Posts Tagged ‘unconstitutional’

Tuesday’s stunning decision by a Milwaukee County circuit court judge that Milwaukee’s taxicab ordinance is unconstitutional could provide some impetus to a plan touted by Ald. Bob Bauman.

Bauman, whose district includes the city’s downtown area, wants to increase the number of taxicab permits in the city, but it would also update vehicle standards and increase inspections. Bauman’s plan is expected to be discussed at 9 a.m. on Thursday at City Hall.

Bauman said Wednesday that Circuit Court Judge Jane Carroll’s decision “reinforces our need to move forward with some reforms.”

Read more by Don Walker of the Journal Sentinel

–SNIP– In one case, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, the Justice Department argued it “had the right to oversee a church’s choosing of ministers,” which even Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan called “amazing.”

Cruz highlights one exchange between Kagan and Leondra Kruger, a DOJ lawyer, in which Kagan asked, “Do you believe, Ms. Kruger, that a church has a right that’s grounded in the Free Exercise Clause and/or the Establishment Clause to institutional autonomy with respect to its employees?”

“We don’t see that line of church autonomy principles in the Religious Clause jurisprudence as such,” Kruger said.

Kagan, who served as Solicitor General under Obama, said it was “amazing” that DOJ believed that “neither the Free Exercise Clause nor the Establishment Clause has anything to say about a church’s relationship with its own employees.”

The court went on to unanimously reject the DOJ’s claim, saying, “We cannot accept the remarkable view that the Religion Clauses have nothing to say about a religious organization’s freedom to select its own ministers.”

Read more by Elizabeth Harrington at CNSnews.com

In a frenzied cry for gun-control, the media is rife with details about the firearms Adam Lanza used to kill 20 children and six adults before turning a handgun on himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012. But information about Lanza’s medical history is scarce, feeding speculation that he may fit the profile of school shooters under the influence of psychotherapeutic medication.

“In virtually every mass school shooting during the past 15 years, the shooter has been on or in withdrawal from psychiatric drugs,” observed Lawrence Hunter of the Social Security Institute. “Yet, federal and state governments continue to ignore the connection between psychiatric drugs and murderous violence, preferring instead to exploit these tragedies in an oppressive and unconstitutional power grab to snatch guns away from innocent, law-abiding people who are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution the right to own and bear arms to deter government tyranny and to use firearms in self defense against any miscreant who would do them harm.”

There is a striking connection between school shootings and psychotherapeutic drugs, also known as psychotropics. Consider these examples:

Read more by Rebecca Terrell at TheNewAmerican.com

Putting Americans in concentration camps?

Anyone remember what happened today, (February 19) 71 years ago?

Probably not.

On February 19th, 1942 FDR willfully and intentionally violated The Constitution, an act for which he should have been impeached.

I am speaking of the Japanese internment — the rounding up of over 100,000 people who were frog-marched into Concentration Camps on American soil.

Far more than half were American Citizens with a full and complete set of alleged Constitutional Rights.

We, America, did this.

Read more by Karl Denninger from Market-Ticker at GunsSaveLife.com

The Constitution of the United States is an undeniably powerful document. So powerful in fact, that it took establishment elitists with aspirations of globalized governance over a century to diminish the American people’s connection to it. It’s been a long time coming, but in the new millennium, there is now indeed a subsection of the masses that not only have no relationship to our founding roots, they actually despise those of us who do!

There are a number of reasons for this dangerous development in our culture: A public school system that rarely if ever teaches children about the revolution, the founders, constitutional liberty, or the virtues of individualism in general. A mainstream media apparatus that has regurgitated endless anti-constitutional shlock for decades, attacking any person or group that presents a freedom oriented view. And a governmental structure that has become so corrupt, so openly criminal, that they ignore all aspects of constitutional law without regard, rarely feeling the need to explain themselves. As a people, we are surrounded daily by the low droning wash-talk of denigration and disdain for our principled foundations. The wretched ghosts of collectivism and tyranny mumble in our ears from birth to death. It’s truly a miracle that every man and woman in this nation has not succumbed to the mind numbing hypnotism . . .

Read more by Brandon Smith at alt-market.com

With CNN’s Candy Crowley shamelessly throwing President Obama a Libya life-preserver at Tuesday night’s debate, the so-called Mohammed video is back in the news. That ought to offend sensible people — and not just because the president, aided and abetted by Ms. Crowley, is lying when he now claims, despite weeks of denials, to have regarded the Benghazi massacre from the first as a pre-planned terrorist attack.

For weeks, Obama and his minions attempted to hoodwink the country into believing that the murders of our ambassador and three other Americans were triggered when Muslim protests over a “movie” virtually no one had seen spontaneously erupted into rioting. In fact, these Americans were killed precisely because Obama’s high-priority policy of embracing Islamists, in Libya and elsewhere, has empowered al-Qaeda and other Muslim militants. The policy’s current implosion, in the presidential campaign’s final days, has made a mockery of Obama’s pretensions about having decimated al-Qaeda — the only part of his record that the president thought it was safe to run on.

The video was the heart of the administration’s initial lie and subsequent cover-up.

Read more at PJ Media

If the citizens of this Republic still took the Constitution seriously, Obama would be impeached for his decision to unilaterally grant amnesty to certain illegal aliens.

Article 1, Sec. 8 of the Constitution, which enumerates the power of Congress, states that “Congress shall have the Power To… establish an [sic] uniform Rule of Naturalization.” Congress has passed numerous laws pertaining to immigration and naturalization, including laws requiring the deportation of illegals.

The role of the President, according to Article II, Sec. 3, is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Obama’s refusal to execute Congress’s immigration laws (or, for that matter, Congress’s Defense of Marriage Act) is an impeachable offense. Article II, Sec. 4 states that the President “shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for… Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The deliberate failure to enforce valid immigration law and allow hordes of foreigners to live and work in the U.S. is, arguably, “treason,” and doing so in an election year to appease Hispanic voters could certainly be considered “bribery.”

Read more by Michael Filozof at American Thinker

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., thinks that President Obama should unilaterally eliminate the debt ceiling, rather than negotiate with Congress to spend more money when the United States hits the debt ceiling later this year.

“I would like to see the Constitution used to protect the country’s full faith and credit, as the Constitution does,” Pelosi told reporters Wednesday. She was endorsing the idea that Obama should use the 14th Amendment — which states that “The validity of the public debt of the United States . . . shall not be questioned” — to circumvent House Republicans who want spending cuts in exchange for another debt ceiling hike.

“I think he should [declare the debt ceiling unconstitutional],” Pelosi said, though she wouldn’t predict Obama’s move. “I’m in a different branch of government. In the minority, in the House. What do I know about what the president’s going to do?”

Read more by Joel Gehrke at Washington Examiner

. . . are becoming clearer. As this CIS report notes, 1) The decree doesn’t just apply to illegal immigrants who were “brought to this country by their parents.” It also would give work permits to those who snuck across the border by themselves as teenagers. “Through no fault of their own” is a talking point for DREAM proselytizers, not an actual legal requirement. 2) The same goes for the phrase “and know only this country as home.” That’s a highly imaginative riff on the decree’s actual requirement, which is for 5 years “continuous residence.” It turns out “continuous residence” doesn’t mean what you think it means. “Immigration attorneys have been successful in getting immigration courts to whittle this down to a point where it is almost meaningless,” says CIS’s Jon Feere. As an illegal immigrant you can go back homeabroad for multiple 6-month stints during those five years–but, if precedent holds, in Janet Napolitano’s eyes you will still “know only this country as home.”

By Mickey Kaus at the Daily Caller

President Obama, I have frequently argued, has been fabulous for the conservative movement. He spurred the creation of the tea party. He helped the GOP win the House majority in 2010 and make big gains in the Senate. His Obamacare has helped revive the Commerce Clause and given a boost to conservative jurisprudence. His refusal to support human rights has caused a bipartisan revulsion and reminded us that foreign policy must be girded by American values. He’s sent independents running into the GOP’s arms. He’s forced conservatives to think hard and express eloquently principles of religious liberty, limited government, free markets and Constitutional democracy.

Obama also has wreaked havoc in the the Democratic Party. He’s firmly affixed the “tax and spend” label to it after Bill Clinton declared that the era of big government was over.

Read more by Jennifer Rubin at washingtonpost.com

Provision that allows feds to suspend passports of accused tax delinquents expected to pass Congress

Efforts to pass a bill that would allow the IRS to deny travel rights to U.S. citizens who the feds merely claim owe $50,000 or more in delinquent taxes represents a de facto move to revoke the citizenship of Americans without due process and in complete violation of the Constitution.

Thanks to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a recently passed Senate bill, the suitably Orwellian entitled ‘Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act’, includes a provision that allows the federal government to revoke passports of Americans accused of owing back taxes.

The legislation now moves to the Congress where, despite a Republican majority, the IRS provision is expected to be retained in the final version of the bill because it will raise an estimated $750 million dollars over ten years.

“There is no requirement that the tax payer be guilty of or even charged with tax evasion, fraud, or any criminal offense — only that the citizen is alleged to owe the IRS back taxes of $50,000 or more,” reports the Daily Economist.

Empowering the IRS to deny fundamental rights on a whim is completely illegal and unconstitutional.

Read more by Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones at Infowars.com

The Obama Record: Little noticed in the president’s remarks attacking the Supreme Court last week were two whoppers he told about ObamaCare. Then again, since that reform was built on untruths, why should he stop now?

At that press event, Obama told any justice thinking of overturning ObamaCare’s central tenet that “in the absence of an individual mandate, you cannot have a mechanism to ensure that people with pre-existing conditions can actually get health care.”

But this is false.

In fact, Obama himself argued precisely the opposite during the 2008 campaign, saying . . .

Read more at IBD Editorials

Senate Republican staffers continue to look though the 2010 health care reform law to see what’s in it, and their latest discovery is a massive $17 trillion funding gap.

“The more we learn about the bill, the more we learn it is even more unaffordable than was suspected,” said Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Republicans’ budget chief in the Senate.

“The bill has to be removed from the books because we don’t have the money,” he said.

Read more by Neil Munro at The Daily Caller

Cardinal Dolan thought he heard Barack Obama pledge respect for the Catholic Church’s rights of conscience. Then came the contraception coverage mandate.

The president of the U.S. Conference of Bishops is careful to show due respect for the president of the United States. “I was deeply honored that he would call me and discuss these things with me,” says the newly elevated Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York. But when Archbishop Dolan tells me his account of their discussions of the ObamaCare birth-control mandate, Barack Obama sounds imperious and deceitful to me.

Read more By JAMES TARANTO at Wall Street Journal

The Spanish term “caudillo” (pronounced cow-THEE-yo) refers to a strongman or autocratic leader. Latin America has had a number of caudillos. Some have been right-wing (i.e., anticommunist, pro-American, such as Somoza in Nicaragua), others left-wing (socialistic and anti-American, like Perón and Chávez), but since Jimmy Carter used his one-term presidency to achieve the extinction of the pro-American species, today’s caudillos are all leftists.

Caudillos typically bulldoze political opposition, become the dominant force in the economic life of the country, and establish a personality cult around themselves. They love power as much as they love themselves, and they aren’t bashful about using their power in defiance of precedents, constitutions, and democratic principles. Until a couple of years ago, I never dreamed that a caudillo could arise in our Anglo-American legal system, upwardly mobile culture, and enlightened constitutional order, but today it seems to be a distinct possibility. Consider the similarities between Barack Obama and the prototypical Latin caudillo.

Read more by Mark W. Hendrickson at American Thinker