Jon’s Blog | January 3 2013
re: NY Times op-ed, “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution,” December 30, by Louis Michael Seidman
It doesn’t surprise me that the NY Times has decided the Constitution is merely a reference document now. The paper’s loyal readership, what’s left of it, lives huddled on the upper east side of New York, behind their hundred-million-dollar front doors, where wealth must be protected through any and all means.
The Constitution might impede that. Much better to have a central government that knows what its business and obligations really are: guarding the fortunes of the rich.
The Times editorial, of course, doesn’t say that. It merely leaves the founding document to wave in the breeze, its every pronouncement up for grabs.
The editorial is a test run to gauge the reaction.
Cutting the ropes that tether the Constitution to the government and the people isn’t a call for new energized dialogue on our common foundations. Things don’t work that way. Instead, what you get is naked fascism; the stronger force wins all arguments.
History, if paid attention to, would teach us that. But history isn’t on the minds of the powers behind the Times. They, like every other special-interest group in America, want guarantees. Wherever the trough is located, they want to stand at the head of the line and feed from it.
They want assured survival in an era of bailouts and waivers. If trillions of dollars are being thrown around by the White House, if the corruption is so thick it’s creating the biggest junta and banana republic in the history of the planet, they want in.
And they want, of course, the government to have all the guns, which requires a new rendering of the 2nd Amendment.
Obama needs allies in his next four years, as he strives to shred as much of the Constitution as he possibly can, and the Times just sent him a signal that they’re with him.
For example, HUD is about to unleash a new housing program across America, a residential version of forced school busing. It will compel every local government that accepts federal-housing money to erect low-income housing and “desegregate its demographic.”
The Constitutional legality of this move is across the river and into the trees. Court battles will spring up like grass in the spring. The White House needs back-up. The Times will provide it. It will come out and say enormous wealth redistribution is right and just and real, and the hell with the Constitution.