President Obama/Elizabeth Warren for Senate Needed Now More than Ever Before

I was elated as I am sure many of you were by the decision handed down yesterday by SCOTUS. In reality we know, I think, the decision hung by a thread and in the end who could know calling the mandate a "tax" instead of arguing it vis a vie the Constitution's commerce clause was the magic bullet for Chief Justice Roberts to red rover to our side. I have thanked him more than once across the blogs.

In reality the word tax in this nation is like saying Kryptonite to Superman. A negative aura was cast on that word practically from the country's founding BUT we all know taxes are eminently necessary for our nation to function to protect its people.

I am convinced effective taxation comes from electing good, ethical, honest, smart legislators and government workers appointed by them to avoid the rip off and con game that has reached Herculean heights especially by the odious decision of Citizens United. I went to a Bill Moyers blog and found the following:

Robert Kaiser, Associate Editor of the Washington Post, explains that as long as Washington is a center of money and power, it will tempt some people. He illustrates his point with the story that titled his book:

I went to [lobbyist Bob] Strauss, and I said, "Explain to me why the lobbying business has boomed so, in the years that you've been in it, 35 years." And he thought about it for a minute, and he said, "You know, there's just so damn much money … ."

It is why we need at least two or even three of the conservative justices responsible for the malignant decision of Citizens United turning Washington into the golden calf on steroids for the 1% supplanted by this Democratic president who works for the 99%. We hope these justices will be replaced when and if he is elected to his second term. It is WHY it is imperative for the reelection of the president to occur. Without that this nation will be taken down a path of oligarchic bought government – regulatorily anarchistic, unbridled and unrestrained in its reach to the goutian 1% whose appetite for all the money including yours and mine is impossible to satisfy. If we do not see these justices replaced we will not see in our time and in our children's time a nation we, as progressives, thought we knew.

I enclose a link here or below to some thoughts I developed about so called “originalist” justices after the decision was handed down.

Onward as the re-election of the president and the election of Elizabeth Warren for Senate is needed now seemingly more than ever before!

http://www.natalierosen.blogspot.com/2012/06/constitutional-essence-of-healthy.html

The Constitutional Essence of a Healthy Nation

I am thrilled by the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act. Even more thrilling was Chief Justice Roberts of the conservative five breaking away from them and voting astutely with progressives. He encased himself in what I think will be one of US history's greatest decisions, perhaps, the Civil Rights Act of health care in our time. When the nation elects brilliant leaders chosen at the right time it does brilliant things. Elections matter! It was a great week for the president and was a happy day for me. 

Having said that, I think about the conservative perspective of judicial review -- the so called constitutional "originalists" often labeled "strict constructionists" who are philosophically consumed by wanting to deviate little from what they think the Founders in 1789 constitutionally meant and wrote. I am quizzical. The population of the US in 1776 was approximately 350 thousand people.  There were 13 fledgling former colonies and a psychology of individual states which the Founders were trying, with difficulty, to form into some sort of collective sovereign entity. 

It was a nation, too, trying to form a just construct while ironically retaining the unjust institution of slavery, the economic lifeblood of especially the south but the whole nation too, as powerful in its time, perhaps, as the military industrial complex is today.  It is a nation now of 50 states populated by approximately 350 million diverse people with a panoply of different interests forming a huge melting pot of ideas.  Could the Founders have envisioned this?
 
A document constructed then must change now in many ways as the social fabric of the nation changes. Does one really think, for example, that the Founders understood their Second Amendment to allow rapid-fire guns with double clip magazines, unlimited assault rifles or a powerful organization advocating for minimal gun control even when a House member or a president is nearly assassinated with ease? Could they have envisioned domestic criminal thuggish often psychotic violence which never ends placing millions of guns in the hands of the psychologically unbalanced who will be tempted to use them at any cost?  

The Founders' nation was originally composed of 13 colonies afterward states needing to maintain state militias because they had confronted the external force of British control. Who is going to overthrow a country of 350 million successfully now? HOPEFULLY, NO ONE will.  What external threat could be so powerful as to force millions of individuals in that complex sovereign nation to think they need and must have weaponry geared for internal and external war which could, in truth, be waged only by local police or the various military forces of government? 

Truly, though, what was the Founders' original intent?  I believe it was to form a document which could accommodate change and thereby withstand the test of time.  I do not think the Founders were so obtuse to believe their institutions should be quick-sanded in 18^th-century cement.

Progressives understand the nation changes. We understand its people through their institutions and its Constitution must reflect that change as well.  The brilliance of the document the Founders wrote about two and one-half centuries ago is that it is flexible enough to accommodate those social changes which, I believe, the Founders knew, eventually, would occur.  We are still a healthy nation.   I hope the essence of progressive thought and its humane Constitutional interpretation keeps us that way.