* Improving security at airports and national borders, including the leaky Canadian border, a favorite two-step entry for foreign terrorists and others.
No two countries have as long a border with such a huge difference in per capita income as Mexico and the United States. The only way to make a substantial and permanent reduction in the flood of illegal aliens into this country is to remove the magnet that attracts them, jobs. A national identification system would allow employers to positively identify citizenship status and enable them to comply with current laws that forbid the employment of illegal aliens.
Now the competitive costs to employers who employ only citizens and legal immigrants are severe. Matthew Reindl, a Great Neck, Long Island employer, testified before Congress September 19, 2002. He said the typical cost for a legitimate employer to provide an employee $500 net per week would be $889 – 78 percent higher than if the employee worked for a non-complying employer or worked for unreported cash from one of many organized and unorganized hiring sites in his area. His employees say they can make more money working for such employers than they make working for him at higher wages, after taxes and other deductions.
The old Immigration and Naturalization Service rewarded law breakers and the new ICE has not changed that. Foreigners who follow the legal procedures to immigrate here may wait for years to get in, and if they are white they may never get in. But if they make it illegally, the old Clinton policy is still in effect under Obama: Do not arrest and deport them unless they commit a major crime in addition to their illegal-entry crime. Although the first illegal entry is a crime, for some inexplicable reason overstaying a visa isn't even a misdemeanor. Remember 9-11; several of those butchers were here on overstayed visas, but now our government is unable to identify and evict or imprison such people without an effective national identification system.
No country can afford to permit unauthorized persons to enter and roam at will. While a national system will not stop all terrorist attacks, we can and should try to prevent terrorists from entering our country and moving about freely. One cannot cash a check, board an airliner or even buy full-strength Sudafed over the counter without ID. Why should verifying your citizenship or right to vote be different? The U.S. is one of the few democracies in the world that doesn’t require photo identification. South Korean, Brazilian, Italian and Malaysian ID cards contain fingerprints and information on distinguishing marks of the holder. In 2010 India started issuing 1.2 billion biometric ID cards, containing only the person’s name, age and birth date as well as fingerprint or iris scans.
Beyond the need to identify and control illegal aliens, the other major problem is voting fraud. Our elections are tainted and our government is becoming more illegitimate each election cycle. Voting fraud is not just recent – Lyndon Johnson’s first election to Congress, John Kennedy’s 1960 presidential votes in Chicago. Clinton’s 1994 “Motor Voter Act” made voter fraud even easier than welfare fraud. States are now required by federal rules to register anyone to vote who is applying with a driver’s license and to accept voter registrations by mail with no identification needed. Government workers are forbidden to challenge new voting registrants. Anyone can request an absentee ballot for a “deadwood” voter and vote by mail. Some people vote in more than one place, some vote in place of others who have said they are not going to vote or who have moved away, some vote in place of dead people, and the law makes it difficult to purge the deadwood from the voter rolls.
Both parties have resisted purging deadwood voters from the rolls, but the Democrats have made voting fraud a major election tool. ACORN -- or whatever it calls itself now -- and other Democrat-friendly organizations are almost openly dedicated to voting fraud, with heavy political support from Democrats in Congress and from Obama, a former ACORN lawyer. A few examples of Democrat voting fraud in the November, 2012 elections: In 59 voting districts in the Philadelphia region, Obama received 100 percent of the votes, a statistical impossibility. In 21 districts in Wood County, Ohio, Obama received 100 percent of the votes where GOP inspectors were illegally removed from their polling locations, and 106,258 voted in Wood County, which had only 98,213 eligible voters. In St. Lucie County, Florida there were 175,574 registered voters but 247,713 votes were cast, and the National Seal Museum, a polling location in the county, had a 158 percent voter turnout. Obama won the 2012 election with Ohio being the swing state. According to the Columbus Dispatch, one out of every five registered voters in Ohio is ineligible to vote. Obama won in every state that did not require a photo ID and lost in every state that required one to vote.
Anyone who makes a serious attempt to identify voter fraud is denounced as racist, a standard Democrat attack. Addressing an NAACP convention in Houston June 11, 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder railed against voter ID laws, and he was speaking to an audience that had to show photo ID to hear his address. He has vigorously attacked every attempt to crack down on voter fraud. Holder is Obama’s point man in protecting Democrat voting fraud, suing states that require photo ID to vote, facilitating voting by criminals, hampering and preventing military voting and refusing to prosecute voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers. The 2009 Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act requires that Armed Forces personnel receive their ballots in time to vote in the upcoming federal election. Despite having several months to comply, Justice Department lawyers sat on their hands as 16 states and territories were caught in noncompliance with the MOVE Act. Called on their failure to act, Justice eventually signed a consent decree but some ballots were printed and mailed two weeks too late to be counted. Many say our country's chief law officer is a criminal.
Ironically, Mexico has a superior voting system with a central data base that makes voting fraud unlikely. Mexico requires a photo, a signature and a thumb-print to register. The voter’s card has a photo, a hologram and a magnetic strip. A voter presents the card and his thumb-print is certified by a scanner. By comparison, voting in the U.S. is a Third World farce. Only 17 states require some sort of documentation to vote. A Rasmussen poll found that 82 percent of Americans believe that “people should be required to show a driver’s license or some other form of photo ID before they are allowed to vote,” but fraudulent photo IDs are readily available. Only a national identification system and central data base will prevent voting fraud, after careful verification of all voters and purging of the voter rolls.
The loudest objections to a secure identification system come from the people who would benefit the most, legal citizens and legal immigrants. The objectors point to our probable-cause protection from unreasonable search, but an effective national identification system protects the innocent by identifying law breakers. Aside from accuracy, the most important requirement of a national identification system is restricting its use to voting, employment and welfare eligibility verification, and police identification and airline security checks.
In addition to requiring secure IDs with one data base and cleaning up the voter rolls, suggestions on voter fraud include repealing the Clintons’ Motor Voter law and outlawing absentee ballots except for invalids, military personnel and others temporarily absent from their voting district.
Honest people who have nothing to hide have nothing to lose and much to gain from a secure national identification system.
SOCIALISM, FASCISM AND CAPITALISM
In 1946 a demolished Germany was divided, West Germany remaining capitalistic and East Germany becoming part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In only one generation West Germany was rebuilt and became a prosperous First World country again, while East Germany became a poor Third World country, degenerating to stagnation and poverty. This one example should lay to rest all doubts about capitalism, but we find ourselves in continuing discussions about the virtues of failed forms of government and continuing First World progression toward socialism, recalling economist Milton Friedman's, " We seem to be saying that we know socialism fails and capitalism s
ucceeds, therefore we need more socialism."
Words identifying different polities are bandied about frequently, often incorrectly. Socialism involves both government ownership and control of the means of production and distribution. Incentives to produce are lost. The riches go to the oligarchy in control and their bureaucrats. What is left goes to sharing misery equally, with the lack of incentives ensuring stagnation of the economy.
Fascism is usually thought of as goose-stepping Nazi troops and Mussolini in a comic-opera dictator pose. Correctly, fascism involves government control of citizens and their production but with private ownership of businesses and property. Capitalism involves private ownership and control of most of the means of production, operating in hope of profit. Individuals and groups provide the capital, management and labor to produce what they believe to be goods and services the public will buy at prices the entrepreneurs believe will provide a return on their investment and efforts.
In a capitalistic country, the legitimate role of government is just to make and enforce reasonable constitutional laws, not to control private enterprises but to provide the structure and environment in which they can thrive. That encourages innovation, the formation of enterprises to provide and improve goods and services, and increased efficiency and productivity through competition. Free markets also reward competitive, good products and services while punishing less competitive, less desirable ones and fraudulent and unethical businesses. Another term for capitalism is “free enterprise”, and both terms are often used by anti-business, big-government forces to characterize capitalism as a system based on greed and exploitation rather than the way to achieve prosperity. Capitalism has made the United States prosperous, and it has even made countries such as Switzerland, Hong Kong and Singapore, without natural resources, paragons of prosperity.
Reasonable laws are necessary to encourage a fair playing field for supply-and-demand competition and to see that success is rewarded, not punished. But Obama and his gang seek control and add redistribution, their euphemism for political theft of private assets. Career politicians use government interference and taxpayers' money to favor certain groups of voters and contributors and to punish what Obama calls their enemies. They say their redistribution theft is fairer, with it they can control more voters, and the bigger the government, the more utopian our society will become. Wherever socialism has been imposed, it has failed, but the Democrats can't be deterred by history lessons; that thwarts their desire to control people.
Since the end of Reagan's second term, each administration and congress has imposed more fascist controls on private property and private lives. The trend has increased dramatically with Obama and Democrat control of the Senate. They have effectively taken control of the banks and other financial institutions, imposed government control of medical care on an unwilling public, spent trillions of dollars borrowed from future generations for a “stimulus” that didn’t stimulate, giving it to unions and other favored groups, and obstructed efforts to develop our badly needed oil and gas resources. In doing so, he has awakened and enraged the nation.
In his first five years as president Obama orchestrated a three-ring circus of incompetent leadership. This should not be surprising, since he was elected president with no executive or leadership experience. His vague and deliberately concealed biography reveals him to have been a neighborhood machine politician whose previous associates are a gang of far-left, anti-American radicals determined to destroy the incentives that have made the U.S. prosperity the envy of the world. He has the responsibility of managing the largest business in the world but his cabinet are almost completely without private sector experience. To insulate his administration from constitutional and congressional control of his actions, he has assembled a gaggle of far-left “czars” to assist in running his fascist state – 37 of them on a recent count.
Five years after the housing bubble burst, the Obama team is doing more of the same things that caused the recession, including demanding that banks “renegotiate” loans where the bureaucrats think the collateral is worth less than the amount owed, with the lender donating the difference in the form of reducing the amount due.
Obama frequently crows about the numbers of “jobs created and jobs saved” by his gigantic “stimulus.” There has been virtually no net creation of productive jobs, only many new government jobs that are merely another government expense, parasitic jobs that contribute little or nothing to the economy. “Jobs saved” is another fraud, another attempt to justify the huge spending for a stimulus that hasn’t stimulated. You can’t count “jobs saved” any more than you can count anything else that might have happened but didn’t. How many tornadoes didn’t California have last year? Instead of letting unemployed workers find some remunerative activity, Congress keeps extending unemployment benefits. Why work? Let the 50 percent of earners who pay income taxes support the unemployed. British legislator Daniel Hannan said, "You do not address the problem of poverty by giving money to the poor . Paying people to be poor has created more poor people in the U.S. and Europe."
Career politicians, always seeking votes, rush to “do something” about every problem. But the history of the stock market crash of 1987 is ignored by the liberals in Washington. The Reagan administration did not intervene, in spite of public pleas to do so. The market and economy not only recovered quickly but what followed was 20 years of economic growth and low unemployment.
The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico revealed another element of Obama’s fascism. With no constitutional basis for doing so, his administration did to a British company what Conn Carroll of the Heritage Foundation called “a shakedown of Godfather-like proportions .… a continuation of President Barack Obama’s ongoing assault on the rule of law.”
David Limbaugh wrote, “Just as Obama blamed Wall Street and exempted liberal government policies and quasi-government entities Fannie and Freddie for their complicity in the financial meltdown, just as he blamed doctors, pharmaceutical and insurance companies for soaring health care costs caused mostly by socialistic government policies … his plan is to shut down our conventional energy industry in favor of new, quixotic [and very expensive] alternative energy methods that will succeed only in propelling this nation even faster toward Third World status.”
Obama, again “not letting a crisis go to waste,” used the BP oil spill to declare a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf, even cancelling permits already issued. With unbelievable hubris, he pressured BP into providing $100 million to pay wages and compensation to the workers idled by Obama’s moratorium. “All drilling must be stopped! It isn’t safe!” The fact is there are over 30,000 wells in the Gulf alone, the BP spill is only the second one to amount to anything since 1982, and the last major drilling spill in U.S. waters was off Santa Barbara in 1969 – 44 years ago. A federal judge cancelled the moratorium but scofflaw Obama immediately announced another moratorium. There is always a natural oil seepage in the Gulf, nature takes care of it, and it is useful in identifying promising places to drill new wells. If we are ever going to reduce our dependence on oil from unfriendly foreign sources, we must develop our own resources while working toward developing economical alternative sources of energy.
The Commerce Clause of the Constitution has been turned into a fascist tool giving Congress and the Administration virtually unlimited power. By unconstitutional judge-made legislation, there is virtually no authority left to the states and the people when Washington decides to take control. Amazingly, for the most part the states do not defy or protest the unlawful federal usurpation of their authority but simply lobby to get as large a share of their own federal tax revenues as they can.
Barack Obama and his fellow liberals are determined to use every power available to them to increase government control, destroying the incentives that have made America prosperous. They are very successfully changing the country into what it was never meant to be -- a European-type welfare state, Orwellian fascism with
out the goose stepping.
STATES’ RIGHTS AND NULLIFICATION
This is possibly the most important issue in the history of the United States. The continuing national drift toward centralized control has reached the point where the machinery provided by the Founding Fathers for maintaining a federation of independent states is broken. The Executive branch, including the permanent bureaucracy that President Reagan described as a powerful force that tries to sabotage much executive and Congressional work, combined with both Congress and the courts ignoring the Constitution, make a caricature of the federal political structure of the United States and the laws provided by the Constitution. That structure is a federation of independent states that delegated to the federal government specific limited, enumerated powers - mainly involving national security, foreign relations and interstate commerce - reserving all other powers to the states and the people. In a free society the people do not require constitutional authority to act, government does. Essential to understanding the intentions of the founders is the fact that the states voted separately to ratify the Constitution, not by a combined vote of all the people together.
As discussed earlier, the three clauses in the Constitution most frequently violated are the welfare, commerce and “necessary and proper” clauses. The welfare clause says, “… to provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” Franklin Roosevelt started the welfare-state snowball rolling in 1933 by interpreting the Constitution’s word welfare to mean charitable welfare. Subsequent administrations and Congresses, seeking to buy votes and support, have greatly expanded that scam. The founders specifically ruled out that interpretation after much discussion, but now federal tyrants claim to be advancing the general welfare when they hand out welfare checks to politically favored voter groups. By appointing judges who were willing to change the original meaning and intent of the Constitution in order to approve the scam, it now has the color of law and the cancerous welfare state metastasizes.
The commerce clause says Congress will have power “to regulate Commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.” The purpose of the clause was to establish a domestic free trade zone to prevent the states from restricting commerce by tariffs or otherwise. In the 18th century, commerce meant only trade or exchange, not all gainful activity; among the several states meant commerce between one state and another, not commerce that might happen to have an effect on commerce generally; regulate meant to make regular – to cause to function in an orderly manner, not to micromanage the economy. Incredible is an abused word, but some “interstate commerce violations" upheld by the courts are truly incredible, including products grown and consumed legally on the same farm.
The “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution gives Congress the power to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper in carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in a Department or Officer thereof.” A study of the many statements of the framers and ratifiers to questions regarding that clause and their assurances of limited powers and limited government leaves no doubt that the intent was simply to enable the government to carry out its enumerated powers. James Madison and many others said that clause grants no supplementary powers.
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments clarified the limited powers granted to the federal government. The Tenth Amendment says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” It is the guarantee that the federal government has only those powers granted to it and no others. During the ratification discussions in the various states there were many confirmations of that understanding because of great concern about the preservation of the rights of the states. Several states even included such confirming wording in their ratifications. Well into the Nineteenth century the same assurances were regularly repeated, including by some Federalists who were proponents of a strong central government.
Particularly since FDR, the corrosion of the Constitution has progressed with almost every president and congress. George W. Bush refused to veto obviously unconstitutional laws for fear he would lose a vote or anger someone, choosing instead to sign them and let the Supreme Court decide on their constitutionality, but that left the fox guarding the henhouse,. Several of the Supreme Court justices view the Constitution as a “living” document and believe their job is not to enforce the Constitution, as they promised under oath to do, but to “interpret” (read change) it to suit themselves. Those nine politically appointed lawyers are appointed for life and answer to no one.
Many constitutional scholars say there is a conflict of interest in a second branch of the same government acting as judge and jury considering the constitutionality of their own actions and legislation. The Constitution provides only two ways for amending it, but the Supreme Court invented and uses a third way, just ignoring what the Constitution says and was meant, changing the meaning of its words and even in a case like Roe vs. Wade, inventing a new legal principle, the "right of privacy", to justify their approval of a new law. For all practical purposes, the federal courts have ceased to police the federal government, using that power irresponsibly. President Obama has invented a fourth way to amend the Constitution. He simply refuses to enforce laws he doesn’t like and illegally legislates by issuing executive orders, even after Congress has refused to pass legislation he proposed, like the Dream Act, legalizing certain illegal aliens.
The result is that some 70 or 80 percent of the laws Congress passes are unconstitutional, in spite of the Supremacy Clause that states, “The Constitution and constitutional laws in pursuance thereof shall be the supreme law of the land.” Aside from the difficult and little-used procedure of legally amending the Constitution, the only method available to enforce the Constitution is by nullification – by states, municipalities and individuals refusing to recognize and obey unconstitutional laws.
Nullification is appropriate when a state defends its rights against unconstitutional federal laws and administrative rulings not authorized by the Constitution. It is based on the principle that a federal law that violates the Constitution is no law at all and is therefore void and of no effect. It is up to the states - as parties to the federal compact - and others to declare the violation and to refuse to enforce or comply with it.
The nullification principle is almost as old as the Constitution. It grew out of protests involving the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, passed during a minor war with the French. The Sedition Act established fines and prison terms for criticizing the government. There were many violent protests, and Thomas Jefferson, then vice-president, felt nullification was a moderate way to defend states’ rights. He said, “To consider the Judges of the Superior Court as the ultimate Arbiter of constitutional questions would be a dangerous doctrine which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy … in office for life and not responsible to the Elective control.” Jefferson’s view was, “Whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void and of no force … each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well as infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.” He continued to endorse the principle of nullification throughout his life, as did John Adams and other Founders. In 1789 John Hay, the first Chief Justice of the United States said, “The jury has the right to judge both the law and the fact in controversy.”
The Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and the Kentucky Resolutions of 1799 protested the Alien and Sedition Acts and urged the states to invalidate them, with Kentucky stating, “Nullification of all unauthorized acts is the rightful remedy.”
Even when nullification fails, it is a useful educational tool. Too few Americans know about the limited powers of our federal government and the ability of the states and citizens to nullify laws and government actions not authorized by the
Constitution. It can be used when governments overstep their lawful authority and also in jury trials. Some laws are unconstitutional, and judges are just fallible lawyers with their own opinions, loyalties and prejudices. The consensus of the founding fathers was that juries must judge the law itself as well as the facts of the case, with jury nullification an essential defense for liberty. If a juror feels the applicable law is unconstitutional or the judge’s rulings and instructions are wrong, jurors can and do invoke nullification and can reach a verdict based on their own analyses and consciences.
Gradually the public and the states have come not only to accept central authority and control, but to look to Washington to solve their problems. Federal control continues to increase when the people and the states allow the president and Congress to wage unnecessary and unlawful wars, interfere in a decreasingly free economy, and seek votes by “helping” people. Now instead of the states protesting the federal usurpation of states’ rights, they mainly squabble over who gets the biggest share of what is left of the loot extracted by the federal government from local taxpayers.
Several states have passed Obamacare nullification legislation. It remains to be seen what Obama tries to do to those states. It is difficult politically for the federal government to punish states that revolt, but for some reason rebellions are rare. The public and the states are not mere puppets controlled by politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, and unreasonable legislation and case law, but they often perform like puppets. When appropriate, states and citizens should object, defund, and disobey peacefully.
A September 5, 2013 Wall Street Journal editorial concluded, “Don’t be surprised if millions of Americans begin to follow the President’s example and conclude that they also don’t have to follow laws they don’t like – and not merely smoking reefer on the front porch.” Freedom Works said, “It seems like a unique time for peaceful civil disobedience and non-compliance – a grassroots rejection of Washington’s corrupt ways.”
REAL IMMIGRATION REFORM
A coalition of powerful forces are again crying for some form of amnesty and legalization for the estimated 12 to 36 million illegal aliens in the United States, led by Barack Hussein Obama. The main advocates are:
* Democrats who want more Democrat voters any way they can get them.
* Illegal Latino immigrants who want to be legalized, and their advocates.
* Multi-culturist liberals who attack our historic assimilation of immigrants.
* Businesses and individuals who want a cheaper, more pliable labor force.