Saturday, February 26, 2005
Harry Reid and cohorts - "almost a socialist"
Senator Harry Reid is trying to make a big name for himself where it concerns President Bush's judicial nominations that the Senate has been snarled with since Bush's election in 2000. Reid is just the latest in a line of Senate obstructionists who have done their level best to thwart the will of the majority of the American people. When I think of this Reid another Reed comes to mind. Speaker of the House Tom Reed from the 1880s, to be specific, who once said "We live in a world of sin and sorrow. Otherwise there would be no Democratic Party."
The current Reid is just the latest example of the left using tactics now that they decried when they were a nascent ideology at the dawn of the 20th century. The Progressives of the late 1800s and early 1900s created a novel way to look at the creation of the Constitution and, therefore, this country. It was a conspiracy theory to beat all conspiracy theories.
The biggest proponent of it was a writer (some call him an historian, but he was no such thing, in reality) named Charles Beard. The novel idea that he proposed in 1912 was that the Founding Fathers hated Democracy and had no interest in philosophy, but were just money grubbing, selfish creeps who wanted to keep the vaunted "people" in misery and poverty. He basically called all the Founders liars. He further went on to state that the Founders used the courts to force their ideas on an unwilling populace, thereby bypassing legislature and democracy. By the way, according to a Beard friend, Matthew Josephson, Charles Beard once described himself as "almost a socialist" in the early 1900s. Shocking, I know.
From that point on leftist intelligensia became fond of claiming that the establishment, the government and the country itself was illegitimate because democracy was thwarted and so it all must be destroyed because of that early deception. They patted themselves on the back that THEY were more "democratic" than Republicans at the turn of the century or any American politician since the founding.
But, do we see what Democrats and Leftist's are now doing and have been doing since FDR's days in office? That's right, hypocritically thwarting democracy by using the courts to go around the legislature as they castigated the Founders for doing. So, now we get back to why Harry Reid is obstructing Bush's judicial nominations. Now we must consider why, for the first time in US Senate history, that filibusters are being used against even lower court nominations. Now we can realize why Harry Reid and his un-democratic Democrats are so intent on trying to "screw things up" in the Senate (Reid's very words Last week). They wish to be LESS democratic. THEY wish to be sure that judges who do not toe the line of their social agenda are to be denied a place in the courts of this country.
At issue is their impotency at the ballot box. They are losing more and more offices as each decade has passed since the Reagan revolution in 1980. But, even before that they realized that their socialist leaning agenda was not something the average American would agree to. So, the courts was the balm they could spread upon their bleeding hearts. If the American people aren't smart enough to agree with the social liberals, then go around them, was and is their cry. Why not? The Founders did it, after all. And FDR did, too. And they were all successful, right?
Only the godfather of this idea that the Founders were anti-democratic created his new polemic on faulty historical analysis. His was an historical fraud of finding "proof" to fit his preconceived "almost a socialist" agenda. Nearly everything the Founder's did in the Constitutional convention was based on the voluminous reading of philosophy and history that the Founders immersed themselves in. The ideas of democracy from the classical histories to that of recent times was the Mother's milk of the Founder's creation of the Constitution as the Federalists Papers makes abundantly clear. Further more, many of the Founders had quite a few run ins with the Supreme Court and other courts themselves and they, too, grumbled about "activist judges". That very fact alone makes the lie to the very basis of the Left's reasoning for court packing.
So, there we have it. Harry Reid is just another "almost a socialist" who is trying his level best to defeat the kind of democracy that the Founders AND the American people want.
I have one request of Harry's constituents. Daschle this guy, will ya?
By Warner Todd Huston
The current Reid is just the latest example of the left using tactics now that they decried when they were a nascent ideology at the dawn of the 20th century. The Progressives of the late 1800s and early 1900s created a novel way to look at the creation of the Constitution and, therefore, this country. It was a conspiracy theory to beat all conspiracy theories.
The biggest proponent of it was a writer (some call him an historian, but he was no such thing, in reality) named Charles Beard. The novel idea that he proposed in 1912 was that the Founding Fathers hated Democracy and had no interest in philosophy, but were just money grubbing, selfish creeps who wanted to keep the vaunted "people" in misery and poverty. He basically called all the Founders liars. He further went on to state that the Founders used the courts to force their ideas on an unwilling populace, thereby bypassing legislature and democracy. By the way, according to a Beard friend, Matthew Josephson, Charles Beard once described himself as "almost a socialist" in the early 1900s. Shocking, I know.
From that point on leftist intelligensia became fond of claiming that the establishment, the government and the country itself was illegitimate because democracy was thwarted and so it all must be destroyed because of that early deception. They patted themselves on the back that THEY were more "democratic" than Republicans at the turn of the century or any American politician since the founding.
But, do we see what Democrats and Leftist's are now doing and have been doing since FDR's days in office? That's right, hypocritically thwarting democracy by using the courts to go around the legislature as they castigated the Founders for doing. So, now we get back to why Harry Reid is obstructing Bush's judicial nominations. Now we must consider why, for the first time in US Senate history, that filibusters are being used against even lower court nominations. Now we can realize why Harry Reid and his un-democratic Democrats are so intent on trying to "screw things up" in the Senate (Reid's very words Last week). They wish to be LESS democratic. THEY wish to be sure that judges who do not toe the line of their social agenda are to be denied a place in the courts of this country.
At issue is their impotency at the ballot box. They are losing more and more offices as each decade has passed since the Reagan revolution in 1980. But, even before that they realized that their socialist leaning agenda was not something the average American would agree to. So, the courts was the balm they could spread upon their bleeding hearts. If the American people aren't smart enough to agree with the social liberals, then go around them, was and is their cry. Why not? The Founders did it, after all. And FDR did, too. And they were all successful, right?
Only the godfather of this idea that the Founders were anti-democratic created his new polemic on faulty historical analysis. His was an historical fraud of finding "proof" to fit his preconceived "almost a socialist" agenda. Nearly everything the Founder's did in the Constitutional convention was based on the voluminous reading of philosophy and history that the Founders immersed themselves in. The ideas of democracy from the classical histories to that of recent times was the Mother's milk of the Founder's creation of the Constitution as the Federalists Papers makes abundantly clear. Further more, many of the Founders had quite a few run ins with the Supreme Court and other courts themselves and they, too, grumbled about "activist judges". That very fact alone makes the lie to the very basis of the Left's reasoning for court packing.
So, there we have it. Harry Reid is just another "almost a socialist" who is trying his level best to defeat the kind of democracy that the Founders AND the American people want.
I have one request of Harry's constituents. Daschle this guy, will ya?
By Warner Todd Huston
# posted by Publius @ 2/26/2005 02:33:00 AM 
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