The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty: The New Fight for the American Constitution - Hardcover

Cuccinelli, Ken

 
9780770437091: The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty: The New Fight for the American Constitution
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0770437095 ISBN 13: 9780770437091
Verlag: CROWN PUB INC, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

The Attorney General of Virginia documents his fight against what he believes to be the Obama administration's unprecedented overreach in such areas as the EPA, the FCC and labor, arguing that the administration's goals of redistributing wealth and concentrating power in Washington are illegal and contrary to Founding Father intentions. 30,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ken Cuccinelli was elected the attorney general of Virginia in November 2009. Prior to that, he was a member of the Virginia Senate from 2002 until 2010, and he is running for governor in 2013. Known throughout his political career for holding both Republicans and Democrats to the principles of limited government, his fidelity to the Constitution and the rule of law comes before party or politics.

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Chapter 1

The Biggest Set of Lawbreakers in America

There is but one element of government, and that is the people . . . For a nation to be free, it is only necessary that she wills it. For a nation to be slave, it is only necessary that she wills it.

—John Adams, 1814, Founding Father and second president of the United States

In March 2010, President Barack Obama and the Democrat-controlled 111th Congress did to the American people what the tyrant we rebelled against in 1775 couldn’t even do when we were merely subjects: they declared that they suddenly had the unprecedented power to force Americans to purchase private products in the name of whatever “public good” the federal government deemed appropriate.

In March 2010, that product was private health insurance, and the mandate to buy it was the centerpiece of the new federal health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also dubbed Obamacare.

But this new power Congress and the president claimed for themselves had the potential to go far beyond the ability to force Americans to purchase just health insurance. The power could be used to force them to buy cars to prop up the ailing automobile industry, to buy gym memberships and vegetables to promote healthy lifestyles, or to buy virtually anything for whatever Congress and the president declared was the public good.

By passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) with this individual insurance mandate, Congress and the president had violated the United States Constitution, as no such power to mandate private purchases had ever been given to the federal government. Unfortunately, without enough lawmakers in Congress willing to uphold their oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” and vote against the unconstitutional act, it became law, and it fell to people like me and my fellow state attorneys general to take the federal government to court to attempt to stop its overreach. In other words, the states had to sue the federal government to protect the U.S. Constitution and our citizens from the federal government.

Though a mandate was unconstitutional, many Americans would embrace this newfound federal power to seemingly solve yet one more of our society’s challenges: health insurance that was too expensive and out of the reach of too many people. Fortunately, the majority of Americans saw this new mandate power for what it was: a diminishing of our liberty that would be difficult to undo, and a power that could just as easily be used for not-so-altruistic purposes down the road.

This book attempts to chronicle the courtroom and the behind-the-scenes fight against one of the greatest assaults on American liberty in our lifetimes—the federal health insurance mandate. I’ll also cover other lawless acts of what I call the biggest set of lawbreakers of our lifetimes—the Obama administration. No other president, no other administration has had such a willful disregard for the law.

The administration used its temporary majority in Congress as well as executive branch agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and others to exercise control over the American people that it didn’t have the authority to exercise, and in the process, it trampled the sovereignty of the states, violated federal law, ignored federal courts, and violated the Constitution to achieve its goals of redistributing wealth, concentrating power in Washington, and rewarding its political allies.

Although I had many policy disagreements with the health care law and the other federal actions I’ll describe throughout this book, I won’t get into many policy discussions here, because that’s already been done elsewhere and because—as the attorney general of Virginia—I couldn’t sue the federal government just because I didn’t like its policies.

We Americans had seen our share of bad laws from Washington that punished achievers, harmed one class of people to advantage another, or ravaged the economy to put more power in the hands of government. But just because laws were bad policy and went against the principles of small government, that didn’t necessarily mean they were unconstitutional. For instance, I had said all along during Virginia’s lawsuit against Obamacare that if the federal health care law had been passed in a constitutional way—funded with a legal tax on citizens instead of as an unconstitutional mandate to buy a private product—I would have had no authority to sue. Fighting back on bad policy is the role of Congress and the people. If laws are onerous but constitutional, the only remedy is at the ballot box—by electing new members of Congress and a new president.

However, when the president is willing to ignore the law repeatedly or disregard the Constitution to force his radical policies on the American people and the states, state attorneys general like me are able to step up and push back in the court.

How did this fight with the federal government come about? To best answer this question, we need to refer back to the history of the United States—starting all the way back with the country’s founding.

In 1775, American colonists began to fight what initially seemed like a futile revolution to throw off the shackles of a powerful tyrant and struggle for their independence. Against the odds, they freed themselves from Great Britain and created a government of their own—one that would exist to secure and protect their newly won liberty.

The framers of the Constitution started with the premise that the government would derive its powers from the people and ultimately would answer to them. They painstakingly designed the Constitution—the document that created the federal government—to grant the government only limited powers, because they understood that a strong central government would be a constant threat to the cherished liberty they had recently won. Regrettably, in the centuries since the Constitution was adopted, we as a people have demanded that government do more to “fix” society’s problems—from poverty to high food costs to transportation issues—and to accommodate those demands, government has willingly grown beyond its original mandate.

We have ended up relying more on government and less on ourselves, our families, our churches, our friends, and our communities. With every new societal problem, enterprising politicians—backed by a cavalcade of cronies and special interests—have identified a new government program or agency to solve it. In the process, the principles of limited government have been pushed aside for what some deem “the greater good.” If the new program was unconstitutional or violated the law, well, then, they declared, that just meant the Constitution or the law wasn’t able to keep up with the times.

Few seemed to notice the cost of these solutions—not just in dollars, but in liberty. Every time we asked government to do something new, we had to transfer some of our authority to it to allow the government to carry out those solutions. Every transfer of our authority came at the expense of just a little more of our liberty. Bit by bit, our federal government gained more and more power, while the people retained less and less.

We had long forgotten Thomas Jefferson’s admonition that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” We weren’t very vigilant, and we let people like President Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste” Emanuel, use real and perceived crises to convince people to let...

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Verlag
CROWN PUB INC
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0770437095
ISBN 13 
9780770437091
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
259
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