Several times a week I force myself to be subjected to five minutes
or so of neocon chatter by Rush Limbaugh, Marc Levin (“The Grate One”), Sean
Hannity, or the FAUX News Channel morning show. Their bloviations are
filled with extreme hypocrisy and delusional contradictions.
For example, during the Bush administration the neocon mantra was
“9/11 changed everything!” by which they meant, “to hell with the
Constitution.” Whenever Judge Andrew Napolitano would challenge any of
his FAUX News Channel colleagues over warrantless wiretaps, NSA spying,
undeclared and unconstitutional wars, torturing of prisoners, the
murder-by-drone of American citizens, etc., this was their mantra, their
all-purpose slogan designed to censor all discussion. “Constitution
Schmonstitution” was their unofficial motto.
Now that a Democrat is in the White House that has all changed.
Marc Levin, who slavishly supported Bush’s “War on Terra” and all of its
constitutional subversions, has even written a very silly book on the
importance of sticking to the Constitution. His fellow neocons
all sounded more like Mussolini than (James) Madison during the Bush
administration but today they have all become born-again constitutionalists.
At least until the next
Republican is elected president.
For
example, the Heritage Foundation published a study entitled “An Executive
Unbound,” condemning Obama for his “abusive, unlawful, and even potentially
unconstitutional actions.” Charles (“Dr. Strangelove”) Krauthammer has
bellowed that Obama’s actions have been “unbelievably unconstitutional.”
George Will has said that Obama’s unconstitutional behavior is “worse than
Nixon’s.” Senator Ted Cruz has published a list of “76 lawless Obama
administration actions” through executive order. What a hoot!
The
funniest and most thoroughly confused of all the neocons has to be Marc
Levin. Rarely does an evening go by on his radio show that he does not
invoke the “wisdom” of his nationalist, Hamiltonian political heroes,
Alexander Hamilton, Chief Justice John Marshall, Justice Joseph Story, and .
. . drum roll please . . . . . . . . Abraham Lincoln in his diatribes against
Obama and the big shots of the
Republican Party.
This,
however, is the root of the problem with all neocons like Levin and their
Republican Party. They are the political descendants of the nationalist
wing of American politics, represented by the views of the above-mentioned
individuals. If Hamilton, Marshall, Story, and Lincoln stood for
anything, they stood for a highly centralized government with a dictatorial
executive branch. They were all mortal enemies of the alternative,
Jeffersonian states’ rights tradition, the tradition that gave us federalism,
the Tenth Amendment, decentralized government, and the rights of
nullification and secession. It is the tradition that is epitomized by
the slogan, “that government is best which governs least,” as Jefferson once
said.
It was
Levin’s hero Hamilton who first invented the poisonous notion of “implied
powers” of the Constitution. He did this in his debate with Jefferson
over the constitutionality of a national bank. In doing so he literally
laid the theoretical groundwork for the dismemberment of the Constitution as a
limitation of governmental power for future generations of despots. He
was also the first to point out how the Commerce and General Welfare Clauses
of the Constitution could be used by slick-talking lawyers like himself to
subvert constitutional limitations of governmental powers and turn the
government into one of more-or-less unlimited powers. Unlimited
government was fine in Hamilton’s view, as long as people of high moral
character (like himself, for instance) were in charge of it. This is
one reason why Jefferson thought of him as a mortal threat to American
liberty.
At the
constitutional convention Hamilton called for a permanent president who would
appoint all the governors as his puppets. All power would have been in
the hands of the central government, especially the executive branch.
He was the original neocon. His proposal was not adopted by the
founders, of course, but was cemented
into place in 1865 when states’ rights, the political philosophy of the
founding generation of Jeffersonians, was neutered. Americans have
slaved under ever-increasing centralized federal tyranny ever since.
Levin’s
other hero, John Marshall, repeated Hamilton’s lies about the American
founding – that the Constitution was supposedly not adopted by state
political conventions but by the “whole people” of the country – to “justify”
increased powers of the central government, including a national bank, which
he declared to be constitutional despite the fact that the idea was discussed
and rejected by the constitutional convention. Like Hamilton, Marshall
was a centralizer and a sworn enemy of federalism. No wonder Jefferson
hated and despised him despite the fact that he was his second cousin.
Joseph
Story, whom Levin praised just a few nights ago on his radio show as though he
was perhaps the Greatest Human Being Ever to Inhabit Planet Earth, was “the
most Hamiltonian of judges,” wrote historian Clinton Rossiter in his book, Alexander
Hamilton and the Constitution. Levin praised Story’s
book, Commentaries on the Constitution,
which Rossiter described as a training manual for “the political elite of the
Northern states” in the nineteenth century. As such, the book is
essentially a roadmap for constitutional subversion. The Supreme Court
“still cites it!!” screamed an absolutely giddy Marc Levin. But of
course they do, for obvious reasons that are apparently lost on The Grate
One. It is an instruction manual for destroying constitutional
limitations on government. In fact, the Supreme Court cites its ideas
so frequently that, as Judge Andrew Napolitano pointed out in
The Constitution in Exile, the Court did not find one single
federal law to be outside the bounds of the constitution from 1937 to 1995.
Joseph
Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution,
which Clinton Rossiter said should have been called “Commentaries on
Alexander Hamilton’s Commentaries on the Constitution,” lays out the
Hamiltonian view of the Constitution. This is the view that the
Constitution should not bind the government in chains, as Jefferson once
said, but should instead serve as a potential rubber stamp of approval of anything the federal government ever
wanted to do (Like healthcare socialism, eh Chief Justice Roberts?).
This was how Hamilton himself viewed the Constitution after the convention
rejected his “president for life” proposal as too king-like. He then
condemned the Constitution as “a frail and worthless fabric.” As “the
most “Hamiltonian of judges,” this is what Joseph Story, Marc Levin’s hero, set
out to do in writing his long-winded book on “constitutional commentaries.”
These
men all laid the rhetorical groundwork for Levin’s ultimate hero, Abraham
Lincoln. Levin was a one-man carnival of contradictions last night on
his radio show by harshly condemning the current leadership of the Republican
Party for not being “Lincolnesque” and going back to the roots of the
Republican Party on the one hand, while on the other hand viciously attacking
Obama for his “dictatorial” and unconstitutional behavior. But it
was Lincoln, armed with several generations of nationalist rhetoric (the
words of Hamilton, Marshall, Story, Daniel Webster, and other fellow
nationalists), who was the most unconstitutional and dictatorial of all
presidents. He claimed the power to redefine treason from its clear
meaning in Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution as “levying war upon the
United States” or “giving aid” and “comfort to THEIR enemies,” to any criticism of him or his policies
(emphasis added). Treason is defined in the Constitution as levying war
upon the free and independent states (as they are defined by the Declaration
of Independence), which of course is exactly what Lincoln did.
Having
declared all of his political opponents to be traitors, Lincoln unconstitutionally
suspended Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern
political critics and opponents without due process; shredded
the First Amendment by shutting down hundreds of opposition newspapers and
censoring the telegraphs; deported his main Democratic Party critic,
Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio in a bold-faced attack on the
separation of powers; confiscated privately-owned firearms in the border
states; violated his oath to protect and defend the Constitution by waging total
war on his own country; rigged Northern elections; intimidated federal judges
with soldiers so that they could not issue writs of Habeas Corpus, further
destroying the separation of powers; enforced the slavery of military
conscription (and executed deserters on a daily basis); and worse.
All of
this has been lavishly praised by left-wing academics like law professor
George Fletcher, in his book, Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined
American Democracy, for laying the groundwork for the kind of
dictatorial executive branch powers that were necessary to give us the
gargantuan welfare state that is bankrupting America today. It has been
similarly praised by the right-wing statists known as “Straussians” (of which
Levin is a follower) because it can be used to “justify” and support an
ever-enlarged warfare state.
If Marc
Levin and the other neocons want a president who behaves more like Lincoln,
they should all become supporters rather than critics of Barack Obama and his
“unbelievably unconstitutional” behavior.
