NEW PRESIDENTIAL DECREES

THE WHITE HOUSE

EXECUTIVE ORDER #3,425,786

FROM:  THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
TO:         HOLLYWOOD

Given the principles I enunciated in Raleigh, NC, I hereby issue this executive order compelling you to add two hours of closing credits to all future films.

[signed] BARACK OBAMA

President of the United States

----------------------------  

[Handwritten message by the President to his personal secretary:]

Anita: Plz send following memo, my private stationery, to Academy Awards show producers:

"Guys, you're gonna have to allow enough show time for MUCH longer 'thank-you' speeches. In future, figure on two-week Oscar TV show, minimum." -- s/ Barack

Also, dash off reminder memo, again my private letterhead, to my Hollywood filmmaker friends (use Clooney's distribution list):

"You didn't produce and direct that." -- s/ Barack

U.S. CONSTITUTION, R.I.P.

With this morning's 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding Obamacare's "individual mandate," which will compel people to buy a product under threat of a tax penalty from the federal government, the U.S. Constitution is now essentially dead as a bulwark against incursions on individual liberty.

This is especially true when considered in the wake of the Court's much earlier 5-4 "Kelo" decision, which permits local governments to claim "eminent domain" as an excuse to seize private property from some individuals and transfer it to other private individuals (political cronies).

If the U.S. Constitution can be construed so as to permit government to force you -- under penalty of law -- to buy designated products from crony-capitalist companies, or allow it to simply take your private property and hand it over to politically connected cronies, then the Bill of Rights is a dead letter. Any way you cut it, today's ruling affirms the premise of collectivism over the rights of individuals. In essence, it says that the government, through legislatures, is in principle unconstrained in its power over the individual.

That this latest ruling was made possible only with the complicity of a pragmatic judicial "conservative," Chief Justice John Roberts, only underscores the philosophical chaos reigning in the nation today. It is so symbolic that the Court's left was united in their support of the mandate, but that the conservatives were philosophically fractured: That, in a microcosm, has been the case throughout our modern political history, which is why we see steady, inexorable triumphs by the political left.

I said before this morning's decision that the Court was likely to "split the difference" between conservatives and liberals in their decision. I was too optimistic: This decision was a complete surrender to the united far left of Court. The reason is this: Conservatism has never been a coherent political philosophy, rooted in a defined, consistent set of principles. There are as many varieties of "conservatives" as there are vegetables in a supermarket. Without any definite grounding in specific principles, conservatives in practice typically wind up compromising and "splitting the difference" with the left...which is committed to a specific principle: to the subordination of the individual to the state. Statism is the uncompromising principle of the left; statism is the principle underlying the "individual mandate"; and statism is the principle which Chief Justice Roberts joined the Court's liberals in championing today. (See my award-winning essay "Up from Conservatism.")

The only thing that could have spared America this sorry day would have been a commitment by a Court majority to the premise of individual rights: to the view that individuals are ends in themselves -- not mere means to the ends of some tribal collective, ends imposed by the brute power of the state. That was the Enlightenment view held by our nation's Founders, and by the Framers of the Constitution, who intended that document to be a barrier to the unlimited exercise of power by the state over individuals. Well, that view, and that document, have been obliterated today.

Do we still have liberties that we can exercise? Yes, in many respects, but only by sufferance of our rulers and by the accidents of the political process -- and no longer by legal right. The only thing that we can do now is to fight endless political and legislative battles for supremacy over the statists, but unsupported by the legal framework and precedents bequeathed to us by our forefathers.

We can begin those battles in earnest this November.

UPDATE. After having a day to peruse many commentaries about the decision, I wanted to add this about the legal travesty that just occurred.

During the legislative debate, Obama and the Dems explicitly denied that the individual mandate penalty in Obamacare was a "tax." They always referred to it as a "penalty" and a "fine." They knew that, politically, passing a giant "tax" on the middle class would be suicidal. And in fact, they never used that term anywhere in the bill.

Moreover, on the first day of oral arguments before the Supreme Court, the government lawyer, the Solicitor General, also denied that it was "a tax" under the Commerce Clause. Why? Because on legal grounds, if it was a tax under the Commerce Clause, it would run afoul of another federal law: the Anti-Injunction Act. That Act would render such a tax illegal, and therefore, Obamacare would have to be rejected as unconstitutional.

But...on the second day of the hearing, the government was also permitted to argue that it was "a tax" -- under the "taxing power" clause of the Constitution. In other words, the government was allowed to argue, simultaneously, that the "fine" was not a tax, but also that it was a tax!

In his Supreme Court opinion, Chief Justice Roberts discarded all those facts. Even though the Congress that passed Obamacare had explicitly, repeatedly denied that the fine was "a tax," and Obama (who signed it) explicitly, repeatedly denied it was a tax, Roberts arbitrarily seized upon the cynical last-minute argument from a government lawyer that it was a "tax" in order to rule that Obamacare's individual mandate was permitted under the Constitution.

Here is what Roberts actually wrote: "Under [my] theory, the mandate is not a legal command to buy insurance. Rather, it makes going without insurance just another thing the Government taxes, like buying gasoline or earning income."

"THEORY"???

That the federal government could tax inactivity?

This is the same John Roberts who -- earlier in his same opinion -- wrote: "The Framers gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it, and for over 200 years both our decisions and Congress's actions have reflected this understanding."

So, like the government attorneys, Roberts also was arguing out of both sides of his pen. He argues that government has no power to "compel " commerce with a "fine"; yet a few pages later, he says the government has the power to do exactly that: force people to engage in "commerce" (buy insurance) or else be hit with a whopping fine (which he arbitrarily calls a "tax").

This was a breathtaking, completely unjustified, fraudulent stretch of law and logic that nobody anticipated. And Roberts's "reasoning" incensed the four dissenting Justices, as a potent Wall Street Journal editorial points out:

In their brutal (and, in a rarity, jointly signed) dissent, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito write that the Chief Justice's logic "is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it.... One would expect this Court to demand more than fly-by-night briefing and argument before deciding a difficult constitutional question of first impression." They score the Chief Justice for carrying 'verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists."

In other words, as Rush Limbaugh put it, "the whole thing is a fraud." Trickery was used at every turn to push Obamacare through Congress; fraud was now used to uphold it in the Supreme Court.

And no less a figure than the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court has made the fraud possible.

The U.S. Constitution has been left in tatters. In Limbaugh's term, no longer is there a legal "backstop" to protect individual rights. If courts can simply invent, out of cloth, language and arguments that don't even appear in the laws they are adjudicating, and if those laws can swipe and transfer property, or compel you to buy government-mandated products, with no legal recourse or Bill of Rights protections, then the Constitution is -- just as I said -- truly a dead letter as a limitation on governmental power over the individual.

UPDATE #2: Chief Justice Roberts actually was AGAINST the individual mandate before he was FOR it, according to reporting by CBS. Along the way, he changed his mind, sources tell CBS, because he was worried about "public opinion" -- meaning: what politicians and the media would think of him and the Court. Read this and weep. Specifically, this is truly sickening:

"Over the next six weeks, as Roberts began to craft the decision striking down the mandate, the external pressure began to grow. Roberts almost certainly was aware of it.

"Some of the conservatives, such as Justice Clarence Thomas, deliberately avoid news articles on the Court when issues are pending (and avoid some publications altogether, such as The New York Times). They’ve explained that they don’t want to be influenced by outside opinion or feel pressure from outlets that are perceived as liberal.

"But Roberts pays attention to media coverage. As Chief Justice, he is keenly aware of his leadership role on the Court, and he also is sensitive to how the Court is perceived by the public.

"There were countless news articles in May warning of damage to the Court – and to Roberts’ reputation – if the Court were to strike down the mandate. Leading politicians, including the President himself, had expressed confidence the mandate would be upheld.

"Some even suggested that if Roberts struck down the mandate, it would prove he had been deceitful during his confirmation hearings, when he explained a philosophy of judicial restraint.

"It was around this time that it also became clear to the conservative justices that Roberts was, as one put it, “wobbly,” the sources said.

"It is not known why Roberts changed his view on the mandate and decided to uphold the law. At least one conservative justice tried to get him to explain it, but was unsatisfied with the response, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation....

"Roberts then engaged in his own lobbying effort – trying to persuade at least Justice Kennedy to join his decision so the Court would appear more united in the case. There was a fair amount of give-and-take with Kennedy and other justices, the sources said. One justice, a source said, described it as 'arm-twisting'....

"The fact that the joint dissent [by the conservative Justices] doesn’t mention Roberts’ majority [opinion] was not a sign of sloppiness, the sources said, but instead was a signal the conservatives no longer wished to engage in debate with him."

Folks, what Roberts did is the complete antithesis of the rule of law -- the premise that we should be a nation "of laws, not of men." The "absolute" governing his ruling was not his oath of office "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States," but public opinion.

But if public opinion is to govern the nation without limit, then why bother having a Constitution or a Supreme Court at all? In pandering to public opinion, Roberts achieved precisely the opposite of his apparent goal: He has delegitimized the reputation of the Supreme Court.

Is the Criminal Justice System "Overly Punitive"?

Was my novel HUNTER wildly inaccurate in its portrait of a overly lenient criminal justice system?

Critics have said that. So, I'd like to address their claim that America is unjustly over-incarcerating legions of minor offenders, and even many actually innocent people. Are we truly "overly punitive" and "over-incarcerating"? Is it therefore true that we could safely release thousands of inmates, thereby saving millions or even billions of taxpayer dollars on unnecessary prison cells?

I took on the belief that huge numbers of people are in prison unjustly in my nonfiction book Criminal Justice: The Legal System vs. Individual Responsibility. Leaving aside, for the moment, the much-smaller federal prison system (where there are indeed a higher proportion of prisoners serving sentences for "crimes" that shouldn't exist), state prisons are quite another matter. The "Excuse-Making Industry" that I exposed in that book has played numerous games with definitions of crimes. One of their games is to define "the inmate" based solely on the current offense for which he is imprisoned -- ignoring the rest of his criminal history, and even other current crimes for which he may be serving concurrent or lesser sentences.

For example, under reigning definitions, "non-violent" or "first-time offenders" behind bars include many individuals who have been arrested in the past but not convicted for violent crimes, solely because plea bargaining minimized the charges against them -- or because records of serious juvenile crimes have been sealed or even expunged -- or because they received a "diversionary" sentence rather than a prior term of incarceration. "Non-violent prisoners" also include individuals whose past incarcerations include crimes of violence, but whose current incarceration may be for a property or drug crime. Similarly, "drug offenders" may be inmates whose past records include property and violent crimes, but whose current offense is for drugs. Likewise, some inmates later found to be innocent (say, via DNA testing) of their current conviction offense have criminal histories for other crimes; yet when released, they are portrayed as wholly "innocent" people. Etc.

By such deviously selective definitions, Excuse-Makers paint a picture of prison cells crammed with thousands of unjustly incarcerated choir boys -- claims that the liberal media are only too willing to echo.

In truth, it's actually very hard to get into prison in these days of "alternatives to incarceration." Usually, you have to be a chronic criminal, arrested many times, and be stupid enough to get caught a lot, so that the judges get tired of seeing you in their courtrooms and finally lock you up. Or you must commit a particularly serious crime. Most convicted criminals are, in fact, serving their terms under "community supervision."

In 2010, the latest year for which statistics have been published, "about 7 in 10 persons under the supervision of adult correctional systems were supervised in the community (4,887,900) on probation or parole at yearend 2010, while about 3 in 10 were incarcerated (2,266,800) in local jails or in the custody of state or federal prisons." In other words, the overwhelming majority of convicted adult criminals -- nearly five million -- are being "managed" on the streets, not behind bars.

In the early 1990s, when I was deeply involved in researching crime, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics provided a host of eye-opening reports about the exact composition of the inmate populations. But as the gods of Political Correctness have taken over the federal government, those stats are now hard to come by, while today the BJS is compelled to collect data on such leftist hobby-horse issues as racial composition of the inmate population, and incidents of rapes and HIV in prison. Still, by diligent digging, you can find at least some interesting data.

From the BJS document "Prisoners in 2010": "In 2009, the most recent data available, 53% of state prison inmates were serving time for violent offenses, 19% for property, 18% for drug, and 9% for public order offenses." In other words, only about 1/5th of state prisoners are behind bars for a current conviction offense that is drug-related. Appendices 16a, 16b, 17a, and 17b give some idea of the composition of state prisons by current conviction offense. But again, this does not mean, for example, that those currently convicted of drug crimes may not also have serious property or violent crimes on their records.

And even if we assume that all drug and many "public order" offenders could be safely released, and thus reduce the need for so many prisons and prison beds, the document "Probation and Parole in the United States, 2010" ought to put that fantasy to rest. Check out Appendix Table 10 on p. 38, a chart of "Adults on Probation, By Most Serious Offense, 2010." You'll find that 447,000 individuals convicted of violent crimes, plus 669,000 property criminals, are free on probation (an alternative to incarceration) -- in other words, well over a million criminals. And to that whopping total you also can add parolees (inmates released early from their prison terms): Check Appendix Table 20 on p. 48, and you'll find an additional 200,000-plus violent criminals and 185,000 property criminals.

In sum, about 1.5 million violent or property criminals are being "managed" on our streets by hopelessly overburdened parole and probation officers who can't possibly keep track of them or their activities. We could release all of the 300,000 or so state and federal drug criminals from prison, and immediately refill all their cells from the legions of convicted violent and property criminals now under "community supervision," and still need over a million additional new cells to house the rest.

And what do these convicts do when they are released back onto our streets? BJS statisticians, tasked with compiling data for their liberal masters, haven't released a fresh study of criminal recidivism (i.e., return to crime) in a long time. But the data they publish on their website are chilling:

* Of the 272,111 persons released from prisons in 15 states in 1994, an estimated 67.5% were rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within 3 years, 46.9% were reconvicted, and 25.4% resentenced to prison for a new crime.

* These offenders had accumulated 4.1 million arrest charges before their most recent imprisonment and another 744,000 charges within 3 years of release.

* Released prisoners with the highest rearrest rates were robbers (70.2%), burglars (74.0%), larcenists (74.6%), motor vehicle thieves (78.8%), those in prison for possessing or selling stolen property (77.4%), and those in prison for possessing, using, or selling illegal weapons (70.2%).

* Within 3 years, 2.5% of released rapists were arrested for another rape, and 1.2% of those who had served time for homicide were arrested for homicide.

Is this evidence that our biggest criminal-justice problem is the "unjust" incarceration of multitudes of "minor offenders"?

So, why are so many dangerous individuals are being "managed" on the streets, rather than behind bars. In 2005, I wrote a two-part piece about the "Excuse-Making Industry" of criminal advocates, many of whom also double as "sentencing consultants." Part I is archived here; and Part II is here. It shows how and why "progressive" advocates of "social justice," who have manipulated definitions and distorted statistics pertaining to economics, have done the same thing with statistics concerning crime and punishment.

Their portrait of an overly punitive justice system is an ideologically driven and financially self-serving fantasy, whose widespread acceptance has led frequently to tragic and horrifying consequences. That was the deadly reality that I meticulously exposed in Criminal Justice? and then dramatized in HUNTER.