A Primer for Constitutional Impeachment (Constitution 101)

I have heard from many talk show hosts that you can impeach a ham sandwich for jay-walking. However, like with other issues, the framers of the Constitution had a convention — they spoke on many of the items added to it’s text, clearly, and were working from definitions and meanings enumerated from their day… and in writing.

MARK LEVIN reads from the book “IMPEACHMENT: THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROBLEMS“, and lays down the case that the writers of the impeachment clause in the Constitution would not allow any frivolous issue be the driver for impeachment.

Obama’s Affordable Care Act Subsidy, Illegal (Turley)

TOWNHALL has this on the above:

…It’s the opinion of the courts, as the LA Times reported back in May of 2016–it’s unconstitutional:

House Republicans won Round 2 in a potentially historic lawsuit Thursday when a federal judge declared the Obama administration was unconstitutionally spending money to subsidize health insurers without obtaining an appropriation from Congress.

Last year, U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer broke new ground by ruling the GOP-controlled House of  Representatives had legal standing to sue the president over how he was enforcing his signature healthcare law.

On Thursday, she ruled the administration is violating a provision of the law by paying promised reimbursements to health insurers who provide coverage at reduced costs to low-income Americans.

The judge’s ruling, while a setback for the administration, was put on hold immediately and stands a good chance of being overturned on appeal.

[….]

Josh Blackman elaborated on this subsidy provision in National Review back in July:

In 2014, a federal judge concluded that with the so-called OPM fix, the “executive branch has rewritten a key provision of the ACA so as to render it essentially meaningless in order to save members of Congress and their staffs.” Allowing the administration to rewrite the law, he wrote, “would be a violation of Article I of the Constitution, which reposes the lawmaking power in the legislative branch.” However, because the plaintiffs in the lawsuit (Senator Ron Johnson and one of his staffers) were not personally injured by OPM’s policy — indeed they benefited — the case was dismissed for lack of standing. While the Obama administration was content to make these illegal payments, the Trump administration should halt them.

Congress is not the only beneficiary of such illegal largess. The ACA employed two strategies to make health insurance more affordable. Section 1401 of the law provides for the payment of subsidies to consumers to reduce premiums. Section 1402 provides payments to insurers to offset certain “cost sharing” fees, such as deductibles and co-pays. But while the ACA funds the subsidies under Section 1401 with a permanent appropriation, to date, Congress has not provided an annual appropriation for the cost-sharing subsidies under Section 1402.

Once again, where Congress would not act, President Obama did so unilaterally. The executive branch pretended that the ACA had actually funded Section 1402 all along, and it paid billions of dollars to insurers. Once again, Mr. Trump is exactly right that this is a “BAILOUT.” And, once again, the payments are a violation of the separation of powers.

Now, we have Jonathan Turley, a constitutional scholar at the George Washington University Law School, reiterating the point that the Obamacare subsidy provision was unconstitutional with Fox News’ Bret Baier last Friday…..

American History In Black and White (Documentary)

(Video Description) Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black and White: A Primer on African American Political History, by David Barton (Book || CD || DVD) Millions of Americans are now realizing the true history of Political parties within America. Historically, blacks faced discrimination and injustice by progressives and liberals in congress. Today these same liberal democrats and progressives falsely accuse republicans and conservatives of the very racism that Democrats have a history of. No longer can liberals rewrite and revise Black History. Meanwhile Liberal feminist Margaret Sanger sought to exterminate blacks through abortion.

A Constitutionally Savvy Deputy Visits an Open Carry Protest

Via The Blaze

This is a good officer… compare this to a bad officer, one used to promote racism… but is anything but:

The author of this wants you to believe what you are witnessing is racism, but as we see, there is a stark difference, via Bearing Arms:

The white open carrier shown first is merely talked to by the responding officer who does not seem overly concerned as the officer stops to check on them and see what is going on.

The black open carrier, carrying a slung AR-15 by his side and with his hands occupied by what appears to be a smart phone, is immediately ordered to the ground at gunpoint, and the deputy holds him in his sights until backup arrives and seaches, but does not cuff the open carrier. It’s worth noting, perhaps, that the responding officers do not feel compelled to point their weapon at the the open carrier at any time.

“Willy Upchuck” is the pseudonym of person who posted the video, and taglines his channel “Cops vs. People,” giving us an idea of his views on law enforcement.

  • “Willy” clearly wants to assert that we’re witnessing racism… but the video doesn’t support that assertion at all.

While the rifles were both AR-15s slung in a similar manner (both down at the hip, where it could be brought into action), “Willy” wants us to overlooking the indisputable fact that we’re dealing with different responding officers, in different locations, with different law enforcement agencies, which may have different protocols and familiarity in handling “man with a gun” calls, at different times, in different circumstances.

The white open carrier, “MarkedGaurdian,” has been trolling his local law enforcement agencies in Oregon for years. His video clip is pulled from an August 2012 stop by an Albany, Oregon officer, who was likely well aware of what long gun open carry advocates had been doing in the area, and who may have even recognized “MarkedGaurdian” on sight.

The black open carrier—whom I totally agree was treated poorly by the responding officer—was in a different (unknown) time and place, dealing with a completely different police force, who may not deal with long gun open carry much, if at all. It could be that this responding agency would treat white open carriers just as poorly. In this second incident we could be dealing with one very bad deputy, who violated his own department’s protocols (and frankly, as he pointed a firearm at a man who wasn’t clearly wasn’t being a threat, he probably did). We don’t know if the deputy was disciplined or even terminated.

“Willy Upchuck” doesn’t apparently want us to know enough about either incident to determine for ourselves what we’re really witnessing, and that says a bit more about him than I think he wants us to know.

Are we witnessing a good cop dealing with the white open carrier, and what appears to be a poorly-trained and over-excited deputy dealing the black open carrier? I think so.

But we simply don’t have like situations here, with different times, places, agencies, etc.

We don’t have and clear evidence of racism, as much as he’d like to assert that this is what we’re seeing.

Update: the second open carrier has been identified as Gabriel Nobles. Here’s his entire video in two parts, Part I and Part II.

Rep. Gowdy’s Floor Speech In Favor Of ENFORCE The Law Act

This first video is another wonderful Trey Gowdy anthem. Click his name in the “TAGS” to see other “music to your ears” speeches:

Video description: Rep. Gowdy’s floor speech in favor of H.R. 4138 the ENFORCE the Law Act.

And this is a recent Jonathan Turley statement before Congress (do the same, check out Turley in the “TAGS”):

Video description:

Via The Blaze ~ I did turn the volume up from the original file… so prep your volume control.

A constitutional law expert warned Congress during a hearing Wednesday that America has reached a “constitutional tipping point” under the watch of President Barack Obama.

Jonathan Turley, professor of public interest law at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., said the legislative branch of the U.S. government is in danger of becoming irrelevant in the face of continued executive overreach.

“My view [is] that the president, has in fact, exceeded his authority in a way that is creating a destabilizing influence in a three branch system,” Turley said. “I want to emphasize, of course, this problem didn’t begin with President Obama, I was critical of his predecessor President Bush as well, but the rate at which executive power has been concentrated in our system is accelerating. And frankly, I am very alarmed by the implications of that aggregation of power.”

“What also alarms me, however, is that the two other branches appear not just simply passive, but inert in the face of this concentration of authority,” he added….

U.S. Timetable According to Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (1589)

1789? 1589? or 1614?

This would mean that the Constitution was signed in 1614, the year Pocahontas married John Rolfe in Jamestown, Virginia. (The Blaze)

 

Via HotAir:

I don’t typically like to give anyone too much grief for what could easily be an innocent mental-to-verbal lapse, but… c’mon, now. Given that she took to the House floor to explicitly argue against the constitutionality of the GOP’s proposed Enforce The Law Act, I must say that her argument might have been a teeny bit more convincing if she was a little more firm in her background knowledge of the actual Constitution. Yikes.

Huh. I didn’t know.

Adam Freedman ~ The Founders Were Not `Neutral`

THE FOUNDERS WEREN’T NEUTRAL

Nobody in 1791 expected any American government—state or federal—to be neutral as between religion and irreligion. The Founders did not have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude about religion; to the contrary, they generally agreed with John Adams’s admoni­tion, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” The federal government was expected to promote and encourage religion in general because, as Madison had argued in Federalist No. 51, the security of “religious rights” depends upon a “multiplicity of sects.” A robust diversity of religions would be the best safeguard against the sort of religious oppression that Europe had witnessed. In short, the Founders hoped to encour­age sects, but not violence. To say this is not an attempt to guess at the secret intentions of the framers. Their support of religion is reflected in the text itself.

For one thing, the Constitution bars atheists from hold­ing public office. Article VI requires that all legislators, and all executive and judicial officers—on both the federal and state level—take an oath to support the Constitution. But under the law at the time, only those who believed in God and in an afterlife could swear an oath. Atheists could not, for example, serve as witnesses in court—to whom would they swear to tell the truth? As late as 1820, New York’s highest court observed, “It is fully and clearly settled, that infidels who do not believe in God, or if they do, do not think that he will either reward or punish them in the world to come, cannot be witnesses in any case… because an oath cannot possibly be any tie or obliga­tion upon them.

At the North Carolina ratifying convention, lawyer and fu­ture Supreme Court justice James Iredell explained that the oath requirement would ensure a basic level of religious belief among officeholders because an oath is a “solemn appeal to the Supreme Being, for the truth of what is said, by a person who believes in the existence of a Supreme Being and in a future state of rewards and punishments.” Madison acknowledged the religious nature of the oath in a letter of October 1787—just one month after the constitutional convention adjourned.

Although the Constitution requires a minimum level of religiosity for all officeholders, it does not favor any particular denomination—Article VI also prohibits any “religious Test” for holding federal office. As a whole, Article IV perfectly illustrates the framers’ vision of the federal government’s role in religion. The government could not, for example, require that all con­gressmen be Anglicans, or even Christians, but it does require that they be theists. Indeed, the framers were so scrupulous about the ecumenical nature of the oath that they specified that of­ficeholders could “swear or affirm” to uphold the Constitution—affirmation being the method for Quakers and other individuals who objected to “swearing.”

NEVER ON A SUNDAY

The early actions of the federal government also tend to debunk the neutrality canard. The very same Congress that approved the First Amendment also provided for paid chaplains in the House and Senate, and called upon President Washington to proclaim “a day of Public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by ac­knowledging, with grateful hearts, the many and signal favors of Almighty God.” That same Congress also reenacted the North­west Ordinance, which declares the government’s policy that the teaching of “religion, morality and knowledge” shall “forever be encouraged.”

The Court’s liberals respond to all this with a phony brand of originalism that recasts the framers as secular humanists.

Happy to ignore the text of the establishment clause, the neutral­ity crowd prefers to focus on things that the framers didn’t say. In Marsh v. Chambers, for example, Justice William Brennan found it highly significant that the framers “did not invoke the name of God” in the Constitution. Well, except that they did—in Article VII, which records the date of the document as “the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven” (emphasis added). Who, one won­ders, did Justice Brennan imagine “our Lord” to be?

Another provision that would be inexplicable to any pro­ponent of strict neutrality can be found in Article I, Section 7. When Congress passes a bill, that clause gives the president ten days to decide whether to veto it; that is, ten days, “Sundays ex­cepted.” Why exclude Sundays? Wait—don’t tell me—I know this one.

Adam Freedman, The Naked Constitution: What the Founders Said and Why It Still Matters (New York, NY: Broadside Books, 2012), 166-169.

Former student of President Obama’s law class cant believe what he is hearing from the President on SCOTUS

My Professor, My Judge, and the Doctrine of Judicial Review

Posted by Thom Lambert on April 3, 2012

Imagine if you picked up your morning paper to read that one of your astronomy professors had publicly questioned whether the earth, in fact, revolves around the sun.  Or suppose that one of your economics professors was quoted as saying that consumers would purchase more gasoline if the price would simply rise.  Or maybe your high school math teacher was publicly insisting that 2 + 2 = 5.  You’d be a little embarrassed, right?  You’d worry that your colleagues and friends might begin to question your astronomical, economic, or mathematical literacy.

Now you know how I felt this morning when I read in the Wall Street Journal that my own constitutional law professor had stated that it would be “an unprecedented, extraordinary step” for the Supreme Court to “overturn[] a law [i.e., the Affordable Care Act] that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”  Putting aside the “strong majority” nonsense (the deeply unpopular Affordable Care Act got through the Senate with the minimum number of votes needed to survive a filibuster and passed 219-212 in the House), saying that it would be “unprecedented” and “extraordinary” for the Supreme Court to strike down a law that violates the Constitution is like saying that Kansas City is the capital of Kansas.  Thus, a Wall Street Journal editorial queried this about the President who “famously taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago”:  “[D]id he somehow not teach the historic case of Marbury v. Madison?”

I actually know the answer to that question.  It’s no (well, technically yes…he didn’t).  President Obama taught “Con Law III” at Chicago.  Judicial review, federalism, the separation of powers — the old “structural Constitution” stuff — is covered in “Con Law I” (or at least it was when I was a student).  Con Law III covers the Fourteenth Amendment.  (Oddly enough, Prof. Obama didn’t seem too concerned about “an unelected group of people” overturning a “duly constituted and passed law” when we were discussing all those famous Fourteenth Amendment cases – Roe v. Wade, Griswold v. Connecticut, Romer v. Evans, etc.)  Of course, even a Con Law professor focusing on the Bill of Rights should know that the principle of judicial review has been alive and well since 1803, so I still feel like my educational credentials have been tarnished a bit by the President’s “unprecedented, extraordinary” remarks….

…read more…