It's About Liberty: A Conservative Forum
Topics => Politics/Legislation/Elections => Topic started by: Pandora on April 07, 2015, 10:22:39 AM
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Must be said again. (http://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com/2015/04/concurrence-at-last.html)
... So it’s been with the point I’ve strained to make about the evil of “compelling government interest:”
... Licensure and “compelling government interest” are interdependent; each requires the other to sustain it. In any analysis of the consequences of accepting those notions as valid, the emphasis should lie upon the government’s privilege of forbidding under threat of punishment. The power to say “you may” arises wholly from the power to say “you may not” – and to enforce the dictate at gunpoint.
But why no government can validly claim to have “interests,” compelling or otherwise, seems to elude most people. The core of it is that in the American Constitutional system, a government is an agent: a hireling charged with specified responsibilities and allowed to engage in certain delimited activities in discharging them. The relationship is exactly parallel to a homeowner who engages a landscaper to trim his hedge. The job is defined by the homeowner, and the landscaper is to do that and nothing else.
Imagine that the landscaper sees himself as having “interests” that include turning the homeowner’s hedge into a topiary. Would the homeowner be justified in becoming upset? Would he have a good case for refusing the landscaper his fee for that “service?” If the answers strike you as obvious, ask yourself why claims of “compelling government interests” should be treated any differently.
There's much more; read it all.
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That is good.
Thank God I've been a proud prickly son-of-a-bitch for some time now, but yeah, I will probably get even more SOBish, for sure!
I did not know the term "compelling state/governemnt interest" first reared it's filthy head in Korematsu v. United States...more fitting irony that it was progressive hero and Democrat icon FDR that rounded up all the Japanese in America...an act subsequently deemed bad by Democrats but not addressed until Reagan signed legislation in 1988. Also, no surprise that Black, in his majority opinion said "racial" roundups are "immediately suspect" then gave FDR his blessing to proceed.
Also no surprise the indefinite detention clause remains in place within the NADA statutes, even though every Democrat alive is dead against it and it is still there under their Dear Leader B. Hussein O.
They can all take "compelling state interest" and shove it up their asses! That crap will never trump "inviolate God-given right to life, liberty and happiness"!
No mercy!
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The truth of this is LOST on a vast majority. Daily life in the "Land of the Free & Home of the Brave" assumes that government has a right and a duty to rule, and that it is intrinsically good for it to do so. People assume that the government has a compelling interest in whatever it claims to have a compelling interest in. The idea that the citizenry is sovereign and should lord over a constitutionally contracted government is viewed as quaint, simple-minded, antiquated.
All but libertarians and conservatives with a libertarian bent. Everyone else falls into the above category. We are a distinct minority, and when the hammer falls, "compelling government interest" will deem us to be the nails. Then the sh*t hits the fan.
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I share Fran's sense of exasperation at how people simply cannot comprehend this. The government's "compelling interests" are exactly what we the people say they are, and no more or less.
Often times I feel like the American experiment was just that, an experiment. Early colonists were in many ways self-selected for individualism, but fast forward a few centuries and the population growth has in effect brought the Old World to these shores. The same stuff those early colonists wanted to get away from is now indigenous to the New World too.
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The government's "compelling interests" are exactly what we the people say they are, and no more or less.
Well, not really. "The government" has no interests, compelling or otherwise. (Or, it oughtn't anyway. Today their compelling interest is to appropriate as much power and money to themselves as possible.) They have duties and responsibilities as listed in the Constitution and some authority lent to them by the people in order to perform same.
In any case, I thought of you while I was reading Fran's piece, as you have written on the issue before.