Sunstein: Obama Wants 'Second Bill of Rights'

Mere hours after Breitbart News published an excerpt from an interview with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) in which he speculated that President Barack Obama would "prefer a different kind of constitution," one with a Bill of Rights based on the South African model, former Obama administration regulatory czar Cass Sunstein published an op-ed making a similar argument: that the president wants a "second Bill of Rights" alongside the existing one. Read more at Breitbart... Read More......

Bill of Rights Day -- A Muslim's View

FOXNEWS, 12/15/2010 by Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy - "As we celebrate the 219th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights today on December 15, it is imperative that we take a moment to reflect upon and embrace the forethought of our Founding Fathers and apply their wisdom to the context that we live in today. This collection of ten amendments to the United States Constitution are what guarantee the sanctity of our individual rights and freedoms and what in the end sets America apart from any nation before or since." Read more at Fox... Read More......

The Truth About the House Health Care Bill

"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government -- lest it come to dominate our lives and interests." -- Patrick Henry

Michael Connelly, Ret. Constitutional Attorney, reviews House Health Care Bill (Hat tip: Jean Nelson/via email)

Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional. What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected.

To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats and the media are saying. The law does provide for rationing of health care, particularly where senior citizens and other classes of citizens are involved, free health care for illegal immigrants, free abortion services, and probably forced participation in abortions by members of the medical profession.

The Bill will also eventually force private insurance companies out of business and put everyone into a government run system. All decisions about personal health care will ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats and most of them will not be health care professionals. Hospital admissions, payments to physicians, and allocations of necessary medical devices will be strictly controlled.

However, as scary as all of that it, it just scratches the surface. In fact, I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of providing affordable health care choices. Instead it is a convenient cover for the most massive transfer of power to the Executive Branch of government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated. If this law or a similar one is adopted, major portions of the Constitution of the United States will effectively have been destroyed.

The first thing to go will be the masterfully crafted balance of power between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. The Congress will be transferring to the Obama Administration authority in a number of different areas over the lives of the American people and the businesses they own. The irony is that the Congress doesn’t have any authority to legislate in most of those areas to begin with. I defy anyone to read the text of the U.S. Constitution and find any authority granted to the members of Congress to regulate health care.

This legislation also provides for access by the appointees of the Obama administration of all of your personal healthcare information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital. All of this is a direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures. You can also forget about the right to privacy. That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd and 4th Amendments may provide.

If you decide not to have healthcare insurance or if you have private insurance that is not deemed “acceptable” to the “Health Choices Administrator” appointed by Obama there will be a tax imposed on you. It is called a “tax” instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid application of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment. However, that doesn’t work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving someone of property without the “due process of law.

So, there are three of those pesky amendments that the far left hate so much out the original ten in th e Bill of Rights that are effectively nullified by this law. It doesn’t stop there though. The 9th Amendment that provides: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people;” The 10th Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are preserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Under the provisions of this piece of Congressional handiwork neither the people nor the states are going to have any rights or powers at all in many areas that once were theirs to control.

I could write many more pages about this legislation, but I think you get the idea. This is not about health care; it is about seizing power and limiting rights. Article 6 of the Constitution requires the members of both houses of Congress to “be bound by oath or affirmation” to support the Constitution. If I was a member of Congress I would not be able to vote for this legislation or anything like it without feeling I was violating that sacred oath or affirmation. If I voted for it anyway I would hope the American people would hold me accountable.

For those who might doubt the nature of this threat I suggest they consult the source. Here is a link to the Constitution: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html

And another to the Bill of Rights: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_ri ghts_transcript.html

There you can see exactly what we are about to have taken from us.

Michael Connelly
Retired attorney,
Constitutional Law Instructor
Carrollton , Texas Read More......

On King's 'Great Wells of Democracy'

January 21, 2008
By Josiah Bunting III
Times-Dispatch Guest Columnist

PLAINS, VA – The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the highest principles of liberty were enshrined in America's founding documents and that one key to securing equal justice for all was to make certain that Americans remembered -- and remained true to -- their national heritage.

Someone visiting Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, King once wrote, would have seen not only America's most segregated city, but also a place where the municipal leaders had never learned basic lessons of American history.

"You might have concluded that here was a city that had been trapped for decades in a Rip Van Winkle slumber," he said, "a city whose fathers had apparently never heard of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, the Bill of Rights, the Preamble to the Constitution, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, or the 1954 decision of the United States Supreme Court outlawing segregation in the public schools."

When King was jailed in Birmingham in 1963 for marching without a permit, he wrote a letter from his cell that is a supremely logical, yet passionate, defense of civil disobedience in pursuit of civil rights. It was the demonstrators in city after city, not the authorities who imprisoned them, King argued, who were defending America's founding principles.

"One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence," he wrote.

LATER THAT YEAR, when he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial, King returned to this theme. "When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence," he said, "they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir."

As we remember King today, it ought to be obvious that future generations of Americans will not be able to claim this inheritance unless they know what it is.
Unfortunately, a recent survey revealed that American colleges are doing a miserable job when it comes to teaching students many of the basic facts about our founding documents and how the principles they enshrine have -- or have not -- been implemented through the decades.

Last fall, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute surveyed 14,000 randomly selected freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges nationwide. Each student was given a 60-question multiple choice "civic literacy" test that focused on American history, government, international relations, and economics. The average freshman scored 50.4 percent, or an "F." The average senior did little better, scoring 54.2 percent -- also an "F."

The results revealed, for example, that only 45.95 percent of college seniors knew that the line "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . . " comes from the Declaration of Independence. Only 47.71 percent knew Fort Sumter came before Gettysburg, which came before Appomattox. Only 61.42 percent knew Abraham Lincoln was elected sometime between 1851 and 1875. Only 42.77 percent knew that the struggle between President Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans was over Reconstruction.

THE RESULTS also revealed that our nation's colleges especially disserved self-identified minority students (Asian, black, Hispanic, and multiracial), with minority seniors scoring an average of 48.2 percent on the civic literacy exam, or just eight-tenths of a point higher than the average for minority freshmen. On average, in other words, American colleges teach minority students virtually nothing about America's history and institutions.

The failure to significantly increase civic knowledge among college students has immediate practical consequences: The more civic knowledge a student gains in college, the survey data demonstrated, the more likely he or she is to vote and participate in other civic activities.

It also has profound consequences for the longer term. As King argued, the rights enshrined in the Declaration, protected by the Constitution, and eventually redeemed by all Americans through decades of civil struggle and reconciliation, are universal and irrevocable.

If we forget what they are, we will forget who we are: one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Lt. Gen. Josiah Bunting III, president of the H. Frank Guggenheim Foundation and superintendent emeritus of the Virginia Military Institute, serves as chairman of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's National Civic Literacy Board. Read More......