Bricks for Brains
August 17th, 2010 . by joelThis past week I helped staff the Republican Party booth at the annual county fair giving out literature, chatting with folks about the GOP’s chances this year and answering questions about candidates and all that. I’ve been doing this for the past few years and have developed some canned responses to some of the usual questions democrats and liberals like to ask in an effort to sort of “throw me a curve”. The one question I often get from them is “why are you a republican?” That’s actually a pretty good question and one that most people, who have not thought about that for a while, probably can’t readily answer without stammering around for a few moments. But I have an answer to that question and it goes like this,
I’m a republican because I believe in the Constitution of the United States. I believe in liberty. I believe in small government. I believe in personal property and for people taking personal responsibility for their lives. I believe the government should be working for the people, not the people working for the government. That’s why I’m a republican.
Sadly our present leaders probably don’t see our country that way, and in fact, often do exactly the opposite. There are so many examples of that opposite thinking that it’s hard to comprehend the meaning of it all. Of course there’s the spending and the debt and the Depression-era joblessness. There’s the redistribution of wealth and playing identity politics and treating groups differently across the spectrum of our society. There’s the repudiation of state’s rights and the Obama inspired class warfare. And the coercion implied in health care legislation and the finance bills and EPA mandates that sound friendly but are Trojan Horses assaulting the fabric of our culture and market driven civil social order.
But there are other ways our leaders act in blatantly unconstitutional fashion that does not necessarily capture the public’s interest.
Military voters know what I’m talking about. Despite our armed forces sacrificing themselves on the battlefields of the Middle East and other places, it seems almost every effort is being made to keep their votes from being counted. You don’t suppose that has anything to do with the fact that military voters are more likely to be republicans than democrats, do you? It’s sort of the exact reverse of the border situation with illegal aliens in which Democrat efforts are being made to keep the border open because Hispanics are more likely to be democrats than republicans. In both cases you can see Congressional and State Democrats doing everything in their power to frame the vote the way they want.
In this specific case the overwhelming evidence in 2008 showed that military voters needed at least 45 days to receive and return their absentee ballots and that more than 20 states failed to provide military voters with sufficient time to vote. This failure alone cost thousands of military members the right to vote and may have resulted in illegitimate pro-Democrat outcomes. Now, 10 months after the passage of legislation forcing the correction of that problem, nearly one-third of the states have failed to implement one or more of the key provisions of the law. At least 11 states (Hawaii, New York, Delaware, Alaska, Washington, Maryland, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Colorado) and the District of Columbia have not implemented the 45-day deadline for mailing absentee ballots. Note that 11 of those 12 entities are run by Democrats. Why am I not surprised?
Then there’s the curious case of “birthright citizenship”, in which American citizenship is presently granted to anyone being born in the United States, regardless of the parent’s citizenship or immigration status. It’s clear this issue is now starting to appear in the media because of Republican, Conservative and Tea Party opposition to rampant illegal immigration and the government’s absolute and complete refusal to do anything about it, unless of course it means suing Arizona to stop them from protecting their own border from foreign invasion. Now that, the government is all too willing to do.
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution says, in part, that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States…….are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” That sounds straight forward enough so what’s the problem?
First, you need to understand that the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, after the Civil War, and was specifically meant to grant citizenship to the former slaves. It was not meant, by any stretch of the imagination of the writers of that amendment, to open the doors to citizenship to anyone else on planet Earth. That was never the intention. To think otherwise is a purposeful misreading and fundamental misinterpretation of the Constitution for dishonest political purposes.
Second, and more importantly, a careful reading of the words generally left absent from that sentence quoted above proves the folly of the “birthright citizenship” assumption. The full quote, not often read in its entirety, is as follows:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
So what do those pesky words “…and subject to the jurisdiction thereof…” really mean? They mean that if, at the time this Amendment was ratified, you were living under the laws, or jurisdiction, of the United States, then you were a citizen. Like the slaves that were born here. They obviously were born under the laws of this country at the time of the ratification. A pregnant former slave born in Brazil, and walking across the American border the day after the 14th Amendment was ratified, would not be a citizen because she was born in Brazil. But what of her child?
It was clearly the custom of the 19th century and for that matter the custom of every other country in every other century, that a child lives under the jurisdiction of the country to which its parents are citizens. There is absolutely nothing written or stated in any record, from that time, that gives any indication that the writers of the 14th thought anything other than that. In fact, to do otherwise, as we unfortunately do today, provides every mother on planet Earth the power to provide her child with American jurisdiction in spite of what the citizens of the United States want. To do otherwise gives HER the power to decide, not the citizens of this country. To do otherwise takes the decision of who should be an American citizen out of our hands and gives it to every other mother on Earth.
Is that what the writers of the 14th Amendment had in mind? Do you believe the writers’ meant for every other person on Earth to have the power to decide the American citizenship of their child, but not including the Americans themselves, that American citizens have nothing to say about who becomes a citizen of their own country? Unless you’re blind to an un-American ideology, you know that’s not what the writers of the 14th intended. To think otherwise is complete nonsense. To think otherwise is to believe in a so-called “living and breathing” Constitution which means no Constitution at all. What bullcrap.
The poor former slave Brazilian mother noted above was living under the jurisdiction of Brazil at the time of her child’s birth in the United States, which makes her child a citizen of Brazil. Same for the Mexican mothers of today having their child in our country. Period.
And speaking of bullcrap, what about the Medicare and Social Security Trustees who issued a report 2 weeks ago on the fiscal health of those funds that was so fantastically and stupidly optimistic, one wonders if they made their observations from the vantage point of an alternate universe. In fact, the trustees, all of whom are Obama regime officials (and include Timothy Geithner, Kathleen Sebelius, CMS recess appointment Dr. Donald M. Berwick, and Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis among others), not only claim ObamaCare extends Medicare’s trust fund by 12 years to 2029, but also noted that the cost projections factored in a 30% cut in fees paid to Medicare physicians, something the Obama regime not only intends to avert but must avert if the health care system in America is to remain intact.
This report is based on the idea that health care costs will rise slower than in the past, despite the fact this has never happened, it includes budget cuts no one intends to make, and requires the perfect implementation of the extraordinarily flawed and imprudent ObamaCare.
In fact, the report submitted was so unbelievable and ridiculous that the Medicare Chief Actuary, Richard Foster, in an unprecedented action, provided his own report calling the former report unreasonable and implausible.
What Foster’s report says is that the 30% cuts, scheduled to take place over 3 years, for physician’s services will not happen, otherwise ObamaCare will drive doctors away from accepting Medicare completely. The report indicates that if the cuts were made 15% of all Medicare providing doctors would become unprofitable as a result of ObamaCare’s payment reductions. He further indicates that the Independent Payment Advisory Board has been given the impossible task of keeping medical costs below medical inflation, which could only happen if the difference is to limit what is covered through rationing. Where have I heard that before?
Foster’s alternative report also says that the number of medical facilities that would become unprofitable will grow to 25% by 2030 and 40% by 2050 if the health reform law is implemented as written.
Having said that, there is a huge difference between optimism (the Obama regime forecast) and completely stupid bullcrap (the Medicare Chief Actuary’s forecast). Obama is clearly a liar. I’m going with the Actuary on this one.
So what’s going on here? It seems to me you either believe in the Constitution or you don’t. You can’t cherry pick the stuff you like and disregard the stuff in the Constitution you don’t. You can’t believe in just 7 of the Amendments to the Bill of Rights. You either accept them all or you accept none. That’s it.
I can’t see how anyone can truly love this country if they don’t believe in entirety of the Constitution. It’s like having bricks for brains. I’m sure the people who don’t believe in the Constitution love some country, it’s just a country other than the United States. It may be something that looks like the United States, but it’s different. It’s not my United States. It’s not the United States I grew up in.
And that’s what the Obama regime and his Democrat minions are offering. They’re offering something that from the outside looks like the United States, but different. It’s a place where the government lies, and tries to get over on you, and says they’ll do one thing but then purposely does another. Obama’s country is a place where nothing the government does can be trusted and where the people work for the government, and defer all their rights to the government.
That place is very different from the real United States. And very unsavory. And probably very dangerous.
And that’s all there is to it.