David Stockman, Pres. Reagan’s budget director, “In 1985, the top five percent wealthiest households had a net worth of trillion, but since then the top 5% have gaining more wealth than the whole human race had created prior to 1980.”

If you remember anything at all about David Stockman, it’s probably his being “taken to the woodshed” by Pres. Ronald Reagan when he was Reagan’s budget director. That was back in late 1981 when he gave a long interview to William Greider for the Atlantic magazine. In a piece titled “The Education of David Stockman,” the young former congressman from Michigan acknowledged that Reagan’s tax cut was “a Trojan horse” to cut the top tax rates for the rich.

“The supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle down’,” Stockman admitted to Greider. “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.”

The result of Reagan’s tax cuts, without accompanying cuts in government spending, were rapidly rising deficits. The deficit created by those tax cuts got so large so fast in the early 1980′s that Reagan himself reversed course and supported budget legislation restoring some of the tax rates.

“Trickle-down economics” is a pejorative terms that refer to the theory that providing tax cuts to the wealthy and tax benefits to conglomerate corporations will provide incentive to corporations and the wealth to great jobs for the rest of the society and thus indirectly benefit the broad population.

The “trickle-down” term is attributed to humorist Will Rogers, who said during the Great Depression of the 1930′s that “money was all appropriated to the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy.”

Stockman is back with essentially the same message as he delivered in that 1981 Atlantic magazine interview.

On a CBS 60 Minutes interview of David Stockman by Leslie Stahl in October 2010 Stockman said that Americans need to pay more taxes:

STAHL: Well, you’ve come out and said that all the Bush tax cuts should be eliminated. Not just on the rich, but on the middle class as well. Explain why.

STOCKMAN: Well, we just can’t afford them. We couldn’t afford them when they were adopted in 2001 and 2003 [by Pres. Bush and the Republican dominated Congress.] Since then, we’ve had two giant unfinanced wars [in Iraq and Afghanistan], a huge bailout of Wall Street, a trillion-dollar stimulus program, and we have now created so much national debt, and such large permanent deficits that we’re going to have to do some very difficult and painful things to close the gap, or we’re going to destroy the economy, and render the federal government insolvent. As hard as that is to believe, we’re edging in that direction.

STOCKMAN: We’ve demonized taxes. All right. We’ve created almost the idea they’re a metaphysical evil. …There should be a one-time 15 percent surtax on the wealthy that he estimates would cut the national debt in half.

STOCKMAN: In 1985, the top five percent of the households, wealthiest five percent, had net worth of trillion, which is a lot. Today, after serial bubble after serial bubble, the top five percent have net worth of trillion. The top five percent have gained more wealth than the whole human race had created prior to 1980.”

See video of the full 60 Minutes segment at the bottom of this article.

Rendering the federal government insolvent is, in fact, the stated goal of hardline conservatives who want to eliminate elected government and turn society over to private corporate control. “Starving the beast” is a fiscal-political strategy adopted by American conservatives in the 1970′s to create or increase existing budget deficits via tax cuts to force future cuts and eventual privatization of Medicare, Social Security, Public Education and every other public service. [see Forbes]

Paul Krugman, columnist for The New York Times: For readers who don’t know what I’m talking about: Ever since Ronald Reagan, the GOP has been run by people who want a much smaller government.

In the famous words of the activist Grover Norquist, conservatives want to get the government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” But there has always been a political problem with this agenda. Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts?

The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be dubbed “starving the beast” during the Reagan years. The idea — propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol — was basically that sympathetic politicians should engage in a game of bait-and-switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government’s fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.

And the deficit came… See full articles in this blog, “ Starving the Government Beast,” and “Billionaire Koch Bros. ‘Want To Destroy Social Security.”

From Thurman’s Notebook

According to the U.S. census, last year our national population hit 308,745,538. One percent of that number works out to roughly 3.1 million people, slightly more than the population of Arkansas or Mississippi, about five or six times the population of Wyoming, or one-third of the population of my state, North Carolina. Try to keep that number in mind as you read the following statistics.

Today the richest 1% of American citizens have a greater combined net worth than 90 percent of our population put together. That means that something on the order of 3 million people in this country control more resources than almost 300 million of us put together, and that’s not just “earned” income. It also includes stocks, bonds, land and other property holdings, etc.. Money represents the power to control resources, and control of that much of our nation’s wealth in the hands of such a small group of citizens is dangerously antithetical to the preservation of our stated democratic ideals.

If the figures above didn’t bother you plenty, perhaps this next bit. Right now, (one hundredth of one percent of our population) 31,000 people in the United States take home an average of more than million in annual income, while the bottom 90% of us average just over ,000. For a bit more perspective on just how small 1/100th of one percent of our population is, follow this link and look up some census statistics on a region of the country that you’re familiar with.

Half of all Americans (104 million people) collectively own only 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States today. That means the other 50% controls 97.5% of it, mostly in the form of profit seeking corporate ventures. Even my fifth-grader knows that that much money and resources in so few hands is a dangerous concentration of power.

Last year the average corporate American chief executive officer was compensated at a rate 343 times greater than the average American worker. Employee compensation relative to gross domestic product in the United States is now the lowest it’s been in over 50 years. We produce more goods and services with fewer workers today than ever before, but we’re paid less in actual purchasing power than our grandparents and great-grandparents earned for similar work half a century ago.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, the top 1% of income earners in the United States brought in 10% of all income. Twenty-eight years later, in 2008, that figure had more than doubled to 21% of all annual earned income while middle class wages remained virtually stagnant and purchasing power eroded significantly over the same period. So much for trickle down economics!

During roughly the same time span the average household income of the richest 1% of Americans nearly quadrupled, from 6,600 to .3 million per year. In fact, from 2001 to 2007, two thirds (66%) of all income growth in the United States went disproportionately to the richest 3 million households (there’s that pesky 1% again) of our population.

Today, about half of all American workers earn less tan 0 per week while the richest 1% average about fifty times that much, ,000 per week. To keep things in perspective, that’s as much as that same 50% of all American workers earn in a year! And things aren’t getting any better. The number of Americans who regularly rely on food pantries and soup kitchens has increased by 46% since 2006.

The official U.S. poverty rate now ranks third highest among all developed nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and any American working man or woman knows that the “official” poverty rate in this country is a terrible joke, so the real numbers are far worse.

These statistics are criminal, especially viewed in the context of the current wave of cuts to our social safety nets, all the while preserving historically low tax rates on massive the incomes of the super rich. Yet somehow we continue to sit idly by, waiting for someone or something to show us the way out of this labyrinth of unconscionable austerity.

Just one year after the financial crisis of 2008, the top hedge fund managers in the United States collectively earned something like billion, an average of billion a piece! It is now common knowledge to anyone paying attention that investment bankers and Wall Street speculators – hedge fund managers being but one subspecies of these criminals -were responsible for that financial disaster. Millions of jobs were destroyed and uncountable harm done to millions of working class American families, yet know no one has been charged with these crimes to date. Why? Because the perpetrators own the government, including the judicial system, out right. There should have been and should still be daily riots in the streets over this wave or organized white-collar crime, but not us, the famously idle Americans, we made barely a peep. Stick a fork in us, cause we’re just about done.

It’s pretty obvious that our so-called democracy is badly broken, perhaps beyond repair. When it costs more to run for Congress than most people can dream of earning in a lifetime, those who stand for election cannot begin to understand, much less represent the will of the working people of this nation. There are no paupers in Congress by design, and more than fifty percent of the leeches that get there are millionaires long before they arrive to serve their terms.

We need a new form of governance in a bad, bad way. We live in a finite world of finite resources. Endless growth and profit taking is not now, nor ever has been sustainable. Don’t believe me, then just take a look at any world history book with the trees it took to make it. Every empire the world has ever produced has failed under the weight of its own greed and the largesse of its ruling class.

The rich and powerful among us must not be allowed to continue reaping the lion’s share of the wealth produced by the rest. We cannot balance our budgets on the backs of our children, our elderly, and the working class who make it all possible while those at the top of the American pyramid scheme commit financial, environmental, and social crimes against humanity with impunity.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats represent the interests of us common folk. Most of them wouldn’t last a week working beside us, and they sure as hell don’t work for us. They work for that tiny fraction, the 1% at the top who control the wealth and hold the power, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can fix this thing if enough of us wake up in time, but we gotta do it soon.

Stop voting for the lesser of evils, because to vote for either is to accept and endorse that evil. Withhold your consent. Don’t vote for either party’s candidates, even if it means you do not vote at all. An election with less than 10 percent turnout cannot ever be deemed legitimate. And never, ever accept the status quo, because today the status quo is a recipe for certain disaster, if not in our life time in that of our children.

Utopia may never be possible, and no single ideology holds all the answers, but to continue down the same path humanity has travelled over the cliff so many times before is simply insane. We’ve got to try something different or we shall simply cease to be.

We will never be without the poor among us, just as there will always be a few who are wealthier than the rest. So long as those who prosper most are made to contribute according to their means; return a proportional share of their profits to support the society which enables their prosperity, we’ll be able to solve our problems and resolve our differences. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we are living in today.

“In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.” — Oscar Wilde

CBS 60 Minutes
Deficits: Taxing The Rich
October 31, 2010 5:15 PM

David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s budget director who once preached tax cuts, is now in favor of putting a one-time surtax on the rich. Lesley Stahl reports.

Text: Deficits: The Battle Over Taxing The Rich

Democratic Blog of Collin County – News

Many people do not remember that the purchase and use of birth control products, even by married couples, was against the law in many states until 1965. Use of birth control products may again be criminalized in many states controlled by conservative lawmakers. There are those who, for the last 46 years, have worked to reverse the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court finding that Americans have a fundamental right of privacy to make family planning decisions, which includes the right to use birth control contraceptives. This year conservative lawmakers in many states are close to again to making the use of contraceptive birth control products a crime through “person-hood” legislative initiatives.

During Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor’s Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings in July 2009 conservative Republican Senators berated Judge Sotomayor for not rejecting the idea that the U.S. Constitution grants implied rights, such as “the right of privacy” from government intrusion into family decisions. This article was originally posted on July 23, 2009 to provide some historical perspective on the conservative Republican position that the U.S. Constitution grants no implied right of privacy, particularly the right to purchase and use contraceptive products.

We updated the post on February 18, 2011 as Republicans, who control the U.S. House of Representatives, passed a bill (H.R. 1) to completely de-fund the nation’s 40-year-old family planning program, Title X. Their target of course was Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides reproductive health services as well as family planning and information about contraceptive options to women and men.

We update this post again this week on the 46th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark June 7, 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision. It is the Griswold v. Connecticut finding that gives explicit voice to the concept that the U.S. Constitution implicitly grants a “right of privacy to Americans.” This right of privacy includes, but does not stop with, the private right to choose when, or whether, to have children, to choose to “home school” our children and to choose with whom we have sexual relationships — do you remember when adultery and same sex partners were civil crimes in many states?

This year the Personhood USA organization threatens to undo the Griswold v. Connecticut decision. Personhood USA argues that a single cell fertilized egg, “from the moment of conception,” is a “person” with full legal and constitutional rights. Because most birth-control pills and intrauterine devices work by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus, use of such birth control methods deprives a fertilized egg, as person, of its lawful and constitutionally guaranteed right to life. Personhood USA considers the use of contraceptive pills and devices tantamount to abortion, and wants to make it a punishable offense for women to control their own fertility.

In other words, a woman commits murder by using most common birth control methods. Doctors, too, commit murder by any procedure or medication that could deprive a fertilized egg from its right to life. Because the proposed legislation makes any effort to terminate any pregnancy a criminal act, it could bar doctors from saving the lives of women with ectopic pregnancies, which are never viable and need to be terminated as soon as possible.

According to 2008 numbers, around 11 million American women use birth control pills and another 2 million use intrauterine devices (IUDs). National surveys have found that nine in ten women in the U.S. use some form of birth control at some point during their life.

Personhood USA has been exceptionally successful at pushing forward “person-hood” legislation that redefines the beginning of life as the moment of conception in numerous state legislatures where tea party candidates won election in significant numbers last fall. Although the medical community has long been in agreement that fertilization does not mark the beginning of a pregnancy or life — fertilized eggs must first be implanted, and only about half of fertilized eggs actually result in a pregnancy — a growing number of lawmakers are supporting Personhood USA’s efforts to buck medical expertise and legally define life as the moment a sperm meets an egg.

If the state legislatures succeed in passing such a law — and if such laws survive judicial scrutiny — it could turn common forms of birth control into the legal equivalent of a homicide. While “personhood” laws have always been a transparent attempt to outlaw abortion, the legislation supported by groups like Personhood USA this year goes much further in trying to assert government control over women’s bodies. These laws would recognize every fertilized egg as an individual and complete human being with full rights, and place millions of women in legal jeopardy.

More at:

• CommonDreams.org: Almost Fifty Years After Griswold, We’re Still Fighting for Access to Contraception.
• Think Progress: Anti-Abortion Groups Push To Outlaw Contraceptives By Redefining Personhood

Updated February 18, 2011 @ 11:58pm

In 1916, one woman’s strength, determination and conviction helped open the door for hundreds of millions of women worldwide to plan their own pregnancies. As a nation, we have made great strides since Margaret Sanger opened that first family planning clinic in New York City nine decades ago, and Planned Parenthood is remains at the forefront of the fight for reproductive health and rights for all women. Planned Parenthood also provides information about the purchase and use contraceptive products. Providing information about birth control products actually saves the taxpayers money — about for every dollar invested.

One in five American women receives care from a Planned Parenthood health center at some point in her life, and 90 percent of this care is preventive — lifesaving screenings for cancer, blood pressure screening, testing for HIV, and testing and treatment for other sexually transmitted infections.

The Republican war on women is renewed today with a vengeance as the U.S. House voted on H.R. 1, 240-185, to block all federal funding to Planned Parenthood, and to go one further, completely de-fund the nation’s 40-year-old family planning Title X program. Read the full story @ DailyKos

Original post July 23, 2009

Many people today do not remember that the sales and use of contraceptive products, even by married couples, were against the law in many states until the mid-1960′s. Even the distribution of books and pamphlets about contraceptive products and practices was illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled such state laws unconstitutional in its 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision. The court based its Griswold decision partially on the grounds that such state laws violated a married couple’s right to privacy in making their own private family planning decisions.

In opposing the legalization of contraception, conservatives declared in 1965, as they continue to declare today, that sex must be inextricably tied only to reproduction; That it is morally wrong for people, young or old, married or not, to pursue sexual pleasure while deliberately preventing pregnancy. Albert Mohler, current president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, voices the social conservative position on contraceptives when he writes, “To engage in sexual pleasure without openness to children is to violate a sacred trust.” This echoes Pope Paul VI’s “Humanae Vitae” encyclical of 1968 that forbade “any action which either before, at the moment of or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation.”

After the court legalized the sale and use of contraceptive products for married couples in its 1965 Griswold decision, and particularly after the court extended its Griswold right to privacy finding to legalize the sale and use of contraceptive products for unmarried couples in its 1972 Eisenstadt v. Baird decision, social conservatives have followed an agenda of limiting the availability of information about contraceptives and family planning options at every turn to everyone, young or old, married or not.

The underlying motivation for withholding accurate information and disseminating misinformation about the effectiveness of contraceptive products, as this blog is discussing in its five part series on sex education, is to discourage people from using contraceptives, period – even through their adult life.

Social conservatives successfully pressed this agenda into action through Abstinence-Only Sex Education funding legislation passed during the years that conservative Republicans controlled the White House, U.S. Congress and many state legislatures, like Texas.

NYTimes: For the past 33 years — since, as they see it, the wanton era of the 1960′s culminated in the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 — American social conservatives have been on an unyielding campaign against abortion. But, as the conservative tide swelled, this campaign has taken on a broader scope. Its true beginning point may not be Roe but Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that had the effect of legalizing contraception. “We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion,” says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. “The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an anti-child mind-set,” she told me. “So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception.”

Social conservatives hold the Supreme Court’s Griswold “right to privacy” declaration with contempt because it is the foundation of the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Citing the Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird decisions, which were based on justifications of privacy, the Justice Burger Court extended the right of privacy to include a woman’s right to have an abortion in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that found a Texas law criminalizing abortions unconstitutional.

The Griswold and Eisenstadt privacy decisions were again cited in the court’s Lawrence v. Texas 2003 decision holding a Texas state law prohibiting certain forms of intimate sexual contact between members of the same sex as unconstitutional; yet another decision conservatives hold in contempt. Justice Thomas’ dissent in Lawrence v. Texas leaves little doubt that he would overrule Griswold if given the chance, and Chief Justice Roberts disparaged Griswold in an article he drafted in 1981, although he claimed to have backed away from that view in his confirmation hearing.

The Bush Administration in 2008 took the conservative abstinence-only agenda a step beyond sex education with an administrative approach to legally restrict access to contraceptive products. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, “The Bush Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services wrote a regulation that defines most birth-control pills and intrauterine devices as abortion because they work by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus.” Most social conservatives define a fertilized egg, from the “moment of conception,” as human person with full civil rights. Any human interruption to the natural processes that allows and egg to be fertilized or once fertilized to implant in the uterus and develop into a full term birth is akin to abortion. In December, the HHS formally adopted this conscientious objection ‘regulation’ permitting federally funded health care providers to decline to provide or participate in services, such as filling prescriptions for contraceptives, to which they object.

In the context of the Judge Sotomayor Supreme Court confirmation hearings last week, Americans should be reminded of the GOP’s on-the-record opposition to the constitutional principle that American have a right to privacy, a right that was “granted” in the 1960s by the Supreme Court’s Griswold v. Connecticut decision.

The GOP is on the record as opposing the court’s finding that the language of the constitution defines a principle that American citizens have a general right of privacy to be left alone without government intrusion into their personal or family decisions and lifestyle. Conservatives in the GOP continue to press their so called strict constructionist constitutional argument, that Americans have no right to privacy, because it is not explicitly enumerated (written) in the Constitution.

By arguing against the Supreme Courts right to privacy finding, conservatives are arguing against the court’s so called “activist” decisions on a broad range of social rights that include child rearing, procreation, marriage, contraception, private and home schooling rights and civil rights equality.

One of the most memorable moments from Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee was the aggressive line of questioning from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C). The South Carolina Republican demanded to know if President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court had a “temperament problem” and even told Sotomayor that she had a reputation as a bully. At another point, the senator asked Sotomayor about her now infamous “wise Latina” comment and her tenure on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund, a legal arm for the Hispanic community, with the inference she is a Latina racist. It was all reflective of the line of questioning that Republicans on the Judiciary Committee pushed all day.

Finally, Senator Graham turned to another line of questioning by asking Judge Sotomayor, “Would you be considered a “strict constructionist” in your own mind?

… I’m asking … Does the Constitution, as written, prohibit a legislative body at state or federal level from defining life or relating the rights of the unborn? … Is there anything in the [Constitutional] document written about [a woman's right to choose] abortion?” Judge Sotomayor finally answered, “The word “abortion” is not used in the Constitution, but the Constitution does have a broad provision concerning a liberty provision under the due process…” Cutting Judge Sotomayor off mid-answer Sen. Graham observed, “That’s my concern. …a lot of us feel that the best way to change society is to go to the ballot box, elect someone, and if they are not doing it right, get rid of them through the electoral process. And a lot of us are concerned … that unelected judges are very quick to change society in a way that’s disturbing.“

[The full exchange between Judge Sotomayor and Sen. Graham can be found in the transcript here.]

Senator Graham’s “strict constructionist” line of questioning exemplifies the GOP’s indefensible positions on American’s right to privacy and civil right of equality regardless of race, sex or religion. Because the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision is based on the courts constitutional “right of privacy” finding, conservatives like Senator Graham, always reference Roe to rally support to their “strict constructionist” constitutional argument that Americans have no right of privacy. The abortion issue is little more than a stalking horse that social conservatives use to attack the Supreme Court’s so called liberal “activist” decisions on a broad range rights issues, including the right to purchase and use contraceptive products.

Conservatives argue that the framer’s “original intent” can be found only in the exact words written in the constitution rather than an understanding and application of the principles that framers were attempting to define. Conservatives maintain that judges who make decisions based on “constitutional principles” carried in the words, rather than application of the exact words, written in the constitution are liberal activist judges who legislate from the bench.

Of course, the Constitution, as written, does not specifically prohibit a legislative body at the state or federal level from segregating schools as separate but equal “white only” and “black only” institutions, but the Supreme Court did find such laws unconstitutional in the court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision. In Brown the court found that the language of the constitution defines principles that segregation deprives segregated citizens of their equal protection under the “due process of law” as granted in the 14th Amendment.

Even the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who held “constructionist” views on constitutional interpretations, opposed Brown v. Board of Education as an unconstitutional decision when he was a Supreme Court clerk. Rehnquist also urged Barry Goldwater to argue that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional.

Nor does the Constitution, as written, specifically prohibit a legislative body at the state or federal level from segregating drinking fountains as “white only” and “black only,” from restricting marriage between people of different races, from making the use of birth control pills and condoms a criminal offense, from requiring parents to send their children to public rather than private schools or even from restricting access to the ballot box on election day through poll taxes, literacy tests and other “Jim Crow” related laws.

These and other such rights are not enumerated by specific wording in the U.S. Constitution, but they are rights that most Americans today believe are implicitly guaranteed by the Constitution. Even so, Americans were denied these rights by many state and federal laws, particularly among southern states like Texas, until the 1950′s and 1960′s.

Conservatives like Senator Graham continue to maintain that it is wrong to appoint Supreme Court Judges, like Judge Sotomayer, who believe the constitution grants rights not specifically enumerated in word and who will not look for opportunities to turn the constitutional clock back to 1950; A time before Brown vs. Board of Education and Griswold v. Connecticut.

Conservatives would reverse Roe v. Wade by reversing the Supreme Court’s 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut finding that the language of the constitution defines principles that American citizens have a general right of privacy to be left alone without government intrusion into their personal or family decisions and lifestyle. By reversing Griswold conservatives would in one stroke set the stage to reverse every Supreme Court “right of privacy” decision made in the past 60 years.

This is the motivation behind the questions that Republicans on the Judiciary Committee pressed on Judge Sotomayor and the reason they are opposed to placing anyone on the Supreme Court that is not a “strict constructionist” conservative.

One time Supreme Court nominee and conservative strict constructionist Robert Bork examined the landmark case Griswold v. Connecticut in his book, “The Right of Privacy” and proclaimed that Justice Douglas erroneously interpreted that the Constitution grants Americans a right of privacy because it was never actually written into the Constitution.

Supreme Court Justices Thomas and Scalia have explicitly argued that the right to privacy is, in fact, not a constitutional right.

• Justice Thomas: there is “no general right of privacy” or relevant liberty in the Constitution (Lawrence v. Texas dissent)
• Justice Scalia: has often spoken disparagingly of the “so-called ‘right to privacy’”(Lawrence v. Texas dissent)

On today’s court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Alito, Scalia and Thomas, who all subscribe to the “constructionist” philosophy of Constitutional Law, are not inclined to broadly protect privacy beyond those cases raising claims based on explicitly written Bill of Rights guarantees. In other words four out the nine justices sitting on the Supreme Court do not recognize the “implied right to privacy” that their Supreme Court predecessors have recognized.

Yet very few conservatives or GOP leaders in their right mind would openly dare argue that there is no right to privacy in the United States because they know it is a losing proposition. Better to leave all but their conservative base in the dark than reveal such uncomfortable and fundamental tenets of their political religions. Conservative politicians use code phrases like “activist judges” and “strict constructionist” to send messages to their faithful conservative base that they would, if they could, revoke the right of privacy, revoke the right to purchase and use contraception, revoke the right of women to make choices about their own health and body and, perhaps, even revoke the finding that segregation is unconstitutional.

Transcripts of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Confirmation Hearing for Judge Sotomayor:

• Each committee senator’s opening statement.
• Sotomayor’s opening statement.
• Part-1 of Tuesday’s transcript, Part-2, Part-3, Part-4 and Part 5.
• Part-1 of Wednesday’s transcript, Part-2, Part-3 and Part-4.
• Part-1 of Thursday’s transcript, Part-2, Part-3, Part-4, Part-5, Part-6 and Part-7.

Related Link:

• NYTimes: Contra-Contraception

Democratic Blog of Collin County – News

Tagged with: democracy, control, more, government, spending, end, of, our, country, bankers, bailouts, money, wasted, foreclosures, paid, off, obama, state, the, union, speech, economic, defense, crisis, economy, politics, reserve, ron paul This is an excerpt from my article I wrote on Before It’s News called “Wake Up America or the Republic Will Fall” and explains [...]
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SUPREME COURT AFFIRMS RACIST ORIGINS OF GUN CONTROL By Frances Rice How ironic that, on the day former exalted cyclop of the Ku Klux Klan Democrat Senator Robert Byrd died, the US Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the gun control laws that are embedded firmly in the Democratic Party’s racist roots. At the heart of the McDonald v. City of Chicago case that is posted on the US Supreme Count’s Internet site is the Court’s decision that the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution – that was pushed through by Republicans after the Civil War, led by Republican Senator Charles Sumner – is the anchor that binds state and local governments to the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for self defense.  Otis McDonald, one of the plaintiffs, is a black man who just wanted to have the right to protect himself from criminals who terrorized him in his home with frequent break-ins.  The only current black US Supreme Court member, Justice Clarence Thomas who was appointed by Republican President George H. W. Bush, courageously delved into the racist origins of gun control laws to demonstrate that such laws have no place in a nation of free people.  The liberal justices on the Court, including Justice Sonia Sotomayor who was appointed last year by Democrat President Barack Obama, voted against the black plaintiff and his fellow Chicago residents. The McDonald case provides a bird eye’s view of the history of Democratic Party racism.  Referenced in the Court’s opinion is the 1856 Republican Party Platform that includes language about the “right of the people to keep and bear arms.”  A key source used by the Court is the book “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877″ by Dr. Eric Foner whose biography can be found on the Internet.  Forner’s book reveals how, before the Civil War ended, Southern States enacted “Slave Codes” that prohibited slaves from owning firearms.  After Republican President Abraham Lincoln issued the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves in the rebelling States, and after Republicans pushed through the Thirteenth Amendment freeing all the remaining slaves, Democrats in the South persisted in keeping the newly freed slaves from owning the means to protect themselves – guns.  The Supreme Court in the McDonald decision wrote about how, after the Civil War, the Southern States started passing laws, called “Black Codes”, to systematically disarm blacks, specifically the over 180,000 blacks who returned to the States of the old Confederacy after serving in the Union Army.  In response to the “Black Codes,” the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866.  But the Democrats would not be deterred.  Very soon after the 1866 law was enacted, Alabama, followed by other Southern States, again passed “Black Codes” that made it illegal for blacks to own firearms.  Cited by the Court in the McDonald case, as an example of such a discriminatory code, is the Mississippi law that stated:  “no freedman, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her county, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife.”  In one Southern town, according to the Supreme Court, the marshal confiscated the weapons of the returning black Union soldiers and, at every opportunity, promptly shot black people.  The Court’s McDonald decision records that: “Throughout the South, armed parties, often consisting of ex-Confederate soldiers serving in the state militias, forcibly took firearms from newly freed slaves”.  In his book about Reconstruction, Dr. Foner revealed that in 1866, the Ku Klux Klan was started as a Tennessee social club.  The Klan then became a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party and spread into other Southern States, launching a “reign of terror” against Republican leaders, black and white.  The Klan would “order the colored men to give up their arms; saying that everybody would be Kukluxed in whose house fire-arms were found”.  In the McDonald decision, the Court pointed out how the Republican-controlled Congress, while debating the Fourteenth Amendment, referred to the right to keep and bear arms as a fundamental right deserving of protection.  Republican Senator Samuel Pomeroy described three “indispensable” “safeguards of liberty under our form of Government”, one of which was the right to keep and bear arms.  Pomeroy said: “Every man . . . should have the right to bear arms for the defense of himself and family and his homestead.  And if the cabin door of the freedman is broken open and the intruder enters for purposes as vile as were known to slavery, then should a well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the polluted wretch to another world, where his wretchedness will forever remain complete”.  Pomeroy’s words reflect exactly the sentiment expressed by Otis McDonald when he and his fellow Chicagoans filed a law suit against the Democrat-controlled City of Chicago that had confiscated their weapons, leaving them to the mercy of intruders who had broken open his door and entered his home for vile purposes. Frances Rice, a retired lawyer and Army Lieutenant Colonel, is chairman of the National Black Republican Association and may be contacted at: www.NBRA.info

© National Black Republican Association, 2010. All Rights Reserved.

BLACK REPUBLICAN: National Black Republican Association E-News

The 2010 election results are in and although Democrats lost control of the House they did manage to retain control of the Senate.

Here’s the quote of the day from Senator John Kerry, on the Senate results and especially Harry Reid’s victory in Nevada:  

“Politico was wrong, Huffington Post was wrong, hell, all the pundits were wrong.  Harry Reid isn’t just Dracula, he isn’t just Lazarus, he’s our Leader and our whole caucus is thrilled that he’s unbreakable and unbeatable.”

The Democratic Daily