“We Don’t Need No Stinking Constitution”

“We don’t need no stinking Constitution. And we sure don’t need no advice and consent from Congress. National sovereignty? Oh, please! That’s so twentieth-century.” At least that seems to be Barack Obama’s position today.


Obama thumbed his nose at Congress and the American people when he authorized the use of American military assets to invoke a no-fly zone over Libya. If news reports are accurate, Obama called Congressional leaders to the White House Saturday, not to discuss with them the pros and cons of U.S. involvement in the Libyan civil war. No, he called them over to inform them of the decision he had already made to commit U.S. forces to enforce a no-fly zone for the United Nations.

Now, there is no question that Muammar el-Qaddafi is a bad guy. Undoubtedly, the Libyan people will suffer greatly if he remains in power after the recent rebellion against his dictatorial rule. He promised to kill his opponents, and we know his ruthlessness in the past. Many innocent civilians have and will die unless he is removed.

Nonetheless, the United Nations’ resolution to order a no-fly zone over Libya to protect the rebels is a dangerous precedent. Our involvement is militarily unwise, financially disastrous, a threat to our national sovereignty, and constitutionally questionable.

Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich declared Obama’s decision an "impeachable offense” because of his failure to consult with Congress or get Congressional authorization beforehand. The Constitution in Article I, Section 8.11 is clear: Congress, not the President, holds the power “to declare war.”

Because of presidential abuses during the Vietnam era, Congress passed the War Powers Act in 1973 to rein in the President. Under it, the President may engage U.S. troops only if the U.S. or its territories are under imminent threat of invasion by a foreign power or if U.S. citizens need to be extracted from an imminent threat in a foreign nation. Otherwise, the President must go to Congress to seek a declaration of war or a Congressional mandate prior to any military action involving U.S. troops. In no case, can the President use the U.S. military if “imminent hostilities” are expected to last for sixty days or more. Some exceptions allow the timeframe to be extended an additional thirty days.

Thus, technically, the President may have the right to engage U.S. forces without any Congressional consultation first under the War Powers Act. It should be noted, though, that many legal scholars consider the War Powers Act itself to be unconstitutional. It has yet to be fully tested in a Supreme Court case.

Obama is the first President to take military action without any consultation with Congress. Every other President, including the Left’s hated George W. Bush, has made his case to Congress and sought advice or a Congressional resolution before sending our military forces into harm’s way.

The irony is that Obama’s previous position was that it is unconstitutional for a President to go to war without Congressional approval. For example, in a December, 20, 2007 interview with Charlie Savage, a Boston Globe reporter, Obama said: “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

Savage asked his question specifically in regards to bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, if needed to stop their development of nuclear weapons. Then-Senator Obama elaborated, “As for the specific question about bombing suspected nuclear sites, I recently introduced S.J. Res. 23, which states in part that ‘any offensive military action taken by the United States against Iran must be explicitly authorized by Congress.’”

Today, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden enthusiastically support the sending of U.S. fighter pilots on the mission to ground Libya’s air defenses under the War Powers Act. They surely did not believe in it when Bush was President.

Savage asked Clinton the same question during her presidential campaign. Then-Senator Clinton gave a very similar answer to Obama’s regarding the War Powers Act. She supported Obama’s S.J. Res. 23 against bombing Iran without Congressional approval.

In 1998, then-Senator Joe Biden gave an impassioned speech on the Senate floor in opposition to “monarchist” Presidents who sent troops into military actions without Congressional approval. He fully outlined the history and intent of the Founding Fathers regarding the Constitution’s restrictions on presidential powers to make war. In this speech, Biden criticized fellow Democrats President Harry S. Truman for his “police action” in Korea and President Bill Clinton for bombing Iraq under United Nations resolutions.

Voting Recommendations for Duval County [Florida] Residents

Below are my recommendations for Duval County residents. As you will see, I have split my ballot more than I usually do. Whomever you chose to support, what matters most is that you exercise your right to vote.

President: John McCain (REP)
Congressional District 4: Jay McGovern (DEM)
Public Defender: Bill White (DEM)
Clerk of Courts: Jim Fuller (REP)
City Council-at-large, Group 2: John R. Crescimbeni (DEM)
School Board, District 1: Stan Jordan
School Board, District 3: W. C. Gentry
Soil & Water Conservation Board, Group 2: Jonathan McGowan
Soil & Water Conservation Board, Group 3: Victor L. Wilhelm, Jr.
Soil & Water Conservation Board, Group 4: Katrina L. Finley

On the judges, I could find no agregious decisions, so I voted to retain all.

Here are my recommendations on the Amendments:

#1: No (A 'yes' vote would give "equal rights" to illegal aliens under Florida's Constitution and prohibit the Legislature from "discriminating" against those who are in the United States illegally.)
#2: Yes (This amendment puts the current definition of marriage under Florida statute in the Constitution to prevent activist judges from ordering Florida to allow homosexual marriages. Current law defines marriage as between a man and a woman. This amendment will have no other impact.)
#3: Yes (This gives homeowners the incentive to make hurricane protection and energy conservation improvements without penalizing them with higher property tax assessments.)
#4: Yes (It encourages property owners to maintain their undeveloped property for conservation purposes with tax breaks.)
#5: Removed from ballot by the Florida Supreme Court
#6: Yes (It requires property tax assessments on working waterfront properties to be assessed according to their current usage, not future or potential usage. It protects small businesses, such as marine repair, commercial fishers, and marinas, from being forced out of business by higher assessments because their properties could be used for condos or resorts, etc.)
#7: Withdrawn
#8: No (This amendment would allow an increase in sales' taxes. Although the purpose is good, increasing taxes on anything at this time of economic turmoil is bad.)

Again, I hope this helps you and please, get out and vote! Deo Vindice, Sue

Barack Hussein Obama Will Not Be America’s First Black President

Even if elected, Barack Hussein Obama will not be America’s first black president. He would become our first biracial president, if the American electorate were foolish enough. It is as inaccurate to say Obama is black as it would be to call him white. He is neither; his ethnicity is biracial.

Why does this matter? Well, words mean things, as Rush Limbaugh frequently repeats. And, some would like to make this election about race, when it is not and should not be. The race card is being played already among some Obama supporters.

Jack Cafferty on CNN’s “Cafferty File” segment of The Situation Room dealt the race card on Thursday. His question asked, if Obama is not elected, does it mean that America is still racist? This question will be asked more frequently the closer we get to November 4th, especially if Obama’s poll numbers continue their downward trend. Cafferty just happened to be the first one I heard do it, but it was predictable.

The premise of the questions is: If whites do not vote for Obama, it must mean they are closet racists. It is a subtle play on white guilt. It might work, too, if Obama were black, but he is not. Obama is as white as he is black. During the early primaries, this reality posed a problem for many black voters; Obama was not black enough for them. Since then, black voters have joined Obama in his denial of his white heritage. This allowed him to clinch the Democratic nomination.

This denial may be new to other blacks but not to Obama. By his own admission, Obama has been denying his 50% whiteness since his early teens. In his memoir Dreams from My Father, he remembered: “I ceased to advertise my mother’s race [white] at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.”(1)

Obama disdained his white grandparents’ and mother’s Midwestern roots. He wrote:

Theirs [his white grandparents] were the faces of American Gothic, the WASP bloodline’s poorer cousins…the world in which my grandparents had been raised, the dab-smack, landlocked center of the country, a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty…where fear and lack of imagination choke your dreams…(2)

About his white grandparents’ reaction to the marriage of his white mother to his black African father, Obama opined:

Whether Gramps realized it or not, the sight of his daughter [Barack’s mother Ann] with a black man offered at some deep unexplored level a window into his own heart. Not that such self-knowledge, even if accessible, would have made my mother’s engagement any easier for him to swallow. In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky…The whole thing seems so fragile in retrospect, so haphazard. And perhaps that’s how my grandparents intended it to be; a trial that would pass…

The family from Wichita had in fact moved to the forefront of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Dr. King’s magnificent dream. How could America send men in space and still keep its black citizens in bondage? …With his black son-in-law and his brown grandson, Gramps had entered the space age.(3)

Abandoned children often turn their missing parent into an idealized, heroic character. The pain of abandonment is too difficult to feel in its full reality. Therefore, abandoned children transform their pain into an intense, if misplaced, identification with the missing parent. Often, this is accompanied by an equal rejection of the parent and family who did not abandon them and is present in their lives. In fact, abandoned children often blame that parent for the missing parent’s leaving.

This was certainly true of Obama. He developed a fantasy vision of his African father and heritage while rejecting his mother’s. He wrote: “To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.”(4)

Writing of his father Barack Obama, Sr., Obama, Jr. admitted:

All my life, I had carried a single image of my father…The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader – my father had been all those things…It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin [Luther King] and Malcolm [X], [W.E.B.] Dubois and [Nelson] Mandela.(5)

Living in Hawaii with his white grandparents as a teen, Obama recalled:

I’d arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents: I could live with them and they’d leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight…I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant…I was living out a caricature of black male adolescence, itself a caricature of swaggering American manhood…(6)

On the basketball court, Obama befriended “blacks close to my age…whose confusion and anger would help shape my own.” Only rarely would he remember guiltily that he had white blood coursing through his veins:

White folks. The term itself was uncomfortable in my mouth at first…Sometimes I would find myself talking to Ray [a black friend] about white folks this or white folks that, and I would suddenly remember my mother’s smile, and the words that I spoke would seem awkward and false…Our rage at the white world needed no object…no independent confirmation; it could be switched on and off at our pleasure.(7)

Not only can Obama still not admit to being partially white, but also on his first trip to Kenya, he denied he was American. In an encounter in a Nairobi marketplace, Obama’s half-sister Auma translates a comment from an old woman, “’She says that you look like an American to her.’ ‘Tell her I’m Luo,’ I said, beating my chest.”(8)

No, Barack Hussein Obama can never be our first black president any more than he can be our 43rd white president. Obama could become our first biracial president. Too bad, if that should happen (God forbid), he would not want to be identified as an American president. No, as his writings prove, he would be our most racist president. Wake up, America.

1 Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father, (Three Rivers Press, New York, NY) 1995, 2004, p. xv
2 Ibid, 12-13; 15
3 Ibid, 22-23
4 Ibid, 51
5 Ibid, 220-221
6 Ibid, 75-76
7 Ibid, 80-81
8 Ibid, p. 310

Goodbye, President Ford

I watched the funeral for President Gerald R. Ford, this morning. It was moving and fitting for the former President. The dignity and ceremony of these national rituals, I believe, are helpful and healing to us as a nation. They remind me of what is important in life: family, relationships, faith in God. As a political activist, it is easy to forget these values in the heat of partisan advocacy.

President Ford was a good example of political civility. President Ford was a loyal Republican. As a leader in the House and as President of the Senate, he "loved a good fight." At the end of the day, though, he could slap Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill on the back and join him in a drink. President Ford understood that good men (and women) could disagree without being disagreeable. He realized bad ideas could come from good people.

Presidential funerals also give us review lessons in history. I remember being very upset, like most Americans, when President Ford pardoned President Nixon. At the time, I could not understand taking that action before a trial and conviction. Looking back, I can see President Ford's wisdom in quickly ending the "national nightmare" of Watergate. President Nixon resigned in disgrace, a punishment probably worse than prison to that prideful man. It reminds me to be cautious in being too quick to judge the presidencies of Carter and Clinton, whom I did not like, or today's President Bush, whom I do. Good historical analysis requires the perspective that only comes with the passage of time.

Watching the coverage of these funerals also supplies some good trivia, too. I don't think I ever knew that President Ford's middle name was "Rudolph." I didn't know that the casket stand used in the Capitol was originally built for President Abraham Lincoln's coffin. The fabric has been replaced but is draped exactly as it was when Lincoln laid in state. I had forgotten that President Ford had two assassination attempts. I remembered the one by Streaky Fromm, probably because a woman was the perpetrator which made it unusual. Does anyone remember who made the other attempt?