United Liberty

The results of the mid-term election became a reality for Democrats yesterday as Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, and more than 90 new members were seated.

John Boehner (R-OH) defeated Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in the election for Speaker. In fact, 19 members of her own caucus voted for someone else (11 voted for Heath Shuler), voted present or did not vote at all; the most members of a caucus to vote against their party’s nominee since 1923.

The power exchange wasn’t limited to the Congress, as the transition also took place on Twitter. The Daily Caller notes:

Late Tuesday evening, hours before the Wednesday kick-off of the 112th Congress, Rep. Pelosi dutifully ceded the use of @SpeakerPelosi in exchange for @NancyPelosi. Meanwhile, @JohnBoehner remains to be actively used by the entering Speaker (he also used @GOPLeader, but that account has been handed over to Majority Leader-elect Eric Cantor), while @SpeakerBoehner became the Ohio congressman’s active account Wednesday morning.

Sounds good to me:

Here is a constitutional amendment I can get behind:

Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution:
“Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States .”

In case you don’t remember, members of Congress and their staffers are exempt from the individual mandate requirements of ObamaCare.

Though I didn’t get around to writing about it, I like the idea of Randy Barnett’s “Repeal Amendment” proposal.

During an interview on Fox News Sunday, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told Chris Wallace that the Founding Fathers would have regulations on guns:

If you look at the values and the historical record, you will see that the Founding Fathers never intended guns to go unregulated, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer contended Sunday.

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Breyer said history stands with the dissenters in the court’s decision to overturn a Washington, D.C., handgun ban in the 2008 case “D.C. v. Heller.”
[…]
Madison “was worried about opponents who would think Congress would call up state militias and nationalize them. ‘That can’t happen,’ said Madison,” said Breyer, adding that historians characterize Madison’s priority as, “I’ve got to get this document ratified.”

Therefore, Madison included the Second Amendment to appease the states, Breyer said.

“If you’re interested in history, and in this one history was important, then I think you do have to pay attention to the story,” Breyer said. “If that was his motive historically, the dissenters were right. And I think more of the historians were with us.”

That being the case, and particularly since the Founding Fathers did not foresee how modern day would change individual behavior, government bodies can impose regulations on guns, Breyer concluded.

With all due respect to Justice Breyer, he is just flat wrong. The Founding Fathers, including James Madison, made clear their views on guns, considering an armed citizenry essential to protecting liberty from a government gone wild.

In this clip from a Fox News, we learn about Brian Aitkens, a father, Foundation For Economic Education scholar, and an entrepreneur in transit from Colorado to New Jersey during a change of residence, who was arrested in January of 2009 for illegal possession of firearms.  Subsequently, he was convicted of that offense, even though the guns in question were legally owned, disassembled, and with ammunition segregated from the weapons, as he fell under the exceptions to the particularly onerous New Jersey gun control laws.

Several days prior to traveling to his new home with his personal belongings, loading his car so full that it took police nearly three hours to reach the firearms, he contacted the New Jersey state to inquire as to how to legally transport them to his new residence.

A full rundown of the circumstances, as well as the movement to set Brian free can be found here.

Nick Gillespie of Reason TV recently spoke with Richard Epstein, author of Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain and How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution, on the presidency of Barack Obama, spending, taxes and many other issues.

Here is the interview:

With the release of his new book, Decision Points, many conservatives and Republicans are making a big deal over George W. Bush’s return from political exile. While I understand that they may be looking at Barack Obama’s presidency, where we’ve seen out of control spending and the Constitution often ignored. It doesn’t make much sense to look back longingly at Bush, who spent like a drunken sailor and treated the Constitution and Bill of Rights like an afterthought.

While I’m not a fan of Michelle Malkin, she is cautioning Republicans not to get too nostalgistic over the return of the Big Spender from Crawford:

The problem, of course, is that Bush nostalgia is indelibly marred by his disastrous domestic policy legacy of big government, big spending, and betrayal of core fiscal principles — the very impetus for the Tea Party movement upon which he now heaps glowing praise.

Take yourselves back to 2007. The headline on my blog on December 3, 2007:

Hillary and Bush agree: Government should bail out homeowners.

Here’s the full video of Law Professor Randy Barnett giving the Sixth Annual Frederich von Hayek Lecture on the subject of the U.S. Constitution and the individual insurance mandate in Obamacare, 90 minutes long but well worth watching:

Over at The Liberty Papers, Stephen Gordon gives us his take on the “If Historical Events Had Facebook Statutes” joke (part 2) with a version for the Founding Fathers.

According to Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), it’s his “constitutional duty” to run up trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has returned to the state for a final campaign push in which he will attempt to persuade Nevadans to return him to office by not only scaring voters away from his opponent but also giving them a list of reasons to support him.

In a subtle shift from his campaign’s recent strategy of almost exclusively negative campaigning against his Republican rival, Sharron Angle, Reid has returned to the argument that the state needs him because of the powerful position he has in Congress.

At a campaign event here Wednesday, Reid paraded local elected officials — Republicans and Democrats — before the assembled media to support his argument that essential federal funding for infrastructure and social programs has flowed to their communities because of his position.

In a jab at Angle, who thinks the federal government should be dramatically scaled back and fulfill only those duties expressly enumerated in the Constitution, Reid argued it is his “constitutional duty” to spend federal money.

So, it’s your “constitutional duty” to spend money that we don’t have, putting the burden on the backs of future taxpayers, on unconstitutional programs and pork? That’s not moral, let alone in the vision of our founders.