Obama's Assault on the Constitution

This article appeared on the American Thinker blog:

April 30, 2010


Obama's stealth attack on our legal foundations

Walt Elgin



Bowing to foreign power was not just a matter of misplaced etiquette. As its creeping socialism morphs into a quirky gallop, Obama's State Department is supporting an International Criminal Court (ICC) with jurisdiction over what has always been sovereign U.S. powers:



..."Pragmatic cooperation" with the ICC-for example, helping it with investigations and sitting in on court bodies, [proponents argue] would give the U.S. a voice on decisions that affect its interests, such as helping the ICC define the "crime of aggression." U.S. officials were stunned that a recent draft defining aggression was so wide-reaching that NATO would have been criminally liable in the 1999 Kosovo war...



...The ICC's indictments have so far targeted nasty characters in Africa, but the court has always resisted outside oversight, especially from the U.S. What's more, no amount of reform of the founding treaty will change the ICC's inherent flaw. The ICC is a child of the doctrine of "universal jurisdiction," which holds that courts can adjudicate crimes [by their definition] committed anywhere in the world.



And other Obama acolytes support a constitutional overhaul to allow more direct control to those in power, without the messiness of congressional action - as originally stipulated in the Constitution. Stephen Markman, Michigan Supreme Court Justice, has warned about Obama's "living constitution" views :





...the important decisions would increasingly be undertaken by courts, especially by federal courts. It will be the California referendum process writ national, a process by which the decisions of millions of voters on matters such as racial quotas, social services funding, and immigration policy have been routinely overturned by single judges acting in the name of the Constitution - not the Framers' Constitution, but a "constitution for our times," a "living constitution," resembling, sadly, the constitutions of failed and despotic nations across the globe...



As various advocates of a 21st century constitution have urged, [the constitution should] be interpreted to allow the invention of a host of new "rights," and thus be construed to guarantee social or economic equality. However pleasing this might sound to some people, there should be no mistake: adopting this interpretation will supplant representative decision-making with the decision-making of unelected, unaccountable, and life-tenured judges.











Posted at 08:01 AM