Posted on April 11, 2007

by

Daniel Clark

While helping his party fabricate a Bush administration scandal, Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama stirred up a minor controversy of his own. In criticizing the president for his firing of eight U.S. attorneys, Obama said, "I was a constitutional law professor, which means, unlike the president, I actually respect the Constitution.

Republican National Committee spokesman Dan Ronayne pointed out that Obama was not in fact a professor, but only a senior lecturer, at the University of Chicago. Fair enough, but the truly dishonest part of Obama's statement is in claiming that his academic achievements translate into a respect for the law of our land. Like all liberal Democrats, the Illinois senator reads the Constitution the same way that W.C. Fields read the Bible ("looking for loopholes"). The difference is that Fields didn't have the chutzpah to claim that this exercise meant he was devoutly religious.

With typical liberal narcissism, Obama thinks the Constitution is all about himself. He said as much when he voted against confirming Chief Justice John Roberts. He agreed that the judge was impeccably qualified, but voiced concern that the two of them would not feel the same way about certain cases.

"In those circumstances," he theorized, "your decisions about whether affirmative action is an appropriate response to the history of discrimination in this country, or whether a general right of privacy encompasses a more specific right of women to control their reproductive decisions, or whether the commerce clause empowers Congress to speak on those issues of broad national concern that may be only tangentially related to what is easily defined as interstate commerce … in those difficult cases, the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart."

Obalderdash.

The type of affirmative action that Obama champions, racial quotas and double-standards in state college admissions, is a direct violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. To selectively deny some students the protection of this law runs afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment's "equal protection" clause.

Not only is there no "general right to privacy" in the Constitution, but Obama has in the past gone to anti-constitutional extremes in defense of abortion. As a committee chairman in the Illinois state senate in 2003, he blocked a bill from coming to the floor that would have protected children who had survived abortion attempts, much like the federal bill that President Bush signed that same year. These children, already born, are not only indisputably people, but also U.S. citizens. Yet the senator dismisses these babies' killings as just more "reproductive decisions."

He barely even attempts to hide his flouting of the "commerce clause" in Article I Section 8, where the powers of Congress are defined. "Interstate commerce" is the large scale physical movement of commodities from one state to another. To someone who truly respects the Constitution, this clause does not leave much room for sentimentalism

When the Constitution is silent on an issue, the Tenth Amendment delegates the decision-making power to state and local governments, not to the whims of the federal judiciary. It contains no "follow your heart" clause to justify Obama's vote against Roberts. The "critical ingredient" is supplied, as always, by the language of the law, not by the individual egos of judges and politicians.

Obama has no constitutional beef with President Bush, who is empowered by law to fire U.S. attorneys, without having to justify his actions to Congress. The only way the senator can claim otherwise is by falling back on the personalized redefinition he used against Roberts. If constitutionality is the product of one's heart, then all Obama has to do is establish that his heart is superior to the president's in order to show that he has greater respect for the Constitution.

That's not hard to do, given the prevailing media mythology. On the one hand, we have the liberal Democrat senator, whose heart is so pure that if only he looked more like a pastry, he could easily be mistaken for Mother Theresa. On the other, our hard-hearted president, who took time off from stealing elections, starting hurricanes and drowning polar bears so that he could bomb Iraqi children to smithereens, just to stop them from flying their kites.

Ergo, Barack Obama is the embodiment of the "living Constitution." That means he can interpret the document to mean anything he needs it to, just as long as his heart tells him so. As it happens, this is also the way he has interpreted the word "professor."

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