We might as well put the Constitution out of its misery.
By Mark Steyn
Wednesday, June 26, 2013 — just another day in a constitutional republic of limited government by citizen representatives:
First
thing in the morning, Gregory Roseman, Deputy Director of Acquisitions
(whatever that means), became the second IRS official to take the Fifth
Amendment, after he was questioned about awarding the largest contract
in IRS history, totaling some half a billion dollars, to his close
friend Braulio Castillo, who qualified under a federal “set aside”
program favoring disadvantaged groups — in this case, disabled veterans.
For the purposes of federal contracting, Mr. Castillo is a “disabled
veteran” because he twisted his ankle during a football game at the U.S.
Military Academy prep school 27 years ago. How he overcame this
crippling disability to win a half-billion-dollar IRS contract is the
heartwarming stuff of an inspiring Lifetime TV movie.
Later
in the day, Senator John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota and alleged
author of the Corker-Hoeven amendment to the immigration bill, went on
Hugh Hewitt’s radio show and, in a remarkable interview, revealed to the
world that he had absolutely no idea what was in the legislation he
“wrote.” Rachel Jeantel, the endearingly disastrous star witness at the
George Zimmerman trial, excused her inability to comprehend the letter
she’d supposedly written to Trayvon Martin’s parents on the grounds that
“I don’t read cursive.” Senator Hoeven doesn’t read legislative. For
example, Section 5(b)(1):
Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall establish a strategy, to be known as the ‘Southern Border Fencing Strategy’ . . .
On the other hand, Section 5(b)(5):
Notwithstanding paragraph (1), nothing in this subsection shall require the Secretary to install fencing . . .
Asked
to reconcile these two paragraphs, Senator Hoeven explained that, “when
I read through that with my lawyer,” the guy said relax, don’t worry
about it. (I paraphrase, but barely.) So Senator Hoeven and 67 other
senators went ahead the following day and approved the usual
bazillion-page we-have-to-pass-it-to-find-out-what’s-in-it omnibus bill,
cooked up in the backrooms, released late on a Friday afternoon and
passed in nothing flat after Harry Reid decreed there’s no need for
further debate — not that anything recognizable to any genuine
legislature as “debate” ever occurs in “the world’s greatest
deliberative body.”
Say what you like about George III, but the
Tea Act was about tea. The so-called comprehensive immigration reform is
so comprehensive it includes special deals for Nevada casinos and the
recategorization of the Alaskan fish-processing industry as a “cultural
exchange” program, because the more leaping salmon we have the harder it
is for Mexicans to get across the Bering Strait. While we’re bringing
millions of Undocumented-Americans “out of the shadows,” why don’t we
try bringing Washington’s decadent and diseased law-making out of the
shadows?
Just when you thought the day couldn’t get any more
momentous, the Supreme Court weighed in on same-sex marriage. When less
advanced societies wish to introduce gay marriage, the people’s elected
representatives assemble in parliament and pass a law. That’s how they
did it in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Portugal,
etc. But one shudders to contemplate what would result were the
legislative class to attempt “comprehensive marriage reform,” complete
with tax breaks for Maine lobstermen’s au pairs and the hiring of 20,000
new IRS agents to verify business expenses for page boys from
disparate-impact groups. So instead it fell to five out of nine judges,
which means it fell to Anthony Kennedy, because he’s the guy who swings
both ways. Thus, Supreme Intergalactic Emperor Anthony gets to decide
the issue for 300 million people.
As Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben so
famously says in every remake, with great power comes great
responsibility. Having assumed the power to redefine a societal
institution that predates the United States by thousands of years,
Emperor Tony the All-Wise had the responsibility at least to work up the
semblance of a legal argument. Instead, he struck down the Defense of
Marriage Act on the grounds that those responsible for it were motivated
by an “improper animus” against a “politically unpopular group” they
wished to “disparage,” “demean,” and “humiliate” as “unworthy.” What
stump-toothed knuckle-dragging inbred swamp-dwellers from which hellish
Bible Belt redoubt would do such a thing? Well, fortunately, we have
their names on the record: The DOMA legislators who were driven by their
need to “harm” gay people include notorious homophobe Democrats Chuck
Schumer, Pat Leahy, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, and the virulent anti-gay
hater who signed it into law, Bill Clinton.
It’s good to have President Clinton’s animus against gays finally
exposed by Anthony Kennedy. There’s a famous photograph of him taken
round the time he signed DOMA, at a big fundraiser wearing that
black-tie-and-wing-collar combo that always made him look like the
maître d’ at a 19th-century bordello. He’s receiving greetings from
celebrity couple Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, who’d come out as gay
the week before and, in the first flush of romance, can’t keep their
hands off each other even with President Happy Pants trying to get a
piece of the action. For a man motivated only by a hateful need to harm
gays, he’s doing a grand job of covering it up, looking like the guy who
decided to splash out for the two-girl special on the last night of the
sales convention. Nevertheless, reacting to the Supreme Court’s
decision, President Clinton professed himself delighted to have been
struck down as a homophobe.
In
his dissent, Justice Scalia wrote that “to defend traditional marriage
is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other
arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United
States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions.” Indeed.
With this judgment, America’s constitutional court demeans and
humiliates only its own. Of all the local variations through which
same-sex marriage has been legalized in the last decade, mostly
legislative (France, Iceland) but occasionally judicial (Canada, South
Africa), the United States is unique in its inability to jump on the
Western world’s bandwagon du jour without first declaring its current
vice president, president pro tem of the Senate, majority leader,
chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, and prospective first First
Gentleman raging gay-bashers. As the Paula Deens of orientation, maybe
they should all be canceled.
There is something deeply weird, not to say grubby and dishonest,
about this. In its imputation of motive to those who disagree with it,
this opinion is more disreputable than Roe v. Wade — and with
potentially unbounded application. To return to the immigration bill,
and all its assurances that those amnestied will “go to the end of the
line” and have to wait longer for full-blown green cards and longer
still for citizenship, do you seriously think any of that hooey will
survive its first encounter with a federal judge? In much of the
Southwest, you’d have jurisdictions with a majority of Hispanic
residents living under an elderly, disproportionately white voting roll.
You can cut-and-paste Kennedy’s guff about “improper animus” toward “a
group of people” straight into the first immigration appeal, and a
thousand more. And that’s supposing the administrative agencies pay any
attention to the “safeguards” in the first place.
As I say, just
another day in the life of the republic: a corrupt bureaucracy
dispensing federal gravy to favored clients; a pseudo-legislature
passing bills unread by the people’s representatives and uncomprehended
by the men who claim to have written them; and a co-regency of jurists
torturing an 18th-century document in order to justify what other
countries are at least honest enough to recognize as an unprecedented
novelty. Whether or not, per Scalia, we should “condemn” the United
States Constitution, it might be time to put the poor wee thing out of
its misery.
http://tinyurl.com/pojd6oy
1 comment:
Excellent as always, Mr. Steyn.
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