Is The Constitution Being Replaced?

President Barack Obama is unhappy with the U.S. Constitution and wants to change it.

America's Founding Fathers, Mr. Obama has said, had “an enormous blind spot” and produced a “deeply flawed” document as the cornerstone of our republic.

One such flaw, he told Democratic Party campaign contributors in Chicago on May 22, is that it apportions two Senate seats to each state, large or small.

“That puts us at a disadvantage,” said President Obama.

Democrats, he said, “tend to congregate a little more densely” in big cities like Chicago and New York, and this, plus the way congressional seats are apportioned by population and state, gives Republicans an advantage.

These “are some structural reasons why, despite the fact that Republican ideas are largely rejected by the public, it's still hard for us to break through,” said President Obama.

Oddly, despite Mr. Obama's claim that the public rejects Republican ideas, the GOP holds a solid majority in the House of Representatives and has a good chance of winning control of the Senate this November.

It is chilling to hear President Obama complaining that the Constitution limits his power to impose his radical egalitarian Progressive ideology. In almost too many ways to count, he has violated his oath to uphold the Constitution and faithfully execute our laws.

His presidency seems like one long end-run around the Constitution and its restrictions on arbitrary governmental power. He has even boasted that he can ignore laws he dislikes and rule via his pen, via the rules and fines of his regulatory agencies, and via emergency powers and Executive Orders.

Mr. Obama seems to share the megalomaniacal view of America's first Progressive Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, who said that the powers of the Presidency are as big as the man occupying the office. Translation: keep grabbing more and more power until they can make you stop. A Progressive president's power is limited only by his ambition.

Far-sighted rather than blind, America's Framers designed the Constitution to ensure that we would be a representative federal republic of states, not a giant collectivist democracy ruled by property-grabbing political demagogues and the majority of votes they can buy by redistributing taxpayer money and citizen wealth.

America's Framers set out to thwart the aims of future power-hungry politicians like President Obama.

In 1787 James Madison, Thomas Jefferson's protege who would become our fourth President, wrote in Federalist Paper Number 10 that the Constitution was shaped to protect property and diversity – including diversity of talent, effort and success.

Contrary to the obsession of Progressives such as President Obama with income equality, Madison recognized that a major flaw in democracies was that they give majorities the power to expropriate the property of minorities, especially the envied minorities that earn more money and property than others.

Democracies, wrote Madison, “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

Democracies tend to self-destruct through class, ethnic and race warfare. Politicians break democracies into “factions,” wrote Madison. By using divide-and-conquer tactics to pit citizens against one another, politicians advance their own power (and wealth).

As Jefferson wrote, the Framers' aim was to restrict the power of politicians and government, to “bind them down with the chains of the Constitution.”

Republics tend to produce many centers of power that check and balance each other. This encourages social stability, harmony, diversity, liberty – and prosperity. This is what America's Framers intended to produce.

Today Mr. Obama's imperious, high-handed radical politics have chilled the climate for investment, deterred investors, and prompted multinational companies to keep $3 Trillion overseas that in the past they would have brought home to the United States to produce jobs and prosperity here. His unrelenting hostility to business has created enormous fear and uncertainty that we are being fundamentally transformed from a republic into a mere democracy where property will be easy to expropriate politically.

Obama's fellow Progressive, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo – a potential 2016 presidential contender - in April 2014 signed into law a National Popular Vote Bill to allocate New York State's electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the largest number of popular votes nationwide – even if a majority of New York voters cast their ballots for someone else.

New York thus joins California and 9 other states, plus the District of Columbia – with a combined total of 165 of the 270 electoral votes, 61 percent of those needed to elect a President – in this blatant circumvention of the Constitution's clearly-intended federal dispersion of power.

If states with more than 270 combined electoral votes agree to this end run around the Constitution, Democrats thereafter will generally campaign only in the biggest cities of the United States.

Had this been in effect in 2000, Al Gore would have become President, even though his home state Tennessee, where people knew him best, voted strongly against him. Gore had gone to liberal California to pump up his vote total in a state he was already sure to carry. Texas Governor George W. Bush could have done likewise in his home state, but under our electoral system he saw no reason to do so.

Our Constitution could be amended if a majority of Americans truly wanted to tilt our democratic Republic to advantage the biggest cities and states, as this measure does....to favor places where President Obama says Democrats “congregate.”

Instead, our Constitution and its restraints on the size and power of government is being replaced in utterly unconstitutional ways by tiny politicians who cast long shadows – which is what happens when the sun is setting.

SOURCES:

Dave Boyer, “Obama Blames Founding Fathers' 'Structural' Design of Congress for Gridlock,” Washington Times, May 23, 2014. URL: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/23/obama-blames-structural-design-congress-gridlock/

Chris Banescu, “Obama Unhappy with America's Constitutional Balance of Powers,” American Thinker, May 24, 2014. URL: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/05/obama_unhappy_with_americas_constitutional_balance_of_powers.html

David A. Patten, “Obama: Constitution is 'Deeply Flawed,'” Newsmax, October 27, 2008. URL: http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/obama-constitution/2008/10/27/id/326165/

James Madison, “The Federalist No. 10,” Daily Advertiser, November 22, 1787. URL: http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa10.htm

CBS New York / Associated Press, “Gov. Andrew Cuomo Signs National Popular Vote Bill,” April 15, 2014. URL: http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/04/15/gov-andrew-cuomo-signs-national-popular-vote-bill/

Lowell Ponte is co-author, with Craig R. Smith, of four books – the latest of which is The Great Withdrawal: How the Progressives' 100-Year Debasement of America and the Dollar Ends. Their latest White Paper, Don't Bank on It!, looks at 19 major risks to your bank accounts and money, and ways people can protect themselves against these risks. Both the book and White Paper are free.