My Political Post for the Season
So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.
Thinking about the election tomorrow, this quote jumped into my head and won’t go away. From where things stand right now, it seems almost a foregone conclusion that Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States. His election is bound to be greeted by cheers from his supporters, likely more than any President in recent memory, and certainly far more than John McCain would earn were he to win the day. And yet with Obama, I find myself convinced that his Presidency will be the end of whatever lingering understanding there may still be that our Federal government is a limited government, the end of a great deal of individual choice, and the death of meaningful democracy.
It doesn’t take long when looking through Obama’s website to see how little respect he has for the concept of limited government. From the economy to healthcare to just about anything else, Obama’s site is filled with promises of things that his federal government would do for us. The government run “public-private business incubators,” the creation of a government operated healthcare plan, the promise to “Weatherize one million homes annually,” and so many other of his proposed policies are all put forward without so much as a second thought whether or not the federal government has the authority to do these things, regardless of whether or not any of them are good ideas. Perhaps fueled by Americans’ poor understanding of what powers actually belong to the federal government, Obama has never, to my recollection, even bothered to ask the question. At a time when people are harping on President Bush and his alleged failure to abide by the restrictions put forth in the Constitution, we prepare to celebrate a new President who spoke with a bit of remorse at the fact that the Warren Court “didn’t break free from the essential constraints … in the Constitution.”
Embodied among those “essential constraints” are the limits which give rise to liberty in the first place. Freedom, at its core, is all about choice; choices Obama appears to not want us to have. Obama proposes a sort of “Use It or Lose It” plan to force oil companies to drill on particular oil fields; figuring out why he knows better than the oil companies which fields to drill when, and exactly what his mechanism is for making the oil companies “Lose It” are apparently left as exercises to the reader. And that was just the most obvious example. By taxing “the rich” to fund Obama’s pet projects, Obama does as most Democrats do in believing that they know better than I do what is and isn’t the right thing for me to buy.
But in the end, the thing that has been and remains the most frightening thing to me about Obama is his view on the courts. Repeatedly throughout his campaign, when asked what qualities he believes are important in a judge, his answers have never included such critical things as knowledge of or adherence to the law. Obama seeks judges with compassion, who will stand up for civil rights and the disadvantaged. While these are certainly nice qualities to look for, the proper role of the courts as the “least dangerous branch” requires that such considerations be trumped a thousand times over by the need for judges to remain within the law. Through his votes in the Senate, his statements on the campaign trail, his seven year old attempt to describe the Warren court as somehow being not “that radical,” it is apparent that Obama’s belief in the role of the courts is that America should — in eight years time — be turned over to absolute governance by the judiciary.
Rule by unelected elites is hardly my idea of democracy. The curtailment of free choice is certainly not my idea of liberty. And yet, the nation is sure to celebrate the rise of President Obama just the same. But perhaps if we’re lucky, the 1960s will come calling, to ask us to give them their failed policies back.
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