Archive for March, 2010

Introduction

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/geoffrey-dickens/2010/03/29/chris-matthews-gets-schooled-tea-partier

As I mentioned in the previous post, this exchange on Chris Matthews’s Hardball raised two important issues.  The first is the Left’s obsession with race, gender, and sexual orientation.  The second, and I believe more important issue, is the place of the 10th Amendment in our federal system, and why it’s important in all issues of federal power.

In the exchange, Melissa Harris Lacewell, a professor at Princeton, says:

Well, well let me just suggest this. That the tea partiers by using the language of tea party have asked us to draw a parallel between their movement and the Revolutionary War movement. But I think if we look more carefully we’ll see that in many ways the tea party movement resembles more closely the kind of secessionist feelings that were both part of the Confederacy before the Civil War and then also remained in the post-civil war Reconstruction era. So in other words-

At which point she is cut off by Dana Loesch (a conservative radio talk-show host) with”

It’s about state sovereignty not secessionism. It’s about 10th Amendment principles.

This is a great exchange, and demonstrates why the 10th Amendment has been so much maligned.  First, we’ll look at the text of the amendment, and then we’ll take a brief look at the history of state sovereignty.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was going through The Federalist (which I think should be required reading for anyone in government) in looking at the the “necessary and proper” clause as well as the 10th Amendment and found this wonderful quote from The Federalist No. 33, composed by Alexander Hamilton in 1788:

If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify.  The propriety of a law, in a constitutional light, must always be determined by the nature of the powers upon which it is founded. [Emphasis mine.]

This quote struck me for several reasons.  First, we should always remember that the government is our “creature.”  This is the concept of Popular Sovereignty.  The government is ours, not a few politicians in Washington, not large corporations, not foreign meddlers, but our own, and we should remind those we have graced to be our representatives of that on a regular basis.

Second, what the federal government can and cannot do should always be determined by the Constitution.  Objections to a law can be formulated in terms of political expediency, pragmatism, ethics, or any number of approaches, but support must always  include the constitutionality of the law to be enacted.

I have another great quote from this particular passage of The Federalist which I will post separately.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/geoffrey-dickens/2010/03/29/chris-matthews-gets-schooled-tea-partier

The above exchange, from Chris Matthews’s Hardball, has brought two topics to mind, both of which I will cover in different posts. The first is the Left’s use of race and gender as a means to steer debate away from the issues and instead instigate ad hominim attacks on their opponents.  Now, I want to point out from the beginning that this isn’t a case of “this side does this, while the other is blameless.”  We know that there are people on the right who do similar things.  But the abundance of these sort of attacks on the Left, and their spread through the mainstream media, shows that they are systemic on the Left.

The discussion Matthews initiates begins from this very premise.  He states, “Is this fight, from the tea party side, aimed at the, or ignited by the health care defeat last week they suffered, about ethnicity and gender and orientation, sexual orientation or is it about the substance of the issue?”  The very fact that this is the premise of his discussion demonstrates his position.  If Matthews believed that the tea partiers were concerned with the substance of the issue, he wouldn’t even raise this question.  So, from the start we know what Matthews’s biases are.  Of course, by focusing attention on the idea that tea partiers only oppose federally run health-care, bigger government, and higher taxes because they are racist-sexist-homophobes, he can ignore the substantive issues being raised by the tea party movement.

An important question, however, is why leftists are so quick to raise the spector of racism-sexism-homophobia at the drop of a hat?  If we look at the focus of leftist politics, we can easily see the reason.  If you spend all your time focusing on people’s race, gender, and sexual orientation, you will often project the same on to others.  Many leftists just cannot believe that everyone is not obsessed with gender, with race, with sexual orientation.  Furthermore, there is an air of superiority, a “How dare you?!” attitude to any opposition to their policies.  They see themselves as enlightened despots who hold the answers to society’s ills, and if we oppose them, there must be something psychologically wrong with us.

Unfortunately, there’s little we can do to convince hardcore leftists that we conservatives are not the way they see us.  On the other hand, they are far in the minority, and we don’t actually have to convince them at all.  If we focus our message on the majority of Americans (and 40% already self-identify as conservative), we can institute real change in our country.

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