Do You Feel Lucky, Punk?
It's been 12 years since Barack Obama broke the chains of limited government. Do you want to limit your government now?
Where were you in the year 2001? Were you born yet when then-State Senator Barack Obama said the government needs more power instead of limited power?
Talking on Chicago Public Radio about the Supreme Court under Justice Warren (1953-1969), Obama said it was a shame that the country “didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution.”
It was fundamentally backward to say “what the federal government can’t do to you,” Obama insisted. No, the more pressing question was “what the government must do on your behalf.”
If you agreed with Obama then, how do you feel now that Donald J. Hitler is carrying the loaded gun of government power? What must he do “on your behalf”?
And where were you on October 30, 2008? Obama was giving a famous speech at the University of Missouri. I don’t remember where I was, but I remember his best line: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
The crowd was ecstatic, and America’s first black president empowered a generation of politicians, activists, professors and judges to gleefully cast off the chains of limited government.
Like millions of other people, you may have been caught up in the excitement of Hope and Change. There would be a new kind of politics and new coalitions of power! Community organizers would pressure government to do … things! … for you!
One thing government could do was compel everyone to buy health insurance, and the 2012 Affordable Care Act did just that. Maybe you like ObamaCare. Maybe you still say that “sometimes government must force people to do the right thing.” Maybe we can all safely ignore that ObamaCare represented the end of a government with limited, enumerated powers.
But let us be clear with one another. Now that the Orange Fascist is wielding the pen and the phone, do you secretly wish his government had less power? If you celebrated “what the government must do on your behalf” in 2012, do you celebrate what the government is doing now?
Do you wish we could go back to 2008 and tell Obama to shut up about unlimited government? Should we embrace a return to the enumerated powers of the Founding Fathers?
Or perhaps we should we just press forward to 1762, when the demon of unlimited government unchained itself in France, community organizers were unleashed to man the barricades, and the people emancipated themselves from the tyranny of their fellow citizens.
I know what you’re thinking. Have there been six elections, or only five, since Barack Obama? To tell you the truth, in all this excitement I’ve kind of lost track myself.
But right now the question is do you feel lucky.
Well, do you, punk?
“If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused. I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.” — Barack Obama, Chicago Public Radio, WBEZ-FM, Jan. 18, 2001.
When did he say “unlimited government”? If ‘what can your government do for you’ is bad then why do we pay taxes? Trying to make the stretch to link Obama’s ideas to this dictatorship that’s been in the making on the right forever is just more gaslighting.
"But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth..."
This is one line that gets forgotten almost every time this speech gets brought up. And this is the true crux of the matter. Obama was, is, and always will be a protege of one Karl Marx. He has always been about Marxism and the idea "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need." But he would never be a Stalin or Lenin or Mao. He did his secretly...with drones...on American citizens...and his very own Stasi...spying on his political opponents! See, not like those other guys at all!