Boehner to Obama: Move your Speech

Earlier today President Obama sent a letter to Speaker Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asking them to hold a joint session of the House and Senate for a prime time speech on September 7th.  Obama planned on convening both houses of Congress to once again talk about job creation--just like he has been doing ever since he was elected.

Supposedly unbeknownst to the President and staff was that the next Republican debate, hosted by the Reagan Foundation, was also planned at the exact same time.  Spokesman Jay Carney stated that the speech was not intended to overshadow the Republican debate and welcomed NBC and Politico--who are both sponsoring the debate--to reschedule it for another time.

John Boehner, citing that House session that night was scheduled for 6:30, publicly pushed back in a letter sent to President Obama.  He instead invited Obama to move the speech to the next night, which would conflict with the opening kick-off of the NFL season.

Even at the height of his power, I can't even imagine Newt Gringrich asserting this kind of authority against Bill Clinton (or for that matter Clinton being so obtuse as to do anything remotely like this).

This move by Boehner shows the weak position of Obama, and it will be very interesting to see how this all unfolds.

The Sphinx Speaks

In an interview with Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal, former Vice President Dick Cheney speaks on the trials and tribulations of the Bush Administration.  Among his targets (no pun intended) are former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage (the same man who outed Valarie Plame as an under cover CIA agent), the Condolezza Rice-backed decision by President Bush to take North Korea off the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, and, of course, President Obama.

With the exception of Richard Nixon and President Bush himself, never has a man been so vilified as Dick Cheney.  Anytime the media did not compare him to Darth Vader, or even Satan himself, was a rare occurrence. 

He served the country honorably and with distinction during his eight years in office.  For that we should all be thankful.

Right to Work Country

Hadley Arkes, truly a teacher of the highest order, explains the irony that has become the celebration of Labor Day.  Our understanding of the "rights of workers" centers on rights that are doled out by the state, not on the rights that are present before the creation of government--rights that are natural to us as human beings.

Arkes shines here:

"Strangely lost from memory here is the fact that the first opposition to unions in the courts came from the judges who had come out of the anti-slavery moment. Justice John Harlan, the great dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson on racial segregation, put the argument on unions most clearly in the case of Adair v. U.S. (1908). The anti-slavery movement confirmed that the individual person was the owner of his own labor. He was not obliged to give justifications when he walked away from the employ of any man."

Lincoln taught the principle of slavery in this way: "You work; I'll eat."  The natural right to labor stems from the natural right to liberty, the principle that allows us to freely use the rights which were given to us by our Creator.  These rights are grounded upon the principle that "all men are created equal"; that we have a corresponding duty to respect the rights that every other human being possesses by nature.

The public-at-large needs to again become familiar with these teachings.

Justice Thomas as Frodo Baggins

Walter Russell Mead highlights Jeffrey Toobin's essay for the New Yorker and finds that the Left's treatment of Justice Thomas is much like how the evil Sauron paid little attention to the journey of Frodo and Sam until it was too late.  Clarence Thomas's principled jurisprudence has been quietly gaining traction, and with the recent likely hood of the Supreme Court soon hearing cases touching on the highest pillars of modern liberalism, Thomas may already be ascending the slopes of Mt. Doom.  

This is a must read.

Bowing Down at the Altar of the New York Times

Last week, Bill Keller, the outgoing editor of the New York Times, proposed a series of questions concerning religion to the Republican presidential candidates (he follows up with a blog post on the topic here).

Of course these questions are borne only out of the finest moderate sensibilities of Keller, who wants to bring these topics up in order to generate a serious national discussion on these important issues.  This just makes itself so much more apparent when he opens the column by implying that one's religious opinions and one's opinions on the likeliness of space aliens occupies the same intellectual space.

But here are my questions for Keller:  Where was this in 2008 in vetting the Democrat candidates?  Where are these types of questions for Democrats period?  Where was this during the Jeremiah Wright controversy?  Where are other cultural questions for Democrats like, for instance, on abortion? 

To be sure, there is nothing wrong in asking candidates questions about their religion, because it is a very important part of many Americans' lives.  But to only ask one side, to tout the implicit lines of reasoning for the other side, and to mindlessly obscure these important questions for the gain of a certain party is appalling.  I would say that the Times should know better than this, but the plain truth is that they don't and don't care.

Fool at a Podium

With apologies to everyone, I have to again bring up our Vice President and his embarrassing trip to China.  In a rambling, incoherant speech, Biden said the following on what it means to be American:

"These accomplishments were made possible not because there’s anything unique about an American.  It’s hard to define what an American is.  Shortly, 50 percent of the American population -- less than 50 percent will be of European stock.  So we are the most -- we are an incredibly heterogeneous nation.  That's part of our strength.  That's part of the boundless capacity of the American people.  But it’s also because of the enduring strength of our political and economic system and the way we educate our children, a system that welcomes immigrants from across the globe who enrich our national fabric and revitalize our diverse multi-ethnic society.  And I would point out, we are still the destination where most people in the world seek to come.  People usually don't seek to come to a nation in decline."

Nothing unique about America?  Hard to define what America is?  George Washington would have to disagree: "The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstitution, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined than at any former period."

You're right Mr. Vice President, there is nothing unique about a country whose principles are based on human nature and not on force or fraud; principles which are accessible to all men and all times; principles that are not grounded on race, gender, or religion; principles that are based on the recognition of equal natural rights of all men; principles that secure all American's civil and religious liberty, etc.

Sigh...

Rick Perry Wants to Amend the Constitution

This article on Yahoo news highlights the seven ways Rick Perry wants to change amend the Constitution.

Among the changes Perry would like to see made are abolishing lifetime tenure for federal court judges, an override of Supreme Court decisions by a two-thirds majority of Congress, and the repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment. 

Perry says of abolishing lifetime tenure that "members of the judiciary are "unaccountable" to the people, and their lifetime tenure gives them free license to act however they want."  But the original intent of Article III was precisely to insulate judges and justices of the federal court from public opinion.  For the Founders, the most dangerous branch--and arguably still the most dangerous branch--is the legislative branch, because it is closest to the people.  Although it is without question that the Supreme Court has expanded their own power since the ratification of the Constitution, Perry's amendment would allow good originalist justices like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia to be at the mercy at the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Chuck Schumer.

Although well intentioned on Perry's part, his proposal to overrule Supreme Court decisions implies that those decisions are the final arbiter of the Constitution.  The Founders never intended such a thing.  Perry may want to consult Jefferson on this matter: "[N]othing in the Constitution has given [the judiciary] a right to decide for the Executive, more than to the executive to decide for them...But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional, and what are not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action, but for the Legislature & Executive also, in their spheres, would make the judiciary a despotic branch."  In 1858, Lincoln argued in the wake of the Dred Scott decision that while he would respect the opinion of the court when it came to that particular case he would not apply it as a principle.  At that time there was a case making its way up the New York court system that, if it had reached the Supreme Court, would have made slavery not only constitutional in the territories but newly formed states would have been forced to accept slavery as well.

If Perry wants to run as a principled conservative, he has to do a little better than this.


  

Say It Ain't So Joe!

In case anyone has forgotten, Joe Biden is still our Vice President, and--much to the chagrin of the American people--the Obama Administration is still letting him represent the county abroad. 

His latest gaffe came when he stated the following on China's one-child policy: “Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family.”  Later, a spokesman issued this retraction-of-sorts: "The Obama Administration strongly opposes all aspects of China’s coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization."

What strong moral denunciations.  But we should all feel better that at least he can "understand" it.  Would Joe be able to come down on this policy if say, it was a plank of the Republican party platform? 

Calling this a sad spectacle is quite possibly the greatest understatement of the year.

Justice Thomas and His Detractors

In a surprising essay--surprising both on account of the author and the venue--for the upcoming edition of The New Yorker, Jeffery Toobin shows Justice Thomas to be a principled leader of the current Supreme Court.  Toobin describes Thomas's jurisprudence as "scholarly" and "influential" and notes that "Thomas’s intellect and his influence have also been recognized by those who generally disagree with his views."

Although Toobin's essay is far from error free--e.g., his oftentimes tone of condescension and his assertion that "the framers often disagreed profoundly with each other, making a single intent behind the Constitution even more difficult to discern,"--his attempt to understand Thomas as he understands himself is a striking contrast to most anything else written on Thomas by the media.

Executive Experience?

Ever since Barack Obama stepped out onto the national stage, one of the main Republican arguments against him was his lack of executive experience.  Much is being said currently about which of the Republican candidates have the most executive experience; stemming from this logic, it seems that whoever has the most will be the best candidate (This curiously seems to make the implicit case that if Obama had executive experience, he would have been more palatable to those claiming executive experience now a must). 

But executive experience alone tells us nothing about the character of that experience.  Hitler, Castro, and Saddam Hussein surely all had executive experience.  Obviously, it goes without saying that we do not want that kind of experience.  Substituting the vacuous term "executive experience" for statesmanship, wisdom, and prudence is most definitely a losing gambit and does nothing to foster a citizenry more capable of self-government.

Welcome

Thanks for tuning into The American Mind Blog where we will mostly discuss politics but will also venture to sports and other interesting topics in-between.  This blog will come from a perspective of recovering the natural right and natural rights principles of the American Founding--principles which are just as true as they were in 1776.  Ultimately, I will leave it to Lincoln to describe the goal of this blog:  "If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it."

I hope that that judgement is once again discovered today.