous word “revolution.” The signification of the word was altered greatly by the catastrophic events of the French Revolution, commencing only two years after the Constitutional Convention of the United States. Before the French explosion of 1789-99, “revolution” commonly was employed to describe a round of periodic or recurrent changes or events, that is, the process of coming full cycle; or the act of rolling back or moving back, a return to a point previously occupied.

Not until the French radicals utterly overturned the old political and social order in their country did the word “revolution” acquire its present general meaning of a truly radical change in social and governmental institutions, a tremendous convulsion in society, producing huge alterations that might never be undone. Thus when the eighteenth-century Whigs praised the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which established their party’s domination, they did not mean that William and Mary, the Act of Settlement, and the Declaration of Rights had produced a radically new English political and social order. On the contrary, they argued that the English Revolution had restored tried and true constitutional practices, preservative of immemorial ways. It was James II, they contended, who had been perverting the English constitution; his overthrow had been a return, a rolling back, to old constitutional order; the Revolution of 1688, in short, had been a healthy reaction, not a bold innovation.

The Whigs, Burke among them, here were employing that word “revolution” in its older sense.

This shift in usage tends to confuse discussion today. If we employ the word “revolution” in its common signification near the end of the twentieth century, what occurred in 1688-89 was no true revolution. In the Whig interpretation of history, at least, the overturn of James II was a revolution not made, but prevented (according to the later definition of “revolution”).

But what of the events in North America from 1775 to 1781? Was the War of Independence no revolution?

That war, with the events immediately preceding and following it, constituted a series of movements which produced separation from Britain and the establishment of a different political order in most of British North America. Yet the Republic of the United States was an order new only in some aspects, founded upon a century and a half of colonial experience and upon institutions, customs, and beliefs mainly of British origin. The American Revolution did not result promptly in the creation of a new social order, nor did the leaders in that series of movements intend that the new nation should break with the conventions, the moral convictions, and the major institutions (except monarchy) out of which America had arisen. As John C. Calhoun expressed this three quarters of a century later, “The revolution, as it is called, produced no other changes than those which were necessarily caused by the declaration of independence.”

To apprehend how the leading Americans of the last quarter of the eighteenth century thought of their own revolution, it is valuable to turn to the arguments of Edmund Burke, which exercised so strong an influence in America, an influence more telling, indeed, after the adoption of the Constitution than earlier. (Until my own generation, Burke’s Speech on Conciliation with the American Colonies was studied closely in most American high schools.)

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, as earlier, Burke strongly approves the Revolution of 1688. “The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty,” Burke declares.

"The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any [scion] alien to the nature of the original plant. All the reformations we have hitherto made, have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity; and I hope, nay I am persuaded, that all those which possibly may be made hereafter, will be carefully formed upon analogical precedent, authority, and example."

The Whig apology for the expulsion of James II, then, here so succinctly expressed by Burke, was that James had begun to alter for the worse the old constitution of England: James was an innovator. As Burke writes elsewhere in the Reflections, “To have made a revolution is a measure which, prima fronte, requires an apology.” A very similar apology, we shall see, was made by the American leaders in their quarrel with king and Parliament, and for their act of separation. The Whig magnates had prevented James II from working a revolution; the American Patriots had prevented George III from working a revolution (a revolution, that is, in the twentieth-century sense of the word). If the events of 1688 and 1776 were revolutions at all, they were counter revolutions, intended to restore the old constitutions of government. So, at any rate, runs the Whig interpretation of history.

One will perceive that already, by 1790, Burke and the Old Whigs were involved in difficulty by this troublous word “revolution.” For the same word was coming to signify two very different phenomena. On the one hand, it meant a healthy return to old ways; on the other hand, it meant (with reference to what was happening in France) a violent destruction of the old order. The English Revolution and the French Revolution were contrary impulses, although for a brief while, with the summoning of the long-dormant Three Estates, it had appeared that the French movement too might be in part a turning back to old political ways.

In America, the dominant Federalists, and soon not the Federalists only, were similarly perplexed by the word. Here they stood, the victors of the American Revolution, Washington and Hamilton and Adams and Madison and Morris and all that breed; and they were aghast at the revolution running its course in France. They had fought to secure the “chartered rights of Englishmen” in America, those of the Bill of Rights of 1689; and now they were horrified by the consequences of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, borrowed in part from that very Declaration of Independence to which they had subscribed. The same revulsion soon spread to many of the Jeffersonian faction, to such early egalitarians as Randolph of Roanoke, Republican leader of the House of Representatives. It spread in England to the New Whigs, so that even Charles James Fox, by 1794, would declare, “I can hardly frame to myself the conditions of a people, in which I would not rather desire that they should continue, than fly to arms, and seek redress through the unknown miseries of a revolution.” In short, Whig revolution meant recovery of what was being lost; Jacobin revolution meant destruction of the fabric of society. The confounding of those two quite inconsonant interpretations of the word “revolution” troubles us still.

The Whig interpretation of history has been most seriously criticized, and perhaps confuted, by such recent historians as Sir Herbert Butterfield. No longer do most historians believe that James II could have worked fundamental constitutional alterations, nor that he intended to; and James was more tolerant than were his adversaries. What ruined him with the English people, indeed, was his Declaration for Liberty of Conscience, indulging Catholics and Dissenters; and what impelled William of Orange to supplant James was William’s dread of a popular rising that might overthrow the monarchy altogether and establish another Commonwealth. William, too, preferred preventing a revolution to making one. For a convincing brief study of the period, I commend Maurice Ashley’s The Glorious Revolution of 1688, published in 1966. Ashley doubts whether the overturn of 1688 did indeed constitute a “Glorious Revolution”; but he concludes that the event “undoubtedly contributed to the evolution of parliamentary democracy in England and of a balanced constitution in the United States of America.”

However that may be, Edmund Burke repeatedly and emphatically approved what had occurred in 1688 and 1689. The Whig interpretation was the creed of his party: it was the premise of his Thoughts on the Present Discontents and of his American speeches. It would not do for Burke, so eminent in Whig councils, to be found wanting in zeal for the Glorious Revolution that had dethroned a Papist. For Irish Tories had been among his ancestors; his mother and sister were Catholics (although that fact appears not to have been widely known); Burke was the agent at Westminster for the Irish Catholic interest; early in his career he had been accused by the old Duke of Newcastle of being “a Jesuit in disguise,” and a caricaturist had represented him in a Jesuit soutane. “Remember, remember the fifth of November”: Burke had been compelled to draw his sword to defend himself during the Gordon Riots. It was prudent for Burke to subscribe conspicuously to the Whig doctrines of 1688 and 1689.

Certainly Burke in part founded his vehement denunciation of the French Revolution upon his approbation of the English Revolution, of that “revolution” which had been a return, in Whig doctrine, to established political modes of yesteryear. Upon the same ground, Burke had attacked mordantly the American policies of George III, advocating a “salutary neglect” of the American colonies because it was to Britain’s interest, as to the colonies’ interest, that the old autonomy of the colonies should be preserved. It was King George, with his stubborn insistence upon taxing the Americans directly, who was the innovator, the revolutionary (in the French sense of the word), in Burke’s argument; Burke, with the Rockingham Whigs, sought to achieve compromise and conciliation.

But it does not follow that Burke approved what came to be called the American Revolution.

The notion that Burke rightly supported the American Revolution but inconsistently opposed the French Revolution is a vulgar error often refuted, by Woodrow Wilson, for one, in his article “Edmund.Burke and the French Revolution,” in the September 1901 issue of The Century Magazine. Burke advocated redress of American grievances, or at least tacit acceptance of certain American claims of prescriptive right; he never countenanced ambitions for total separation from the authority of Crown in Parliament. Burke’s stand is ably summed up by Ross Hoffman in his Edmund Burke, New York Agent (1956):

"Burke had no natural sympathy for America except as a part of the British Empire, and if, when the war came, he did not wish success to British arms, neither did he desire the Americans to triumph. Peace and Anglo-American reconciliation within the empire were his objects. After Americans won their independence, he seems to have lost all interest in their country."

During the decade before the shot heard round the world, Burke seemed a champion of the claims of Americans. That sympathy, nevertheless, was incidental to his championing of the rights of Englishmen. It was for English liberties that the Rockingham Whigs were earnestly concerned. If the king should succeed in dragooning Americans, might he not then turn to dragooning Englishmen? It was the belief of the Whigs that George III intended to resurrect royal prerogatives of Stuart and Tudor times; that he would make himself a despot. That peril the Whigs, and Burke in particular, with fierce invective, considerably exaggerated; but it is easy to be wise by hindsight. George III was a more formidable adversary than ever James II had been. Where James had been timid and indecisive, George was courageous and tenacious; and often George was clever, if obdurate, in his aspiration to rule as a Patriot King. At the end, Burke came to understand that in the heat of partisan passion he had reviled his king unjustly; and in his Letter to a Noble Lord (1796) he called George “a mild and benevolent sovereign.”

Yet neither to the American Patriots nor to Burke, in 1774 and 1775, had George III seemed either mild or benevolent. Upon the assumption that King George meant to root up the liberties of Englishmen, to trample upon the British constitution, the dominant faction of Whigs in America determined to raise armies and risk hanging. They declared that they were resisting pernicious innovations and defending ancient rights: that they were true-born Englishmen, up in arms to maintain what Burke called “the chartered rights” of their nation. They appealed to the Declaration of Rights of 1689; they offered for their violent resistance to royal authority the very apology offered by the Whigs of 1688. In the older sense of that uneasy word “revolution,” they were endeavoring to prevent, rather than to make, a revolution. Or such was the case they made until a French alliance became indispensable.

II

THE THESIS THAT the Patriots intended no radical break with the past, that they thought of themselves as conservators rather than as innovators, scarcely is peculiar to your servant. It is now dominant among leading historians of American politics. It is most succinctly stated by Daniel Boorstin in his slim volume The Genius of American Politics (1953):

"The most obvious peculiarity of our American Revolution is that, in the modern European sense of the word, it was hardly a revolution at all. The Daughters of the American Revolution, who have been understandably sensitive on this subject, have always insisted in their literature that the American Revolution was no revolution but merely a colonial rebellion. The more I have looked into the subject, the more convinced I have become of the wisdom of their naivete. 'The social condition and the Constitution of the Americans are democratic,' de Tocqueville observed about a hundred years ago. 'But they have not had a democratic revolution.' This fact is surely one of the more important of our history."

The attainment of America’s independence, Boorstin makes clear in his writings, was not the work of what Burke called “theoretic dogma.” What most moved the Americans of that time was their own colonial experience: they were defending their right to go on living in the future much as they had lived in the past; they were not marching to Zion. To quote Boorstin directly again:

"The American Revolution was in a very special way conceived as both a vindication of the British past and an affirmation of an American future. The British past was contained in ancient and living institutions rather than in doctrines; and the American future was never to be contained in a theory."

This point is made with equal force by Clinton Rossiter in his Seedtime of the Republic: The Origin of the American Tradition of Political Liberty (1953). In the course of his discussion of Richard Bland, Rossiter remarks that

"Throughout the colonial period and right down to the last months before the Declaration of Independence, politically conscious Americans looked upon the British Constitution rather than natural law as the bulwark of their cherished liberties. Practical political thinking in eighteenth-century America was dominated by two assumptions: that the British Constitution was the best and happiest of all possible forms of government, and that the colonists, descendants of freeborn Englishmen, enjoyed the blessings of this constitution to the fullest extent consistent with a wilderness environment."

Men like Bland, and those, too, like Patrick Henry, more radical than Bland, regarded themselves as the defenders of a venerable constitution, not as marchers in the dawn of a Brave New World. As Rossiter continues in his chapter on the Rights of Man: “Virginians made excellent practical use of this distinction. When their last royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, pro- claimed them to be in rebellion, they retorted immediately in print that he was the rebel and they the saviors of the constitution.” It was the case of James II and arbitrary power all over again.

Or turn to H. Trevor Colbourn’s study The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (1963). He writes:

"In insisting upon rights which their history showed were deeply embedded in antiquity, American Revolutionaries argued that their stand was essentially conservative; it was the corrupted mother country which was pursuing a radical course of action, pressing innovations and encroachments upon her long-suffering colonies. Independence was in large measure the product of the historical concepts of the men who made it, men who furnished intellectual as well as political leadership to a new nation."

Here we have for authority the famous sentences of Patrick Henry in 1775: “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.” The appeal of even the more passionate leaders of the American rising against royal innovation was to precedent and old usage, not to utopian visions.

The men who made the American Revolution, in fine, had little intention of making a revolution in the French sense (so soon to follow) of a reconstitution of society. Until little choice remained to them, they were anything but enthusiasts even for separation from Britain. This is brought out in an interesting conversation between Burke and Benjamin Franklin, on the eve of Franklin’s departure from London for America; Burke relates this in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791).

"In this discourse Dr. Franklin lamented, and with apparent sincerity, the separation which he feared as inevitable between Great Britain and her colonies. He certainly spoke of it as an event which gave him the greatest concern. America, he said, would never again see such happy days as she had passed under the protection of England. He observed, that ours was the only instance of a great empire, in which the most distant parts and members had been as well governed as the metropolis and its vicinage: but that the Americans were going to lose the means which secured to them this rare and precious advantage. The question with them was not whether they were to remain as they had been before the troubles, for better, he allowed, they could not hope to be; but whether they were to give up so happy a situation without a struggle? Mr. Burke had several other conversations with him about that time, in none of which, soured and exasperated as his mind certainly was, did he discover any other wish in favour of America than for a security to its ancient condition. Mr. Burke’s conversation with other Americans was large indeed, and his inquiries extensive and diligent. Trusting to the result of all these means of information, but trusting much more in the public presumptive indications I have just referred to, and to the reiterated, solemn declarations of their assemblies, he always firmly believed that they were purely on the defensive in that rebellion. He considered the Americans as standing at that time, and in that controversy, in the same relation to England, as England did to King James the Second, in 1688. He believed, that they had taken up arms from one motive only; that is, our attempting to tax them without their consent; to tax them for the purposes of maintaining civil and military establishments. If this attempt of ours could have been practically established, he thought, with them, that their assemblies would become totally useless; that, under the system of policy which was then pursued, the Americans could have no sort of security for their laws or liberties, or for any part of them; and that the very circumstance of our freedom would have augmented the weight of their slavery."

Such were the language and the convictions of the American Patriots, as Rossiter puts it, “right down to the last months before the Declaration of Independence.” Then what account do we make of the highly theoretical and abstract language of the first part of the Declaration of In- dependence, with its appeal to “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” to self-evident truths, to a right to abolish any form of government? Why is Parliament not even mentioned in the Declaration? What has become of the English constitution, the rights of Englishmen, the citing of English precedents, the references to James II and the Glorious Revolution?

These startling inclusions and omissions are discussed penetratingly by Carl Becker in The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas, first published in 1922. Indeed the language of much of the Declaration is the language of the French Enlightenment, and, more immediately, the language of the Thomas Jefferson of 1776, rather than the tone and temper of the typical member of the Continental Congress:

"Not without reason was Jefferson most at home in Paris. By the qualities of his mind and temperament he really belonged to the philosophical school, to the Encyclopaedists, those generous souls who loved mankind by virtue of not knowing too much about men, who worshipped reason with unreasoning faith, who made a study of Nature while cultivating a studied aversion for “enthusiasm,” and strong religious emotion. Like them, Jefferson, in his earlier years especially, impresses one as being a radical by profession. We often feel that he defends certain practices and ideas, that he denounces certain customs or institutions, not so much from independent reflection or deep-seated conviction on the particular matter in hand as because in general these are the things that a philosopher and a man of virtue ought naturally to defend or denounce. It belonged to the eighteenth-century philosopher, as a matter of course, to apostrophize Nature, to defend Liberty, to denounce Tyranny, perchance to shed tears at the thought of a virtuous action."

The Francophile Jefferson, in other words, was atypical of the men, steeped in Blackstone and constitutional history, who sat in the Continental Congress. Yet the Congress accepted Jefferson’s Declaration, unprotestingly. Why?

Because aid from France had become an urgent necessity for the Patriot cause. The phrases of the Declaration, congenial to the philosophes, were calculated to wake strong sympathy in France’s climate of opinion; and, as Becker emphasizes, those phrases achieved with high success precisely that result. It would have been not merely pointless, but counterproductive, to appeal for French assistance on the ground of the ancient rights of Englishmen; the French did not wish Englishmen well.

Here we turn again to the quotable Daniel Boorstin (who differs somewhat with Becker). It is not to the Declaration we should look, Boorstin suggests, if we seek to understand the motives of the men who accomplished the American Revolution: not, at least, to the Declaration’s first two paragraphs. “People have grasped at ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ forgetting that it was two-thirds borrowed and, altogether, only part of a preamble,” Boorstin writes. “We have repeated that ‘all men are created equal’ without daring to discover what it meant and without realizing that probably to none of the men who spoke it did it mean what we would like it to mean.” Really, he tells us, the Revolution was all about no taxation without representation. “It is my view that the major issue of the American Revolution was the true constitution of the British Empire, which is a pretty technical legal problem.”

Amen to that. Burke declared, looking upon the ghastly spectacle of the French Revolution, that nothing is more consummately wicked than the heart of an abstract metaphysician who aspires to govern a nation by utopian designs, regardless of prudence, historical experience, convention, custom, the complexities of political compromise, and long-received principles of morality. The men who made the American Revolution were not revolutionaries of the meta- physical sort. They had practical grievances; they sought practical redress; not obtaining it, they settled upon separation from the Crown in Parliament as a hard necessity. That act was meant not as a repudiation of their past, but as a means for preventing the destruction of their pattern of politics by King George’s presumed intended revolution of arbitrary power, after which, in Burke’s phrase, “the Americans could have no sort of security for their laws or liberties.” That is not the cast of mind which is encountered among the revolutionaries of the twentieth century.

III

THE CAREFUL STUDY of history is of high value, among other reasons because it may instruct us, sometimes, concerning ways to deal with our present discontents. I do not mean simply that history repeats itself, or repeats itself with variations, although there is something in that, and particularly in the history of revolutions on the French model, which devour their own children. (Here I commend Crane Brinton‘s The Anatomy of Revolution and D. W. Brogan’s The Price of Revolution.) I am suggesting, rather, that deficiency in historical perspective leads to the ruinous blunders of ideologues, whom Burckhardt calls “the terrible simplifiers,” while sound historical knowledge may diminish the force of Hegel’s aphorism that “we learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”

The history of this slippery word “revolution” is a case in point. Political terms have historical origins. If one is ignorant of those historical origins, powerful statesmen are ignorant of them, great errors become possible. It is as if one were to confound the word “law” as a term of jurisprudence with the word “law” as a term of natural science. If one assumes that the word “revolution” signifies always the same phenomenon, regardless of historical background, one may make miscalculations with grave consequences, perhaps fatal consequences.

The French Revolution was a very different phenomenon, as was its successor, the Russian Revolution. These were philosophical revolutions, or, as we say nowadays with greater precision, ideological revolutions: catastrophic upheavals, in the later signification of the term “revolution.” Their objectives were unlimited, in the sense of being utopian; their consequences were quite the contrary of what their original authors had hoped for.To apprehend the French Revolution, we still do well to turn to the analyses by Tocqueville and by Taine; for the Bolshevik Revolution, we have the recent books by Solzhenitsyn, Shafarevich, and others. “To begin with unlimited liberty,” says Fyodor Dostoievski, “is to end with unlimited despotism.” Or, as Burke put it, to be possessed liberty must be limited.

The American Revolution, or War of Independence, was a preventive movement, intended to preserve an old constitutional structure for the most part. Its limited objectives attained, order was restored. It arose from causes intimately bound up with the colonial experience and the British constitution, and little connected with the causes of the French Revolution. In intention, at least, it was a “revolution” in the meaning of that term generally accepted during the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century.

A considerable element of the population of these United States has tended to fancy, almost from the inception of the Republic, that all revolutions everywhere somehow are emulatory of the American War of Independence and ought to lead to similar democratic institutions. Revolutionary ideologues in many lands have played upon this American naivete, successfully enough, from Havana to Saigon. This widespread American illusion, or confusion about the word “revolution,” has led not merely to sentimentality in policy regarding virulent Marxist or nationalistic movements in their earlier stages, but also to unfounded expectations that some magic overnight “democratic reforms," free elections especially, can suffice to restrain what Burke called “an armed doctrine.” How many Americans forget, or never knew, that in time of civil war Abraham Lincoln found it necessary to suspend writs of habeas corpus?

Knowledge of history is no perfect safeguard against such blunders. It did not save Woodrow Wilson, who had read a great deal of history, from miscalculations about the consequences of ”self-determination” in central Europe. It did not save his advisor Herbert Hoover, who knew some history, from fancying that an improbable “restoration of the Habsburg tyranny” in central Europe was a more imminent menace than live and kicking Bolshevism or the recrudescence of German ambitions. Nevertheless, knowledge of history generally and knowledge of the historical origin of political terms are some insurance against ideological in- fatuation or sentimental sloganizing.

The crying need of our age is to avert revolutions, not to multiply them. Recent revolutions have reduced half the world to servitude of body and mind, and to extreme poverty, in Ethiopia and Chad, in Cambodia and Timor, and in fifty other lands. What we call the American Revolution had fortunate consequences because, in some sense, it was a revolution not made, but prevented. Folk who fancy the phrase “permanent revolution” are advocating, if unwittingly, permanent misery. The first step toward recovery from this confusion is to apprehend that the word “revolution” has a variety of meanings; that not all revolutions are cut from the same cloth; that politics cannot be divorced from history; and that “revolution,” in its common twentieth-century signification, is no highroad to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Imposing A Century-Old Urge To Regiment Reality

Don't let the beginning fool you. The passage of just a few hours time has changed things, but not enough of them. By the time you get to the end of the article, you'll be running to find your pitchfork and a torch.

One of the finest writers around anywhere, Patrick McIlheran in "Health Care Designed in a Rug Bazaar" found here puts his finger on the wealth redistribution which is fundamental to the healthcare reform:

Congressional accountants say the cost of health care subsidies will rise 8% a year. ...

[T]he bill will mask this fundamental problem by taking money from some Americans - for instance, by more heavily taxing investments, and isn't that how to grow an economy? - and giving it to others. Families making $80,000 a year would get subsidies. By its design, the plan enshrines the idea that you consume health care someone else buys, the very mechanism leading to spiraling costs.

This plan is not single-payer, but it's not the improved market that backers claim. It is a parody of a market. You cannot choose to buy coverage but must buy it. Washington will design the plans - low-cost, high-deductible coverage, for instance, will be practically impossible. The prices will be controlled. The doctors will be told how to practice.

Your government will command, prohibit or direct every move in the belief that you're an incorrigible slob and your doctor is a fool. This plan does not build a single-payer hell, but pervasive bureaucratic control amounts to grading the site for it.

None of this is even new. By backers' own admission, they're doing what Teddy Roosevelt wanted to do 100 years ago. This is the imposition of a century-old urge to regiment reality. Previous half-steps toward that got us the mess we're in now, so how will this bring anything but disaster?

Follow the link for the rest.

Remember This Rule: Titles of Legislation Do The Opposite of What They Promise

Ominously entitled "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" it is certain that the effect of the legislation will be anything but protection of patients and affordable care:

language of the Hyde Amendment prohibiting the use of federal funds for abortion will become obsolete;

$500 billion in new taxes;

a similarly sized cut to Medicare;

additions to the budget deficits because of phony accounting involving ten years of taxes but only six years of expenditures;

and government dictating that you purchase insurance approved by the Secretary of HHS even if you don't want it, need it or use it.

The Hill is reporting just before midnight Saturday that the bills have been voted to the floor:

In a vote of 8-5 late Saturday night, the House Rules Committee voted to send the healthcare bill to the floor for a Sunday vote.

Democratic Rep. Mike Arcuri (N.Y.) was the only committee member to break party ranks.

Arcuri is also a firm "no" vote against the health bill. "After several meetings and conversations with the president, Speaker of the House, administration officials and colleagues, I am not convinced enough changes can be made to the Senate health care bill to meet the needs of the people in my district," he had said in his Thursday statement announcing his vote.

Here is the text of the rule:

Senate Amendments to H.R. 3590 - the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act"

H.R. 4872 - the "Reconciliation Act of 2010"

The rest is here.

What's The Difference Between A President and A King?

"You can say no to a president."

Read the rest here.

A Hiving We Will Go

Michael W. McConnell of Stanford University, a former federal judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, makes the point today many of us have been trying to make all week, namely, that the healthcare bill that might pass the House, consisting of two parts, is going to be "hived," a fine old English word of Germanic origin which means "separated off from a larger thing."

This hiving of the bill will mean that the president will be presented with a bill to sign which is missing a part of itself by intent and design, because the House which is sending it knows what the constitution's meaning is, namely, that bills must be identical from the House and the Senate before they can be signed into law. They just don't want to admit it. The House wants to pretend to have voted for the Senate healthcare bill just as much as it wants to pretend to be sending the same bill as the Senate passed to the president.

The problem is that what the president will sign won't be the same bill that passed the Senate, nor will it have passed in the same politically accountable way, with Yeas and Nays associated with it. To put it in a nutshell, House leadership doesn't have the courage of its lawless convictions. They're a bunch of cowards and traitors, and they know it.

Here's the relevant passage from McConnell:

No one doubts that the House can consolidate two bills in a single measure; the question is whether, having done so, it may then hive the resulting bill into two parts, treating one part as an enrolled bill ready for presidential signature and the other part as a House bill ready for senatorial consideration. That seems inconsistent with the principle that the president may sign only bills in the exact form that they have passed both houses. A combination of two bills is not in "the same form" as either bill separately.

The passage is part of an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal dated March 20, 2010 under the title "The Health Vote and the Constitution -- II: The House Can't Approve The Senate Bill In The Same Legislation By Which It Approves Changes To The Senate Bill."

Feds Must Disclose Where Over $2 Trillion Of Taxpayer Money Has Gone

And I'll bet you didn't know it was missing! The courts have spoken twice, but expect more delaying tactics by the Fed. Excerpts from the Bloomberg.com story as posted here follow:

The US Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled today that the Fed must release records of the unprecedented $2 trillion US loan program launched primarily after the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. The ruling upholds a decision of a lower-court judge, who in August ordered that the information be released. ...

The US Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, “sets forth no basis for the exemption the Board asks us to read into it,” US Circuit Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs wrote in the opinion. “If the Board believes such an exemption would better serve the national interest, it should ask Congress to amend the statute.” ...

“We’re obviously pleased with the court’s decision, which is an important affirmation of the public’s right to know what its government is up to,” said Thomas Golden, a partner at New York-based Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP and Bloomberg’s outside counsel. ...

Lawyers for Bloomberg argued in court that the public has the right to know basic information about the “unprecedented and highly controversial use” of public money.

“Bloomberg has been trying for almost two years to break down a brick wall of secrecy in order to vindicate the public’s right to learn basic information,” Golden wrote in court filings. ...

The Fed’s balance sheet debt doubled after lending standards were relaxed following Lehman’s failure on Sept. 15, 2008. That year, the Fed began extending credit directly to companies that weren’t banks for the first time since the 1930s. Total central bank lending exceeded $2 trillion for the first time on Nov. 6, 2008, reaching $2.14 trillion on Sept. 23, 2009. ...

The case is Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 09-04083, US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (New York).

And You Thought It Stood For "Main Stream Media"

"[T]he rate of new HIV diagnoses among MSM [men having sex with men] in the U.S. is more than 44 times that of other men (range: 522–989 per 100,000 MSM vs. 12 per 100,000 other men)."

h/t Centers for Disease Control, via Volokh here

Top Ten Reasons Why The Left Hates The Senate Healthcare Bill

Top 10 Reasons to Kill Senate Health Care Bill (from Fire Dog Lake here):

1. Forces you to pay up to 8% of your income to private insurance corporations — whether you want to or not.

2. If you refuse to buy the insurance, you’ll have to pay penalties of up to 2% of your annual income to the IRS.

3. Many will be forced to buy poor-quality insurance they can’t afford to use, with $11,900 in annual out-of-pocket expenses over and above their annual premiums.

4. Massive restriction on a woman’s right to choose, designed to trigger a challenge to Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court.

5. Paid for by taxes on the middle class insurance plan you have right now through your employer, causing them to cut back benefits and increase co-pays.

6. Many of the taxes to pay for the bill start now, but most Americans won’t see any benefits — like an end to discrimination against those with preexisting conditions — until 2014 when the program begins.

7. Allows insurance companies to charge people who are older 300% more than others.

8. Grants monopolies to drug companies that will keep generic versions of expensive biotech drugs from ever coming to market.

9. No re-importation of prescription drugs, which would save consumers $100 billion over 10 years.

10. The cost of medical care will continue to rise, and insurance premiums for a family of four will rise an average of $1,000 a year — meaning in 10 years, your family’s insurance premium will be $10,000 more annually than it is right now.

House of Representatives Main Switchboard: (202) 224-3121

Seen On A Car In Maine

h/t Theo

Of 56 Democrat Women in the House, Just 2 Voted For Stupak

Kathleen Dahlkemper of Pennsylvania and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio voted for the Stupak Amendment last November, but for the House healthcare bill. All the other women in the House Democrat Caucus, 54 of them, voted against the Stupak Amendment which prohibits federal funding of abortion.

Only Stephanie Herseth Sandlin of South Dakota, Suzanne Kosmas of Florida, and Betsy Markey of Colorado voted against the House healthcare bill.

Nancy Pelosi is whipping them all today, according to Roll Call:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is asking all female Democratic Members to attend a hastily called meeting Wednesday morning but isn’t saying what the meeting is about. . . .

The meeting comes as Democratic leaders enter the final stretch of health care reform — and as they scramble to address fractures in their Caucus over abortion and immigration provisions in the bill.

The full story is here.

Louise Slaughter's Rules Committee: Das Schlachthaus of the Constitution

Yes, noxious things indeed emanate out of the slaughterhouse of the constitution, Democrat Representative Louise Slaughter's (NY-28) Rules Committee [(202) 225-3615]. Do you remember the speech code she "updated" to protect the current president from hurtful epithets from the House floor?

Despite the code, people defiantly think their thoughts anyway, say about how Obama hides behind that woman's skirts. Or about how his subsequent indecorous remarks to the Supreme Court before Congress assembled just prove that he's a hypocrite himself when it comes to decorum, in addition to being a liar on healthcare. Read Paragraph 25 "References to Executive Officials" for yourself here and a summary here with video of the Rep. Wilson incident. Louise Slaughter is all about limiting free speech, to protect her man.

And now this tyrant of a woman is trying to slaughter the constitution itself by dispensing with the requirement to vote on legislation and send it to the president. In short she is in revolt against Article I, Section 7 of the constitution. But it's not just her in revolt. She's doing this for Obama, whom she serves. The truth is that it is Obama who is in revolt against the constitution. He's just organizing the Washington community to pull it off.

If the Senate healthcare bill is to become law as the president wants (after all he's a creature of the Senate, isn't he?), the constitution requires that "the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and Nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively." There are not enough votes in the House to pass the bill which passed in the Senate. So Slaughter instead wants the House to deem that this has already occurred in both Houses when it has in fact occurred in only one. It's like a lawyer stipulating to certain facts, except in this case there is no real fact in the House, only the desire, which the wrath of constituencies back home has up to this point thwarted from expressing itself successfully.

In other words, Slaughter wants the House to vote for something entirely new, something which pretends the Senate healthcare bill has already passed in the House when it has not. There will be no yeas and Nays recorded for the Senate healthcare bill as such anywhere except where they have been recorded already, in the Senate, and therefore there will be no healthcare legislation per se to send on to the president. All they will have is a Senate healthcare bill which has in fact stalled in the House, and what amounts to a new "let's pretend" bill.

Secondly (and this point is crucial but not at all appreciated so far) since no bill from the Senate will in fact have been passed in the House, if the House passes a bill which merely assumes that the Senate healthcare bill is passed and sends that on to the president for signature, the House will be guilty of violating the constitution because it did not first send it to the Senate to have the "let's pretend" bill ratified there, which it must also do, according to the constitution. Bills must have yeas and Nays recorded from both chambers, remember? In other words, the House is about to circumvent the constitution by by-passing the Senate and sending the "let's pretend" bill directly to the president, asserting, in desperation, that it has Senate approval by incorporation.

In effect the House leadership is playing a game of chicken with the Senate, knowing that because the executive branch has got their back, the Senate can do nothing and can be hung out to dry. There is no mechanism by which the Senate may intrude itself anymore since sending their bill to the House. The filibuster would only be a threat if a bill came back to the Senate, which explains why everything is happening the way it is happening: A bill must by all means be prevented from returning to the Senate, where it will die a death by a thousand cuts. The only mechanism which the Senate might naturally rely upon now in the event of House misbehavior would be the presidential veto, but the president is not going to veto the "let's pretend" bill. The president is conspiring with the House to get such a bill, and there is nothing the Senate can do about that anymore. And in point of fact, the majority in the Senate will be happy to see their bill become the law, despite the lawlessness that made it happen. A concluding note of irony might be that President Obama might delay his vacation until the "let's pretend" bill is presented to him, and then leave for ten days without signing the bill.

If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) [another federal accommodation of religion!] after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it . . ..

(Article I. Section 7.)

He could always claim he never signed the bill, just as the cowardly representatives in the House will claim, too. Those six little words, "as if he had signed it," at once the inspiration perhaps for the whole effort at "deeming," and for avoiding responsibility for the effort at the same time, used against the will of the American people.

It remains to be seen if Americans will just sit by and watch America burn to the ground like Dresden did in the novel Slaughterhouse Five. I fully expect them to. They voted for this guy. They do not want to think that Slaughter and the Left in this country are attempting a coup. They resemble no one so much as Billy Pilgrim, whose response to everything, good or evil, was "so it goes." At least a few people seem concerned, but not enough as Anthony Dick notes here. One can only hope that patriots in the House, if there are any left, will see Slaughter's Solution for what Dick rightly says it is: subterfuge. I'll call it by its other name: treason against the United States. Expelling Louise Slaughter, as Mark Levin calls for, doesn't begin to go far enough. Louise Slaughter should be arrested and put on trial. Tomorrow.

Contemptuous Dismissal of our Democracy, by Democrats

Abe Greenwald at Contentions doesn't mince words about the very serious assault being waged on our way of life by one of our own political parties:

For our current leaders, the mission goes forward. Plan B, it turns out, is as alien to the American experience as Plan A. Having failed to reshape our democracy through demagoguery, Obama is attempting to subvert it by decree. If he needs to dispense with the “we” in “yes we can,” so be it. The “our” in “our time is now”? Gone.

As the President and Nancy Pelosi have explained, they’re down to yes and now. Here’s how Pelosi recently described her health-care battle stance:

We will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in. But we are going to get health care reform passed for the American people for their own personal health and economic security and for the important role that it will play in reducing the deficit.

The barriers she cites are none other than the checks and balances, the procedural roadblocks, put in place centuries ago so that no lawmaker or executive could force policy upon the American people “for their own personal health and economic security.” Speaker Pelosi’s statement is not merely colorful evidence of tenacity and cunning. It is a contemptuous dismissal of democracy. Just as the plan for socialist annexation of one sixth of the economy is a dismissal of free-market capitalism.

Read the rest here.

Our Liberty Is Not Abstract, But Sensible

Tony Blankley zeroes in here on the distinctive American attachment to the tangible, a disposition we inherited more from Rome than from Athens, from Antiquity not Modernity, from tradition not innovation, from Burke not Johnson:

March 10, 2010

An American Obsession with Freedom

By Tony Blankley

The publishing of the Declaration of Independence 233 years ago by our Founders was responded to in London by two of the 18th century's greatest minds: Dr. Samuel Johnson (after whom a literary age was named) and Edmund Burke (the intellectual father of modern Anglo-American conservatism).

Dr. Johnson made the harsh assertion that our Declaration was "the delirious dream of republican fanaticism" that, if sincere, would "put the axe to the roots of all government." Moreover, he went on, it was the rankest hypocrisy for owners of slaves to shout for freedom, or, as Johnson put it: "Why is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?"

But it was Edmund Burke who had the more profound insight. He recognized that it wasn't despite being slaveholders that American Colonists felt so powerfully about liberty. Rather, being in the midst of the obvious evils of slavery, those men who were free more fully appreciated their freedom. "Those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of rank and privilege," Burke argued. Or, as Jedediah Purdy (from whose historically rich and ingenious book "A Tolerable Anarchy" I have abstracted these observations) put it: "Slavery made masters uniquely sensitive to any invasion of their independence."

These sensitivities -- sensibilities -- that Burke so shrewdly observed in 1775 continue to manifest themselves in American politics today as we fight over socializing health care, nationalizing industries, indebting our grandchildren, regulating and taxing energy creation and the other intrusions into what Americans have long considered not to be the government's business.

Burke would understand what Europeans (and many European-influenced Americans) in 2010 continue to scoff at as America's obsession with the slogan of freedom. Because although we Americans may talk about freedom as an abstraction -- and believe in freedom as an abstraction -- our politics come alive when we experience an intrusion into what John Adams called "the sensations of freedom."

As Burke explained: "Abstract liberty, like other abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point which ... becomes the criterion of their happiness."

I believe that the rise of the Tea Party movement and the impassioned nature of American politics in 2009-10 is the result of the Obama administration's having, probably inadvertently, intruded into "some favorite points which becomes the criterion of (our) happiness."

That is to say, though the Democrats see their health care proposal as merely another step along a continuum of government action, a strong majority of the American people sense that the "quantity" of the intrusion has changed the "quality" of the intrusion.

What is seen, currently, as a basically private-sector health process with some government intervention has crossed over, in the Democrats' plans, into basically a government system. And, by being seen to have so crossed over, it is an attack on "some sensible object" (i.e. private-sector health care) in which our "Liberty inheres."

Similarly, the shift from less than $500 billion of annual deficit in the last George W. Bush year to a $1.5 trillion deficit in each of the first and second Obama years (and the proposed addition of almost $10 trillion of new public debt over the next decade) has -- by the increase in quantity -- changed the nature of public debt in such a way as to intrude into our sense of our fundamental liberty.

If the Chinese, by selling off our debt notes, can destroy our economy and way of life at a whim -- as the accumulating debt suggests is possible -- then what had been merely irresponsible, self-indulgent deficit spending by both Republicans and Democrats in the recent past has transformed into a fundamental threat to our liberty and our grandchildren's future.

The Obama administration and the Democrats crossed a line and touched a nerve in America's body politic. We sense our fundamental freedom endangered. And the response will be as remorseless as was our revolution against the British. Against all odds, the intrusion on those things around which our "liberty inheres" will be driven from our political midst. (It is not Waterloo, but Yorktown, that is likely to be the terminal point.)

The first hard step in that defense will be the election in November. The second, even harder step will be the rollback of already enacted debt and damage to our freedom. Defining the extent and detail of the rollback must be the agenda for the government's loyal opposition in this year's election. And the things to which we are loyal are our Constitution, our founding principles and the good institutions and social contrivances brought into being by those principles over our providential history.

Obama as Stalinist: The People Must Be In Error About Healthcare

It's all there if you really think about it, paler because it lacks a military face, but discernible nonetheless:

Obama's stated goal to transform the country rapidly;

the cult of personality which he has done nothing to discourage;

his enthusiasm for interfering with common liberties from fishing to private communications;

state-capitalism in the form of government ownership of industry;

enrichment of the unionized federal workforce at the expense of the unemployment-ravaged private sector;

and the co-opting of the radicals who supported him in the interest of promoting his own personal power.

All in all, an un-democratic man indeed, who flies under the cover of race.

And Jay Cost hopes "moderates" in the Democrat party can stop him? After what Obama did to a centrist like Representative Eric Massa (NY-29)? Moderation is hardly what is called for in a situation like this.

March 09, 2010

It's Time for Moderate House Democrats to Stand Up to Obama

Jay Cost

According to Gallup, Barack Obama entered the presidency with a net approval rating (i.e. percent approve minus percent disapprove) of 56%. This past weekend, he was at just +1%. No newly elected President has fallen so far so fast since polling began. Only Bill Clinton - in his difficult first year in office - came close.

Some pundits have an overly-reductionist take on Obama's fast-declining numbers, arguing that the precipitous drop is entirely due to the stagnant economy. They like to draw a comparison to Ronald Reagan, whose numbers fell quickly as he dealt with a recession early in his term. No doubt some of Obama's decline is related to the recession, but the 44th President - unlike the 40th - was elected when the economy was already contracting. This gives Obama political cover that Reagan did not have. Just 7% of Americans, according to a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, blame Obama for the recession.

If it's more than the economy, what else is it? Health care is a strong contender. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day of last year, Obama's net job approval rating in the RCP average declined by 63%. This was the period when House Democrats were beginning to divide openly over their reform proposals, and when the town hall protests started. As the debate has dragged on, his net approval has inched closer and closer to zero. Today, the country is essentially split in half over his tenure.

That split is not random. It breaks down along the typical cleavages. Obama is strong in the East; weak in the South. Young people like him; seniors do not. Democrats stand with him; Republicans and Independents don't. Blacks approve; whites do not. Single people support him; married people don't.

Yet the Democratic Party controls Congress today because in the last two election cycles it healed these divisions, at least partially. In 2008, House Democrats split the South. They won voters young and old. They won Independents. They held their own with whites. They split married voters. This is why they have a majority in the 110th House of Representatives.

If the current trends in public opinion continue, they will lose that majority because of President Obama's divisiveness. We have seen hints of things to come with GOP victories in Virginia, New Jersey, and most recently Massachusetts - as the difference-making voters for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008 turned to the Grand Old Party.

Either Mr. Obama and his advisors are blind to this, or they don't care, or both. I think it's both; call it willful blindness, a self-serving belief that 2008 was indeed a liberal realignment, and that the numbers will eventually reflect it. Regardless, House Democrats should know that the voters who have made them a majority party in recent cycles strongly oppose this health care bill; they have turned against President Obama; and they will eventually turn against them if they go along with the President. Moderates from the South and Midwest will be the first to go down to defeat as the party shrinks from a majority to a minority.

Yet such crassly selfish political considerations are not at the core of the debate moderate Democrats should be having. The real question is this: what is the Democratic Party all about? As I have argued before, the substance of this bill - with a mandate enforced by the Internal Revenue Service that all citizens buy a product from a private company as part of the terms of public citizenship - is antithetical to the historical spirit of the party.

But it's not just the substance. It's the process. The ever-obliging mainstream media have helpfully reduced the appropriateness of reconciliation to a merely legislative question, thus obscuring the bigger political reality: the Democrats must use reconciliation to pass health care because they no longer have a filibuster-proof majority; they no longer have a filibuster-proof majority in part because of health care. Their chosen strategy may pass muster with the Senate parliamentarian, but it suggests a blatant disregard for public opinion.

This is par for the course for the 44th President, who has made pretty clear his belief that, when he and the people disagree, the people must be in error. Democratic primary voters in small town Pennsylvania opposed him not because he was inexperienced, you see, but because their bitterness made them provincial. Now, Americans who don't support this bill simply don't understand it. They'll see things better after the Congress passes it.

Such arrogance makes for bad politics because it's un-democratic. Yet it's also un-Democratic. It's not unreasonable to expect the party of the people to respect the judgment of the people, especially on an issue that is so important and that has attracted so much attention. The public is as well informed about the health care debate as they ever are about anything. One would hope that the Democratic Party would acknowledge and respect this fact.

Progressives at liberal opinion journals and in the D.C. press corps have had trouble with this idea - and have ironically taken to employing fallacies of composition to suggest that public opposition is irrational. The people like the various elements of the bill, so the fact that they dislike the whole thing is a sign that they're not thinking clearly. If this argument was valid - if the whole was merely the sum of its parts - the Washington Redskins, an organization that likes to lure the best players from other teams rather than build from the ground up, would stand at the top of the National Football League.

The Democratic Party is broader than its progressive intellectuals and media cheerleaders. It has the majority not just because of San Francisco, California - but also Murfreesboro, Tennessee and Zanesville, Ohio. Those places voted Democratic in the 2008 House elections. Some progressives, especially in the blogosphere, see that as a problem - the "ConservaDems" they elect hold up true progress. But it's historically the greatest strength of the Democratic Party, whose appeal has long been much broader than the GOP's.

House Democrats should bear this in mind as they consider the current reforms. This bill would signal not just a major change in health care, but also in the Democratic Party itself. The end result will be a smaller, more narrowly liberal party that is less trusted by the mass public to respect its collective judgment. The party will keep San Francisco and The New Republic, but sooner or later they'll lose Murfreesboro and Zanesville.

Mr. Obama has indicated that he is all right with this. But in our system of separated powers, his opinion is insufficient. Ultimately, the decision rests with Southern and Midwestern House Democrats. They must make the final choice. They can vote with the President on a bill whose substance and process reflect little of the grandest traditions of the Democratic Party. Or they can stand up to him, and tell him that they have had enough of his condescending attitude and strong-arm tactics.

What moderate House Democrats should not do is assume that, if they vote with him on this one, President Obama will stop here. This President talked during the campaign about building a broad consensus for change. Yet when push comes to shove, he cares much more about change than consensus. He plans to tackle immigration reform, and there's no doubt he's still eyeing cap-and-trade. He has promised the Congressional Progressive Caucus that they can revisit health care later. If their constituents ultimately disapprove, moderate House Democrats shouldn't expect Barack Obama to give a damn. That's not his style. He likes to give lip service to consensus - but when you read the fine print, he inevitably defines any divergent viewpoints as out-of-bounds. He did it on the stimulus. He's doing it on health care. If moderate House Democrats don't stand up to him now, he'll do it on cap-and-trade, immigration reform, and who knows what else. Sooner or later, their constituents will elect representatives who will stand up to the President.

And those new representatives will probably be Republicans.