Seth Leibson 06-01-2012

June 1, 2012

As Broadcast on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America

By Seth Leibsohn



A quick tale of two pieces of legislation and a quick note on civics—One piece of legislation passed the Senate by a vote of 85 to 14 and the House by a vote of 342 to 67.  Another piece of legislation passed the Senate by a vote of 60 to 39 and the House by a vote of 219 to 212.  The first was passed by what you might call supermajorities; the second by the narrowest of margins.  The first was the Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton; the second was the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare,” and signed into law by President Barack Obama.



Now, when the Supreme Court took up Obamacare, President Obama said the following, just two months ago:



I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected congress.



….[than an] unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.



Well, this is a good example and I’m pretty confident this court will recognize that and not take that step.



“An unelected group,”  “a duly constituted law,” “a strong majority.”  Is a piece of legislation that passed with no bi-partisanship a duly constituted law with a strong majority?  Maybe.  But what about a law with bipartisan support that passed by 25 more votes in the Senate and by 123 more votes in the House?  Will President Obama take this odd position on judicial review with respect to the Defense of Marriage Act as he did with Obamacare?  I ask this as the First Circuit Federal Court of Appeals just held the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional.  And yes, it will head to the Supreme Court.



Of course we know President Obama’s views on this because he and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, made the decision they would not enforce or defend in court the “duly constituted” law passed with a “strong majority” because they happened to merely disagree with it.



If you can now begin to wonder why that extra-Constitutional power-grab, to not defend a law your oath requires you to defend, was contemptuous of the Constitution, perhaps you can now also see the raw political calculation made to challenge the Supreme Court on Obamacare by lecturing the American people on the exact opposite of the whole point of what we know as Judicial Review—a practice that goes back to John Marshall and Marbury v. Madison.



If the President doesn’t understand that the role of the courts is, in fact, to analyze laws (and let’s remind him, laws only get passed by majorities) and sometimes hold them unconstitutional, that is, strike them down, then he understands very little about not only the history of America but the role of the Constitution, the three branches of government, and, in fact, democracy itself.  I never attended the University of Chicago but if this is what was taught at its law school, in his classroom, those students ought to get their tuition back.  To say what he did about the Court and Obamacare, and to do what he did on the Defense of Marriage Act is not any kind of brave defense of the Constitution or constitutional rights, it is, rather, a playing of politics with our Constitution and that, I always thought, as I learned it from the writings of the left about the Nixon administration, was what is called “An Imperial Presidency.”



And, of course, imperialism is a danger to democracy, a threat to it, because it is oppositional to it.  One can make this point regardless of one’s political and policy views about the Defense of Marriage Act or Obamacare, it is a point about constitutionalism.  It is a fundamental misunderstanding about one of the very pillars of our democracy.  Of course, unless, President Obama actually knows all this and is just lying deliberately, which would be worse.


But I think he may actually not know all this because time and again he betrays his ignorance about history just as he betrays his ignorance about things he was to be oh-so-smart about, like other nations’ views.



Rewind to his first foray into bad history.  When he was running for President, Barack Obama—in justifying his position that he would meet with Iran without precondition and in his first year of office—said the following: “That is what Kennedy did with Khrushchev; that’s what Nixon did with Mao; what Reagan did with Gorbachev.”



As I’ve pointed out before, in reverse order, Ronald Reagan met with no Soviet leader during the entirety of his first term in office, not (ever) with Brezhnev, not (ever) with Andropov, not (ever) with Chernenko. He met only with Gorbachev, and only after he was assured Gorbachev was a different kind of Soviet leader — and after Perestroika, not before.



If Barack Obama wants to affiliate with Richard Nixon, that’s certainly his call. But one question: Was Taiwan’s expulsion from the U.N. worth “Nixon to China”? That was the price of that meeting.



As for the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit of 1961, Kennedy himself said “He (Khrushchev) beat the hell out of me.” Paul Nitze said the meeting was “just a disaster.” And, Khrushchev’s aide, after the first day, said the American president seemed “very inexperienced, even immature.” Khrushchev agreed, noting that the youthful Kennedy was “too intelligent and too weak.”  So successful was the summit that the Berlin Wall was erected later that year and the Cuban Missile Crisis, with Soviets deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba, commenced the following year.



That was Obama’s understanding of world history.  It was upside down, wrong, what a teacher would give an “F” grade to a student for writing about the summit.  And yet that is the history President Obama used and has used in negotiating with Iran.  Let me pause here to say we should not be negotiating with Iran, we should be confronting Iran.  Let me add parenthetically that of course bad history doesn’t end here, this week we also received a mis-lesson—I should say our ally Poland received a mis-lesson—on this history of the Holocaust and World War II courtesy of President Obama.  He clearly is a man who knows very little at a time when we need a president who knows a lot.



But back to Iran for just a moment.  Even during a month when Iran’s President Machmoud Achmadinejad reiterated a desire for the “destruction of the Zionist entity,” i.e., Israel, the US continued to negotiate with Iran.  Now please remember, in advance of the Baghdad negotiations that just concluded in abject failure, I had quoted Secretary of State Clinton and others in the administration who were optimistic about these meetings.  Indeed, one headline read “Clinton Optimistic on Iran nulear talks.”



Well, how did those talks go?  The Financial Times headline:  “Iran talks end in harsh lesson for west.”  A Reuters headline:  “Iran has enough uranium for 5 bombs.”  By the way, the first line of that story:  “Iran has significantly stepped up its output of low-enriched uranium and total production.”  A Washington Post headline:  “Iran nuclear talks: World powers to continue discussion, but no progress on a deal.”  And Bret Stephen’s report in the Wall Street Journal on what transpired:  “Iran did more than just reject demands to shut down its underground enrichment facility at Fordo and ship its near-bomb-grade uranium abroad. It also announced it would do precisely the opposite: install more centrifuges at Fordo, increase the rate of enrichment, and forbid any U.N. inspections of suspected military sites.”



This, after optimism ahead of the talks that we all warned and continued to warn about.  And now, Thursday, we get the report based on satellite imagery that Iran is actually hiding the development of nuclear weapons at its Parchin site, a place it refuses IAEA inspectors to enter.



When you do not know your own history, when you do not know your own democracy, when you do not know your own Constitution, it becomes increasingly easy to not know other nations’ histories, other nations’ ideologies, and other nations’ governing constitutions—even when they have nothing but evil designs on and for you.  You think sanctions will work?  Read the words of modern Iran’s founder, Ayatollah Khomeni.  He said “We know how to fast.”  Indeed, Iran does.  The irony here—it is Iran’s appetite we are feeding.



Just as it was Syria’s appetite this administration fed.  President Bush pulled our ambassador out of Syria years ago.  Obama knew better, and in an attempt to reset our foreign policy toward Syria there, he restored our ambassador; only now, after Syria’s charnel house geared back up, to pull our diplomatic corps out of there again.



You don’t know history—ours or others’; you don’t know democracy—ours or others’; you don’t know ideology—especially our enemies’, and this is the government you get:  closing down our own understanding of constitutionalism domestically, endangering the world abroad, and endangering ourselves at home.  This is, to quote the French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel, how democracies perish.  They perish by not understanding what makes and keeps us strong, and they perish by, to quote the American political scientist Jeane Kirkpatrick, “[D]epending for its very survival on the promises of its adversaries.”  And of course they perish by playing politics with the Constitution.


We can keep going this way for a while I suppose, but if we do, we will have to ask ourselves soon enough—if we are alive to ask ourselves—what is it, just what is it, we are governing here?  A democracy that thrives and enriches and empowers its own people while it teaches something to the world? Or, indeed, something else that is dependent on the vagaries, tyrannies, and appetites of the world—and vagaries, tyrannies, and appetites that we, indeed, helped to feed?



You see, ignorance can destroy you from within as well as from without.



If we don’t see that choice and those possibilities now, it will—not far down the line—be too late to see them, ever.  I submit, we’ve come too far, fought too hard, and bled too much for that.