President Obama announced shortly after he was elected that this nation must be remade “block by block, brick by brick...” This is one promise he seems determined to keep.
The changes being wrought by the Obama administration are not coming out of left field. (No pun intended.) They represent perhaps the culmination of many trends and developments that have been overtaking America for decades.
The changes are too numerous to cover in one article. The following are worth pondering.
Threats to the Constitutional Republic
America is a Constitutional Republic. But its Constitution is regularly under threat by politicians, as well as judges. To the extent that Americans allow the Constitution to be circumvented or flouted, by that much is the significance of our founding Document diminished.
Obamacare is one example. Space does not permit an analysis of this massive bill. However, the way this legislation was passed sheds light on the problem at hand.
How many legislators knew what was in it before they voted? Nancy Pelosi said that “you have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it.” A bill consisting of over 2000 pages, making a dramatic change in the entire health care system of the nation, is passed without legislators fully knowing what it contains and publicly debating its merits.
The People as Obstacle
In the words of scholar and author Thomas Sowell, “’we the people’ are treated as an obstacle to circumvent by the current administration.” And “One way of circumventing the people is to rush legislation through Congress so fast that no one knows what is buried in it.”
One example he offers is the inclusion in the health care reform bill of a provision creating a tax on people who buy and sell gold coins. What has this to do with health care? Nothing. But - as Sowell discusses in another article - for reasons unrelated to health care, the Obama Administration wanted this tax, so it was stealthily inserted into the health care bill.
Furthermore, as Sowell states, the major financial reform bill was similarly rushed to passage without careful debate or deliberation. In his words: “Not since the Norman conquerors of England published their laws in French, for an English-speaking nation, centuries ago, has there been such contempt for the people’s right to know what laws were being imposed on them.”
Reputedly, when Benjamin Franklin was asked what Congress was creating at the Constitutional Convention, he said “A Republic madam, if you can keep it.” If Americans allow clever and underhanded politicians to undermine the Constitution by defaulting in their responsibility to know and evaluate exactly what is in pending major legislation, what becomes of this Republic?
The Corruption of Justice
Another sign of America in peril is the way Federal justice is being administered. There could be no better example than the travesty being committed by Eric Holder’s Justice Department. At first, it appeared that the Attorney General simply abandoned prosecution of young black thugs who gathered at a voting site in Philadelphia with menacing clubs, intimidating voters. This, after the government had won the case by default. (Holder's Department chose to drop the matter, except as against one defendant; and, as for him, the Justice Department sought none of the usual sanctions.)
Later it was revealed, however, that the problem is much larger. As reported by, among others, Investor’s Business Daily, there is “a deliberate policy of not prosecuting minorities” when the victims are whites.
Christopher Coates, former voting chief of the Civil Rights Division, appeared last week before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and provided damning testimony against the Holder Justice Department. According to IBD, Coates said “the Panther decision ‘was the result of their deep-seated opposition to the equal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act against racial minorities and for the protection of white voters who have been discriminated against.’”
Coates’ testimony supported earlier similar accusations made by J. Christian Adams, formerly a career lawyer in the Justice Department's Voting Section. Says IBD: “Adams had told the commission that DOJ officials ‘over and over and over’ showed ‘hostility’ to prosecution of voter intimidation cases involving ‘black defendants and white victims’.”
So much for a post-racial Presidency, previously touted by the Administration.
A Fatal Syndrome
These developments evidence a syndrome that has been developing for decades, perhaps reaching its epitome in the Obama administration. This syndrome has two aspects.
First, the relinquishment by individuals of more and more of their autonomy to the government - especially the Federal Government – and reliance on government to make major decisions for them.
Second, the ever increasing presumption by politicians that they know what’s best for everyone, and should, therefore, be the ones to tell the people how to live.
The Cult of Victimization
The cult of victimization, so rampant today, plays right into this syndrome. This phenomenon has been described by Dr. David Gutmann, emeritus professor of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago.
Dr. Gutmann notes a significant change that has occurred in Sociology, Anthropology and Psychology in recent decades. Previously, there was an emphasis on the inner life of the individual, and the contributions of the individual's emotional life to society and to culture. But now “we see the withdrawal from the shores of the inner sea, in favor of variables external to the individual – particularly politically correct dimensions of Race, Ethnicity and Gender.”
Moreover, according to Dr. Gutmann, previously “the troubled individual was not primarily a victim of society, but of his own Motivated Misperceptions….But if the individual was the author of his own troubles, then the sources of his pain also belonged to him, and he could, with help, undo them. However, under the current Marxist regime in the Social Sciences, the troubled individual is always a Victim, not of himself but of outside forces – the economy, the capitalists, the homophobes, the sexists, George W. Bush – that he can only change through collective revolutionary action.”
Enter the Obama administration and its supporters.
Scott Rosmarin - After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in political science, and Rutgers Law School, Scott practiced law for ...
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