Posts Tagged US Constitution
Another Second Amendment Victory
Posted by Scott in Constitution, Guns on May 20th, 2009
The Texas state Senate approved a bill to allow concealed carry license holders to carry firearms on public college campus classrooms and dorms.
Opponents to this bill say that violence will increase over otherwise petty issues, such as disputes over grades, love affairs, and other rivalries. They also say that it will lead to a greater incidence of suicide. They also said that the passage of Texas’ concealed carry law back in the mid-1990′s would turn the state into the wild west. It’s been over a decade since the passage of the concealed carry law, and the predicted bloodshed still has not occurred.
The bill was introduced to reinforce the second amendment right to keep and bear arms.
It also will allow college students and faculty members to defend themselves in the event of an event such as the mass murders at Virginia Tech in 2007, where 32 people were shot before the gunman decided to end his own life.
There have been other campus shootings like the one at Northern Illinois last year. As I mentioned in an earlier post, shootings like this don’t end by unarmed victims politely asking the shooter to stop, but rather by the shooter’s own accord when they meet resistance. Most often it is when they kill themselves.
The steps the Texas legislature is taking is a positive step towards making sure the state’s public campuses remain free of violence. Regardless of what the bill’s opponent’s say, if this bill becomes law, students of Texas colleges will be much more safe because of it. This bill isn’t designed to deputize the student body, but rather it is designed to enable them to protect themselves against violence. The same way that concealed carry laws protect the general public from violent attacks off campus, and the second amendment protects Americans against the government.
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Pay Your Taxes If You Have Political Ambitions
Before Timothy Geithner became the Treasury Secretary, he worked for the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF employs people from all over the world, including Americans. While working there, foreigners don’t have to pay US income taxes, and in an attempt to be fair to the Americans who also work there, the IMF pays the Americans for their share of income taxes.
This doesn’t mean that Americans are exempt from paying taxes in the US. This is a minor detail that Timothy Geithner missed during his tenure with the IMF. Because of the fact that the IMF didn’t pay taxes on his behalf, he was considered an independent contractor, or self-employed. Under the US tax law there is a concept of self-employment taxes, where the individual is both the employer and the employee for all intents and purposes. This means that they have to pay the employer and employee portions of payroll taxes.
Not only didn’t Geithner pay his self-employment taxes, the IMF reimbursed him for what he should have paid had he been a law abiding citizen like the rest of us.
It turns out that this isn’t the last time that Secretary Geithner followed laws as if they were a suggestion, rather than the rule. Turns out that all of the bailout money being paid out by the billions is unconstitutional as well.
Article I Section 9 of the US Constitution states that “No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law…”. This isn’t just a minor point the founding fathers decided to throw into the Constitution.
Secretary Geithner got around this Constitutional issue when the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was passed. According to a report by the Congressional Budget Office, this established the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP as it has become more popularly known. This authorized “the Treasury to purchase $700 billion in assets to alleviate the crisis in credit markets”.
Essentially, this gave him a blank check to hand out $700 billion to “stabilize” the economy. A stabilization effort, which will take years to pay back if any of the bailed out companies go under.
Isn’t it nice of him to hand out our taxpayer dollars when he isn’t even willing to pay his own fair share?
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Supreme Court Takeover
Posted by Scott in Constitution on May 7th, 2009
President Obama will be faced with appointing someone to the Supreme Court now that Justice David Souter has announced his retirement. The question of who he will appoint remains open.
It’s possible that this person will have a liberal agenda that they wish to push on the American people through this position. Even liberals should recognize that this is dangerous, because it could cloud the objectiveness that is necessary when interpreting the Constitution. It is especially dangerous when considering that Supreme Court appointments are for life.
Think about it this way. You go to traffic court to fight a ticket you received, even though you weren’t speeding. The judge hearing your case recently had a family member who was killed by a speeding motorist. He doesn’t care really what your defense is, because he has no sympathy for speeders. It doesn’t matter to this judge that the Constitution requires due process and equal protection of the laws. This wouldn’t be fair to the defendant, nor would it be legal.
Now think about a Supreme Court justice who has an agenda, regardless of what that agenda might be, who uses their position to push their ideas on the American people. If they have as little regard for the Constitution as the judge from the traffic court we’ll instantly loose all protections under the Constitution, unless of course you were in agreement with the justice. Everyone will be equal, but some will just be a little more equal than others.
We have a great country because of the laws that provide us with security from the government. The checks and balances in place keep a group of men from running the government as they see fit, as opposed to how the law says it should be.
I know it seems like an extreme example, but think about if we had President Hitler. He decides to appoint anti-Semite justices to the Supreme Court, who have no problem with rounding up Jews and locking them away in camps. All the appeals in the world won’t fix the injustice as you’ll only be met by an anti-Semitic Supreme Court.
Now, I’m not suggesting that President Obama’s agenda is as extreme as Hitler’s – far from it in fact. I simply used an extreme example to drive the point home.
The bottom line is that the President can only damage this country for eight years. He can, however appoint justices who can continue to damage the country for decades to come. This is where it gets dangerous.
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Constitutional Ignorance
Posted by Scott in Constitution, Elections, Gov't Operations on April 29th, 2009
There’s a lot to the US Constitution. The men who wrote it were very smart in the way they worded it. They had the foresight to include checks and balances, through the separation of powers among the various branches of government and defined what each branch can, and more importantly, can’t do.
They also defined the form of government that will govern the United States. If you were to ask 10 people what form of government that is, you’d most likely get 9 out of 10 that respond with “democratic, because we’re a democracy”. They’d all be wrong.
We are not a democracy. We’re a republic.
Article IV Section 4 of the Constitution states: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government…”
So what does this mean? According to Webster’s, a republic is defined as “…a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president…a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government…a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law…” (emphasis added).
A democracy on the other hand is where the majority rules. You can throw the checks and balances out the window in a democracy, unless of course that’s what the majority wants.
People can justify majority rule by thinking that what’s good for the majority, must be good for the rest of the population. They do this when talking about the electoral college, saying that it is a dated system, and a simple majority should take it’s place.
What they don’t consider is that only nine states contain over 50% of the US population. If we abolished the electoral college, conceivably, those nine states could determine the result of a presidential election. With the electoral college those states only have a total of 255 votes while 270 are needed to win an election.
There are a lot of things the government does these days that may not necessarily be constitutional, but is justified because it benefits the majority. While it may be true that the majority benefits, it doesn’t mean that the minority isn’t suffering in one way or another because of it.
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Politics of Torture
Posted by Scott in Constitution, War on Terror on April 23rd, 2009
The eighth amendment to the US Constitution reads as follows: ”Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
Recently tactics used to extract information from terrorists has come under heavy scrutiny, as they are being considered torture. If these tactics are indeed deemed to be torture, then they would be in violation of the eighth amendment’s “…nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted” clause.
”Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
The United States is a country founded on principles, and those principles are what make the US a great nation. Without them, we have nothing. Those principles include the freedom of speech, and of religion, the right to bear arms, and the right against self incrimination. The freedom from cruel and unusual punishments is also included in this list of rights the people retain from the government.
Some people might claim that the US Constitution only applies to US citizens, and therefore the torture was justified in interrogating foreign terrorists. To them, I would question why they think the Constitution only applies to US citizens? The Constitution simply lays out what the government can and cannot do. Not who they can and cannot do something to.
Think about this: a foreign citizen comes to the US on vacation, and witnesses a robbery. Unfamiliar with the laws of the United States, he is afraid to talk to police about what he saw, fearing retaliation from the robber. Should the police be allowed to torture this individual so he provides them with information, just because he’s not an American? I don’t think so.
Granted the severity of a robbery versus a terrorist attack is quite different. Nonetheless, torturing someone to get information about either is still unconstitutional.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t see a problem with using interrogation techniques that are not considered “cruel and unusual” in order to extract information from terrorists. Our intelligence agencies have been effectively interrogating people for years without having to torture them.
I’ve never been subjected to water boarding, which is one of the techniques in question, so I couldn’t say if it would be torture to go through. Is it cruel and unusual? I don’t know. I’m not writing this to determine which techniques are torture and which are not. I’m simply trying to get people to think about how the Constitution applies to this extreme situation, because its unhealthy to not question the government if they are overstepping their bounds.
After all, the government was designed to answer to the people, and not so that the people answer to the government.
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