Hillary needs to brush up on her Constitution
Candidate Clinton seems to think a President ought not to exercise the veto power given the holder of the office by the Constitution. Today she criticized Bush for suggesting he would veto a troop withdrawal bill. That, said Hillary, would be “vetoing the will of the American people.”
A little civics lesson here for Hillary. This country is not and never has been a pure democracy, but rather a republic. That’s actually what our representatives in Congress (of which she is one) are all about. And the Constitution expressly gives the President the power to override the will of up to two-thirds of Congress, those representatives of the American people.
But of course Hillary knows that; I doubt she counseled Bill similarly when he threatened to veto legislation. Let’s see: President Clinton vetoed seventeen bills in his first term and twenty in his second, not to mention a fairly liberal (pardon the word) use of the line item veto, which he exercised freely during its short venue as a constitutionally allowed course of action.
Were Hillary to be elected to the Presidency in 2008 I somehow doubt she’d be so very respectful of the will of the people, were it to differ with the will of Hillary.
eternityroad.infoHypocrisy. Check out the two links on this page, Neo, from Eternity’s Road.
“You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of climate, you are not allowed to criticise others – after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?…
“Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others’ shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all the vices. For, you see, if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour – you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all the political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.
“You wouldn’t believe the things they said about the original Victorians. Calling someone a Victorian in those days was almost like calling them a fascist or a Nazi….
“Because they were hypocrites… the Victorians were despised in the late Twentieth Century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves – they took no moral stances and lived by none.”
“So they were morally superior to the Victorians – ” Major Napier said, still a bit snowed under.
“— even though – in fact, because – they had no morals at all.”
“We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy,” Finkle-McGraw continued. “In the late Twentieth Century Weltanschaaung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception – he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course. most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it’s a spirit-is willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing.”
“That we occasionally violate our own moral code,” Major Napier said, working it through, “does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.”
“Of course not,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It’s perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved – the missteps we make along the way – are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power.”
Link To BookworM
Link to quoted piece
You see, the Left has no beliefs other than a belief that they are fit to exercise power and abuse it. That they are the One True Faith, and everyone else is heretical if they disagree, and therefore must be purged.
Because they have no beliefs, they try to define hypocrisy as behaving in a way different than what you believe humans should act. Thomas Jefferson for example. Since the Left doesn’t believe in anything… obviously they are not hypocritical, right Neo…
She does have a problem with the Constitution. Especially since she seems to think the Constitution allows he Federal government to establish Universal Healthcare.
There’s no particular ignorance of the Constitution involved here. She didn’t say he couldn’t ignore the public, that he didn’t have that legal power. She just said to the public (paraphrased). “Hey. He’s ignoring you! Does that piss you off? Then vote for me!” Which is how running for office tends to work. That there’s a political price to be paid for using the quasi-dictatorial power of the Presidency is one of the checks on said power although term limits make it less of one if he doesn’t care about the future of his party.
Nor does it seem fair to accuse her of hypocrisy over this particular issue (although needless to say, nobody gets elected to high office without their fair share of hypocrisy). The fact is, her husband did not ignore public opinion the way that Bush does. If you showed him the kind of polls that Bush sees, he wouldn’t “stay the course”. He’d change course. Most Presidents would. That probably includes a hypothetical President Clinton II. So she really isn’t accusing him of something that she would do herself. Odds are good she really wouldn’t.
So certainly there’s room to criticise her on the grounds that you belive she’d be disastrously wrong in her policies, perhaps precisely because she’d listen to the public, and the public doesn’t know its rear end from a hole in the ground. But that isn’t hypocrisy, nor is it Constitutional ignorance. It’s just you disagreeing with her on a matter of importance.
“But that isn’t hypocrisy, nor is it Constitutional ignorance. It’s just you disagreeing with her on a matter of importance.
Oh, you missed the entire point here.
How do you veto a mandate? You dont. Saying what Hillary said, that Bush was thwarting the will of the people obviously isnt true. Especially after Pelosi resorted to dressing this bill up with enough pork to get “blue dog” Dems to consider voting for it in the first place.
“The fact is, her husband did not ignore public opinion the way that Bush does. If you showed him the kind of polls that Bush sees, he wouldn’t “stay the course”. He’d change course.
Of course, not seen as a plus among some of us, whom, BTW realize this is a Republic. Not a mobocracy.
Why is it obviously not true that Bush is “thwarting the will of the people”? I mean it’s obviously true that Bush has no legal obligation to care about what the public thinks but nobody claimed he did. Does that obligate the public (or other politicians) to never dispute what he does if they don’t like it?
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Hillary is only a Bush in Clinton clothing, what do you expect?