Obama said, “If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.”
“But,” Obama said, “The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted.”
Before anyone carps that this was 2001, this fits with his response to Joe the Plumber, and he hasn’t (and I’m sure won’t) disavow it.
I don’t get it…at a time when the gap between the rich and poor is at its largest since the great depression, would a redistribution of wealth be such a bad thing?
On the first read it seems that someone with lesser abilities may view that as saying “Wealth redistribution” is unconstitutional. However, what he is saying is that “wealth redistribution” is not guaranteed by the constitution, so it would constitute a radical shift in the way we view the constitution for a court to require wealth to be redistributed. That says nothing about, absolutely nothing about, what a legislator or executive can do in regards to positive public programs, and the resulting behavior of lower courts. The essential point: The constitution is such that it restrains the government, the Warren court wasn’t radical because it’s ruling are compatible with this view.
Positive public programs are neither constitutionally required nor flatly unconstitutional, they are a matter of legislation.
When you apply both you end up with zero liberties. The two are not compatible.
How exactly do you intend to get hookers and drugs with no money?!
More importantly, what makes you think I, or any other hard working citizen, will cover your ass for healthcare and medication knowing you’re making yourself unhealthy with hookers and drugs?
Socialism depends on either the slavery of the innocent or the slavery of all.