Here’s a member of the House…
…who seems to get it—Diane Black of Tennessee’s 6th Congressional District:
If President Obama can unilaterally decide which parts of the law he must enforce, what is to prevent the next president, regardless of party, from unilaterally deciding to not enforce these and other laws passed by Congress? And how far is he willing to test Americans’ patience with his increasingly imperial presidency?
One wonders, however, what Ms. Black and her Republican colleagues are planning to do about it.
I’d never heard of Diane Black before, but I noticed that the article refers to her as “congressman.” And then I read this in her Wiki profile:
Black is one of three female U.S. Representatives in the 113th Congress who identifies as a “congressman.”
Interesting. Here’s the story on that:
All three of these women are Republicans from deep red states: Marsha Blackburn and Diane Black of Tennessee and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming…
Congressman Blackburn has previously stated that the term “congresswoman,” which is today used by the vast majority of women – and Republican women – in the House, is “grammatically incorrect” and a “politically correct misnomer” because the term “‘Congressman’ is not a gender specific job.”…
Representative Black’s composite voting record during her first year in the House in 2011 earned her the designation of the most conservative member of the chamber followed by a #26 ranking by National Journal in 2012.
Black seems to be unafraid of bucking the tide. Good for her.
Ditto for fireman and policeman.
I’ve seen her speak here in Nashville at different events, and she is what she seems to be. Conservative, pro-life and not afraid to vote that way.
Today is National Women’s Equality day also (designated in 1971).
This day in history also marked the passing of the 19th amendment (in 1920).
We are all equal until we prove ourselves to have no common sense. Those without common sense are liberals. 🙂
Given past history with regards to Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman, I assume she knows what is going to come for her very soon. I hope she and her family are ready for it.
And… did you see the Christine Donnell story?
They did a number on her in New Jersey and it was coordinated with the IRS digging in her records..
I don’t know why Journalists aren’t just skewering everyone and everybody right now.
Baklava:
I have described liberalism as unprincipled; but, its connotation is that its adherents lack common sense. This is a generally accurate assessment of their philosophy, which is essentially informal, and is incapable of ensuring consistency. This is also what motivates the phrase, “get off my lawn,” as liberalism is, by its nature, generational. It offers insufficient guidance for proper development beyond a limited time frame.
Liberalism is unprincipled, progressivism is selective, libertarianism is inadequate, and conservatism is just right (i.e. tolerant).
re: conservatism
Classical liberalism tempered by Judeo-Christian principles is tolerant and generous with cause.
The ultimate question is just who will obey the law if the president doesn’t? First it will be the people around him who will disobey the law while acting in his name. Then it will be the people in the next circle surrounding them. It will expand outwards in an ever widening circle. The Congress won’t want to be left out of the fun and join in too. This won’t happen overnight but will be a continual erosion until we finally have a government of men instead of a government of laws. It’s precisely what Archibald Cox, the first Watergate prosecutor, warned about.
It’s going to be a long three and a half years until we have some else besides Obama.
To me, libertarians don’t seem to understand that their philosophy drives up costs for everyone.
It comes down to personal responsibility.
Conservatives believe in it. Liberals don’t. Libertarians don’t understand that just because they are personally responsible it doesn’t mean their philosophy is good for the nation.
The RADICALLY funny thing is that libertarians want a cut in government up to 80%. And yet how would we get there? We can’t even get a freeze in government spending! Increases are called cuts and journalists are economically illiterate.
If we all help ourselves to account (except those who were truly non-able bodied and elderly) then we would see that each family is responsible for:
1) Their own health insurance
2) Their own higher education
3) Their own aspirations as to what they want to achieve
4) Rewards for their risk or the consequence for making poor business decisions.
Government at it’s core (at the federal level) is to provide for the common defense.
It’s gone from 50% of expenditures in 1960 to less than 17% now and we are in major deficits each year. Defense is not the spending problem and we are in heap big trouble when we have to pay the piper and the U.S Dollar loses it’s reserve currency status.
Soon it will come to this, if it is not already there: If the so-called President thinks he is the law; and if the corrupt bureaucrats in Washington – who are truly the worst imaginable human beings this side of Hanibal Lecteu – can exempt themselves from the laws they pass….
What is to stop John and Jane Q. Public from unilaterally deciding to screw the law altogether?
More and more. More and more.
There is simply NO MORAL OBLIGATION to follow the laws anymore. We are back by the long route to Hobbes. And we are learning that morality and legality are more intertwined than was thought.
Martin Luther King was correct – and who quotes him on this one anymore!…An unjust law is no law at all.
A corrupt and malicious President is no President at all. A Gestapo IRS is no IRS at all. A thug Congress is no Congress at all.
If Obama was white the MSM would already be talking seriously about impeachment.
Obama can do anything he wants because, as the SCOTUS says, he is part of a protected class … and everyone damn well knows it.
“If Obama was white”
… he never would have made it out of the second tier of Presidential also-rans. In fact he probably never would have been senator, would still be doing small jobs in the Illinois legislature for the Chicago machine.
Many years ago, more than 60, I was told that we had a special system of government that had a system of checks and balances that constrained our public servants from working their arbitrary will upon us. I had little reason to question this until recently. Now, however, I realize that we have been overly dependent upon our prominent citizens, our leaders, to be honorable men.
Now that tyrants have captured one of our two major political parties we are defenseless. Our judicial system is institutionally incapable of adjudicating gross violations of law in a timely manner. The Executive branch (Obama) has committed so many egregious violations of law as to constitute a Cloward-Piven type assault on our polity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy
The Republican Party, at the national level, has become a coterie of courtiers. The table scraps are delicious and the soirees are sublime.
What’s a soul to do?
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
has a certain ring.
Several years ago, here in North West Ohio, we had a mayor who seemed to selectively enforce some laws. I wrote for a list of laws that I could ignore without fear of penalty and did not receive a reply. (I didn’t really expect one.)
Barry is on the same track, he can say/do whatever he wants and not fear any press coverage or pushback by the courts and/or legislators.
This seems to me to be a prime argument to elect people who have, along with a good sense of right and wrong, also a genuine commitment to laws in general and the US Constitution in particular.
}}} Black seems to be unafraid of bucking the tide. Good for her.
… and Sad for the Tide. Very Sad.
She should not be bucking it. It should be moving with her.
}}} re: conservatism
}}} Classical liberalism tempered by Judeo-Christian principles is tolerant and generous with cause.
Classical liberalism and modern conservatism as nearly identical.
PostModern liberalism is neither of those, by any stretch.
The typical self-defining liberal of today believes themselves to be “middle of the road”, even though they are actually so far out in left field that they could not SEE the middle of the road if they had the telescope at Mt Palomar at their feet.
It says more than enough that they find themselves in a position where they have to refrain from referring to Ralph Nader as an “arch-conservative”.