Washington Post journolist Ezra Klein laid several eggs during
a gaffe-filled interview on MSNBC earlier today.
Because the cable channel's ratings now trail reruns of Gilligan's Island and hospital sonograms, no one would have known
except for the heroes over at NewsBusters.
They took the bullet for the rest of us and transcribed his statements regarding the new House requirement to read the Constitution at the start of the session. Among his remarks were these timeless gems:
[The Constitution] has no binding power on anything. And two, the issue of the Constitution is not that people don’t read the text and think they’re following. The issue of the Constitution is that the text is confusing because it was written more than 100 years ago and what people believe it says differs from person to person and differs depending on what they want to get done.
Well, gee Ira -- I mean Ezra, my mortgage note is nearly 30 years old. I don't really understand it very well, and my interpretation is probably different than the bank's, so our opinions as to what I should pay are amorphous -- confusing, even.
After realizing he'd become even more of a laughingstock than usual, Klein used his WaPo bully pulpit to
claim he'd been misinterpreted and brutalized by conservatives.
This morning, I gave a quick interview to MSNBC where I made, I thought, some fairly banal points on the GOP's plan to honor the Constitution by having it read aloud on the House floor...
...The rather toxic implication of [my comments] is that one side respects the Constitution and the other doesn't. That's bunk, of course: It’s arguments over how the Constitution should be understood, not arguments over whether it should be followed, that cleave American politics. The Constitution was written more than 223 years ago, and despite the confidence various people have in their interpretation of the text, smart scholars of good faith continue to disagree about it. And they tend to disagree about it in ways that support their political ideology. I rarely meet a gun-lover who laments the Second Amendment's clear limits on bearing firearms, or someone who believes in universal health care but thinks the proper interpretation of the Commerce Clause doesn't leave room for such a policy.
Bzzzt! Wrong, schmuck!
Everyone with an iota of intellectual curiosity knows the history of the New Deal and how great swaths of it were ruled
clearly unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. It was only
after FDR's threats to stack the Supreme Court -- to bring four new Elena Kagan members to bear -- that the Democrat president was able to bully the High Court into egregious rulings like
Wickard vs. Filburn.
Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942), was a U.S. Supreme Court decision that dramatically increased the power of the federal government to regulate economic activity. A farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed his chickens. The U.S. government had imposed limits on wheat production based on acreage owned by a farmer, in order to drive up wheat prices during the Great Depression, and Filburn was growing more than the limits permitted. Filburn was ordered to destroy his crops and pay a fine, even though he was producing the excess wheat for his own use and had no intention of selling it.
The Supreme Court, interpreting the United States Constitution's Commerce Clause under Article 1 Section 8 (which permits the United States Congress "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;") decided that, because Filburn's wheat growing activities reduced the amount of wheat he would buy for chicken feed on the open market, and because wheat was traded nationally, Filburn's production of more wheat than he was allotted was affecting interstate commerce, and so could be regulated by the federal government.
You read that right: a cowed Supreme Court, which had been blatantly threatened by FDR,
ruled that a farmer growing wheat for use on his own farm was engaging in interstate commerce.
A more outrageous court decision you'd be hard-pressed to find.
Wickard, in particular, opened the floodgates to expansive interpretations of the Commerce Clause, never before contemplated in American history and certainly foreign to the principles enunciated by the Framers in all of their writings.
So, yes, Klein is a lying schmuck who either knows little of the Constitution's history or simply doesn't care.
The very welfare state he supports is collapsing around us: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, "Great Society" and every other disastrous Democrat brainchild hatched since the Wickard decision has America literally teetering at the brink of economic collapse.
Question: how many years has the
Congressional Budget Office warned that America's entitlement spending is "unsustainable"? More years than Klein's been alive, to be sure. Yet the progressives express an insatiable desire to confiscate private property, to centralize government and to ignore the Constitution while doing so, and see no limits to the scope of government.
This country's Framers
studied Cicero, John Locke, the Baron de Montesquieu, Adam Smith and others whose timeless wisdom were used to help construct a society of vast wealth, infinite freedom and limited government.
In little more than two hundred years, Americans defeated slavery, Nazism, military Shintoism and Communism; refined mass production; invented human flight; created 75% of all medical innovations on the planet; put a man on the moon; invented the telephone, the Internet and the search engine; and advanced humankind in millions of other ways, in every field and endeavor. Those achievements weren't created because of the Democrats' welfare state -- they were created
in spite of them.
Yet Klein ignores history, logic and reason and claims that progressives have some sort of equal claim to the Constitution. He is a bald-faced liar. This country's founders studied thousands of years of human history -- despotic regimes, authoritarian lunatics, totalitarian zealots -- and attempted to constrain
government, not the individual.
Klein clearly refutes the notions of the God-given rights of man, of private property and of carefully constructed limits on an all-powerful, centralized, authoritarian government. For progressives can articulate no limits on government, no checks on their insatiable appetite for control over the individual.
The Founders of this country would despise you, Ezra Klein. You
and your progressive ilk who reject the Constitution and the Declaration. You're a buffoon and a laughingstock -- and everyone knows it.
Hat tip: Memeorandum. Linked by: Michelle Malkin, Pundit & Pundette, and Adrienne. Thanks!
[18,301 page views, 9 tweets] Over at Thin Progress, the intellectually stunted Matthew Yglesias contends that "If The Founders Had Wanted a Supermajority Requirement for the Senate, They Could Have Put One in the Constitution".
[72,305 page views, 178 tweets] Check out the crowds at the mall for the 8/28 patriots' rally versus the progressives' "One Nation" protest.
