Obama Opposes the Constitution

The primary responsibility of the President as the Commander-in-Chief and head of the Executive Branch of the federal government is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution requires the person elected President to take this oath before he enters on the execution of his office: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."

This is absolutely critical, for only the Constitution with its protections of the rights of the individual and its limits on the power of the federal government stands between us and the many forms of tyranny that governments and the leaders who run them have historically been greatly drawn to. We have had many Presidents who have done a poor job of preserving the Constitution, but we have never had one who has so blatantly stated that he does not believe in it and that it is wrong. Since the Constitution only protects our liberties to the extent that we understand it and insist on a society that lives in accord with its principles, it is fatal to have Presidents, Senators, and Congressmen who do not understand it and believe in it.

In 2001, when Obama was an Illinois state senator, he gave an interview on Chicago Public Radio in which he bemoaned the fact that the Warren Court had failed to disregard the protections of the Constitution to set out on a massive redistribution of income in the name of political and economic justice in society. You can listen to him yourself here. He states clearly that he wants a Constitution which, contrary to the Founding Fathers intent, will require people to serve others in our society. Ironically, he does not see that this requires the enslavement of some, commonly the hardworking and able, to those who wish to have a helping hand in life. He advocates what he calls positive rights, which he expresses as the right to demand that government will provide for the wishes of the people. What this really means is that the government and the people have the right to make claims on the life of others for what some people want. This is the very heart of socialism, which is why I am forthrightly identifying him as a thorough-going socialist.

The text of his comments follows:

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.

To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that. …

I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn’t structured that way.

On reading this, one also gets the impression that this man wants to foment a revolution against the Constitution on the streets. He has frequently spoken of the corps of young people he wants to dedicate themselves to various socialist programs and I find myself picturing the Brown Shirts also dedicated to the socialist programs of Hitler. At the least, he will clearly do everything he can to bring about further, accelerated reinterpretations of the Constitution, which interpretations he clearly understands thwart the will of the Founding Fathers, in order to abridge more of our negative individual rights. The reason the Founding Fathers did not make a Constitution full of Obama's positive rights is because they understood that government does not have the right to impose upon the individual's negative rights in order to lay obligations upon him to be his brother's, his neighbor's, or a stranger's keeper.

The two concepts of rights are completely incompatible. Positive rights negate negative rights. Positive rights must have the consequence that everyone is endangered by everyone else who might make a claim upon his service by using force to take his time, his income, and his property. All societies based on positive rights wind up pitting everyone in a desperate battle against everyone else. There is no possibility of harmony in such societies.

A President Obama will be a complete disaster. We must not allow this man to further erode the few remaining protections our Constitution provides to the individual in our society. We cannot allow him to use the force of government to herd us down the road and over the cliff into a total socialist society. Remember that even those nice-sounding, seemingly caring programs of socialism are always carried out at the point of a gun and do not allow anyone to insist on managing their own life. Socialism pretends to offer security, but what it delivers is a loss of freedom and a loss of prosperity. It chokes economic growth, since it chokes incentives, innovation, personal initiative, and it devours wealth and investment. If socialism led to the good life, the USSR would not have collapsed, China and India would not have had to make economic reforms to have the relative economic booms they have been having recently, and Africa and South America would be much better off than they are. The United States bucked socialism to a degree and because of that, we have much better lives today and we dominate world commerce. Obama would herd us down the old much-traveled road to socialist failure.

Socialist government not only leads to economic slowdown, but it dispirits the people and forces them to act like children before their state mother. Socialism means perpetual childhood. It also produces a brutal society in which force is used as a matter of course to govern almost all human interactions. George Washington said that government was not a pretty thing, it was dangerous. Government is at its heart all about the use of force, which is why government had to be strictly limited by the Constitution. Socialism is the glorification of force as the means to govern every human interaction. Obama is a socialist. Obama glorifies the use of force.