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In a 2006 interview, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said the Constitution is basically about one word democracy that appears in neither that document nor the Declaration of Independence. Democracy is Americas way of allocating political power. The Constitution, however, was adopted to confine that power in order to secure the blessings of that which simultaneously justifies and limits democratic government natural liberty.
The fundamental division in U.S. politics is between those who take their bearings from the individuals right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom, and those whose fundamental value is the right of the majority to have its way in making rules about which specified liberties shall be respected.
Now the nation no longer lacks what it has long needed, a slender book that lucidly explains the intensity of conservatisms disagreements with progressivism. For the many Americans who are puzzled and dismayed by the heatedness of political argument today, the message of Timothy Sandefurs The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty is this: The temperature of todays politics is commensurate to the stakes of todays argument.
The argument is between conservatives who say U.S. politics is basically about a condition, liberty, and progressives who say it is about a process, democracy. Progressives, who consider democracy the source of liberty, reverse the Founders premise, which was: Liberty preexists governments, which, the Declaration says, are legitimate when instituted to secure natural rights.
Progressives consider, for example, the rights to property and free speech as, in Sandefurs formulation, spaces of privacy that government chooses to carve out and protect to the extent that these rights serve democracy. Conservatives believe that liberty, understood as a general absence of interference, and individual rights, which cannot be exhaustively listed, are natural and that governmental restrictions on them must be as few as possible and rigorously justified. Merely invoking the right of a majority to have its way is an insufficient justification.
With the Declaration, Americans ceased claiming the rights of aggrieved Englishmen and began asserting rights that are universal because they are natural, meaning necessary for the flourishing of human nature. In Europe, wrote James Madison, charters of liberty have been granted by power, but America has charters of power granted by liberty.
Sandefur, principal attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, notes that since the 1864 admission of Nevada to statehood, every states admission has been conditioned on adoption of a constitution consistent with the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration . The Constitution is the nations fundamental law but is not the first law. The Declaration is, appearing on Page 1 of Volume 1 of the U.S. Statutes at Large, and the Congress has placed it at the head of the United States Code, under the caption, The Organic Laws of the United States of America. Hence the Declaration sets the framework for reading the Constitution not as basically about democratic government majorities granting rights but about natural rights defining the limits of even democratic government.
The perennial conflict in American politics, Sandefur says, concerns which takes precedence: the individuals right to freedom, or the power of the majority to govern. The purpose of the post-Civil Wars 14th Amendment protection of Americans privileges or immunities protections vitiated by an absurdly narrow Supreme Court reading of that clause in 1873 was to assert, on behalf of emancipated blacks, national rights of citizens. National citizenship grounded on natural rights would thwart Southern states then asserting their power to acknowledge only such rights as they chose to dispense.
Government, the framers said, is instituted to improve upon the state of nature, in which the individual is at the mercy of the strong. But when democracy, meaning the process of majority rule, is the supreme value when it is elevated to the status of what the Constitution is basically about the individual is again at the mercy of the strong, the strength of mere numbers.
Sandefur says progressivism inverts Americas constitutional foundations by holding that the Constitution is about democracy, which rejects the framers premise that majority rule is legitimate only within the boundaries of the individuals natural rights. These include indeed, are mostly unenumerated rights whose existence and importance are affirmed by the Ninth Amendment.
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Progressives are wrong about the essence of the Constitution
President Goodluck Jonathan
President Goodluck Jonathan on Thursday adjourned an enlarged meeting with state governors on security challenges facing the country till Wednesday.
The adjournment was necessitated by the absence of the All Progressives Congress governors.
Governor Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State told State House correspondents that the meeting was adjourned till 4pm on Wednesday to give room for the All Progressives Congress governors to attend.
All the APC governors did not honour the Presidents invitation to the meeting which was scheduled to commence at 1pm at the First Ladys Conference Hall of the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
Only 15 Peoples Democratic Party governors, one All Progressives Grand Alliance governor, one Labour Party governor, two PDP deputy governors and an acting governor arrived at the venue as of 2pm on Thursday.
But Akpabio claimed that only the PDP governors were invited to the Thursday meeting to interface with the President and his security chiefs because of the challenges being faced in some parts of the country.
He said, This is a fallout of our meeting which we held with the PDP governors and we felt that there was a need for us to also meet with security chiefs.
Mr. President has listened to us and even said that since it is a problem that involves all the states of the federation, it is better for all the state governors to be in attendance. Because of that, he has graciously agreed to meet with all the governors of the 36 states of the federation on Wednesday by 4pm.
Of course, you know we are very much concerned first as the PDP governors and the centre belongs to the PDP and so we felt that we should see our President, and if need be, with some of the security chiefs.
It seems memories are short on San Francisco's progressive left, at least when it comes to tech companies and it happens to be union contract negotiating time.
Supervisor David Campos marched at the head of a protest Tuesday by the city's largest public employee union to denounce the Mid-Market tax break, designed to attract companies to the downtrodden area, as a corporate giveaway. He took the microphone as the throng blocked Market Street in front of Twitter's headquarters.
"We're simply here to say that these corporations have to pay their fair share," Campos told the crowd, mostly members of Service Employees International Union Local 1021, a progressive powerhouse on the city's political scene that organized the protest as it seeks pay raises for its workers.
This is the same David Campos who co-sponsored legislation in 2011 with a fellow progressive supervisor at the time, Ross Mirkarimi, that created a six-year tax break for startup companies' stock options.
That legislation was aimed at helping tech companies, like Zynga and Yelp, that were preparing to go public and would have seen a big spike in their tax bills if they remained in San Francisco, the only jurisdiction in the state that taxed gains on stock options.
The view of many at City Hall was that the stock-option tax break was a way to keep tech companies in San Francisco that didn't stand to benefit from a tax break the city had carved out for businesses that moved to, or grew in, the forlorn Mid-Market area. That tax break was designed, in part, to keep Twitter from fleeing to the suburbs.
While SEIU members attack the Mid-Market tax break as a failed form of trickle-down economics, the stock option tax break authored by progressives has so far cost the city more money.
The city wound up not collecting $1.9 million in taxes from the Mid-Market incentive through the end of 2012, while the stock-option break amounted to almost $4.9 million over the same period, according to the city's tax collector.
Figures are still being compiled for 2013, which included Twitter's lucrative initial public offering. Analysts project the tax break will allow the company to save more than $56 million on its tax bill over six years.
SEIU official Gabriel Haaland told the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 2011 that the Mid-Market tax break was "a sleazy land grab," while praising the Mirkarimi-led effort as "honestly trying to deal with tax policy," even though the Mid-Market incentive has led to a resurgence in the area and the stock option tax break doesn't require larger companies to provide community benefits, like local purchasing and volunteering, as the Mid-Market break does.
Read more here:
Progressives rip one corporate tax break, laud another
Governors on the platform of the All Progressives Congress on Thursday shunned a meeting called by President Goodluck Jonathan to address the security challenges facing the country.
As at the time the meeting started at the First Ladys Conference Hall of the Presidential Villa, Abuja, at about 2pm, 15 Peoples Democratic Party governors, one All Progressives Grand Alliance governor, one Labour Party governor, two PDP deputy governors and an acting governor were in attendance.
The meeting presided over by the President also had Vice President Namadi Sambo; Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Senator Pius Anyim; and the National Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki (retd.) in attendance.
Governors in attendance include: Gabriel Suswan (Benue), Martin Elechi (Ebonyi) Ramalan Yero (Kaduna), Isa Yuguda(Bauchi), Theodore Orji (Abia), Ibrahim Dankwanbo (Gombe), Godswill Akpabio (Akwa Ibom), Liyel Imoke (Cross River), Willie Obiano (Anambra) and Idris Wada (Kogi).
Others are Olusegun Mimiko (Ondo), Ibrahim Shema (Katsina), Jonah Jang (Plateau), Emmanuel Uduaghan (Delta), Sule Lamido (Jigawa), Sullivan Chime (Enugu), Babangida Aliyu (Niger), Garba Umar (Acting governor, Taraba), John Jonah (Deputy Governor, Bayelsa) and Kebbi State Rear Deputy Governor,
The meeting was also attended by the Minister of Defence, Brig.-Gen. Aliyu Gusau (retd.), Minister of Interior, Abba Moro; Minister of Police Affairs, Alhaji Abduljelili Adesiyan, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Aminu Wali, Director-General of State Security Service, Ita Ekpeyong; Chief of Defence Staff and Service Chiefs; as well as Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Abubakar.
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APC govs shun Jonathans security meeting