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Dr. Sam Vaknin is an Israeli psychologist. He has written extensively about narcissism. He is  the author of the Malignant Self Love. Vaknin is a world authority on narcissism. He understands narcissism and describes the inner mind of a narcissist with great skill. When he talks about narcissism everyone listens. He says that Obama’s language, posture and demeanor, and the testimonies of his closest, dearest friends suggest that the man is either a narcissist or a man with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

Dr. Vaknin says, "I must confess I was impressed by Obama from the first time I saw him. At first I was excited to see a black candidate. He looked youthful, spoke well, appeared to be confident — a wholesome presidential package. I was put off soon, not just because of his shallowness but also because there was an air of haughtiness in his demeanor that was unsettling.. His posture and his body language were louder than his empty words. Obama’s speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history. Never a politician in this land had such quasi ‘religious’ impact on so many people.  The fact that Obama is a total incognito with Zero accomplishment, makes this inexplicable infatuation alarming. Obama is not an ordinary man. He is not a genius. In fact he is quite ignorant on most important subjects."

Narcissists project a grandiose but false image of themselves. Jim Jones, the charismatic leader of People’s Temple, the man who led over 900 of his followers to cheerfully commit mass suicide and even murder their own children was also a narcissist. David Koresh, Charles Manson, Joseph Koni, Shoko Asahara, Stalin, Saddam, Mao, Kim Jong Ill and Adolph Hitler are a few examples of narcissists of our time. All these men had a tremendous influence over their fanciers. They created a personality cult around themselves and with their blazing speeches elevated their admirers, filled their hearts with enthusiasm and instilled in their minds a new zest for life. They gave them hope! They promised them the moon, but alas, invariably they brought them to their doom.

When you are a victim of a cult of personality, you don’t know it until it is too late.

One determining factor in the development of NPD is childhood abuse.  "Obama’s early life was decidedly chaotic and replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations," says Vaknin. "Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through a divorce when he was an infant two years old. Obama saw his father only once again, before he died in a car accident. Then his mother re-married and Obama had to relocate to Indonesia , a foreign land with a radically foreign culture, to be raised by a step-father. At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live with his maternal (white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently in the following few years and then she vanished from his life in 1979.  She died of cancer in 1995."

One must never underestimate the manipulative genius of pathological narcissists. They project such an imposing personality that it overwhelms those around them. Charmed by the charisma of the narcissist, people become like clay in his hands. They cheerfully do his bidding and delight to be at his service. The narcissist shapes the world around himself and reduces others in his own inverted image. He creates a cult of personality. His admirers become his co-dependents. Narcissists have no interest in things that do not help them to reach their personal objective. They are focused on one thing alone and that is power. All other issues are meaningless to them and they do not want to waste their precious time on trivialities. Anything that does not help them is beneath them and does not deserve their attention.

If an issue raised in the Senate does not help Obama in one way or another, he has no interest in it. The"present" vote is a safe vote. No one can criticize him if things go wrong. Those issues are unworthy by their very nature because they are not about him.

Obama’s election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a contract and advance to write a book about race relations. The University of Chicago Law School provided him a lot longer than expected and at the end it evolved into, guess what? His own autobiography! Instead of writing a scholarly paper focusing on race relations, for which he had been paid, Obama could not resist writing about his most sublime self. He entitled the book Dreams from My Father.

Not surprisingly, Adolph Hitler also wrote his own autobiography when he was still a nobody. So did Stalin. For a narcissist no subject is as important as his own self. Why would he waste his precious time and genius writing about insignificant things when he can write about such an august being as himself?

Narcissists are often callous and even ruthless. As the norm, they lack conscience. This is evident from Obama’s lack of interest in his own brother who lives on only one dollar per month.. A man who lives in luxury, who takes a private jet to vacation in Hawaii, and who raised nearly half a billion dollars for his campaign (something unprecedented in history) has no interest in the plight of his own brother. Why? Because, his brother cannot be used for his ascent to power. A narcissist cares for no one but himself.

This election was like no other in the history of America . The issues were insignificant compared to what is at stake. What can be more dangerous than having a man bereft of conscience, a serial liar, and one who cannot distinguish his fantasies from reality as the leader of the free world?

I hate to sound alarmist, but one is a fool if one is not alarmed. Many politicians are narcissists. They pose no threat to others. They are simply self serving and selfish. Obama evidences symptoms of pathological narcissism, which is different from the run-of-the-mill narcissism of a Richard Nixon or a Bill Clinton for example. To him reality and fantasy are intertwined.

This is a mental health issue, not just a character flaw. Pathological narcissists are dangerous because they look normal and even intelligent. It is this disguise that makes them treacherous. Today the Democrats have placed all their hopes in Obama. But this man could put an end to their party. The great majority of blacks voted for Obama. Only a fool does not know that their support for him is racially driven. This is racism, pure and simple.

The downside of this is that if Obama turns out to be the disaster I predict, he will cause widespread resentment among the whites. The blacks are unlikely to give up their support of their man. Cultic mentality is pernicious and unrelenting. They will dig their heads deeper in the sand and blame Obama’s detractors of racism. This will cause a backlash among the whites. The white supremacists will take advantage of the discontent and they will receive widespread support. I predict that in less than four years, racial tensions will increase to levels never seen since the turbulent 1960′s.

Obama will set the clock back decades. America is the bastion of freedom. The peace of the world depends on the strength of America , and its weakness translates into the triumph of terrorism and victory of rogue nations.. It is no wonder that Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, the Castrists, the Hezbollah, the Hamas, the lawyers of the Guantanamo terrorists, and virtually all sworn enemies of America are so thrilled by the prospect of their man in the White House.

America is on the verge of destruction. There is no insanity greater than electing a pathological narcissist as president.

The Obama "birth certificate" is fabricated.  Go to the following site to see the evidence:

Post Continues on wireupdate.com

Another:

Obama’ Birth Certificate.

The birth certificate issue is linked to other of Obama’s documents the American public is not permitted to see.  The college records undoubtedly reveal more than Obama’s grades.  Only an insane person or a person who has a lot to hide would take all the steps and go to the expense that Obama has to keep his biography a secret.

“Questions over Obama’s [past]  have arisen because of his almost total concealment of documentation from his life – including his passport records, kindergarten records, Punahou school records, Occidental College records, Columbia University records, Columbia thesis, Harvard Law School records, Harvard Law Review articles, University of Chicago articles, Illinois State Bar Association records, Illinois State Senate records and schedules, medical records, Obama/Dunham marriage license, Obama/Dunham divorce documents, Soetoro/Dunham marriage license and adoption records.”   WND

His college records alone would include information on how Obama’s education was funded and who paid for that education.   They would tell us whether he received tuition and other moneys as a foreign student.  Answers to these questions are important.  Ultimately they are more important than the state of our economy this week and more important than the foreign wars we are involved in.  Because Obama is at the heart of our government, he has access to the nation’s most important documents.  And he has the power to act on his contempt for the United States.

The public has a right to know what Obama has expended so much money and effort to hide. Yet, the main stream media are not even curious.

Sanity returns to three leaders of European Countries, but not to the elite and their sycophants in the United States.  It seems United States leaders and our military officers have poor skills in identifying the enemy.  What power is there over members of the Senate and over the officers in our military that causes them to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the REAL THREAT to our safety, our freedoms, and our culture?

ANSWER: It has to come from the highest  authority of our government: our Kenyan, Muslim President.

For any reasonable person who reads this excellent piece from the Wall Street Journal, there can be do doubt where the problem lies.

From the Wall Street Journal

FEBRUARY 16, 2011

Major Hasan, ‘Star Officer’

Every branch of the military issued a final report on the Fort Hood massacre. Not a single one mentioned radical Islam.

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

In a month of momentous change, it was easy to overlook the significance of another revolutionary event. Who would have believed that in the space of a few weeks the leaders of the three major European powers would publicly denounce multiculturalism and declare, in so many words, that it was a proven disaster and a threat to society?

One after another they announced their findings—Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, Great Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, and France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy. Multicultural values had not only led to segregated communities: They had, Mr. Cameron noted, imposed policies of blind toleration that had helped nurture radical Islam’s terrorist cells.

There can be no underestimating the in-so-many-words aspect of these renunciations. This was multiculturalism they were talking about—the unofficial established religion of the universities, the faith whose requirements have shaped every aspect of cultural, economic and political life in Western democracies for the last 50 years. Still, they were out there—words coolly specific, their target clear.

They came at a fitting moment, just as Americans had been handed a report providing the fullest disclosures so far about the multiculturalist zeal that had driven Army and medical school superiors to smooth Nidal Malik Hasan’s rocky way through training, promote him, and, despite blatant evidence of his unfitness, raise not a single concern. Maj. Hasan, U.S. Army psychiatrist, would be assigned to Fort Hood where, in November 2009, he opened fire, killing 12 fellow soldiers and a civilian employee, and wounding 32 others.

Associated Press

Maj. Hasan at the Bell County Jail after his shooting spree at Fort Hood.

In this report, titled “A Ticking Time Bomb” and put out by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, there is a detail as dazzling in its bleak way as all the glowing misrepresentations of Dr. Hasan’s skills and character, which his superiors poured into their evaluations of him. It concerns the Department of Defense’s official report on the Foot Hood killings—a study whose recital of fact made no mention of Hasan’s well-documented jihadist sympathies. Subsequent DoD memoranda portray the bloodbath—which began with Hasan shouting “Allahu Akbar!”—as a kind of undefined extremism, something on the order, perhaps, of work-place violence.

This avoidance of specifics was apparently contagious—or, more precisely, policy. In November 2010, each branch of the military issued a final report on the Fort Hood shooting. Not one mentioned the perpetrator’s ties to radical Islam. Even today, “A Ticking Time Bomb,” co-authored by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.) and Susan Collins (R., Maine), reminds us that DoD still hasn’t specifically named the threat represented by the Fort Hood attack—a signal to the entire Defense bureaucracy that the subject is taboo.

For the superiors in charge of Hasan’s training at Walter Reed and his two years at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the taboo was of a more complicated order—one that required elaborately inventive analyses through which Hasan’s stated beliefs, ominous pronouncements, and evident unconcern with standards of behavior required of an officer could all be represented as singular virtues, proof of his exceptional value to the Army. It could not have been easy. Still, they managed.

They did so despite Hasan’s astounding trail of performances, each more telling than the next. To fulfill Walter Reed’s academic requirement for a presentation on a psychiatric theme, Hasan proffered a draft consisting almost entirely of wisdom from the Quran arguing for the painful punishment and liquidation of non-Muslims. Hasan evidently viewed the Quranic verses as a sufficient presentation—a view his superior didn’t share, given its lack of any mention of a psychiatric theme. When that guide warned him the presentation was “not scholarly” and might prevent his graduation, Hasan revised. The finished product was not much different. Still, Hasan was allowed to graduate.

He went on to his medical fellowship, where he soon delivered another class lecture, this one on the Islamist theme that the West, in particular the U.S military, had mounted a war on Islam. The presentation brimmed with views sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, the motives of the 9/11 perpetrators, and suicide bombers. It so infuriated his classmates that their outraged eruptions caused the instructor to end the presentation.

There would be more of the same to come. One classmate witness told investigators that Hasan sought every possible opportunity to share his radical Islamist sympathies. His highest obligation, he told classmates, wasn’t to the Constitution, which he had sworn to protect and defend, but to his religion.

His Islamist sympathies would attract the interest of the FBI, which soon picked up on this U.S Army major’s contacts with a terrorist suspect, unnamed in the Senate report. The agency would, however, have no continuing great interest in Hasan. Among other reasons, its agents had seen the impressive evaluation reports characterizing Hasan as an authority on Islam—one whose work even had “extraordinary potential to inform national policy and military strategy,” as one of his superiors put it in his officer evaluation report.

The same Hasan who set off silent alarms in his supervisors—the Psychiatric Residency Program Director at Walter Reed was one of them—would garner only plaudits in the official written evaluations at the time. He was commended in these as a “star officer,” one focused on “illuminating the role of culture and Islamic faith within the Global War on Terrorism.” One supervisor testified, “His unique interests have captured the interest and attention of peers and mentors alike.” No single word of criticism or doubt about Hasan ever made its way into any of his evaluations.

Some of those enthusiastic testaments strongly suggested that the writers were themselves at least partly persuaded of their reasoning. In magical thinking, safety and good come to those who obey taboos, and in the multiculturalist world, there is no taboo more powerful than the one that forbids acknowledgment of realities not in keeping with the progressive vision. In the world of the politically correct—which can apparently include places where psychiatrists are taught—magical thinking reigns.

A resident who didn’t represent the diversity value that Hasan did as a Muslim would have faced serious consequences had he behaved half as disturbingly. Here was a world in which Hasan was untouchable, in which all that was grim and disturbing in him was transformed. He was a consistently mediocre performer, ranking in the lowest 25% of his class, but to his evaluators, he was an officer of unique talents.

He was a star not simply because he was a Muslim, but because he was a special kind—the sort who posed, in his flaunting of jihadist sympathies, the most extreme test of liberal toleration. Exactly the kind the progressive heart finds irresistible.

A decision as to whether Maj. Hasan will go to trial—it would be before a military court-martial —should be forthcoming next month. He stands charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder, committed when he turned his laser equipped semi-automatic on members of the military at the Soldier Readiness Center. The likelihood is that the trial will go forward. If it does, the forces of multiculturalist piety, which played so central a role in advancing this Army major and concealing the menace he posed, will be the invisible presence on trial with him.

Ms. Rabinowitz, a member of the Journal’s editorial board, is the author of “No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusations, False Witness And Other Terrors Our Times” (Free Press, 2003).

The growth of Islamist extremism in the West is something even the politically correct can no longer ignore.

By DOUGLAS MURRAY

London

‘Multiculturalism has failed,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron last weekend in Munich. If anybody thought they had read those words before, it is because they have. Many times. Last October German Chancellor Angela Merkel (sitting onstage with Mr. Cameron when he gave his speech on Saturday) said the same. Finally, Europe’s mainstream party leaders seem to be realizing what others have long noticed: Multiculturalism has been the most pernicious and divisive policy pursued by Western governments since World War II.

Multiculturalism is a deeply misunderstood idea. That was one of the reasons for its political success. People were led to believe that “multiculturalism” meant multiracialism, or pluralism. It did not. Nevertheless, for years anybody who criticized multiculturalism was immediately decried as a “racist.”

But the true character and effects of the policy could not be permanently hidden. State-sponsored multiculturalism treated European countries like hostelries. It judged that the state should not “impose” rules and values on newcomers. Rather, it should bend over backwards to accommodate the demands of immigrants. The resultant policy was that states treated and judged people by the criteria of whatever “community” they found themselves born into.

In Britain, for instance, this meant that if you were a white English girl born into a white English family and your family decided to marry you against your will to a randy old pervert, the state would intervene. But if you had the misfortune to be born into an “Asian-background” family and the same happened, then the state would look the other way.

In 1984, a British school principal named Ray Honeyford politely suggested in an article in the Salisbury Review that it might be a good idea if students at his state-funded school were able to speak English and did not disappear to Pakistan for months at a time. The result was a siren of accusations of “racism,” which willfully ignored his arguments and precipitated the end of his career.

The multicultural model may have continued a lot longer if it hadn’t been for radical Islam. The terrorist assaults and plots across Britain and Europe—often from home-grown extremists—provided a breaking point that few sentient people could ignore. The question now is what can be done.

In his speech in Munich, Mr. Cameron rightly focused on the problem of home-grown Islamic extremism. He stressed several preliminary steps—among them that groups whose values are opposed to those of the state will no longer be bestowed with taxpayer money. It is a symptom of how low we have sunk that ceasing to fund our societies’ opponents would constitute an improvement.

But this is a first, not a final, policy. The fact is that Britain, Germany, Holland and many other European countries have nurtured more than one generation of citizens who seem to feel no loyalty toward their country and who, on the contrary, often seem to despise it.

The first step forward is that from school-age upward our societies must reassert a shared national narrative—including a common national culture. Some years ago the German Muslim writer Bassam Tibi coined the term “Leitkultur”—core culture—to describe this. It is the most decent and properly liberal antidote to multiculturalism. It concedes that in societies that have had high immigration there are all sorts of different cultures—which will only work together if they are united by a common theme.

The Muslim communities that Mr. Cameron focused on will not reform themselves. So the British government will have to shut down and prosecute terrorist and extremist organizations, including some “charities.” There are groups that are banned in the U.S. but can and do still operate with charitable status in the U.K. Clerics and other individuals who come from abroad to preach hate and division should be deported.

Will Mr. Cameron manage to do any of this? There is reason to be skeptical. In the wake of the 2005 subway and bus bombings in London—attacks carried out by British-born Muslims—Tony Blair announced that “the rules of the game are changing.” They then stayed the same.

It is possible that Mr. Cameron will show more political courage. If he does, he will undoubtedly be lambasted by the defenders of multiculturalism. He will also become a leader of significance. If he doesn’t, then future generations may well associate him with Munich. But it will not be for Saturday’s speech. It will be with a previous prime minister who also went to that city and who returned with an honor that proved deeply temporary.

Mr. Murray is director of the Center for Social Cohesion in London.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only.

Wilders: "The lights are going out all over Europe"

Speech of Geert Wilders at the resumption of his trial in Amsterdam today:

The lights are going out all over Europe. All over the continent where our culture flourished and where man created freedom, prosperity and civilization. Everywhere the foundation of the West is under attack.

All over Europe the elites are acting as the protectors of an ideology that has been bent on destroying us since fourteenth centuries. An ideology that has sprung from the desert and that can produce only deserts because it does not give people freedom. The Islamic Mozart, the Islamic Gerard Reve [a Dutch author], the Islamic Bill Gates; they do not exist because without freedom there is no creativity. The ideology of Islam is especially noted for killing and oppression and can only produce societies that are backward and impoverished. Surprisingly, the elites do not want to hear any criticism of this ideology.

My trial is not an isolated incident. Only fools believe it is. All over Europe multicultural elites are waging total war against their populations. Their goal is to continue the strategy of mass-immigration, which will ultimately result in an islamic Europe – a Europe without freedom: Eurabia.

The lights are going out all over Europe. Anyone who thinks or speaks individually is at risk. Freedom loving citizens who criticize islam, or even merely suggest that there is a relationship between islam and crime or honour killing, must suffer and are threatened or criminalized. Those who speak the truth are in danger.

The lights are going out all over Europe. Everywhere the Orwellian thought police are at work, on the lookout for thought crimes everywhere, casting the populace back within the confines where it is allowed to think.

This trial is not about me. It is about something much greater. Freedom of speech is not the property of those who happen to belong to the elites of a country. It is an inalienable right, the birthright of our people. For centuries battles have been fought for it, and now it is being sacrificed to please a totalitarian ideology.

Future generations will look back at this trial and wonder who was right. Who defended freedom and who wanted to get rid of it.

The lights are going out all over Europe. Our freedom is being restricted everywhere, so I repeat what I said here last year:

It is not only the privilege, but also the duty of free people – and hence also my duty as a member of the Dutch Parliament – to speak out against any ideology that threatens freedom. Hence it is a right and a duty to speak the truth about the evil ideology that is called islam. I hope that freedom of speech will emerge triumphant from this trial. I hope not only that I shall be acquitted, but especially that freedom of speech will continue to exist in the Netherlands and in Europe.

Gallup/USA Today Poll: 71% Want GOP to Consider Tea Party Ideas

Monday, 31 Jan 2011 03:36 PM

By Dan Weil

A new Gallup/USA Today poll shows great public respect for tea-party movement ideas. In the survey, 71 percent of the respondents say they want GOP leaders to look at tea party positions when developing policy, Politico reports. Among that 71 percent, 42 percent says listening to tea party ideas is “very important,” while 29 percent say it’s was “somewhat important.”
Among Republicans, 88 percent say it’s important for party leadership to take tea party ideas into account. And just over half of that 88 percent say it’s very important, while 35 percent say it’s somewhat important.
Among independents, 72 percent of those polled said it is important for Republican congressional leaders to consider tea party ideas. Of that total, 46 percent say tea party ideas are very important, while 26 percent say they are somewhat important.
© Newsmax.

The Tea Movement played a significant role in turning the country’s attention on the main document of our freedom: the US Constitution.  Since the beginning of our nation’s history there have been leaders who wanted to strengthen the power of central government at the expense of the rights promised to individual citizens and States by the Constitution.    The struggle continues.  I recommend reading Thomas DiLorenzo’s Hamilton’s Curse on this subject.

But the good news is that the Constitution still has its defenders:

“The Constitutional Moment”
Wall Street Journal  

Feb. 1, 2011

Judge Vinson introduces ObamaCare to Madison and Marshall.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Federal Judge Roger Vinson opens his decision declaring ObamaCare unconstitutional with that citation from Federalist No. 51, written by James Madison in 1788. His exhaustive and erudite opinion is an important moment for American liberty, and yesterday may well stand as the moment the political branches were obliged to return to the government of limited and enumerated powers that the framers envisioned.

As Judge Vinson took pains to emphasize, the case is not really about health care at all, or the wisdom—we would argue the destructiveness—of the newest entitlement. Rather, the Florida case goes to the core of the architecture of the American system, and whether there are any remaining limits on federal control. Judge Vinson’s 78-page ruling in favor of 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business, among others, is by far the best legal vindication to date of Constitutional principles that form the outer boundaries of federal power.

At the heart of the states’ lawsuit is the individual mandate, which requires everyone to purchase health insurance or be penalized for not doing so. “Never before has Congress required that everyone buy a product from a private company (essentially for life) just for being alive and residing in the United States,” Judge Vinson writes.

Congressional Democrats and the Obama Administration justified this coercion under the Commerce Clause, so it is fitting that Judge Vinson conducts a deep investigation into its history and intent, including Madison’s notes at the Constitutional Convention and the jurisprudence of the first Chief Justice, John Marshall. The original purpose of the Commerce Clause was to eliminate the interstate trade barriers that prevailed under the Articles of Confederation—among the major national problems that gave rise to the Constitution.

The courts affirmed this limited and narrow understanding until the New Deal, when Congress began to regulate harum-scarum and the Supreme Court inflated the clause into a general license for anything a majority happened to favor.

In a major 1942 case, Wickard v. Filburn, the Court held that even growing wheat for personal use was an activity with a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce, thus justifying federal restrictions on the use of agricultural land meant to prop up commodity prices. It wasn’t until the William Rehnquist Court, a half-century later, that the Justices began to recover some of the original limits, notably in the Lopez (1995) and Morrison (2000) cases.

Yet even in its most elastic interpretations, the Commerce Clause applied only to “clear and inarguable activity,” Judge Vinson writes, the emphasis his. It never applied to inactivity like not buying health insurance, which has “no impact whatsoever” on interstate commerce. He argues that breaching this frontier converts the clause into a general police power of the kind that the Constitution reserves to the states. As the High Court put it in Lopez, obliterating this distinction would “create a completely centralized government.”

The Administration contends that not purchasing insurance—inactivity—is really activity, because everyone will eventually need medical care and their costs will be transferred to the insured. But Judge Vinson dissects that as a “radical departure” from the Constitution and U.S. case law. It is “not hyperbolizing to suggest that Congress could do almost anything it wanted,” he writes. “Surely this is not what the Founding Fathers could have intended.”

He notes that no one can opt out of eating any more than they can from the medical system, so return to the Wickard example of wheat: “Congress could more directly raise too-low wheat prices merely by increasing demand through mandating that every adult purchase and consume wheat bread daily, rationalized on the grounds that because everyone must participate in the market for food, non-consumers of wheat bread adversely affect prices in the wheat market.”

Unlike Judge Henry Hudson in Virginia, who also found ObamaCare to be unconstitutional, Judge Vinson addresses the Administration’s fallback argument that the Constitution’s Necessary and Proper Clause justifies the law even if the Commerce Clause doesn’t. He writes that this clause “is not an independent source of federal power” and “would vitiate the enumerated powers principle.” In other words, the clause can’t justify inherently unconstitutional actions.

Judge Vinson also went beyond the Virginia case in striking down the entire ObamaCare statute—paradoxically, an act of judicial modesty. Democrats intentionally left out a “severability” clause if one part of the bill was struck down, and the Administration repeatedly argued that the individual mandate was “essential” to the bill’s goals and mechanisms and compared it to “a finely crafted watch.” Judge Vinson writes that picking and choosing among thousands of sections would be “tantamount to rewriting a statute in an attempt to salvage it.”

***
We take a measure of vindication in the decision—David Rivkin and Lee Casey, the lawyers who argued the Florida case, first suggested in these pages that the individual mandate was unconstitutional. Judge Vinson’s learned opinion has put down a Constitutional argument that will reverberate all the way to the Supreme Court.

Forget Obama trying to get cozy with Republicans following the rejection of his policies in the November elections.  He has done irreparable harm to the nation in a number of ways that should not be forgiven.   One of those “god-damn-America” policies is in the field illegal immigration.

The failure of Obama to enforce immigration laws and his interference aimed at preventing Arizona from enforcing those laws amounts to treason.  The evidence for that assertion appears in the article below from Jihad Watch posted by Robert Spenser.

Jihad Watch
Iranian book celebrating jihad-martyrdom suicide bombers found in Arizona desert

Underscoring yet again that border control is a national security issue, obscured as it is by spurious charges of "racism." "Iranian Book Celebrating Suicide Bombers Found in Arizona Desert," by William La Jeunesse for FoxNews.com, January 27 (thanks to Anne Crockett):

EXCLUSIVE: A book celebrating suicide bombers has been found in the Arizona desert just north of the U.S.- Mexican border, authorities tell Fox News.

The book, "In Memory of Our Martyrs," was spotted Tuesday by a U.S. Border Patrol agent out of the Casa Grande substation who was patrolling a route known for smuggling illegal immigrants and drugs.
Published in Iran, it consists of short biographies of Islamic suicide bombers and other Islamic militants who died carrying out attacks.

According to internal U.S. Customs and Border Protection documents, "The book also includes letters from suicide attackers to their families, as well as some of their last wills and testaments." Each biographical page contains "the terrorist’s name, date of death, and how they died."…

Statements from U.S. officials, including FBI director Robert Mueller, have raised serious concerns in recent years over "OTMs" — or illegal immigrants other than Mexicans — who have crossed the southwest border at alarming rates.

Mueller testified before the House Appropriations Committee in March 2005 that "there are individuals from countries with known Al Qaeda connections who are changing their Islamic surnames to Hispanic-sounding names and obtaining false Hispanic identities, learning to speak Spanish and pretending to be Hispanic."

Just last year, the Department of Homeland Security had in custody thousands of detainees from Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. U.S. Border Patrol statistics indicate that there were 108,025 OTMs detained in 2006, compared to 165,178 in 2005 and 44,614 in 2004.

Authorities would not release a picture of the book to Fox News, or reveal how long they believe it was lying in the desert. Immigration officials have previously discovered items along the U.S.-Mexico border from Middle Eastern origin, including Iranian currency in Zapata, Texas, and a jacket found in Jim Hogg County, Texas, that was covered in patches including an Arabic military badge that illustrates an airplane flying into a tower.

The Tea Party movement is NOT a political party. Rather, it is a grassroots movement of millions of like-minded Americans from all backgrounds, political parties, and ethnic groups who share similar core principles.  These advocates of better government  come from a dozen or so loosely affiliated groups whose members identify with Tea Party objectives.   These people are not looking to form a third political party.  By their own inclination they support candidates of any party who believe in those core principles and who will sincerely take the oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.

Those in the Tea Party movement support the original US Constitution as the founders intended it: a document that establishes a federal government with limited and enumerated powers and that  leaves other non-enumerated powers to the States and to the people themselves.  They believe that the Constitution preserves personal liberty and encourages personal responsibility and a free-market economy.

The only way to depart legally from the provisions of the existing Constitution is through the process of amendment, a process the founders wisely included in the document.  So the argument that the passage of time makes the document outdated is false. Tea Party principles transcend arguments for or against any particular legislative or policy initiative.  Honest disagreements on proposed laws and policies can always be expected, and, because the founders knew that, they provided a framework of government in which differences of opinion can be openly discussed and reconciled in a civil fashion.

All this is unsettling to the politician who would rather campaign on a party label than to discuss an issue on its merits. In the last few weeks I have heard politicians complaining that too much is being made of the Constitution.  Perhaps they prefer not to be bound by its provisions. The oath required of office holders is simply to support that Constitution and laws not inconsistent with it.  That oath is required of members of any political party.

It is likely that those who wish  to circumvent the Constitution know that they cannot make a persuasive argument to the people for its amendment.  Such a politician is usually one of the elite who pretends to know better than the people what they want and need and who is unwilling to allow the people to express themselves on the matter. Tea Partiers believe that such a politician should be quickly voted out of office.

The people who fear or oppose the Tea Party movement either don’t know what it is, or they are entrenched advocates of a huge federal government with the power to ignore the Constitution and the power to control citizens’ lives in ways not permitted by the Constitution.  Politicians who want to evade the responsibilities of the oath of office try to smear the reputation of the Tea Party movement because, in truth, it is their enemy.

The level of hate generated against Palin by the left is unprecedented.

It started in 2008.

YouTube Video Calling for Palin’s Death

Friday, 14 Jan 2011 10:22 AM

By Jim Meyers

A four-minute video montage of “hate tweets” on YouTube directed at Sarah Palin and calling for her death is creating outrage on the Internet. The video was posted on Tuesday, before President Barack Obama’s Wednesday address calling for unity in the wake of the Tucson shooting rampage, which killed six and injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 12 others.

The montage is set to Alice Cooper’s song “School’s Out.”

Among the tweets:

“Why couldn’t Sarah Palin get shot instead?”

“I hope Sarah Palin dies an ugly death and takes her moronic hate with her.”

“Can somebody please shoot Sarah Palin?”

“I hope Sarah Palin gets cancer and dies in the next two years.”

“Sarah Palin should be shot for her encouragement of fanaticism against Democrats.”

“Join us in praying to God that Sarah Palin contracts cancer and dies.”

“Sarah Palin is the single most dangerous threat to the future of the human race. Somebody bloody shoot her.”

According to Fox News, “attempts to reach some of the Twitter users who posted the messages were unsuccessful.”

Twitter’s terms of service advise that “we may not monitor or control the content posted via the services and we cannot take responsibility for such content.”

One of the many posters responding to the video stated: “Such hate and yet the left feels totally justified in putting the blame on others for one idiot’s action.”

Examiner.com observed: “Will this get condemned over at the DemocraticUnderground, or ThinkProgress? Maybe.

“Will they make as big a stink as they do about Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, and call on YouTube to pull the video and perhaps implore Twitter to pull the Twitter accounts? Unlikely they make that much noise, but it would be nice if they did.”

© Newsmax.

In an article by Ted Sampley in the October-December 1996 Issue of the
U.S. Veteran Dispatch, we learn the extent of Jane Fonda’s guilt:  

The vets said “no apology will ever erase the pictures of Jane Fonda in giggly bliss, laughing and clapping her hands, as she mounted the gunner’s seat of a communist Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun.” Bui Tin, a former high ranking Vietnam Communist Party official and North Vietnamese Army colonel who served on the North Vietnamese Army general staff during the war, became disillusioned with communism after the war and went into exile in Paris and the United States. He testified in 1991 before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs about his knowledge of U.S. prisoners of war.

Bui Tin said in a recent interview by Minnesota human rights activist Stephen Young, that Fonda’s highly published support of the North Vietnamese gave them “confidence” to continue to fight and “hold on in the face of the battlefield reverses.”

When Fonda appeared at a press conference in Hanoi wearing a red Vietnamese dress and declared she was “ashamed of American actions” in the war and that she would struggle along with the communists, “we were elated,” Bui Tin said.

He said the American antiwar movement was “essential” to the North Vietnamese strategy for victory. “I’d say a lot of American boys lost their lives because of the encouragement she gave the North Vietnamese,” said a former rifle platoon leader from Texas.

Many thinking people are bewildered by the actions of the Obama administration.

But once we are willing to face certain unpleasant realities, the surprise and confusion disappear.

1.  Obama does not like the United States, its history, or its traditions.  He does not identify with these things.  It may be because he is not really a citizen of the country in fact or just in spirit. His two “autobiographies” are filled with bitterness toward whites—even his own mother.  He does not identify with Christianity which was the religion of the founding fathers and the overwhelming majority of citizens since the colonial days.  But he does identify with Islam.  He did not observe the traditional Christian prayer day in Washington, but a few weeks later welcomed a Muslim prayer day.  He makes excuses for a Muslim in the US Army who murdered 13 other soldiers while he was yelling the jihadist slogan, “Allah is Great.”  As President bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia.   He attended the church of god-damn-america Wright.

2.  For the reasons in #1 , he is not concerned about tearing down American institutions.  He disrespects the Constitution; he is a sole mate of William Ayers who probably helped him write his “autobiographies”;  Ayers tried to cripple the United States back in the 1960′s and ran with left-wing revolutionaries of that time.  Obama insults American allies; he courts enemies of the United States like Chavez. He appoints scores of Czars who either hold his views or whom he  can use as his puppets, and in doing so he bypasses Congress. Destroying the country is not one of his worries, because a country in chaos is more likely to keep or turn to a tyrant.

3,  To continue doing  all of these things,  Obama only needs to maintain power.  To do that he talks the talk of a conventional liberal and in other ways tosses crumbs to those mindless partisans who want to believe that he is a legitimate leader of the United States; some members of Congress are more interested in  holding  power than honoring their oath of office. In order to hold power he ignores the Black Panther tactics at the polls and his attorney general dismisses charges against members who intimidated voters in Philadelphia in 2008.  To maintain power he curries the favor of homosexual at the expense of a unified national  armed forces.  He supports any  minority group which either supports or does not hinder his own agenda.  He wants open borders because that will give him additional potential voters with an obligation to him, not to the laws or Constitution of the United States.  He wants most of all a dependent electorate with their hands out to  Federal government; he does not want  independent persons who think and act for themselves.  Meanwhile, he has taken eight vacations at tax payers expense  in just two years of his regime.

Politicians have been unwilling to admit these truths to themselves, let alone to the public. And the main stream media, who always take the short term view of things, are still exulting for partisan reasons in Obama’s election.

TANCREDO:

The case for impeachment

Obama has violated his oath of office over immigration

By Tom Tancredo

5:57 p.m., Thursday, July 22, 2010

The Washington Times

Eleven years ago, like every citizen elected to serve in Congress or any person appointed to any federal position, I swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.” I’ve always thought it significant that the Founders included domestic enemies in that oath of office. They thought liberty was as much at risk from threats within our borders as from outside, and French political thinker and historian Alexis de Tocqueville agreed with that warning.

In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the greatest threat to our nation was clear – and foreign. While Islamic terrorism still represents the greatest external threat to America and American lives, the avowed program of the Obama regime has changed the picture in a fundamental way.

For the first time in American history, we have a man in the White House who consciously and brazenly disregards his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution. That’s why I say the greatest threat to our Constitution, our safety and our liberties, is internal. Our president is an enemy of our Constitution, and, as such, he is a danger to our safety, our security and our personal freedoms.

Barack Obama is one of the most powerful presidents this nation has seen in generations. He is powerful because he is supported by large majorities in Congress, but, more importantly, because he does not feel constrained by the rule of law. Whether he is putting up the weakest possible defense of the Defense of Marriage Act despite the Justice Department’s legal obligation to support existing law; disenfranchising Chrysler and GM bondholders in order to transfer billions of investor dollars to his supporters in the United Auto Workers; or implementing yet a third offshore oil-drilling moratorium even after two federal courts have thrown out two previous moratoriums, President Obama is determined to see things done his way regardless of obstacles. To Mr. Obama, the rule of law is a mere inconvenience to be ignored, overcome or “transcended” through international agreements or “norms.”

Mr. Obama’s paramount goal, as he so memorably put it during his campaign in 2008, is to “fundamentally transform America.” He has not proposed improving America – he is intent on changing its most essential character. The words he has chosen to describe his goals are neither the words nor the motivation of just any liberal Democratic politician. This is the utopian, or rather dystopian, reverie of a dedicated Marxist – a dedicated Marxist who lives in the White House.

Because of the power he wields over budgets, the judiciary, national defense and even health care, his regime and his program are not just about changing public policy in the conventional sense. When one considers the combination of his stop-at-nothing attitude, his contempt for limited government, his appointment of judges who want to create law rather than interpret it – all of these make this president today’s single greatest threat to the great experiment in freedom that is our republic.

Yes, Mr. Obama is a more serious threat to America than al Qaeda. We know that Osama bin Laden and followers want to kill us, but at least they are an outside force against whom we can offer our best defense. But when a dedicated enemy of the Constitution is working from the inside, we face a far more dangerous threat. Mr. Obama can accomplish with the stroke of his pen what bin Laden cannot accomplish with bombs and insurgents.

Mr. Obama’s actions, not just his words, show the threat he poses. A level of government deficit spending unheard of since World War II and trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see represent an unacceptable threat to our economic security and our children’s future. Mr. Obama could be the first president to guarantee that the next generation of Americans has a lower standard of living than their parents.

Mr. Obama’s most egregious and brazen betrayal of our Constitution was his statement to Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican, that the administration will not enforce security on our southern border because that would remove Republicans’ desire to negotiate a “comprehensive” immigration bill. That is, to put it plainly, a decision that by any reasonable standard constitutes an impeachable offense against the Constitution. For partisan political advantage, he is willfully disregarding his obligation under Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution to protect states from foreign invasion.

There is no higher duty of the federal government and our elected representatives than to protect our nation from invasion. Multiple reports and testimony before Congress by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials have stated that a porous border with Mexico is “a path” terrorists will use if they can. Some would-be terrorists, including at least one associated with Hezbollah, already have. Recent reports of contacts between Hezbollah and Mexican drug cartels make it all but certain that terrorists intent on destroying us will come across our southwestern border. Therefore, it is of utmost importance for the administration to do everything in its power to keep Americans safe. Our safety is not a bargaining chip for another amnesty – or for any other political objective whatsoever.

Mr. Obama’s refusal to live up to his own oath of office – which includes the duty to defend the United States against foreign invasion – requires senators and representatives to live up to their oaths. Members of Congress must defend our nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Today, that means bringing impeachment charges against Mr. Obama.

Tom Tancredo is a former member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and five-term member of Congress from Colorado. He serves as chairman of the Rocky Mountain Foundation

.

Paul Ryan
Member, U.S. House of Representatives

PAUL RYAN is in his sixth term as a member of Congress, representing Wisconsin’s First Congressional District. He is the ranking member of the House Budget Committee and a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee. A graduate of Miami University in Ohio, he and his wife Janna have three children and live in Janesville, Wisconsin.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on January 13, 2010, in Washington, D.C., at an event sponsored by Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship.

SOMEONE once said that before there was the New Deal, there was the Wisconsin Deal. In my home state, the University of Wisconsin was an early hotbed of progressivism, whose goal was to reorder society along lines other than those of the Constitution. The best known Wisconsin progressive in American politics was Robert LaFollette. “Fighting Bob,” as he was called, was a Republican—as was Theodore Roosevelt, another early progressive. Today we tend to associate progressivism mostly with Democrats, and trace it back to Woodrow Wilson. But it had its roots in both parties.

The social and political programs of the progressives came in on two great waves: the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s. Today, President Obama often invokes progressivism and hopes to generate its third great wave of public policy. In thinking about what this would mean, we need look no farther than the health care reform program he is promoting along with the leadership in Congress.

Let me say here at the beginning that even though survey after survey shows that 75 percent or more of Americans are satisfied with the quality of their health care, no one I know in Congress denies that health care reform is needed. Everyone understands that health care in our country has grown needlessly expensive, and that some who want coverage cannot afford it. The ongoing debate over health care, then, is not about whether there should be reform; it is about what the principle of that reform ought to be.

Under the terms of our Constitution, every individual has a right to care for their health, just as they have a right to eat. These rights are integral to our natural right to life—and it is government’s chief purpose to secure our natural rights. But the right to care for one’s health does not imply that government must provide health care, any more than our right to eat, in order to live, requires government to own the farms and raise the crops.

Government’s constitutional obligations in regard to protecting such rights are normally met by establishing the conditions for free markets—markets which historically provide an abundance of goods and services, at an affordable cost, for the largest number. When free markets seem to be failing to meet this goal—and I would argue that the delivery of health care today is an example of where this is the case—government, rather than seeking to supply the need itself, should look to see if its own interventions are the root of the problem, and should make adjustments to unleash competition and choice.

With good reason, the Constitution left the administration of public health—like that of most public goods—decentralized. If there is any doubt that control of health care services should not have been placed in the federal government, we need only look at the history of Medicare and Medicaid—a history in which fraud has proliferated despite all efforts to stop it and failure to control costs has become a national nightmare. In 1966 the cost of Medicare to the taxpayers was about $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that it would cost $12 billion (adjusted for inflation) by 1990. The actual cost in 1990 was nearly nine times that—$107 billion. By 2009 Medicare costs reached $427 billion, with Medicaid boosting that by an additional $255 billion. And this doesn’t take into account the Medicaid expansion in last year’s “stimulus.”

The health care reform bills that emerged from the House and the Senate late last year would only exacerbate this crisis. The federal takeover of health care that those bills represent would subsume approximately one-sixth of our national economy. Combined with spending at all levels, government would then control about 50 percent of total national production.

The good news is that we have a choice. There are three basic models for health care delivery that are available to us: (1) today’s business-government partnership or “crony capitalism” model, in which bureaucratized insurance companies monopolize the field in most states; (2) the progressive model promoted by the Obama administration and congressional leaders, in which federal bureaucrats tell us which services they will allow; and (3) the model consistent with our Constitution, in which health care providers compete in a free and transparent market, and in which individual consumers are in control.

We are urged today—out of compassion—to support the progressive model; but placing control of health care in the hands of government bureaucrats is not compassionate. Bureaucrats don’t make decisions about health care according to personal need or preference; they ration resources according to a dollar-driven social calculus. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the administration’s point people on health care, advocates what he calls a “whole life system”—a system in which government makes treatment decisions for individuals using a statistical formula based on average life expectancy and “social usefulness.” In keeping with this, the plans that recently emerged from Congress have a Medicare board of unelected specialists whose job it would be to determine the program’s treatment protocols as a method of limiting costs.

President Obama said in December: “If we don’t pass [this health care reform legislation]…the federal government will go bankrupt, because Medicare and Medicaid are on a trajectory that are [sic] unsustainable….” On first hearing, this argument appears ludicrous: We must stop the nation from going broke by enacting a program costing $800 billion or more in its first decade alone? On the other hand, if the President means what he says, there is only one way to achieve his stated goal under the new program: through deep and comprehensive government rationing of health care.

The idea that the government should make decisions about how long people should live and who should be denied care is something that Americans find repugnant. As is true of the supply of every service or product, the supply of health care is finite. But it is a mistake to conclude that government should ration it, rather than allowing individuals to order their needs and allocate their resources among competing options. Those who are sick, special needs patients, and seniors are the ones who will be most at risk when the government involves itself in these difficult choices—as government must, once it takes upon itself management of American health care.

The very idea of government-run health care conflicts with the American idea of a free society and the constitutional principles underlying it—the principles of individual rights and free markets. And from a practical perspective it makes no sense, given that our current health care system is the best in the world—even drawing patients from other advanced countries that have suffered by adopting the government-run model.

But if one begins with the idea that health care reform to reduce costs should be guided by the principles of economic and political liberty, what would such reform look like? Four changes to the current system come immediately to mind.

One, we should equalize the tax treatment of people paying for health care by ending the current discrimination against those who don’t get health insurance from their jobs—in other words, everyone paying for health care should receive the same tax benefits.

Two, we need high-risk insurance pools in the states so that those with pre-existing conditions can obtain coverage that is not prohibitively expensive, and so that costs in non-high-risk pools are stabilized. To see the value of this, consider a pool of 200 people in which six have pre-existing heart disease or cancer. Rates for everyone will be through the roof. But if the six are placed in a high-risk pool and ensured coverage at an affordable rate, the risk profile of the larger pool is stabilized and coverage for the remaining 194 people is driven down.

Three, we need to unlock existing health care monopolies by letting people purchase health insurance across state lines—just as they do car insurance and other goods and services. This is a simple and obvious way to reduce costs.

Four, we need to establish transparency in terms of costs and quality of health care. In Milwaukee, an MRI can cost between $400 and $4,000, and a bypass surgery between $4,700 and $100,000. Unless the consumer is able to compare prices and quality of services—and unless he has an incentive to base choices on that information, as he does in purchasing other goods and services—there is not really a free market. It would go a long way to solve our health care problems to recreate one.

These four measures would empower consumers and force providers—insurers, doctors, and hospitals—to compete against each other for business. This works in other sectors of our economy, and it will work with health care.

So why can’t we agree on them? The answer is that the current health care debate is not really about how we can most effectively bring down costs. It is a debate less about policy than about ideology. It is a debate over whether we should reform health care in a way compatible with our Constitution and our free society, or whether we should abandon our free market economic model for a full-fledged European-style social welfare state. This, I believe, is the true goal of those promoting government-run health care.

If we go down this path, creating entitlement after entitlement and promising benefits that can never be delivered, America will become like the European Union: a welfare state where most people pay few or no taxes while becoming dependent on government benefits; where tax reduction is impossible because more people have a stake in welfare than in producing wealth; where high unemployment is a way of life and the spirit of risk-taking is smothered by webs of regulation.

America today is not as far from this tipping point as we might think. While exact and precise measures cannot be made, there are estimates that in 2004, 20 percent of households in the U.S. were receiving about 75 percent of their income from the federal government, and that another 20 percent were receiving nearly 40 percent of their income from federal programs. All in all, about 60 percent of U.S. households were receiving more government benefits and services, measured in dollars, than they were paying back in taxes. It has also been estimated that President Obama’s first budget alone raises this level of “net dependency” to 70 percent.

Looked at in this way, I see health care reform of the kind promoted by the Obama administration and congressional leaders as part of a crusade against the American idea. This is a dramatic charge, but the only alternative is that they are ignorant of the consequences of their proposed programs. The national health care exchange created by their legislation, together with its massive subsidies for middle-income earners, would represent the greatest expansion of the welfare state in our country in a generation—and possibly in history. According to recent analysis, the plan would provide subsidies that average a little less than 20 percent of the income of people earning up to 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Level. In other words, as many as 110 million Americans could claim this new entitlement within a few years of its implementation. In addition to the immediate massive increase in dependency this would bring on, the structure of the subsidies—whereby they fade out as income rises—would impose a marginal tax penalty that would act as a disincentive to work, increasing dependency even more.

And before I conclude, allow me to clear up a misperception about insurance exchanges: it makes absolutely no difference whether we have 50 state exchanges rather than a federal exchange, as long as the federal government is where the subsidies for consumers will be located. In other words, despite what some seem to believe, both the House and the Senate versions of health care reform set up a system in which, if you are eligible and you want a break on your insurance premium, it is the federal government that will provide it while telling you what kind of insurance you have to buy. In this sense, the idea of state exchanges instead of a federal exchange is a distinction without a difference.

* * *

Americans take pride in self-government, which entails providing for their own well-being and the well-being of their families in a free society. In exchange for this, the promoters of government-run health care would make them passive subjects, dependent on handouts and far more concerned about security than liberty. At the heart of the conflict over heath care reform, as I said at the beginning, are two incompatible understandings of America: one is based on the principles of progressivism, and would place more and more aspects of our lives under the administration of unelected “experts” in federal bureaucracies; the other sees America as a society of free individuals under a Constitution that severely limits what the federal government can rightfully do.

We have seen many times over the past 100 years that the American people tend to be resistant to the progressive view of how we should reform our system of government—and I believe we are seeing this again today. Americans retain the Founders’ view that a government that seeks to go beyond its high but limited constitutional role of securing equal rights and establishing free markets is not progressive at all in the literal sense of that word—rather it is reactionary. Such a government seeks to privilege some Americans at the expense of others—which is precisely what the American Revolution was fought to prevent.

Americans understand that the problems facing our health care system today, real as they are, can be addressed without nationalizing one-sixth of the American economy and moving us past the tipping point toward a European-style social welfare state. They know that we can solve these problems while at the same time remaining a free society and acting consistently with the principles that have made us the greatest and most prosperous nation on earth. It is our duty now as their representatives to come together and do so.

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