Barack Obama
Shutterstock

We have to go back to Obama and what Obama did rhetorically. The Pandora’s box he opened when Republicans took control of the House, and then particularly when they had control of the House and the Senate, and he said, “We can’t wait. We can’t wait for legislation to pass. We can’t wait for the good, ordinary workings of divided government to find consensus we can all agree on. I have a phone and a pen and I’m gonna do whatever I have to do to do the ‘right thing.'”

And then, having said that he did not have the power to legalize the Dreamers and the people under DACA…he then announced that he did. And he unilaterally did, and then once again, the system worked in the sense the courts struck it down. And struck down other unconstitutional efforts by the Obama administration in the second term. 

But Trump’s assault on the Constitution, Trump’s language about the Constitution, that we have to go beyond the Constitution. You know, you can’t steal an election, so we have to suspend the Constitution because they’re stealing the election. All of that.

I don’t think that rhetoric would have existed absent Obama breaching some kind of blood/brain barrier relating to how we talk about ordinary working order and the Constitution was not bridgeable.

The idea that you could do something patently unconstitutional because it was “right” and then maybe you’d have some hail Mary and some court would say, “Yeah, go ahead.” That’s not something that people did until 2013. And now we got a Governor of New Mexico saying, “I don’t think the Constitution applies to my state. It’s not absolute.”

— John Podhoretz in Commentary Magazine Podcast ‘They’re Coming After the Constitution’

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

54 COMMENTS

  1. Oh, just freakin’ great — a thread that will soon be polluted by Liar69er and his TDS-inspired lying rants.

    Thanks.

  2. Obama, the Manchurian candidate, is at the root or many of our ills today and probably pulling most of Biden’s strings. I also suspect he got a cut of Biden’s influence peddling!

    • Obama is and always has been an empty suit. Valerie Jarrett was always the one pulling his strings. Obama doesn’t fart unless VJ approves it.

      • The word on the street in China is that he was cheating on his wife with men while smoking crack. Didn’t Obama say he did a little blow? I guess he was referring to more than one thing. He’s the most protected politician in the history of this country.

        • I’m still curious as to how the fact that the font/typeset used on ‘ol Barry’s alleged “birth certificate” was shown to have not even existed yet (at the time of his alleged birth in alleged Hawaii) was so easily swept under the rug and never discussed again.

          Talk about protected…

      • I think the suit is filled with manure.

        The old saying about incompetent and ineffectual leaders, s**t in a suit.

  3. To know who bill ayers is is to know who the self serving lord marshal b.h. obama is.

    democRats bill clintoon, b.h. obama, Jim Crow Gun Control joe biden…Who are the Biggest Gun Salesmen in US History?

    • After yesterday’s revelation about how far a certain Democrat would go for campaign funding the Dems have proven they will sink to further depths than the Clintons.

  4. Gee, if only somebody warned about slippery slopes hundreds of years ago.
    Maybe “two steps forward one step back.”
    Perhaps “give an inch, take a mile.”
    Incrementalism?
    Decaying standards?
    Something about genies and bottles.

    You know, all those things that don’t exist yet affect every aspect our lives for all points on the timeline.

    Maybe the biggest lie of all is that there every were standards.

    • The only difference now is that the mask is off. They don’t even try to hide it. They know the Mockingbird media will cover for them.

      • The Dems have the media, big tech, big business, Gov bureaucracy, and lettered agencies at their beck-and-call but still whine about how they are outnumbered.

  5. Not so much what Obama did, how could you expect an alleged “Constitutional scholar” to know any better, it’s more about the feckless Republicans that abdicated their responsibilities and ALLOWED that POS to get away with his “phone and pen” bullshit (clownboy even ADMITTED that his crap was “unconstitutional” but no one had the balls to formally call him out)… I blame MY Senators and Representatives for everything that Clown did AND for the current state of affairs with “Braindead Bribem” in the Whitehouse…

  6. Obama was the beginning of the neo-liberal/leftist/commie hellscape we now inhabit in this country. Clown world. Upside-down land. And what did the Repubs do? Ran corporate shill Mittens against him in 2012. The Dems are insane, and the Repubs are stupid.

    What a choice.

  7. “I don’t think the Constitution applies to my state. It’s not absolute.”

    Words straight out of Bribems mouth…, No Amendment is absolute?

  8. So no matter what the republicans might do that is illegal, immoral, unamerican or just plain stupid is because the democrats started it. Yeah right.

    • We got a red kid and blue kid getting fat off of eating our cookies and you are why they will always get away with it.

  9. The assault on the Constitution began within 20 years of the Bill of Rights ratification. it picked up steam post reconstruction an landed us where we are today.

    People in power want more power and the wealth power attracts.

    • Back that up a bit. It got started at the beginning of the Civil War. First, Lincoln suspended the right of habeus corpus (to keep Maryland from voting for secession), and then he declared that states did not have the right to secede from the Union, which was the beginning of the supremacy of federal power over states’ sovereignty. Although this was in many ways a good thing, still it signaled the beginning of the burgeoning of federal power and the Administrative State that has become the antithesis of the republican government enacted by the founders.

  10. Commentary is a monthly American magazine on religion, Judaism, and politics, as well as social and cultural issues. Founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945 under Elliot E. Cohen, editor from 1945 to 1959, Commentary magazine developed into the leading post-World War II journal of Jewish affairs. The periodical strove to construct a new American Jewish identity while processing the events of the Holocaust, the formation of the State of Israel, and the Cold War. Norman Podhoretz edited the magazine from 1960 to 1995.

    His son John, the guy being quoted in this article, led the “Against Trump” movement in 2016. John is divorced and Jewish.

    American-Israeli journalist Benjamin Balint and former editor at Commentary described the magazine as the “contentious magazine that transformed the Jewish left into the neoconservative right”.[12][13] Historian and literary critic Richard Pells said that “no other journal of the past half century has been so consistently influential, or so central to the major debates that have transformed the political and intellectual life of the United States.”

    Commentary was the successor to the Contemporary Jewish Record, which was published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and ran from 1938 to 1945.

    Commentary was instrumental in helping define the narrative for the invasion of Iraq along with the neoconservative publications The Weekly Standard and National Review.

    This is why it’s so important for the US to support Israel. Without Jews and Israel, the USA would not have its foreign policy!

    • Go away you anti-Semitic troll. Go push your garbage lies somewhere else. Jews didn’t lead us into Iraq, the Democrats under Obama did.

      • Umm… the US invaded Iraq years before Obama. The US has always had this corrupt corporatist element. Henry Clay proudly called it the American System. USMC Lt Gen Smedley Butler wrote a book “War is a Racket” about it.

        • You notice that butler said or did nothing to rock the boat before he secured a lucrative .gov pension for life? He was an officer. At any time that he wanted he could have resigned and left that corrupt system. But he stayed to earn his pension.

          Only after he got his bennies secured did he start spouting off. How far would you trust his opinion, and that is what his writings are, just opinions from a man with no honor?

        • jwm enough to not casually dismiss it as a possibility. Whistle blower protection is a sick joke and limited marketable experience paired with being blackballed sucks. With that said would need to read up and see what is viable.

      • Actually, it was Bush 2 and the “yellow cake” letter the Brits swore was true. Had he not listened to the Brits, we never would’ve gone there. The good news is that Sadam and his corrupt regime are gone and has been replaced with a corrupt quasi-democracy. “Mission accomplished!” /s

      • George Bush I led us into Kuwait (and a glorius victory), and GWII led us into Iraq (based on lies and for all the wrong reasons). Obama was the one who pulled us out, carrying out promises to withdraw made by GWII, when Iraq would not extend immunity guarantees to our soldiers. ISIS followed. Get your history straight.

    • Largely a cut-and-paste from Wikipedia, without crediting the source.

      Also know as “plagiarism” — the fraudulent representation of another person’s language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one’s own original work, per Wikipedia.

  11. It started long before Obama, it started with Lincoln (the First Imperialistic president of the US), and it has been a problem repeated by many President’s with the worst ones uniformly being the Democrats Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Clinton, Obama

  12. Obama’s unilateral action and New Mexico Governor Grisham’s unilateral action are simple examples of the human condition: there are people among us who lack internal constraints, who want what they want, and who will try to take it regardless of the righteousness or propriety of their desires.

    You cannot persuade such people with appeals to decency or arguments of wrong-versus-right because THEY DON’T CARE. The sad reality is that we have to be ready and able to forcibly stop such people from stealing our dignity, our property, our time, our health, and our very lives.

  13. Sorry Grace, we could’ve done without this one. This article is just stupid. Quite frankly, the DemonicRats had already suspended the constitution in 2020 when they changed election law in multiple states through administrative fiat and the courts and not the legislature. Those states that did so should not have had their electors counted on 1/6. In short, Trump was right.

  14. To be fair GWB started alot of this with the patriot act and their own bending of the constitution. Obama just took it to the next level.

    • Joe Biden was there, in the midst of digging people out. He wore blisters on his hands, his dog was even there looking for survivors.
      After much digging he found what he was searching for, however the chocolate chip ice cream had already melted.
      ” I love the smell of strawberry suave shampoo in the morning, it smells like,,,,Victory.”

      • ” I love the smell of strawberry suave shampoo in the morning, it smells like,,,,Puberty” There I fixed it for you.

    • “i’d be more interested in what angus podgorny has to say.”

      I’m far more interested in what a properly dry-aged Angus steak tastes like, hardwood flame-broiled, medium rare, with sauteed mushrooms, and a healthy hint of garlic.

      Dayum, 6 hours until supper… 🙁

  20. I’d personally say that the patriot act was the first big step in complete disregard for the Constitution. it likely wasn’t the first step but it was the most public and we let them do it….

  23. Andrew Jackson, a Democrat, when informed a Supreme Court ruling went against him, allegedly said, ” They ruled, now let them enforce it.” And, yes I may have the quote wrong in the wording. Been many years since I studied that part of history.
    IIRC it was a ruling on the Indian Removal Act.
    So the Democrats have a long history of defying SCOTUS rulings and trying to subvert the Constitution.
    The current leftist trend and current pattern of defiance started with Woodrow Wilson. Envious of the Soviet rule in Russia.

  24. Not Entirely Off Topic:
    I’m close to apolitical, and certainly lack an aggressive stance.
    I would ask that in our stew pot of opinions that once in a while we inject a phrase or two describing simple and honest courses of civil action. Angry outbursts are great, but an inch of progress would help us more.
    Note that my own assessment of our current situation is that most mass shooters and rioters are fully funded and protected by (Insert Millionaire’s Names Here), active members of cabals. Protected by US Gubmint Agencies that WE PAY FOR.
    Being angry isn’t enough…being useful or even eloquent enough to sway the Television-Addicted folks who are mindlessly backing these damaging dramas would be much better.
    To Quote Star Trek Scotty and Bones at the same time: “I’m an Engineer, not a Lawyer”.
    Maybe more of us should have gone to law school. (Not me, thanks).
    IMHO: Useful advice and plausible direction on how to literally fight City Hall is always gratefully welcomed, and would benefit the readers of the site more directly.
    Rant over.

Comments are closed.