My friend David has written an excellent opinion piece on what big government is doing. I don't care about your political persuasion, you would do well to read this piece and think seriously about the consequences of allowing government to run unfettered. It is affecting everything we do today and will continue unless we demand that our leaders follow the U. S. Constitution. Here's David.
Among the other idiotic and ludicrous rules passed by New York's Mayor Bloomberg recently, we now find that he is banning pizza deliveries from bringing along a two liter bottle of soft drink. It doesn't seem to matter how many pizzas you order for how many people.
How has this type of thing happened?
From a legal standpoint, I guess he can do this under authority granted to him by the State of New York, but with the federal government, the trend started way back in the civil rights era. For example, let's take what is called the "Public Accommodations Act", which prohibits private business from discriminating against customers by race. Constitutionally, the only federal law which could have been passed, and even it can be deemed of dubious legality by many because of the states' rights issue, was to throw out state laws enforcing racial segregation. Well and good, but to force private business owners to serve anyone they don't want to serve, as the act did, is a basic denial of property rights. I would stress the word "basic".
If I, as an owner of a restaurant, put a sign up stating that I don't serve redheads, short people, and illegal aliens, it is my right to do so. If certain members of the public don't like that, then they can eat somewhere else. The fact is, one can still not serve redheads, short people, and illegal aliens if one wishes, but one must adhere to federal law requiring the serving of an ever increasing list of "minorities" such as blacks and homosexuals. It's almost to the point to where one is only allowed discriminate against white males.
If a state has laws enforcing racial segregation, then it can be argued that the federal government has the authority to prevent that under the Equal Protections Clause of the 14th Amendment. However, there is no constitutional requirement for a private business owner to be limited in his right of whom to serve and whom not to. This is a concept invented by the Congress in 1964 and backed up later by the Supreme Court by stretching the 14th Amendment far beyond its original intent.
An example of how the 14th Amendment has been warped beyond its original meaning, if you care to research it you will find that the same Congress which passed the 14th Amendment passed a law the following year requiring racial segregation in the schools of Washington, D.C. Obviously, the amendment was not meant to apply to public schools, yet that is what the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation was based on. Well, that was the only Constitutional factor, most of the decision was based on sociological factors which are not supposed to be part of the court's purview.
The PAA (Public Accommodations Act) then evolved into prohibitions of discrimination in most any area one can conceive of, almost none of them Constitutional. It is interesting to note, and now almost forgotten, that the original PAA did not apply to bars, beauty shops, barber shops, and several other types of businesses which escape me for the moment. Apparently it was okay to discriminate some places but not others. These exceptions were deleted in later years. Federal laws were passed prohibiting racial discrimination in employment, lending, and many other areas. For the most part, the application of genuinely equal rights did not work. It was then that the federal government dreamed up the idea of forced school busing to equalize the races, racial quotas in employment, school admissions, and gerrymandering of voting districts to guarantee black majorities.
The goal became equal outcome, not equal rights. As one jurist put it, apparently without realizing the illogic, "It's okay to discriminate in order to get rid of discrimination."
So what do we have today as a result? We have more blacks in all black schools than we did in 1954....and they are not doing well. Three years ago Louisiana put out the results of the previous year's achievement tests and blacks scored lower on average than they did when the schools were segregated. And I would point out this is after tests have been considerably dumbed down.
In employment, many blacks hold positions they are incapable of handling. They are there because federal law requires there be no "disparate impact" on the black race in areas of employment. Qualifications simply no longer matter. In addition to production, the effect on morale in the work force has been devastating. As an example, I remember a few years ago when the Houston Police Department promoted 400 blacks to sergeant who could not pass the required exam. As a result, other applicants did not get deserved promotions and the blacks took over as supervisors with all of the men under them knowing they were not qualified. This is happening in private industry, the military, and government civil service.
Folks, this is one of things destroying our system.
So far as voting rights, there is a Congressional district in North Carolina created so that there will be a majority black district. It stretches almost the entire length of the state and is less than 5 miles wide at several points, all designed to squeeze the greatest number of blacks into the district. While this is an extreme case geographically, the concept is not different at all throughout the country where such districts are created specifically to have black voting majorities, yet this is not viewed as racial discrimination.
By the same token, a number of colleges now have all black dormitories, black student unions, and other black organizations. These were created by choice and approved by the colleges; however, any such white organizations are prohibited.
Blacks from the "New Black Panthers" guarded voting precincts Philadelphia and kept whites from voting there with clubs. They were videotaped, yet this administration refuses to prosecute them. Two attorneys from the Justice Department have testified before Congress that on orders from the current Attorney General, no blacks will be prosecuted for civil rights violations. Black mobs roaming the streets in dozens of cities have been attacking whites and Hispanics, beating, robbing, and in several cases killing them, on a regular basis since last summer. Prosecutions have been negligible.
OK, I have gotten carried away from my original point here. That being that the federal government has completely overstepped its bounds in the past 50 years, albeit on a gradual basis, to get us where we are now. In my view, they have used the precedents established to enforce civil rights to do it, even though these new precedents, for the most part, threw out precedents long established over the years. For example, two Supreme Courts and over 30 federal judges down through the years had ruled that racial segregation in public schools was perfectly legal....until 1954.
Precedent is one of the bedrocks of our legal system. The Founders knew that things would change and evolve over the years. If something in the Constitution needed changing, they provided a way to do that through a Constitutional Amendment. That is the only way our Constitution can be legally changed. Unfortunately, the courts and the Congress have ignored this hard fact and we have gone from a Rule of Law to a Rule of Men. History has proven over and over that a Rule of Men always leads to tyranny.
How has Congress reached this point? I just answered that in the previous paragraph. They ignore the Constitution and Rule of Law. They pass any bill they wish which covers any area they wish. Are you aware that there has been a law in effect now for several years which regulates the size of your toilet tanks? Are you aware that the government is now telling you what kind of light bulbs you can own, and they are all made in China? Find those things in the enumerated powers of the Congress. The Constitution does not grant Congress the power to get involved with energy, education, health, welfare, or any of a myriad of other things we now take for granted. They are not allowed to spend one penny on any of these things, yet they do it anyway.
These are matters the Founders reserved for the states. We forget that our nation was founded as a Republic. The federal government was granted very few powers and the states were granted all of the rest. In other words, the states were voluntarily part of a union which they were to control and in which the federal government had no more power than was granted it by the states and the Constitution.
That Republic is long gone. It has been replaced by an all powerful national government, not a federal one, which pays only scant attention to the Constitution.
For example, in the Executive Branch, this president has assumed powers simply not granted him by the Constitution. After all, he said in an interview prior to his first election that, "The Constitution is greatly flawed." So, he simply ignores it. In the past year or so he issued an executive order to the Justice Department to not enforce the Defense of Marriage Act because he did not consider it Constitutional.
One of the few powers granted to the Executive, and it is more of a requirement than a power, is to enforce all of the laws of the United States. Yet, he orders laws not to be enforced such as with the Immigration Act. He ordered parts of it not to be enforced and added a few provisos of his own through Executive Orders. He took control of two auto companies, fired the president of one, gave them money he was not authorized to give, and did all of this even though the Supreme Court ruled in 1952 that a president had no power to do such a thing.
He broke the law. In fact, what he did are impeachable offenses. Nonetheless, with the exception of a few lone voices, there has been nary a peep of protest from the Congress, the Press, or the people.
All three branches of the government and both parties are culpable for the disaster which awaits us. In fact, it is breaking over our heads at this moment. If it is not stopped, and I am pessimistic that it can be at this time, the greatest, freest, most generous nation in the history of the world will vanish. We will have a nation where everyone, except for the ruling elite, is equal....that meaning equally miserable. We will have a government which will control our every movement from birth to death. A government in which there are few, if any, individual liberties. In fact, it will be just like the government we fought a revolution against to establish the original Republic of the United States. The problem is, we will have no frontier to escape to as well as no will to fight where we stand. The circle will have turned.
On that happy note, I bid you adieu for the day.
Davidhttp://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/soda_ban_to_sap_your_4t5pEK0hvo3PoNZEBOdZ2L
