Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

Archive for the ‘Constitutional Limits of Government’ Category

States are starting to fight back against unconstitutional power grabs.  God bless Texas!

The state’s slogan is “Don’t mess with Texas.” But the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is doing just that, and at stake is whether the Obama administration can impose its global-warming agenda without a vote of Congress.

President Obama’s EPA is already well down the path to regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, something the act was not designed to do. It has a problem, however, because shoehorning greenhouse gases into that 40-year-old law would force churches, schools, warehouses, commercial kitchens and other sources to obtain costly and time-consuming permits. It would grind the economy to a halt, and the likely backlash would doom the whole scheme.

The EPA, determined to move forward anyway, is attempting to rewrite the Clean Air Act administratively via a “tailoring rule,” which would reduce the number of regulated sources. The problem with that approach? It’s illegal. The EPA has no authority to rewrite the law. To pull it off, the EPA needs every state with a State Implementation Plan to rewrite all of its statutory thresholds as well.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Chairman Bryan W. Shaw saw the tailoring rule for what it really is: a massive power grab and centralization of authority. They are fighting back, writing to the EPA:

“In order to deter challenges to your plan for centralized control of industrial development through the issuance of permits for greenhouse gases, you have called upon each state to declare its allegiance to the Environmental Protection Agency’s recently enacted greenhouse gas regulations – regulations that are plainly contrary to U.S. laws. … To encourage acquiescence with your unsupported findings you threaten to usurp state enforcement authority and to federalize the permitting program of any state that fails to pledge their fealty to the Environmental Protection Agency. On behalf of the State of Texas, we write to inform you that Texas has neither the authority nor the intention of interpreting, ignoring or amending its laws in order to compel the permitting of greenhouse gas emissions.”

Texas leaders are doing what Congress so far has been unable to do (a Senate vote to stop the EPA’s global-warming power grab got just 47 votes on June 10): take on the EPA. Good thing, because Texas would be hit especially hard by these regulations.

Federalist principles have allowed Texas to become the strongest state in the union. The Lone Star State leads the nation in job creation, is the top state for business relocation and has more Fortune 500 companies than any other state and is the top state for wind generation. President Obama said he wants to double U.S. exports in five years; he could look to Texas, as we are the top exporting state in the country. The Obama administration could learn a lot from Texas.

Instead, it is attempting to ride roughshod over Texas, and it goes beyond the greenhouse-gas issue.

Read more at the Washington Times

Fantastic article by a mommy patriot, Stephani Scruggs, on American Majority:

I got to thinking about the movement today – specifically Unite In Action & the 2010 March on DC.  In a moment of exhaustion fueled pity, I couldn’t help but think…I’m just a housewife, how the heck am I going to fit all this into one day?  I don’t have a legion of personal assistants…I don’t even have one.  I am not paid, yet I am working from the time I get up in the morning until the wee hours of the next.  (And let me tell you, moms with children under the age of 6 REALLY should to get to bed before 2am EVERY night….because the kids are going to wake up at 7am whether we like it or not).  My kids have learned to make their own sandwiches, and don’t even ask me when I vacuumed last.  I’m lucky if I can squeeze in a shower every other day, and my kids think the computer & telephone are evil devices which have surgically attached themselves to Mommy.  I have a house to clean, bills to juggle, kids to raise, 6 chickens, 3 dogs, 1 pregnant goat and a husband to care for.

Meanwhile, my phone rings off the hook and my 3 email boxes are overflowing with people asking what do we do now?  How do we save the country?  Is it too late? Tell us what to do – we need TOOLS!  Then the media jumps in to label myself and my compatriots as angry, greedy, racist, white men and calls us a vile name previously only heard in XXX theaters.  It is enough to drive a girl stark raving mad! When the first call came in this morning (8am on a Sunday no less) all I could think is “I’M JUST A HOUSEWIFE!”

Then it occurred to me; we are nearly all housewives.  In The 912 Project, nearly all of the group leaders are women – many professionals, some retired, but mostly housewives.  At Unite In Action, more than half of the Board of Directors are housewives – including the President, Vice President, CFO and Military Advisor.  The Event Coordinator for March On DC?  Housewife.  The Liberty XPO Chair?  Housewife.  Symposium Chair?  Housewife.  Young Patriots, Education, Graphic Design, Volunteer Coordinator, Clergy Outreach, Merchandising & Transportation Chairs?  Yup, all housewives.  Don’t get me wrong; we’ve got a few guys thrown in, but we are almost entirely housewives trying to pull off the largest Liberty oriented training event in history.

And you know what?  This is exactly how it should be.  Housewives are the ones who literally manage the world.  The microcosm of each household is the macrocosm of society.  My house and your house and their house…this is reality.  And in reality, it is the housewives who carry the burden of the future.  Yes, the men provide, but we clean up the messes, both literally and figuratively.  Vomit on the floor?  No problem; get the Clorox.  Teen angst?  Here comes a lesson in character.  We balance the budget and figure out how to pay all the bills with money left over for savings and college funds.  A new pair of Jimmy Choos versus Walmart sneakers so we can pay the rent?  You know what we will bring home.   Homework due or exams to study for?  You know we will be there making sure everything gets done.  In short, we the housewives are tasked with the future of our children and therefore the future of society.

So yes, a bunch of housewives are running the 2010 March on DC & Liberty XPO.  Because we know it takes WORK to clean up a mess.  Because we know you need TOOLS to get the job done.  Because we know EDUCATION is everything.  And because WE WILL NOT STAND FOR THE LOSS OF OUR CHILDREN’S LIBERTY – nor will we stand for the bankrupting of our grandchildren’s future.  Because we know this mess will not be cleaned up overnight, and November will not fix everything! WE WILL move past street parties and protests.  WE WILL do everything we can to get real classroom training & tools into the hands of the patriots who need them, AND WE WILL SAVE THIS COUNTRY!

So, girls grab your gloves, the Clorox, the character lessons, the budget, and the mops and meet me in DC – September 9^th& 10^th.  We’ve got a House to clean!

P.S.  If you see Keith Olbermann, send him my way…I’ve got a bar of soap just itching to clean up that potty mouth!

Tea Party: mostly moms

Mommy Patriots: A Call to Arms

Mommy Patriots – Striking A Balance

Moms From All Across America on the Glenn Beck Show

Let’s Hear it for the Girls: Republican Female Candidates On The Rise

The Year of the GOP Women

When the Founding Fathers issued the Declaration of Independence, they proclaimed: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, have made it clear that they are willing to operate without such authority in order to pass their “cap-and-trade” energy-tax legislation. For the sake of our representative government, they must be stopped.

On Nov. 2, the American people will give their consent to the candidates whose legislative agenda they support. Based on the discontent throughout the country, both sides of the aisle think the upcoming midterm elections will reduce the size of the current Democratic congressional majority. A widespread loss of Democratic seats would be an unmistakable condemnation of the far-left legislative agenda being pushed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Obama administration.

Incredibly, this forecasted repudiation of big government could be greeted by ousted politicians with a repudiation of voter intent. After the election, but before the newly elected Congress is sworn in in January, the current Congress may call a lame-duck session in November and December. During this session, congressmen and senators removed from power may still vote to enact new legislation. Some Democrats already are talking about their plans to exploit this session to address unpopular issues.

Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lieberman have been particularly unabashed about their hopes to advance the cap-and-trade bill in a lame-duck session where defeated congressmen and senators would be estranged from the will of people. This bill – which intentionally would raise the cost of energy produced by fossil fuels so we would use less of it – has not had enough support to pass. In fact, the bill was shelved recently by Mr. Reid, who clearly stated, “We know we don’t have the votes.” They don’t have the votes because congressmen do not want to vote for another expensive, unpopular bill just before a highly contested election. Of course, those congressmen who lose their election will no longer be accountable to the people in a lame-duck session.

Mr. Lieberman admits that “there is a certain awkwardness in a lame-duck session. But these are big and important issues. …” Perhaps it is the opening words of the Constitution are the cause of that “certain awkwardness.”

“We the People” speak with our votes and already have spoken out resoundingly against this energy agenda. If those who support cap-and-trade are voted out of office, Mr. Lieberman and his colleagues should respect that message.

Read more at the Washington Times

The Obama-Pelosi Lame Duck Strategy: Push through union ‘card-check,’ cap and trade, and more

America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution

You can tell it’s a volatile political year when a balding, middle-aged pollster gets a standing ovation from hundreds of state legislators after delivering the news that only 23% of the people in this country believe today’s federal government has the consent of the governed.

“Americans don’t want to be governed from the left or the right,” Scott Rasmussen tells the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conference of 1,500 conservative and moderate legislators. “They want, like the Founding Fathers, to largely govern themselves with Washington in a supporting—but not dominant—role. The tea party movement is today’s updated expression of that sentiment.”

Mr. Rasmussen tells the crowd gathered around him after his speech that the political and media elites have misread the tea party. He believes this strongly enough that he’s teamed up with Doug Schoen—a pollster for both President Bill Clinton and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg—to publish a new book that will seek to explain the movement’s significance. “Mad as Hell” will be out early next month.

Thanks to the shifting tectonic plates of American society, polls have come to dominate our politics as never before, and Mr. Rasmussen is today’s leading insurgent pollster.

Early this year, Mr. Rasmussen delivered the first early-warning sign that Scott Brown would change the direction of American politics. A Rasmussen poll showing Mr. Brown surging and only nine points down with two weeks left to go before January’s special Senate election in Massachusetts attracted the instant attention of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. “How had this happened? What the bleep was going on?” is how the New York Times characterized his reaction. A Boston Globe poll taken about the same time showed Democrat Martha Coakley with a safe 15-point lead.

Mr. Rasmussen has a partial answer for Mr. Emanuel’s question, and it lies in a significant division among the American public that he has tracked for the past few years—a division between what he calls the Mainstream Public and the Political Class.

To figure out where people are, he asks three questions: Whose judgment do you trust more: that of the American people or America’s political leaders? Has the federal government become its own special interest group? Do government and big business often work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors? Those who identify with the government on two or more questions are defined as the political class.

His recent polls show huge gaps between the two groups. While 67% of the political class believes the U.S. is moving in the right direction, a full 84% of mainstream voters believe the nation is moving in the wrong one. The political class overwhelmingly supported the bailouts of the financial and auto industries, the health-care bill, and the Justice Department’s decision to sue Arizona over its new immigration law. Those in the mainstream public just as intensely opposed those moves.

The division of Americans into these groups has real significance for the way polls are conducted and how their results are interpreted, according to Mr. Rasmussen.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

The desire for liberty is universal. Our God-given natural rights, and the desire to defend them, are planted in our hearts!

As Tea Party protests pop up in places like Moscow, Tel Aviv and the Hague, Americans may question whether the Tea Party platform can cross international and cultural borders. For activists outside the U.S., the answer is a resounding “yes.”

“I think the message of the American Revolution is global. The message of natural, unalienable rights, the message of opposition to tyrannical government — that’s not just well-known, that’s universal,” Boris Karpa, organizer of the Israeli Tea Party, told The Daily Caller in an e-mail. “As you know well, many countries have based their founding documents on the U.S. Declaration of Independence or other American documents.”

Although several international organizers had never even heard of the Boston Tea Party until U.S. protests brought the events of 1773 back into the spotlight, they now wear the Tea Party badge proudly as an example of American exceptionalism worth emulating.

“This [Tea Party] title is ideal for Russia,” Max Kronos, organizer of the Moscow Tea Party, told The Daily Caller in an e-mail. “This event has forever gone down in history — in Russia, such events have not happened.”

That’s not to say the Tea Party moniker has always been helpful.

“The mainstream media calls the U.S. Tea Parties a bunch of gun-loving racist rednecks,” Roy Hofkamp, organizer of the Dutch Tea Party, told The Daily Caller in an e-mail. “That image in the media was not an advantage for us, but fortunately more and more Dutch people get their news from foreign media and they knew our intentions were good.”

Those intentions — laissez-faire capitalism, low taxes and fewer regulations — cross boundaries. Each Tea Party does, though, hold particular outrage for specific policies in its individual country. For Hofkamp, the burning issue is immigration reform.

“We pay 50 percent in taxes. Our social security is so high that people refuse to get back to work and stay for years in social security. More than 30 percent of all non-Western immigrants [enter] into social security and never [get] out of it,” Hofkamp said. “So they come here for economic reasons and benefit on the surplus of the working class. We think it’s about time to stand up against that.”

Karpa said reinvigorating Israel’s stagnating business climate is one of his group’s principle planks.

Read more at the Daily Caller

Tea Partiers of the World, Unite!

America’s Just Revolution

View on YouTube – Part 1

View on YouTube – Part 2

View on YouTube – Part 3

View on YouTube – Part 4

View on YouTube – Part 5

View on YouTube – Part 6

Attacks on Freedom

The Original Tea Party

View on YouTube

The Civil War and Gilded Age

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Progressivism

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FDR’s State And LBJ’s Society

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Big Gov’t and Tea Parties

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The Constitution and Freedom

Woodrow Wilson and the roots of Progressivism

Barack Obama and “The Second Bill of Rights”

America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution

We the Serfs

WHO has changed how the constitution is interpreted?

“If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object; but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become an easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

For too long, constitutionalists have been fractured into Independents, Libertarians, and other third parties like the Constitution Party.   By defecting from the Republican party, we left it to the “progressive” RINOs who prefer the “Third Way“, and robbed ourselves of the opportunity to steer the party towards true conservative principles.  No more. 

It’s time for constitutionalists to register Republican and take over the party from within.  Not just by voting in primaries, but by assuming leadership roles and working through the ranks until only true constitutionalists are left.  If we can’t take over a political party, what makes us think we can take back the country?

While the tea party is not a formal political party, local networks across the nation have moved beyond protests and turned to more practical matters of political accountability. Already, particularly in Republican primaries, fed-up Americans are turning out at the polls to vote out the big spenders. They are supporting candidates who have signed the Contract From America, a statement of policy principles generated online by hundreds of thousands of grass-roots activists.

Published in April, the Contract amounts to a tea party “seal of approval.” It demands fiscal policies that limit government, restrain spending, promote market reforms in health care—and oppose ObamaCare, tax hikes and cap-and-trade restrictions that will kill job creation and stunt economic growth. Candidates who have signed the Contract—including Marco Rubio in Florida, Mike Lee in Utah and Tim Scott in South Carolina—have defeated Republican big spenders in primary elections all across the nation.

These young legislative entrepreneurs will shift the balance in the next Congress, bringing with them a more serious, adult commitment to responsible, restrained government.

But let us be clear about one thing: The tea party movement is not seeking a junior partnership with the Republican Party, but a hostile takeover of it.

The American values of individual freedom, fiscal responsibility and limited government bind the ranks of our movement. That makes the tea party better than a political party. It is a growing community that can sustain itself after November, ensuring a better means of holding a new generation of elected officials accountable.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Midterms Not Just Toxic for Democrats

Can The Tea Party Deliver On Election Day?

To understand what the 1st Amendment REALLY means in regards to religious freedom, just take a look at excerpts of some of the Supreme Court decisions for the first 200 years of our nation’s history.

The 14 crosses erected along Utah roads to commemorate fallen state Highway Patrol troopers convey a state preference for Christianity and are a violation of the U.S. Constitution, a federal appeals court said Wednesday.

The ruling reverses a 2007 decision by a federal district judge that said the crosses communicate a secular message about deaths and were not a public endorsement of religion. It’s the latest in a recent rash of mixed-bag rulings on the public use of crosses.

A three-judge panel from Denver’s 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in its 38-page ruling that a “reasonable observer” would conclude that the state and the Utah Highway Patrol were endorsing Christianity with the cross memorials.

“This may lead the reasonable observer to fear that Christians are likely to receive preferential treatment from the UHP,” the justices wrote.

Read more at Fox News

Only if by “reasonable observer”, they mean someone with anti-religious paranoia. 

This is what you get with Moral Relativism.  Each case is anybody’s guess.  Under the rule of activist judges who re-interpret the constitution and override the voters by judicial fiat, nobody’s religious liberties are secure.

Display with Ten Commandments Ruled Constitutional by Court of Appeals

Supreme Court: Memorial Cross is Constitutional

National Day of Prayer ruled unconstitutional

Judge rules against student’s religious expression

Rev. Franklin Graham: Oppression of Christianity in U.S. Coming

“Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.” ~ Ronald Reagan

View on YouTube

Here come the food police – literally!

When the 20 agents arrived bearing a search warrant at her Ventura County farmhouse door at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday a couple weeks back, Sharon Palmer didn’t know what to say. This was the third time she was being raided in 18 months, and she had thought she was on her way to resolving the problem over labeling of her goat cheese that prompted the other two raids. (In addition to producing goat’s milk, she raises cattle, pigs, and chickens, and makes the meat available via a CSA.)

But her 12-year-old daughter, Jasmine, wasn’t the least bit tongue-tied. “She started back-talking to them,” recalls Palmer. “She said, ‘If you take my computer again, I can’t do my homework.’ This would be the third computer we will have lost. I still haven’t gotten the computers back that they took in the previous two raids.”

As part of a five-hour-plus search of her barn and home, the agents — from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, Los Angeles County Sheriff, Ventura County Sheriff, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture — took the replacement computer, along with milk she feeds her chickens and pigs.
 
While no one will say officially what the purpose of this latest raid was, aside from being part of an investigation in progress, what is very clear is that government raids of producers, distributors, and even consumers of nutritionally dense foods appear to be happening ever more frequently. Sometimes they are meant to counter raw dairy production, other times to challenge private food organizations over whether they should be licensed as food retailers.

What’s behind all these raids? They seem to stem from increasing concern at both the state and federal level about the spread of private food groups that have sprung up around the country in recent years — food clubs and buying groups to provide specialized local products that are generally unavailable in groceries, like grass-fed meats, pastured eggs, fermented foods, and, in some cases, raw dairy products. Because they are private and limited to consumers who sign up for membership, these groups generally avoid obtaining retail and public health licenses required of retailers that sell to the general public. (For more on what’s behind the raids, see this new post.)

Read more at Grist

S510 Vote Delayed, But Not Defeated

Food freedom under attack

The FDA vs Raw Milk and the Constitution

Delia Lopez: Our government has gone Gestapo

The Oregon Consumers and Farmers Association endorses Delia Lopez for Congress

Next time Democrats call you extreme, show them this video:

View on YouTube

“We the people” are the familiar opening words of the Constitution of the United States– the framework for a self-governing people, free from the arbitrary edicts of rulers. It was the blueprint for America, and the success of America made that blueprint something that other nations sought to follow.

At the time when it was written, however, the Constitution was a radical departure from the autocratic governments of the 18th century. Since it was something so new and different, the reasons for the Constitution’s provisions were spelled out in “The Federalist,” a book written by three of the writers of the Constitution, as a sort of instruction guide to a new product.

The Constitution was not only a challenge to the despotic governments of its time, it has been a continuing challenge– to this day– to all those who think that ordinary people should be ruled by their betters, whether an elite of blood, or of books or of whatever else gives people a puffed-up sense of importance.

While the kings of old have faded into the mists of history, the principle of the divine rights of kings to impose whatever they wish on the masses lives on today in the rampaging presumptions of those who consider themselves anointed to impose their notions on others.

The Constitution of the United States is the biggest single obstacle to the carrying out of such rampaging presumptions, so it is not surprising that those with such presumptions have led the way in denigrating, undermining and evading the Constitution.

Read more of Part I at the Patriot Post

Dismantling America: Part II

Dismantling America: Part III

Dismantling America: Part IV

WHO has changed how the constitution is interpreted?

Thomas Sowell, the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution and author of Dismantling America, discusses, with Hoover research fellow Peter Robinson, why he believes America is collapsing.

View on YouTube: Part 1

Thomas Sowell discusses same-sex marriage and judges who legislate from the bench.

View on YouTube: Part 2

American Collapse: Chapter 3
Thomas Sowell says a loss of personal responsibility is at the heart of the decline of American society.

Libertarian Economist Thomas Sowell on Property Rights

Next on the government takeover list: your private property!

Have you heard of the “Great Outdoors Initiative”? Chances are, you haven’t. But across the country, White House officials have been meeting quietly with environmental groups to map out government plans for acquiring untold millions of acres of both public and private land. It’s another stealthy power grab through executive order that promises to radically transform the American way of life.

Property owners have every reason to be worried. The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) is a pet project of green radicals, who want the decades-old government slush fund for buying up private lands to be freed from congressional appropriations oversight. It’s paid for primarily with receipts from the government’s offshore oil and gas leases. Both Senate and House Democrats have included $900 million in full LWCF funding, not subject to congressional approval, in their energy/BP oil spill legislative packages. The Democrats have also included a provision in these packages that would require the federal government to take over energy permitting in state waters, which provoked an outcry from Texas state officials, who sent a letter of protest to Capitol Hill last month:

“In light of federal failures, it is incomprehensible that the United States Congress is entertaining proposals that expand federal authority over oil and gas drilling in state water and lands long regulated by states… Given the track record, putting the federal government in charge of energy production on state land and waters not only breaks years of successful precedent and threatens the 10th Amendment to the United Sates Constitution, but it also undermines common sense and threatens the environmental and economy security of our state’s citizens.”

This power grab, masquerading as a feel-good, all-American recreation program, comes on top of a separate, property-usurping initiative exposed by GOP Rep. Robert Bishop and Sen. Jim DeMint earlier this spring. According to an internal, 21-page Obama administration memo, 17 energy-rich areas in 11 states have been targeted as potential federal “monuments.” The lives of coyotes, deer and prairie dogs would be elevated above states’ needs to generate jobs, tourism business and energy solutions.

Read more at Real Clear Politics

White House land grab

View on YouTube

“Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.” ~ Samuel Adams

“It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.” ~ Frederic Bastiat

Independence and the Right to Private Property

What Freedom Can Do For a Country

Is U.S. Now On Slippery Slope To Tyranny?

Quick quiz: What do we call a system of government in which an unelected cadre of self-professed wise men make decisions for a nation of millions, all the while insulting those millions as ignoramuses? We used to call it tyranny. Now, apparently, we call it an “independent judiciary.”
 
At least that’s the way the left sees it. The role of the judiciary in this country, according to liberals, is to act as a sort of super-Senate, qadis on the hill who decide based on whim and fancy how the rest of us should live. The American people are benighted morons; the judiciary is full of brilliant moral thinkers. They must rule us.
 
This perspective, of course, would have sickened the Founding Fathers, who established an independent judiciary in order to adjudicate legal disputes, not to rewrite laws at will. In fact, the founders recognized the threat of judicial omnipotence, which is why they wrote the Constitution so as to limit the judiciary: The judiciary cannot control its own purse strings, nor can it even define its own jurisdiction. Under Article III of the Constitution, Congress’ power over the judiciary doesn’t end with up-or-down judicial nominee votes—Congress actually has the power to take whole areas of law away from the judiciary completely.

Read more at CNS News

Liberals see Supreme Court as backup legislature