McCain's Legacy Precedes Him

Does the US Constitution mean anything anymore? The Founders' wisdom displayed in its construction appears an increasingly thin barrier between us and the sort of soft despotism of which DeTocqueville warned us. Encouragingly, no new breaches have yet occurred under Chief Justice Roberts, and several existing ones have been repaired. Yet there is abroad in this land of ours an impulse to throw it off, as if it actually were, in the immortal words of William Jefferson Clinton to his Euro interlocutors, "that damned constitution", an 18th century institutional relic still impeding the bright future the left has in mind for us all. One such inconvenience for liberals-in-hurry is the First Amendment's prohibition of government restrictions on free political speech.

It is a measure of the pathology of the times that this bedrock principle, once enshrined as sacrosanct, has been dealt a significant blow by the tag-teaming effort of all three branches of government in passing into law the McCain-Feingold atrocity, somehow sidestepping the actual words, meaning, and intent of the constitution, which to many startled and alarmed observers thought impossible to misinterpret--does "no" mean "no" only in the context of sexual harrassment? John McCain, George Bush, and the five Supremes whose pretzel logic delivered that serious blow to our first amendment privileges, especially deserve the opprobrium, even the hot anger, of all liberty-loving citizens.

George Will points to the kind of brush fires springing up across the land, typified by the outrage in my home state of Colorado. Residents of Parker North, a conclave of some 200 houses, were surprised to find that their public objections to being annexed by the larger town of Parker ran afoul of McCain Feingold. Under the umbrella and instruction of the federal government in its expressed intent to regulate political speech despite the constitution's clear language denying that authority, many state and local officials, mimicking their constitutional elders, are driving their various regulatory trucks through the hole blasted in the constitution's walls by his eminence John McCain. Thanks, Senator.

The residents of Parker North are being assisted in a federal lawsuit against their local commissars by the Institute for Justice. Perhaps this important suit will make it to the attention of the Supremes, and with their new majority will remedy this egregious, and dangerous, deprivation of liberty. Read the Will piece here,

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/the_parker_six_beat_mccainism.html

and consider donating to the Institute for Justice here: http://www.ij.org/.--they are doing the Lord's work here and in many areas of constitutional incursion by governments intent on taking from YOU the liberties the fundamental law of the land guarantees to US citizens.