ELENA KAGAN SHOULD BE REJECTED

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

That was an old typing practice sentence that I remember well, and is very apropos today. In light of this week's close call regarding upholding our 2nd Amendment rights, keeping the Supreme Court clean of judicial activists could not be more crital.

The ever lovely and brilliant Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum has written an excellent dissertation on the reasons why Elena Kagan is not fit to wear the robes of a Supreme Court justice from the great Townhall.com.

It is so important to voice your opinion to the Senators about to make an all important decision about her. Here are their numbers on page 1, page 2, and page 3.

Elena Kagan Should Be Rejected
by Phyllis Schlafly, June 30, 2010

Barack Obama revealed his goal for the Supreme Court when he complained on Chicago radio station WBEZ-FM in 2001 that the Earl Warren Court wasn't "radical" enough because "it didn't break free from the essential constraints placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution" in order to allow "redistribution of wealth." Now that Obama is president, he has the power to nominate Supreme Court justices who will "break free" from the Constitution and join him in "fundamentally transforming" America.

That's the essence of his choice of Elena Kagan as his second Supreme Court nominee. She never was a judge, and her paper trail is short. But it's long enough to prove that she is a clear and present danger to the Constitution.

When Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, she presented a guest speaker who is known as the most activist judge in the world: Judge Aharon Barak, formerly president of the Israeli Supreme Court. The polar opposite of the U.S. Constitution, which states that "all legislative powers" are vested in the elected legislative body, Barak has written that a judge should "make" and "create" law, assume "a role in the legislative process," and give statutes "new meaning that suits new social needs."

Barak wrote that a judge "is subject to no authority" except himself, and he "must sometimes depart the confines of his legal system and channel into it fundamental values not yet found in it." Channel? Does he mean he channels in a trance, as Hillary Clinton supposedly channeled discourse with the long deceased Eleanor Roosevelt?

Despite Barak's weirdo writings, or maybe because of them, Kagan called him her "judicial hero." Judge Robert Bork, a man careful with his words, says that Kagan's praise of Barak is "disqualifying in and of itself."

Bork said that Barak "establishes a world record for judicial hubris." Bork wrote that Barak embraces a judicial philosophy that "there is no area of Israeli life that the court may not govern."

During Kagan's confirmation hearing for solicitor general, Sen. Arlen Specter asked her views on using foreign or international law or decisions to interpret our Constitution and laws. She wrote in reply that she approves using "reasonable foreign law arguments."

Au contraire. The U.S. Constitution states that our judges "shall be bound" by "the Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof."

Federal law requires all educational institutions receiving federal funds to present an educational program on the U.S. Constitution on every Constitution Day, September 17. Kagan thumbed her nose at Constitution Day 2007 by hiring a transnationalist to the Harvard faculty, Noah Feldman, and featuring him for two days of speeches.

Transnationalists are lawyers who advocate integrating foreign and international law into the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and laws. In his Harvard Constitution Day address, Feldman urged the "use of international legal materials in constitutional decision-making ... to help actually decide cases," and opined that "international tribunals' rulings must be treated as law."

Kagan's hero is also a transnationalist. In his book "The Judge in a Democracy," he sharply criticizes the U.S. Supreme Court for failing to cite foreign law, and he praises Canada, Australia and Germany for their "enlightened democratic legal systems."

Kagan is particularly inappropriate because this anti-military woman would replace the only veteran on the court, John Paul Stevens. As Harvard Law School dean, Kagan signed a brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn or rewrite the Solomon Amendment, which she called "profoundly wrong."

That popular federal law denies federal funds to colleges that bar military recruiters from the campus. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected Kagan's argument, which proves what an extremist she is.

Kagan demonstrated her feminist extremism when she served as the lead White House strategist advising President Bill Clinton to veto the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Ten years later, substantially the same act was passed by Congress, signed by President George W. Bush and upheld by the Supreme Court.

Feldman has just published a long New York Times magazine article in which he worries about how the Supreme Court will rule on lawsuits over Obamacare, Obama's takeover of big corporations and the cronyism in stimulus spending. Feldman hopes the Kagan appointment means that "the moment has arrived for progressive constitutional thought" to take over the courts.

The left is counting on Kagan to play a major role in getting the Supreme Court to uphold Obama's transformation of our exceptional private enterprise system to a socialist economy. The New Republic magazine is salivating at the prospect that Kagan will reassert the discredited doctrine of the "living Constitution."

A Rasmussen poll reports that 42 percent of Americans oppose Kagan's confirmation, and only 35 percent favor her. Are senators listening?

Read more Phyllis Schlafly here.

Clunkers, A Case Study in Why Obamanomics Is Failing

As if we didn't need another reason to reject government run health care, the government run 'Cash for Clunkers' program has been suspended (or in trouble). Add this program to the list: Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Amtrak, the Post Office, and our school system to name a few.

We can also add to the list "jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs" to quote Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi -- temporary as they may be, and non-existent as they may be. Heritage lays it all out for us:


Cash for Clunkers, A Case Study in Why Obamanomics Is Failing
The Heritage Foundation

If you watch television you’ve seen the ads: “So bring in that old jalopy and get up to $4500 towards the purchase of a new or select used vehicle. That’s right get up to $4500 for that old piece of junk, plus you keep the rebates. You have to hurry! Since funds are limited for this program it’s first come first served!” Well we’re about to find out just how limited those funds were. The Obama administration’s cash-for-clunkers program has been such a “success” that in just the first week of full implementation, the $1 billion originally allocated for the program is about to be exhausted already. Does this mean the program is over? We don’t know. Nobody does. And that is just the beginning of why this program is a perfect illustration of why Obamanomics will fail.

Does Nothing for Environment: Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) are open to allocating more money for the program, but only if the rules are changed so that the program might actually do something for environment; because right now it is not. Edmunds.com auto analyst Jessica Caldwell explains why: “What you buy has to have an increase in fuel economy from what you traded in. But in some cases, that increase can be minimal. Owners of large pickup trucks like a Ford F150 only have to buy a replacement that increases efficiency by one mile per gallon. And they still get a $3,500 rebate. The environmental impact is negligible and the impact on national fuel demand and consumption is very small. The only real benefit in a like-for-like swap can be improved emissions standards on newer vehicles. Rather than discourage those people, they included them in this program.” Caldwell didn’t even mention the pollution costs of actually building a new car and the disposal of the old car, rather than just the pollution caused by driving the vehicle.

Hurts Working Americans: The federal government’s push to help auto makers has unintended consequences which will hut many lower-income Americans. Economist, Freakonomics author and New York Times blogger Steven Levitt writes: “People who drive clunkers are generally not in the market for new cars. Presumably their replacement car will be a used car. The increased demand for used cars will lead to higher prices for used cars.” Driving up the cost of older cars may be an intended consequence for policymakers to encourage people to buy new, but it’s a bad deal for consumers.

Hurts Charities: Speaking of ads, you probably have heard a ton on the radio from charities asking you to donate your old in exchange for a tax deduction. Do a Google search of “Donating Cars for Charity” and you will see a list of charities that cash-for-clunkers is taking money from.

Further Entangles Government in Market: The program has already spent $150 million and has another $800 million to $850 million in obligations. What that means is that the nation’s auto dealers have already paid car buyers almost a billion dollars but are still waiting for their cash from the federal government. The USA Today reports: “Carmakers and dealers have booked expensive advertising to capitalize on buyers’ interest in CARS, and now will be left promoting a tie-in with a discontinued government program — one that wasn’t supposed to end until Nov. 1. “Disappointed,” said Chrysler spokesman Scott Brown. “It’s too late to recall the ads,” says Beau Boeckmann of Galpin Ford, the nation’s largest Ford dealer, in Los Angeles. “We had increased our ad budget to get the word out. We are very heavy on radio, newspaper and getting direct mail together,” Boeckmann says. “Now what do you tell people when they walk in” for a clunker deal? “It’s tough.”

Only Adds to Debt: Just this week, President Barack Obama told Business Week: “We’re not going to be able to drive the next big stretch of economic growth through debt.” But the first $1 billion was also deficit spending, and the extra $3 to $4 billion needed to fully fund the program will also have to be borrowed. And much like most government programs, Congress was incapable of actually estimating how much it would cost. They are now facing the prospect of tripling down on a program only a week after it began.

When President Obama bailed out General Motors he told the nation his administration: “will not interfere with or exert control over day-to-day company operations.” But despite what he may believe, his cash for clunkers program does exactly that: it significantly interferes with the day-to-day operations of millions of companies nation wide. In that same Business Week interview mentioned above, Obama says: “What you haven’t seen from our Administration is a suggestion of a bunch of command-and-control, top-down, heavy-handed bureaucratic regulations that would bog businesses down.” But that is exactly what the cash-for-clunkers is. The fact that Obama doesn’t understand this basic economic fact should truly frighten all Americans as he plots more non-"command-and-control, top-down, heavy-handed bureaucratic regulations" for the health care, energy, and financial sectors. As one auto dealer told CBS News: “If they can’t administer a program like this, I’d be a little concerned about my health insurance.”