by Sarah Palin
Some find the words of the Founders too limiting for their bloated vision of government. After all, government that is true to the ideals of our Charters of Liberty is government that is limited. If government exists to protect our God-given rights—and not to bail out big banks, buy car companies, take over our health care, and tell us which lightbulbs we can use—then that government does a few things, does them well, and gets out of the way in order to allow its citizens to realize their potential.
Remember the 2001 interview about the Constitution by then–Illinois state senator Barack Obama that surfaced during the 2008 campaign? In it, Senator Obama complained as he captured perfectly the constraints on government created by the Constitution. Speaking about the Supreme Court in the 1950s and ’60s during the civil rights movement, Obama expressed regret that the High Court
never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues of political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted it the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. (emphasis mine)
Our future president called the civil rights movement’s focus on the courts—and the courts’ subsequent failure to break free of the constraints imposed by the Constitution—a “tragedy.” But a lot of us call it basic fairness and adherence to our founding principles. We believe it’s a good thing that we came so far in achieving racial justice while keeping faith with our Constitution.
Some like to dismiss all this talk about staying true to our founding documents as the ideological rants of people who are obsessed with constitutional theory. But whether we remain true to our Constitution or not has practical, real-world consequences for all of us.
The Supreme Court, along with the rest of the federal judiciary, has tremendous power over our lives today. Their rulings mean the difference between free political speech and censored political speech, property rights that are protected by government and property rights that are routinely violated by government, and the survival of innocent life and the state-sanctioned killing of innocent life. The reason this is the case is because so many of the people who appoint and approve our judges and justices erroneously believe the courts’ duty isn’t to interpret the law but to make the law. In cases where their agenda can’t prevail among the people’s representatives in Congress, they have turned to the courts to make policy. That means having judges and justices who are no longer guided by the Constitution and the law, but by their personal opinions. President Obama himself has said that, in the really difficult, consequential cases, justices shouldn’t go with the law but with their hearts. “That last mile can only be determined on the basis of one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy,” the president said.
But if you look at the oath of office that every Supreme Court justice takes, you see that it commits them to a very different standard. They pledge not to pick winners and losers based on their hearts or their “empathy,” but to impartially apply the Constitution and the law. Here is their oath:
I, (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as Supreme Court Justice under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.
When you take the time to read the plain text of this oath, and then consider many of the criteria that President Obama and other progressives have spelled out for their judges and Supreme Court justices, there is no other conclusion to come to other than that progressives want Supreme Court justices who will violate their oath of office.
Now, empathy is certainly a good and virtuous thing. It’s something we should practice ourselves, and look for in our doctors, our teachers, and our neighbors. But should empathy be the guiding criterion for our judges? After all, one person’s empathy may be another person’s antipathy. Our Constitution spells out a separation of powers between Congress, the president, and the judiciary for a very good reason: to protect our freedom and our right to govern ourselves from one person’s idea of “empathy.” When we give more power to unelected judges, we take power away from “we the people.”
It’s no accident that progressives view the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as obstacles to be mowed down or maneuvered around to create bigger government. After all, their name itself, progressives, implies that there is something defective or at least inadequate about America. Progressives exist, their name implies, to “correct” America and to “correct” all the rest of us in the process.
The epitome of progressive thinking was Barack Obama’s promise, just before the 2008 election, that “we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” I guess you could say he warned us! But the problem is that Americans don’t want a fundamental transformation of their country. Americans are awakening to the fact that, of course our country has changed a great deal since it was born, but our Founders hit on some timeless truths that will never change and should never change. More and more of us view our founding truths as a bulwark, not just against bigger government, but against losing that fundamental sense of decency that Senator Smith fought for. If we forget these truths—or reject that they are timeless—we lose something fundamental about ourselves. No, “transformation” won’t save America; “restoration” of our honor, dignity, and freedoms will save America.
Every generation thinks it is having its arguments for the first time. In fact, our old friend Calvin Coolidge—is it just a coincidence that one of the presidents who most appreciated our founding principles is one of the least celebrated by the academic elite?—made this point over 80 years ago. In the same speech I cited earlier, the one celebrating the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence (which is full of interesting nuggets; I highly recommend it), President Coolidge delivered a devastating rebuke to those who thought the principles of our founding were no longer relevant way back in 1926:
It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter [the Declaration of Independence]. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
It’s worth asking: Who are the real “progressives” in America today? As President Coolidge said, to deny the principles of our founding isn’t to go forward (to “progress”) but to go “backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.” Those who run down American values and think our founding principles are somehow intolerant or theocratic have it exactly backward. The words of the Declaration of Independence, brought to
life in the words of the Constitution, are the most liberating, most human-rights-respecting words ever written. They assert the moral and political equality of all men and women, no matter who their parents are or how much money they have. What could be more “progressive” than that?
What’s most amazing to me is that I think most Americans understand this. Most Americans don’t just blindly love their country; they understand the unique gift of freedom it represents and they strive to live up to it. The men and women of our military make sacrifices to defend this freedom every day. But ordinary Americans do so as well, by resisting trading their freedom for the promise of cradle-to-grave government security the way so many countries of Western Europe have. Americans don’t just cling to their liberty like spoiled children. We understand that freedom isn’t free. It’s one of the many things about the American people our politicians underestimate.
Take the recent health care debate as an example. The folks pushing President Obama’s government health care bill seemed to think that we could be bought. But when we say we believe that our rights are God-given it means something. Those words in the Declaration of Independence mean that our rights are sacred; government can’t legitimately violate them or add to them. The proponents of government health care didn’t seem to think that Americans understood this principle—or, if we understood it, we didn’t really mean it. They seemed to think we could be bribed by pie-in-the-sky promises; that we were gullible enough to believe that government could manufacture a new “right” to health care and we wouldn’t pay the price with our freedom, such as our freedom to keep what we earn, to choose our own doctor, and to buy—or not buy—health insurance.
They were wrong, and for proof you don’t have to look any further than the shameful way in which Obamacare was written and passed. It was written in secret, behind closed doors, far from the promised C-SPAN cameras. And it wasn’t long before we found out why: To win the support of nervous politicians, President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had to resort to trading pork in the bill for votes, cutting sleazy deals behind closed doors like the infamous “Louisiana Purchase” (in which a Louisiana senator’s vote for the bill was secured in exchange for $300 million in extras for that state) and the “Cornhusker Kickback” (in which a Nebraska senator’s vote was secured in a similar fashion). Not only that, but to pass the bill, congressional Democrats had to resort to all kinds of legislative shenanigans to avoid an up-or-down vote. At one point, Speaker Pelosi told a national audience that we’d have to pass the bill to “find out what’s in it.” She even hatched a plan to pass the bill without the House ever actually voting on it! And why? Because the support in Congress wasn’t there. And the support in Congress wasn’t there because public support wasn’t there. The American people have a principled wisdom that all the lawyers and academics and schooled-up “experts” in D.C. fail to appreciate. Washington may have managed to make it the law, but we still don’t support Obamacare. It turns out we can’t be so easily bought.
Still, the bill was passed and the damage has been done. In the end, this unsustainable bill jeopardizes the very thing it was supposed to fix: our health care system. Somewhere along the way we forgot that health care reform is about doctors and patients, not the IRS and politicians. Instead of helping doctors with tort reform, this bill has made primary care physicians think about getting out of medicine. It was supposed to make health care more affordable, but our premiums will continue to go up. It was supposed to help more people get coverage, but there will still be twenty-three million uninsured people by 2019.
Americans have been reminded many times that elections have consequences, and Obamacare was definitely one of them. But as my father would say, instead of retreating, Americans are reloading. We don’t consider the health care vote a done deal, not by a long shot. Instead, it was a clarion call, a spur to action. We will not let America sink further into debt caused by government controlling another one sixth of our economy—and mandating its approved health care coverage—without a fight. We will not abandon the American dream to government dependency, fewer freedoms, and less opportunity.
If our current leadership in Washington had ventured outside the Beltway more, they would have known that Americans are serious about our freedom. And we have the common sense to know there’s no free lunch. As usual, a sign I spotted at a health care reform rally (held up by a guy I’m pretty sure wasn’t a constitutional law professor) said it best: “Governments Don’t Give Rights. Governments Take Rights Away.”
There, written in black acrylic paint on neon poster board, was as good a description of what it takes to defend our freedom as I have ever seen. The giant that is America has been awakened.
The worst thing you can say about a fellow American in politics today is that he is a racist. It just doesn’t get any more damning than this accusation. That’s why so many of us were horrified to hear news reports that people protesting the passage of the health care bill had shouted racial epithets at an African American congressman as he walked to the Capitol to cast his vote. It was a serious charge, made by supposedly serious men, and repeated endlessly in the mainstream media. At a critical moment in the debate, it overshadowed all the arguments that opponents of Obamacare had made—that the bill would put government in control of our health care, cost too much, and explode the deficit. The racism charge painted opponents of the law with the lowest form of hate, not the best interests of their country or their neighbor.
But was it true? Despite the fact that everyone walks around these days with a cell phone capable of capturing video, evidence to support the charge has never emerged. In the weeks and months after the alleged incident, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart even offered huge cash rewards to anyone who could produce proof that the health care protestors had shouted racial slurs. No proof ever emerged.
But a lack of evidence hasn’t stopped liberal activists and their allies in the media from repeatedly accusing patriotic Americans at Tea Party rallies and elsewhere of being racists. And let’s not kid ourselves. The purpose of this charge isn’t to clarify but to confuse. It’s thrown out there to shut down debate by declaring one side of it (dissenters from the Obama agenda) unworthy of being taken seriously. After all, if we’re motivated only by the fact that there is a “black man in the White House” and not by serious policy differences, what’s the point in discussing those policy differences? This tactic is of a piece with the shameful tendency on the left not simply to declare their opponents wrong, but to declare them evil. Conservatives and liberals don’t have honest policy disagreements, this strategy says; conservatives are just bad people.
But more Americans have opposed Obamacare than have supported it since the health care debate began. A majority of Americans opposed the bill when it was proposed, then passed. A majority oppose it today. Does that mean that a majority of Americans are bad people? And would that be the same majority of Americans who voted for Barack Obama for president?
The deep unrest in America today wasn’t caused by the color of the president’s skin but the content of his policies. And more and more, it seems that the starting point for these policies is the liberal view that the Constitution is a flawed document. One of the main arguments that the Constitution is flawed and no longer relevant is directly related to the issue of race. It’s an issue that all admirers of the Constitution and of our founding have to deal with squarely and honestly: the Constitution’s initial compromise on the issue of slavery.
It sometimes seems like slavery is all that liberal academics and the mainstream media want to talk about when the topic is America’s birth, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t acknowledge the contradiction that slavery represented to American principles. To do less is to denigrate the greatness of those principles. To love our country is to confront our history squarely and honestly. To love our fellow Americans is to admit that we have not always
, as a nation, respected their God-given rights.
Confronting our history, of course, also means acknowledging how much progress we’ve made as a nation to overcome the legacies of slavery and segregation. It always amazes me how some on the left would rather focus on America’s sins rather than on the steps we’ve taken to heal and redeem them. Laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, which followed one year later, are great human achievements. They made our country better, not just for some of its citizens, but for all of its citizens. Wouldn’t it be more constructive to celebrate these great achievements instead of dwelling obsessively on the problems that made them necessary in the first place?
In our hearts, I believe Americans are a fundamentally just and tolerant people. I’ve been to big cities and little towns throughout the country. I’ve met thousands of Americans. I’ve disagreed with some, agreed with more, and cherished (almost!) all of them. There are exceptions, of course, but in my experience, Americans are too busy raising their families, building their businesses, and looking after their neighbors to spend a lot of time fixating on the color of someone’s skin.
Still, I don’t think it’s an accident that the opponents of this new American awakening so often accuse Tea Partiers and others of being racist. For one thing, it’s a guaranteed conversation stopper. Just saying the word racist instantly ends any legitimate debate. Just the accusation gives the accuser an excuse not to debate the issues at hand.
The second reason the charge of racism is leveled at patriotic Americans so often is that the people making the charge actually believe it. They think America—at least America as it currently exists—is a fundamentally unjust and unequal country. Barack Obama seems to believe this, too. Certainly his wife expressed this view when she said during the 2008 campaign that she had never felt proud of her country until her husband started winning elections. In retrospect, I guess this shouldn’t surprise us, since both of them spent almost two decades in the pews of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church listening to his rants against America and white people. It also makes sense, then, that the man President Obama made his attorney general, Eric Holder, would call us a “nation of cowards” for failing to come to grips with what he described as the persistence of racism.