Coming soon: the ACORN Constitution

David

Er, I suggest you look up how the Constitution can be changed. It's barely possible to provide amendments without a lot of pain, let alone rewrite it wholesale.

Vision Aforethought

Oops. Now those who oppose US style gun law can see why concerned Americans have chosen to retain the right to bare arms. It's called being ready for a rainy day. Apparently, a certain amount of precipitation is forecast...

Mr Jeeves

Well Barack Obama must be a genius. Whilst giving an interview for Chicago Public Radio in 2001 he decided to spell out his entire policy for judicial reform for his presidential run seven years later. Doubtless his statement that he was going to 'spread the wealth around' was in fact the launch of his economic redistribution strategy when the liberal elite and the washington caliphate apoints him president for life of the new Islamo-Socialist Republic of America in 2012.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that in four years America won't have a new constitution written by ACORN, or a liberal judiciary, or a democratic congress or indeed anyone else for that matter.

I'm also somewhat controversially going to suggest that ACORN is not staffed exclusively by vicious ruffians, robbers and murderers as your article also helpfully suggests.

Peter T

.is this blog censored.or what?. I posted a little something re you're, getting better like a good wine with age, article on Dorkins..he the high priest of Purblind Certitude..hoping to get a bite from Skinner The Nutter.
Where is it & why didn't it get a fly?.
I remain,flummoxed yet still yours,

Hysteria

Mel - you are right - and you and others have been pointing us this way - interesting now to hear it in his own words. I listened to the interview, and was pretty amazed that no-one had picked this up - the language is pretty clear.

Sadly the argument is too late - the MSM have been asleep too long for them to latch on to this in the last week.

Hysteria

David - you are right - but this also speaks to his intent and world-view

Dee Ranged

America is sleep-walking into a nightmare created by its repudiation of anything Republican.

.

Verity

Not just this tape, made in 2001, but the tape that The Los Angeles Times has under lock and key showing Obama at a party speaking of his friendship with Rashid Khalidi, a leading Palestinian scholar and activist.

This is so damaging that the LA Times is refusing to release it because, "...we promised...". Awwwwww. "And" said editor Russ Stanton yesterday, "The Times keeps its promises." This was after several days of stonewalling with "No comment." (Why was a promise not to release it made if it was not outstandingly dangerous to Obama's campaign?)

Obama schmoozes around with Islamic terrorists (here described as "activists").

As others have pointed out, when there is a tape that is this explosive, somewhere, someone has a copy ...

Andrew Forbes

If he actually attempts any of this, it'll be fiendishly difficult; requiring 2/3's majorities in Congress. Also the Supreme Court is currently tipped against him by Bush nominees. Them, in 2 years, there'll be Congressional elections which, if Obama's program is unpopular, will elect more Republicans, maybe even so that the Republicans control Congress. So he won't be able to do very much that's terribly radical. Checks and balances.

As we've discovered, the only area where there are insufficient checks and balances is the President's prerogative to go to war.

Dixon

David
October 29th, 2008 12:35pm
" Er, I suggest you look up how the Constitution can be changed. It's barely possible to provide amendments without a lot of pain, let alone rewrite it wholesale."

Unfortunately, David, it looks like Democrats will have control of both houses, so the changes would indeed be possible.

Dont forget that the constitution was changed to allow Roosevely to have a third term in office. About as fundamental an alteration and extension of power as can be envisaged. And that wasin living memory

RMH

Rashid Khalidi

Funded by McCain.

Not long left beofre the wingnuts go sick.

Verity

Note to Charles Johnson and all our (R) American cousins - has anyone checked eBay?

Johnny

That's right, Mr Jeeves, Mr Obama has simply abandoned all these ideas but has somehow declined to tell us all.

To quote the Holy One: "Don't tell me words don't matter."

Why should anything in his political track record bother us at all?

Just kneel at the temple of the Obamessiah, America, and offer your Constitution up for sacrifice.

John Birch

David: Well put. This blog repeatedly demonstrates complete ignorance of how the American system works. As for warning about a leader who threatens freedom, has Melanie missed things like warrantless wiretapping and attacks on habaeus corpus.

Verity: Did you know that in the 1990s the International Republican Institute gave a Khalidi organization several grants, including one worth half a million dollars? The chair of the ICR at the time was John McCain. I trust you and Melanie will now condemn McCain.

John Birch

Vision Aforethought: Do you mean Americans like the white supremacists arrested the other day for plotting to kill Obama among others?

Brennen Bearnes

I know basic comprehension of well-structured English sentences is probably too much to ask from a class of pundits who have been insisting for weeks now that they can't grasp any fundamental distinctions between slightly more progressive taxation and (pick one or more of) Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, or Maoism, but I still can't escape the sense that this has got to be some kind of put on.

Martin Meenagh

The Constitution was not changed to keep Roosevelt in power; it was changed after Roosevelt to keep another President from more than two terms or ten years if he or she was a Vice-President propelled into office.

In 221 years, there have been only 27 amendments. These have generally come in batches. The last one passed in the 1990s, but started in the 1790s. Each of these require two thirds of both houses of Congress and three quarters of each state legislature. They are not valid until this happens.

It sounds to me that what Obama was referring to was the Poor People's Campaign and the associated developments from the Civil Rights Campaign after 1966. This did not work through the courts. It sought to build a coalition for economic change through political action within Congress. It failed, though Nixon, under the spell of keynesianism, actually instituted the really big welfare reform that threw money and rights at broken communities and encouraged family breakup--the Aid to Families with Dependent Children programme.

There is no basis for the idea that a President, even with the Congress behind him, can fundamentally change the US. Obama would have to change the cities, the statehouses, and the other 850000 or so elected authorities.

It is far more likely that he will be unable to deal with the deficit or infrastructure problems and the wars left behind by the Bush administration.

Sorry for the long post, but I thought it necessary just to clarify the facts as this discussion progresses

AF - Austin, TX

Wonderful analysis. You are our warrior. Keep it up.

David Lindsay

In point of fact, there was a Marxist coup in 2000, when the old hands from Trotsky's Fourth International. If you can find their constitutional authority for the Federal Executive's acquisition and maintenance of an overseas empire, never mind for things like wire-tapping, then you will be doing very well indeed.

By contrast, Obama could quite reasonably be portrayed as the most conservative candidate for at least sixty years: an economic patriot ("protectionist"), a foreign policy realist ("isolationist"), and electorally in hock to the biggest "Nativists" and some of the biggest moral traditionalists in America, namely the blacks and their churches.

I have just been told, by someone who knows for certain, that the Republican leaders in the House now expect to lose forty seats, while those in the Senate are bracing themselves for a filibuster-proof sixty Democrats, along with President Obama.

A liberal one-party state? Well, no, not necessarily. It depends who the forty more House Democrats, and the sixty Democratic Senators, are. Those likely to win even Democratic primaries in normally deep red states are not likely to be either morally and socially liberal diehard capitalists and warmongers (like the Clintons, although Bush has done everything they ever wanted and then some, whatever he might say or have said), or morally and socially liberal economic populists and foreign policy realists (who are actually quite rare, there as here, and who tend to be not so much populists as just Leftists, there as here).

No, they are most likely to be morally and socially conservative economic populists and foreign policy realists, the sort of people whom a primary system would produce in much of the United Kingdom if we were lucky enough to have such a thing.

Congressmen Altmire, Berry, Boren, Costello, Cuellar, Davis, Donnelly, Ellsworth, Holden, Kildee, Lipinski, Marshall, McIntyre, Melancon, Mollohan, Murtha, Oberstar, Ortiz, Peterson, Rahall, Skelton, Shuler, Stupak, Taylor, Wilson, et al are on course to be joined by figures such as Bobby Bright (AL-02, a Baptist deacon), Parker Griffith (AL-05, a pro-life doctor and endorsed by Alabama's State Fraternal Order of Police), Doug Heckman (GA-07, a special forces colonel in the Army Reserves and endorsed by General Wesley Clark), Mike Montagano (IN-03), David Boswell (KY-02), Don Cazayoux (LA-06), Joseph Larkin (MI-11), Travis Childers (MS-01), Jim Esch (NE-02), Steve Driehaus (OH-01), Bill O'Neill (OH-14) and Kathy Dahlkemper (PA-03).

Meanwhile, the Senate already includes staunch pro-lifers such as Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska. It also includes Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, an economically populist opponent of the neoconservative war agenda, and a cultural conservative who served as Navy Secretary in the Reagan Administration.

If the filibuster-proof sixty mark is reached, then it will be reached in such persons as Ronnie Musgrove (MS, who as State Governor signed the law banning public funding of abortion) and Bob Conley (SC, a traditional Catholic, Ron Paul activist, and opponent of the bailout).

I know why neocons are worried.

Conservatives, on the other hand, should be cock-a-hoop.

John Birch

Dixon: What you say is simply wrong! The U.S. constitution was amended (22nd admendment) after FDR's death to prevent a president from serving more than 2 terms--it wasn't changed to allow him to serve more than 2 terms. It also has to be ratified by U.S. states so the whole idea that Obama could change the constitution, even if he wanted to, is, like much of what appears on this blog, absolute hokum.

Andrew Forbes

Dixon; one of us is showing our ignorance. It may well be me, but here goes:

Changing the constitution requires a 2/3's majority, and while the Democrats will have a majority, it won't be this big. Also, they don't have 3-line whips and supine MPs like we have; many Democratic Congressmen are pretty conservative, so really radical socialist programs (as opposed to constitutional changes) will get voted down by a simple majority. And if something does get through, voters have another go in 2 years to re-balance Congress.

And I don't think they changed the constitution to allow FDR to run a 3rd time; I understand that after he'd won it a 4th, the constitution was amended to introduce the 2 term limit. Too much of a good thing. They'd have had the Gipper in ad infinitum. And Clinton would have beaten Bush in 2000. Checks and balances.

Michael B

David and others don't seem to understand how politics and the judiciary are capable of working and conniving together. Erosions of basic Constitutional principles are an all too real fact, a very real, ongoing challenge. Witness for the prosecution: Obama's Constitutional Subversion, excerpt:

A new report ... written by Second Amendment lawyer Dave Hardy of Of Arms and the Law finds that while constitutional law professor Barack Obama was serving on the Joyce Foundation's Board of Directors from 1994-2002, Joyce set out to corrupt the availability of academic scholarship concerning the Second Amendment. The goal was to control published research so that the U.S Supreme Court would be influenced as much as possible by the overwhelming preponderance of recent scholarship favoring the collective rights interpretation favored by gun control advocates and firearm prohibitionists.

Hardy summarizes:

"The Joyce Foundation years ago realized that a Supreme Court case on the Second Amendment was likely, and decided to use its millions to buy the case indirectly. It created a supposed academic research center as its wholly-owned subsidiary. It corrupted law reviews, dictating their content, and even trying to dictate who could speak at universities accepting Joyce's money. It laundered its money through its Center and thru a University’s Foundation.

"An attorney named Barak Obama was right in the middle of the plan."

David

"favoring the collective rights interpretation"

Since the Constitution is applied through interpretation, it's hardly being subverted by doing so. Different people will have different views on the interpretation of constitutional law. Trying to advocate for one view is no more subversive than advocating for another.

Further, it should be noted the SCOTUS, thanks to recent appointments, is skewed to the right, and is likely to remain so for some time, thanks to the youth of the appointments.

(This is of course no guarantee- the most judicially activist and liberal court, responsible for, amongst other things, Roe vs Wade, took hold after appointments by Eisenhower, who though the chap he appointed was "sound".)

Mark

Wow Melanie, you're really surpassing your traditional standards of hyperbole with this one.

Several points:
1. As others have pointed out, the Constitution is very difficult to change (2/3 of each house plus 3/4 of all state houses)

2. The party system in the US is very different to that of the UK; it's much looser and so even if the Dems do get a filibuster-proof majority, it doesn't mean that the leadership will actually be able to pass anything. Look at HillaryCare in 1993 for example, or Bush's attempts to privatise Social Security a few years ago.

3. a) Positive liberties don't require a constitutional amendment - in the UK, for example, we have a right to healthcare free at the point of need. You won't find this in the Human Rights Act. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, tax credits are all examples of the implementation of positive liberties.

b) Obama doesn't dismiss negative liberties. The tape was a discussion about the Civil Rights era which was founded on a desire to gain negative liberty (the right to vote, for example).

c) Your point that "negative liberty *is* liberty" is not as uncontroversial as you suggest, and your ensuing discussion about negative and positive liberties is very mixed up. I suggest you read Isaiah Berlin's seminal "Two Concepts of Liberty", it's pretty short and well worth a look.

d) Positive liberty creates obligations on government, not on citizens. It doesn't require a restructuring of the basic relationship between state and citizen. Indeed, the US certainly provides positive liberties to a varying extent and depending on circumstances: the right to a minimum standard of living (read: unemployment or incapacity insurance), healthcare, or an education, or perhaps clean air, for example.

4. Although I'm an Obama supporter, I accept that it's unlikely things will change particularly significantly after this election. There will be some adjustment in the spread of income tax so that those with more pay more, and those with less pay less. There will also be a expansion in the amount of people with healthcare, but it still won't be universal, and the problems with affordability will almost certainly remain.

5. I don't get your attacks on ACORN. All that's happened is that they've paid people to register new voters and a few bad apples have made names up to make their quota. I think it's quite unlikely that Mickey Mouse is actually going to turn up at a Florida polling station. In any case, the idea that there's a massive conspiracy to register fake voters and send people to vote multiple times belongs to the outer echelons of the wingnutosphere - the Free Republics, or LGFs, or Michelle Malkins for example - not on the blog of a well-respected British political magazine. Voter suppression is a far bigger problem than voter oppression - look at Florida 2000 for example, and the tens of thousands of people wrongly struck off voter rolls.

Despite the foaming at the mouth of Michelle Malkin and her readers, there is not going to be that radical a change in the next few years of an Obama presidency. The United States as we know it is not going to end on January 20th. So you can put your superlatives and your alarmist rhetoric away, Mel.

(sorry this ended up being so long!)

robzrob

Group rights, in the person of the corporation, already exist.

(Got that off Ch**sky, in case you didn't know)

(Censored it to prevent any strokes/heart attacks amongst the contributors here)

Fabio P.Barbieri

It is certain that Obama and a majority Democrat Congress will not have the power to change the Constitution so totally. It is however also certain that they will try. And that they will do everything in their power to fill every level of government with fellow travellers, crooked judges of the kind who discover a right to gay marriage in the Fourteenth Amendment, complacent FBI and CIA heads, and so on and so forth and so following. We can also expect that state and local government that does not want to go along for the ride will be punished in in any of the hundred ways that the federal government can - denied spending, penalized in terms of every kind of decision-making, left out of the bags of industrial and agricultural goodies, even openly reviled and attacked by the Democrats' media accompliced, until belonging to such states will be seen as being pariah-like. An unprecedented one-party majority, just as that party is in the grip of Dean and the extremist Kos groupings, would leave the Constitution as an empty shell, while the majority ignores it and complacent judges support them. The result would be disastrous, and incidentally economically nightmarish.

Conservative Cabbie

It's always nice to see John Birch look down on us dumb wingnuts.

The fact is that whilst the constitution is very difficult to change, it has as been stated been changed a number of times in the past and if there is a Democratic supermajority, now seems to be the most likely time for it to happen again even if some of those Dems are mildly conservative.

As for getting round the constitution, how about Roe vs Wade. A ruling based upon the constitutional right to privacy but one which makes it virtually impossible to ban abortion. It is possible to use the constitution to your own ends particularly if you have SCOTUS on your side. Speaking of which, it is very likely that the next President will select two judges to the bench giving either a liberal or conservative majority.

David

"It is however also certain that they will try."

Proof?

Conservative Cabbie

Reference this video.

I think it's better if this video stays locked up. By all accounts it isn't all that damaging - Obama praises a respected professor who happens to have once been in the PLO (whose leader appeared on the Whitehouse lawn with Bill Clinton) and who has expressed anti-Israeli sentiments. It wasn't as if he was a terrorist, he was a spokesman I believe.

However, the LA Times keeping it locked up has created a story out of this video that will run and run until the election or the video is released. By keeping it hidden, the LA Times are allowing people and the media to question what's on the video, why is Obama so worried about it and confirms the view that the media is in the tank for Obama - all adding to peoples doubts about Obama. Locked up, it's a six day story, released, it's only a one day story.

Keep it locked up I say.

Barackobama

The suggestion that socialism or other forms of collective actions are disallowed by the US constitution (or conflict with the intentions of the Founding Fathers) is contentious.
It conflicts with any reasonable reading of the US constitution that takes into account the context in which it was written.
The document has never defined what individuality meant. But its original application implied that an individual was not a woman (since women did not have the vote); not a man with less than the requisite amount of wealth (who also could not vote); not a slave and not a member of a disapproved religion. It is indisputable from their actions that the Founding Fathers meant that an individual was white, male, rich and Christian. This is a collective definition and the Founding Fathers knew it was. As they demonstrated through their actions before, during and after the revolutionary war, they were not libertarians and probably not even classical liberals.
The US constitution in reality sets out the rules governing relations among the collective that replaced government by the British crown in the American colonies in 1783. It legitimized then, and legitimizes now, collective (including coercive) action. The USA would not have been able to take control of most of North America, and hold it, without it.
The definition of individuality has since been extended to encompass women and people of all ethnicities and religion, regardless of their wealth or income. The right of the collective to take action in the interests of the collective over the interests of the individual, nevertheless, remains. It is therefore consistent with the founding principles of the US for the collective, however defined, to elect a government that promises socialist policies, including income redistribution and collective ownership.
The argument about socialism in the US would be more fruitfully conducted if it were framed in philosophical terms. Socialists believe in four principles: that everyone should be treated equally; that co-operation is invariably better for society than competition; that acting to remedy a wrong is always justifiable and that, in the right circumstances, most people will do the right thing most of the time.
Liberals (and libertarians) regard equality to be elusive or even impossible and believe competition is usually the best way to strengthen society; that acting to remedy wrongs is often a mistake or counterproductive and that the law and the market are the most effective ways to promote good behaviour.
If they really want to defeat socialist arguments, rather than simply repress them, liberals should welcome open debate about why they are wrong. Sadly, it is almost impossible for this to happen in the US because of the misrepresentation of socialist principles (and at least partly because the word has been used in the past as a code word for African-Americans and Jews).
It is probably the most serious deficiency of the US’ political culture and one that many of the Founding Fathers would have lamented.

Conservative Cabbie

Exclusive from Donal Blaney - Obama has links to Irish terrorism.

Well actuall no, Blaney makes the point that Obama now seems to be interjecting himself into N. Ireland as an issue.

In a written response to the Irish American Unity Conference, Obama has stated that he is in favour of devolving policing and justice to the N Ireland assembly and favours a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

God help us if he's got his sights on us now.

See Donal Blaney's piece.
http://tinyurl.com/5w4tym

The IAUC piece is here.
http://www.iauc.org/node/162

Wilf

Good post, Fabio Barbieri. Spot on.

Conservative Cabbie

I can't believe I'm going to say this but that was a great post from Barack Obama above. Informative and balanced. Thankyou.

Conservative Cabbie

I previously said that this Khalidi dinner video wasn't a big story. However if what Little Green Footballs is reporting is true then I definately change my mind.

http://tinyurl.com/662wuh

It is a report that Obama is heard to say in the video "He congratulates Khalidi for his work saying “Israel has no God-given right to occupy Palestine” plus there’s been “genocide against the Palestinian people by Israelis.”

I'm sceptical, but if true then he's probably lost the Jewish vote en masse.

derek

why are my comments not showing up?

John Birch

Conservative Cabbie: Not looking down on you at all but simply pointing out that amending the constitution requires amendment by the states not just Congress so the hysteria being whipped up on this site is just that.

Roger K

I have just heard Obama sneer that McCain calls him a socialist and a Marxist because he shared his toys at kintergarten. Would Mr. Obama like to tell us where he went to kintergaten?

Jesus

Yes. Obama threatens the freedom you have to say and do exactly what you want, regardless of the consequences. Where has this founding father crap taken us? To where we are now? Give me Marx, Lenin, whoever, anyday. The pigs have become the humans and the humans have become the pigs. A capitalist society is no better than a communist one, as Animal Farm pointed out. It is freedom of the human spirit we require, not dictatotship in the name of democracy, or God, or whoever. Watch out, sweetie. Change is coming. Jesus was a community organiser.

paddy greene

I live in the states. People are SLEEP WALKING here; Oprah Winfrey, the VIEW, George Clooney, every late night comedian and MSM sell all things Obama all the time. I am well educated as are my friends; you cannot have an intelligent conversation about Obama; you cannot mention
Bill Ayres, you cannot mention ACORN, you cannot discuss his credentials, his core beliefs, his background because no one is listening to anything because they hate George Bush and well, Obama is not George Bush!!! The collapsing of the banks/wall street was the nail in McCain's coffin. Sarah Palin has been denigrated so thoroughly by mainstream media that the mention of her name alone brings laughter and derision. I am a registered democrat with educated liberal friends. They cannot bare a discussion about Acorn, Ayres or anything that might question the integrity of Obama. Oh, and by the way, they think our popularity in Europe is dependent on an Obama victory! How scary is that?! Get some of that fat Russian money floating around London and buy some prime time spots on American TV and do an half hour infomercial with Michelle Phillips educating the idiots in my country about the realities of this election because people truly have their heads us their asses on this one.

fellow traveller

why are we even discussing amending the constitution? Am I the only person who reads that as a discussion of the dead end that the civil rights movement reached when it shifted its focus to the courts? He's saying that community organisation was likely to improve our lives (as it had in the 1960s).

Community organisation isn't a revolution. It's what improves our schools, generates charity donations, reduces crime and stops roads being built that destroy communities.

It's practiced by right and left, rich and poor. It's as far from state socialism as you could get.

So even if he could change the constitution, there's actually nothing in this 7-year-old clip that even suggests that

"America is about to get a new constitution written by the thugs of ACORN."

Calm down everyone!

Ronnie

Fabio P. Barbieri, I very much enjoyed your contribution.

I'm pretty sure that, if you work hard, you could turn your post into a novel. It would have everything a great 'bodice-ripper' could ever wish for. That is why the film rights would be worth millions and it would certainly exceed the performance of 'Titanic' at the box office.

I leave it to you of course, you are the author, but I see the story climaxing atop a dark rain-swept hill. With a small group of bedraggled survivors, huddled together, waiting for the end. Possibly quoting from Melanie's last blog...

jgo

Why is it the media has recently chosen to depict the Reds with blue?

David

"Why is it the media has recently chosen to depict the Reds with blue?"

Oh for the love, of...the ignorance here knows no bounds. In the US, red has been the traditional colour for the Republicans, and blue for the Democrats for quite some time.

stupidity through hatred

Melanie's overblown language probably tells its own tale about the reliability of what she writes. But periodically it's interesting to look at how she abuses her sources. Here the mismatch between Obama's words and what she says about them is about as great as it could be.

A few questions :

Q1 Does Obama suggest a new constitution written by ACORN (as apparently claimed by Melanie)?

A1 No, certainly not in the "really important bit" she quotes.

Q2 Is Obama suggesting any amendments to the existing constitution (as apparently claimed by Melanie)?

A2 Again no, not in the bit she quotes.

Q3. Does Obama, as Melanie claims, “lament” – cry out in grief? - “the fact that the Supreme Court has never waded into 'economic justice'”?

A3. No, there's none of that.

Q4 Does Obama “dismiss negative liberties”?

A4 Again no.

The rest of the piece is built on these (deliberate?) misrepresentations.

So what was Obama saying? Read it again. Simply, I think, that the civil rights movement became too court focused and tended to lose track of the need for political activity.

The man's a lawyer embarking on a political career and he's reflecting on the limits to what can be achieved through the courts and the need therefore to engage politically.

No big deal. Except apparently to Melanie.

Ronnie

Derek, because they are probably crap.

fellow traveller

stupidity through hatred: thanks, I thought for a minute I was the only person looking at this and thinking: "where's the bit about radicalising the proletariat to overturn the values of society?"

Nick Kaplan

Mark; there are so many errors in your post it is quite difficult to know where to start.

First the point about how hard it is to change the constitution is somewhat irrelevant since Melanie’s worry was about Obama’s view of the Judiciary rather than the legislative process. We must remember that if Obama wins he will have a four year opportunity to appoint justices to the Supreme Court (if any currently on their die). Do we really want a man who sees the Constitution to be a constraint which needs to be broken to be nominating those that are going to interpret that constitution?

You argue that Obama doesn’t dismiss negative liberties. The problem is the enforcement of positive Liberties necessitates the violation of certain negative liberties for it requires a drastic expansion of the state. Thus coercion, the very opposite of negative liberty, increases as positive liberties are expanded.

It is interesting that you recommended Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ given that his conclusion is the exact one Melanie describes and you criticise i.e. That freedom consists in negative liberty and that Positive Liberties are the route to tyranny.

Your comment that positive liberties create obligations on government not citizens is naive in the extreme. Who is it that funds government? Oh yes... the humble tax payer, thus it is the citizen who faces the expense of all these ever expanding positive liberties. But the real worry is that those who typically support positive liberty are not only completely willing to sacrifice the wealthy for the greater good but they are quite literally ready to “force people to be free.” Have you read Taylor’s essay “What’s wrong with negative liberty,” it’s scary stuff... Taylor suggest for example that people’s own desires may get in the way of their own “self-realisation,” how he presumes to know what is better for me than I do I can only guess, but this is almost certainly the road to tyranny. This concept then requires a most fundamental restructuring of the relationship between citizen and state for the state no longer sees its role as protecting your rights and freedoms, it instead sees it role as a means of achieving socially engineered goals by robbing some and coercing others. It leaves the poor completely dependent on hand outs and drained of any desire for autonomy and it leaves the wealthy as little more than a means to others’ ends.

Robin in Georgia

Mark said: 5. I don't get your attacks on ACORN. All that's happened is that they've paid people to register new voters and a few bad apples have made names up to make their quota. I think it's quite unlikely that Mickey Mouse is actually going to turn up at a Florida polling station. In any case, the idea that there's a massive conspiracy to register fake voters and send people to vote multiple times belongs to the outer echelons of the wingnutosphere ..........

A few bad apples.... what???... Mark is quite uninformed. Mickey Mouse is only one example. There are hundreds of thousands of illegitimate registrations submitted. ( in the neighborhood of 800,000 ) ACORN admitted that only 1/3 of the 1.2 million registered voters that they have submitted this election cycle are legitimate. They have submitted about 1.2 million registrations to the voting precincts, clogging the system and overloading the workers, which will allow people to slip through the system and vote illegally. ACORN admitted that only about 400,000+ of those submitted registrations are legitimate. NO, Mark, it is not just a few bad apples... it is a large majority of bad apples.

I am all for the people being able to vote. I am not, however, all for people cheating the vote and cancelling out my legitimate vote.

Dixon

"Dixon: What you say is simply wrong! The U.S. constitution was amended (22nd admendment) after FDR's death to prevent a president from serving more than 2 terms--it wasn't changed to allow him to serve more than 2 terms. It also has to be ratified by U.S. states so the whole idea that Obama could change the constitution, even if he wanted to, is, like much of what appears on this blog, absolute hokum."

The point is that IT WAS CHANGED! You only endorse tmy observation, without seeming to understand my point: that "David" implied such a change to be implausible, yet it has happenned in living memory!

It always amazes me on forums like this how people are quick to pick holes in an argument without having understood it in the first place!

fellow traveller

Nick Kaplan: "It leaves the poor completely dependent on hand outs and drained of any desire for autonomy and it leaves the wealthy as little more than a means to others’ ends."

If you read the interview, there is simply no indication that's what Obama has in mind.

It's up to you if you think that's what he has planned. I guess you do, because you say

"those who typically support positive liberty are not only completely willing to sacrifice the wealthy for the greater good but they are quite literally ready to “force people to be free.” "

In my opinion this seems, in comparison with the stated policies and track record of the Obama campaign, to be a bit of an over-reaction.

fellow traveller

Dixon: "It always amazes me on forums like this how people are quick to pick holes in an argument without having understood it in the first place!"

I don't want to be picky, but he did understand. His central point is that your comment

"it looks like Democrats will have control of both houses, so the changes would indeed be possible."

was hokum.

John Birch

Dixon: No, you were factually wrong which is what I pointed out. And my point is that the president can not simply wave a magic wand and change the constitution-- the ERA failed to be ratified by a sufficient number of states and it died. Repeated efforts to ban flag burning through the constitution have gone nowhere. It is no easy thing to change the U.S. constitution because it is not up to just the president and congress. That's why the suggestion that Obama could come in and radically change the U.S. is silly. The U.S. is a system of checks and balances---it would be much easier to radically change a parliamentary system than the system of the U.S.

Nick Kaplan

Fellow traveller; If you actually read some of the tripe that academics etc write about positive liberty you would understand just what a dangerous and destructive concept it is.

If find it hard to believe that you don’t think Obama wants to increase handouts to the poor or to clobber the rich. These are “stated policies” and they are completely consistent with my criticisms.

The fact that Obama doesn’t explicitly call his desire to steal and coerce a desire to steal and coerce is hardly surprising, it wouldn’t be a very sensible tactic for winning elections. But such views (about positive liberty) are completely consistent with all of his actions over the last 20 years. It’s consistent with his “community work” (another way of saying community agitating) it is consistent with his suing of banks that didn’t meet their CRA obligations, it’s consistent with the views of nutters like Ayers and Wright that he has chosen to associate with, it’s consistent with being in the pay of teachers unions and other “special interests” of the left, and it’s consistent with his whole left-wing elitist mindset (like his comments about small town American’s clinging to their guns and bibles).

Patriot

Thank you for recalling hints of the past and the links between our great nations - things most do not know or care to recall. Our educational system in the U.S., predominantly controlled by Obama's ilk, has finally succeded in erasing historical knowledge which has lead to the wide support of Chairman Obama by our young. I will never forget the King's tyranny overthrown and erased by our Founders and eventually by our Constitution - excessive taxation; theft of property and quartering of soldiers; ouright seizure of lands and property of those who opposed the King; squelching of speech, guns, and religious expression; the Boston Tea Party's cause. If these sound familiar, they are the reasons we have our Bill of Rights (freedom of speech, search and seizure, freedom of religion and freedom from government-mandated religion, the right to keep and bear arms, etc.). Our Constitution sought to say "never again" will the State reign over the individual. Now it seems Rules for Radicals has succeded in erasing that memory. If the radicals succeed in removing the protections of our Founders, as Obama wishes to happen, tyranny will re-enter. Slavery will ensue.

Mark

Nick,

Obama's view of the judiciary is (at least from this interview) quite obviously that it is the wrong place to carry out attempts to advance positive liberties. He argues that grass-roots activism, community organising and legislation is the real way to expand opportunity.

As for the option of appointing other judges to interpret the constitution differently, sure that's possible, but of course the Supreme Court has to make judgements that others can accept. If its legitimacy were compromised, it would make it that much more difficult for its judgements to be enforced (Hamilton-"it may truly be said to have neither force nor will, but merely judgement, and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive"). Look at the result of Brown v Board; segregation didn't end in many areas until the late 60s or even 70s, despite the judgement being made in 1954. Some state executives were loath to enforce its judgement (partly because of "with all deliberate speed", but the point still stands). Or look at Georgia v Cherokee Nation 1831.

States would still have to enforce the judgements of an Obama court, so it would need to retain its legitimacy.

Not particularly wanting to get into a long argument about political theory, but…

I cited Two Concepts of Liberty because it’s a good article (or, lecture). It explains a distinction between positive and negative liberties, a distinction that Melanie doesn’t seem to understand.

She says: negative liberty “means that everything is permitted unless it is actively prohibited. ‘Positive liberty’, by contrast, means that individual rights consist instead of what the state hands down to the individual.”

This seems more to be more of a common law/roman law distinction to me.

Berlin’s distinction is this: negative liberty is “the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others”. Positive liberty “derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master”. Among positive liberties are contained such ideals as democracy, equality, justice.

The analysis is brilliant and well worth a look, but I think there are several problems with Berlin’s conclusions, not least that the positive/negative distinction is not as hard has he thinks it to be (they’re often inseparable; they often require each other; negative liberties conflict so a conflict-resolution mechanism is necessary, which suggests positive liberty). He also argues that democracy (a positive liberty) is not in and of itself desirable; a person’s individual freedom can be constricted under a democracy as much as under an authoritarian regime. This is patently false; when a democracy fails to guarantee fundamental negative liberties it stops being a democracy. Dahl’s well-respected definition of democracy is “contestation open to participation”. There can be no true participation without negative liberties. Additionally, the checks and balances inherent in a democracy (be they institutional (judicial review, separation of powers, accountability through the ballot), or more cultural (civil society)) should prevent a democracy from severely restricting the negative liberty of its citizens.

I actually think the biggest problem with Berlin’s conclusion is that he talks in terms of absolutes. Some people aim for absolute equality, for example, and ignore negative liberties. But most social democrats care both about individual freedom (look at the liberation movements of the 60s and 70s) and other values such as equality, justice, etc. He rightly criticises monist arguments as being dangerous, but his own argument is actually itself monist. The two conceptions of liberty are not as fundamentally divergent as he suggests.

However, if you still want to argue that positive liberty is dangerous and undesirable, consider this quote from Hobbes (Leviathan, c21):
“There is written on the turrets of the city of Luca in great characters at this day, the word LIBERTAS; yet no man can thence infer that a particular man has more liberty or immunity from the service of the Commonwealth there than in Constantinople. Whether a Commonwealth be monarchical or popular, the freedom is still the same.”

Do you agree with this? Are the citizens of democratic Luca as free as the subjects of the Sultan of Constantinople?

How about the French Revolution, or the American Revolution and War of Independence? Was that not a desire for ‘positive’ freedom of collective self-direction? (Obviously it was also a desire not to be taxed by Britain)

Taylor’s paternalist argument that self-abnegation can lead to independence can be applied to negative as well as positive liberties (as Berlin readily admits). At the same time, it isn’t necessary for either.

If you are really concerned about constrictions on negative freedom, you should be worried about voting for anything resembling the last eight years.

Dixon

fellow traveller
October 31st, 2008 8:25am

"
I don't want to be picky, but he [ Previous poster ] did understand. His central point is that your comment

"it looks like Democrats will have control of both houses, so the changes would indeed be possible."

was hokum."

No, you are reading his SECOND response to my comment, whilst I was responding to his FIRST , which specifically contended that my point was wrong because the ammendment came in after Roosevelt. Whereas my point had been that an amendment was passed within living memory, not the character or date of the amendment.

In his SECOND response he only further indicates his failuire to grasp this point, even AFTER I had spelled it out, by repeating his comment about the amendment.

As far as having two thirds seats being "hokum" that is not something you are in any position to declare until AFTER the election.

Linda Carter

David, Obama won't have to change the Constitution. All he has to do is appoint 3-4 new Supreme Court judges who are committed to "interpreting" the Constitution any way they see fit, and who is going to stop them? 3-4 of the liberal ones on the Court right now are getting ready to retire and only holding on till Obama gets elected!
>>Er, I suggest you look up how the Constitution can be changed. It's barely possible to provide amendments without a lot of pain, let alone rewrite it wholesale.