I think the Obama inaugural is worth at least one more day’s commentary. But I’ll let the cartoonists carry most of the weight today. For instance, we all know the president takes his oath of office while putting his hand on the Bible. According to one cartoonist, perhaps this should have happened at that moment:

It didn’t. God rarely makes such a dramatic gesture; He prefers we figure it out because, frankly, it shouldn’t be that hard. All one has to do is look at Obama’s actions for the last four years. If we’re so comatose not to be aware of his attitude toward the rule of law, we deserve to suffer the consequences.

The speech itself also has generated commentary for its unabashed and unapologetic liberal/progressive nature. Again, why would anyone be surprised? When some were saying Obama would tack to the center to get support for Obamacare and other initiatives, I never bought it. He is too ideological for that. He boldly ventured where few publicly dare to go:

He’s also quite adept at appearing to venerate American tradition and reverence for the Founding. But if you listen closely, you realize he’s uprooting those principles, replacing them with an opposing ideology:

One of his points, in passing, was the importance of reasoned debate and how we all should refrain from name-calling. Are we really that absent-minded with respect to his own conduct?

In the entire speech, there was not one word about the danger of the mountain of national debt he has accumulated. He’s not really all that concerned about it. One of his mentors, economist John Maynard Keynes, who was largely responsible for convincing politicians that government spending was the pathway to prosperity, once famously [or infamously] remarked about his lack of concern over debt, “In the long run, we are all dead.” In other words, don’t worry about it—we all die anyway, so spend to the hilt.

The biggest problem with that scenario is that future generations will have to deal with what we’ve done. They will be stuck cleaning up the mess.

That’s the height of irresponsibility. That’s the kind of president we have.

Last Friday, I commented on the withdrawal of Louie Giglio from praying the benediction at the upcoming Obama inaugural. My goal was to point out the intolerance on the Left toward evangelicals who view homosexuality as a sin. We are to be considered “haters” and fringe elements in American society.

I want to revisit that story again, but from a different angle. One question I didn’t raise earlier was whether Giglio should have agreed to participate in the inaugural. One naturally would be honored to be asked to such a high-profile event, but is it wise to be part of something that celebrates another four years of Obama’s rule? I realize Christians will differ in their views of this, but let me state the case for what I have concluded, at least with respect to my conscience.

There is, in my mind, a distinct difference that can be made between the personal and the public in this instance. As a Christian, I want everyone to come to the knowledge of the truth, and I will take any opportunity afforded me to reach out to anyone with the gospel message. That includes even those who have done their best to undermine that truth. So if I were ever asked—and this is a stretch, I know—to a meeting with President Obama that was private, either one-on-one or with a small group of some kind—I would accept that invitation readily. We have to take advantage of all open doors to allow the Holy Spirit to touch the hearts of those who need redemption.

However, if I were invited instead to do what Giglio was invited to do—give the benediction at Obama’s inaugural—I would probably decline. Why? If I were on the platform with President Obama, it would appear as if I am in support of his policies. Public perception is very important. There are a lot of low-information voters out there who, without checking out the particulars, would simply assume I was an Obama supporter. Therefore, I would be linked unfairly to the following Obama policies and beliefs:

• Obama’s all-out promotion of abortion on demand. He is the most pro-abortion president in American history, even rejecting, when he was an Illinois state senator, a bill that would have allowed doctors and nurses to give medical aid to a child born alive during an attempted abortion. That is radicalism to the extreme, and I would never want to be associated with that. During his first presidential term, he also vociferously promoted continued funding of Planned Parenthood, which is the foremost provider of abortion in the nation. The latest statistics reveal that Planned Parenthood helped bring about 333,000 abortions in a recent year, a new record for that organization. This is horrific, and I must, in conscience, distance myself publicly from anyone who holds such extreme views.
• Obamacare, which I loathe as an engine of tyrannical governmental control over individuals, now is the vehicle by which Christian organizations are being persecuted for their beliefs in the area of abortion. The HHS mandates are attempting to force Christian colleges and businesses to offer abortifacient drugs and other means for furthering abortion in their healthcare plans. This is an outright attack on the First Amendment’s promise of liberty of conscience with respect to religious belief.
• Obama’s decision to promote homosexuality, not only as a legitimate lifestyle with no moral repugnance, but beyond that, his espousal of same-sex marriage. No president has ever promoted this false concept of marriage, and it is just as dangerous to the health of our society as his approval of abortion. In both cases, the family, as understood Biblically, is undermined.
• His total lack of concern for the constitutional constraints on presidential power, as he now prepares to run the country via unconstitutional executive orders.
• His complete rejection of any genuine fiscal discipline, seeking to be granted unlimited authority to add to the nation’s debt as much as he chooses, bypassing Congress. Both this power play and the one mentioned just above it are the fruit of his overall Marxist and anti-colonial mindset, both of which see the United States as an oppressor and its Constitution as an outdated document no longer applicable to the socialist vision of the future.

For these and many other reasons I could list, I would not in any way want my presence on a stage with the president to be misinterpreted as a show of support. I can pray for the nation quite well privately; I don’t have to be the public face of blessing on the next four years of antichristian rhetoric and action.

As I said earlier, I know there are those who will disagree with my conclusion, but I have to abide by my conscience before God, and to accept the invitation Louie Giglio originally accepted would be, at least for me, a public renunciation of my most deeply held beliefs. In good conscience, I could never do it.

Christians are going to be faced with many more decisions like these. How are we going to respond? Will we stand firm on what we know to be true? As long as we are always willing to share the truth with anyone who is open to it, and as long as we conduct ourselves in the proper spirit, I believe God will honor our strong stand.

Who cares about constitutional limitations? Certainly not Barack Obama. He likes to let people know he was a professor of constitutional law, but the truth is that 1) he was a lecturer, not a professor per se, and 2) he has no regard for the document at all. He’s referred to it as an encumbrance that gets in the way of his goal of transforming America.

As I noted yesterday, and as at least some of the media have picked up on, he doesn’t really believe the country has a spending problem. He made this clear in his supposed negotiations with John Boehner:

Some may wonder how he can be so blind. Well, ideology creates blindness, and this president is the most radical ideologist who has ever occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He’s so wedded to his Marxist, anti-imperialist, bring-down-America views that he can’t deal with reality:

Back to his disregard for the Constitution: he now wants unilateral authority to raise the debt ceiling, as if Congress doesn’t exist. He seeks unlimited power to spend and go into debt, and thinks there should be no repercussions. Even most kings at the time of the writing of the Constitution couldn’t do that. The Founders set up a balanced form of government that clearly delineated the powers of the presidency. Obama desires to toss aside all their hard work that created a federal republic to protect liberty.

Then there was the suggestion yesterday, floated by none other than Joe Biden, that Obama could use executive orders to curtail firearms. Going back again to the Founders and the Constitution, the Second Amendment specifically says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” The militia mentioned in the amendment, taken in the context of the era, referred to the body of the whole people of a state, not some appendage of the government. The whole point was to be able to halt any tyranny imposed by the government.

The only legitimate, legal way to get around that amendment, which is part of the cornerstone of constitutional government that protects liberty, is to ratify another amendment rescinding the first one. That happened with prohibition. Three-fourths of the states would have to agree that the right to keep and bear arms no longer is in effect. Not even Congress has the authority to pass a law wiping this out.

Yet what is Obama hinting at? He seems to believe he can just sign an executive order and make anything happens that he wishes. Executive orders are not even mentioned in the Constitution. They are supposed to be merely a way for presidents to set up rules for how the executive branch of the government will operate. They are to apply to the bureaucracy only; they should have no direct effect on citizens, and certainly no effect on a ratified constitutional amendment.

Obama’s apologists will say that other presidents have used executive orders in this fashion. True, but hardly a rationale for doing so again. Just because other presidents have done something unconstitutional is no basis for allowing this president to continue the practice. The most egregious use of executive orders came in the 1930s during FDR’s New Deal. Roosevelt simply declared that all Americans had to turn in their gold to the federal government. He had no authority to declare any such thing, yet he did it. He then exchanged their gold for Federal Reserve Notes, which became the only currency allowed in the country. It was a display of raw power, and it worked. But that didn’t make it right.

If Obama follows through on this threat, he will further solidify the opinion of many that he seeks to set up a presidential dictatorship. How, one may ask, can this be possible in a nation that values liberty? Well, look at the last election. How much do we really value liberty anymore? Anyone with any sense at all knew what Obama wanted to do. Yes, he is a problem, but we are the greater problem:

Obama’s ideology and goals have been transparent from the start. Some of us are willfully blind about them, others are deceived, and still others have converted to his way of thinking. We are on the precipice. Will we pull back and regain our liberty? Will we take back Obama’s “hope and change” slogan and put it to good use this time? Let’s hope it’s not too late for change.

“Do away with the electoral college!” That’s the cry that emanated from some Democrats after the 2000 election when Al Gore won the popular vote but George Bush won the electoral vote and the presidency. Some, including Hillary Clinton, called for a change in the Constitution to a simply majority vote nationwide to determine the winner. I believe that would be shortsighted and a detriment to our political system. Why? Let me offer a short history of why the Founders chose this method.

• Are you aware that the Constitution says nothing about the people as a whole voting for the president?

• Did you know that there was no popular vote for presidential candidates in the first elections, and that it only became widespread in the 1820s?

• Further, do you realize that the controversial 2000 election could have been decided constitutionally without counting even one vote in Florida? A riot might have ensued, but it could have been done without violating the rule of law.

The Constitution never uses the term “electoral college,” but that’s how we describe the method set up there for choosing a president. The choice rests, not with a popular vote, but with electors selected by state legislatures. The Founders gave the people a vote for their representatives in the House, but senators were sent to the nation’s capital by state legislatures [another whole blog post would be needed to cover that] and those same legislatures were tasked with picking the official slate of electors who would cast a state’s vote for president. Why was this?

The reasoning behind it was that legislatures would choose the most trusted, wisest people in the state to decide among the various candidates. That part of the electoral college system hasn’t worked as intended. They apparently didn’t foresee the country dividing into a rigid party system. Today, when the legislatures pick their electors, they follow the popular vote total for the state and send the slate of electors for the winning party. So, in practice, all the legislatures are doing is rubber-stamping what the people have decided. That’s one reason some say the method should be discarded: it doesn’t accomplish the purpose for which it was established.

However, there is another aspect of the electoral college system that works quite well, and the main reason why I want to keep it intact—it provides for a proportional vote for the presidency, allowing every state to have some say in who that next president should be. Let me illustrate with that famous map that was circulating on the internet shortly after Bush was declared the winner in 2000. Look at it carefully:

What you see are all the counties in the nation. Every county in red was one Bush took; the blue counties were won by Gore. There is a pattern in the voting. Gore wins most of the big cities/heavily populated areas [plus Indian reservations], while Bush is victorious in the overwhelming number of those counties. In fact, you could travel from the east coast to the west and never cross a county that went for Gore.

Why is this significant?

If we went to a simple majority vote for the presidency, no candidate would ever find his way to many of the states. The entire mid-section of the nation would never see a presidential contender during a campaign. They would spend all their time in the heavy population areas because that’s where they would win the most votes. Gore won the popular vote by taking big majorities from places like New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. That means candidates would have to woo urban voters who have their own priorities and policy preferences. Meanwhile, other segments of the population—rural, small town people—who might have different priorities and views of what the government should be doing, would be ignored. No one would ever visit Oklahoma, for instance, or Wyoming, or North Dakota. It wouldn’t be worth the time.

At least with the current system, every state has some proportional weight in determining the winner. Candidates cannot dismiss the interests of the vast middle section of the country. The three electoral votes of Wyoming might sometime play a pivotal role in deciding the victor. No one can be ignored completely.

While no electoral system is perfect, I believe allowing states some proportional say is a vast improvement on a simplistic nationwide majority vote. Why should the desires of New York City and a few select other urban areas overwhelm the wishes of other sectors of the nation? Don’t worry, New York; you still have a greater proportional vote in the selection. But the current method is far more representative of all the interests of our nation.

Obamacare isn’t necessarily here to stay. Some states, like Texas, are refusing to accept it. Republican governors overall are waiting to see what happens in the election. Done deals are not always done deals. Yet the federal government is in full battle array, planning to take over one-sixth of the American economy. The price tag, according to new estimates, is now triple what we were told at the beginning. On top of all that, the IRS is now in charge of enforcing it since the Supreme Court, in its supreme wisdom, has declared it a tax. This really is a burgeoning monstrosity.

Yet as the Obama administration gears up for the implementation of the program, it might discover some speed bumps:

Many doctors are contemplating retirement if this does go into operation [no pun intended]. No matter how bureaucratic the current healthcare system may be, and despite complaints we all have about how it is managed, we haven’t seen anything yet. If you feel like you’re just a small cog in a big machine now, wait until Obamacare is in full swing:

Republicans in Congress are telling the American people where they stand on it. Even though they knew it wouldn’t pass in the Senate, the House held a vote this past week on repealing the act, and it passed. Democrats consider it a mere political ploy, but I guess that’s because they really don’t believe the other side of the aisle has a deep philosophical disagreement with the whole approach. Of all the Democrats’ objections to repealing the law, the least compelling one might be this:

Yes, politics was a factor in holding the vote, but the political aspect was a statement to the American people of where the GOP stands on the issue. Many Republicans rightly fear that Obamacare tips the balance for the future of the country in a direction that will make us no different than the failing economies and governments of Europe. They fear it will alter the very character of the nation, and those fears are not without foundation:

We’ve taken far too many steps away from constitutionalism and toward unhealthy dependence on government over the years, starting with FDR’s New Deal through LBJ’s Great Society to Obama’s nebulous Hope and Change. To me, the choice is clear: either roll back this infringement on liberty, both civil and religious, or share the fate of other nations that have followed this foolish path.

The Fourth of July used to be one of the premier American holidays. People celebrated it because they understood the principles behind the resistance to taxation without representation and the potential for government overreach. Those were lessons we used to know. Things have changed.

But if you were to take a survey of our current knowledge of America’s founding and the principles upon which it was based, you might get a variety of responses, few of them heartening:

If some of our Founding Fathers could appear to us now to explain the those principles, I wonder how we would receive their wisdom?

And if anyone should ask why we have degenerated to this level, I would offer this as one of the reasons:

Education has been stripped of the Biblical, eternal values; they’ve been replaced by a new set of values that goes under the guise of teaching children how to think, not what to think. But if you look carefully at what is being taught, you will realize there is no such thing as value-free education. Values are always being taught; the question is which values.

Along with the expulsion of Biblical principles from our education, we also don’t expect too much of our students. We wouldn’t want to damage their self-esteem by giving them failing grades. I can speak from experience that an unhealthy percentage of college students are shocked when they don’t get an A. The problem must be the professor; he expects too much.

This dumbing-down has affected our entire society. A recent study of how congressmen speak, for instance, is most revealing:

Yes, quality education still exists, but you have to know where to find it. In the meantime, I’m going to do all I can to educate this new generation in the basic Biblical principles that undergird all knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. We need a new declaration of independence from the likes of Jersey Shore, Bill Maher, and Jon Stewart.

Four justices got it right yesterday. Unfortunately, five got it wrong. The most painful part of the divide is that Chief Justice John Roberts led the charge for upholding the clearly unconstitutional Obamacare. Wait a minute, you say, how can I call it unconstitutional when the Supreme Court has declared otherwise. Because it is. The four justices who wrote in dissent, with Anthony Kennedy surprisingly in agreement, declared that the entire law should be thrown out because of its blatant unconstitutionality. Those judges understand the original wording and original intent of the Constitution.

This 5-4 vote would have gone the other way without the disappointing defection of Roberts. There has been speculation—and that’s all it can be at this point—that he was swayed by the White House attack on the integrity of the Court, and that he somehow thought by going in this direction, he was upholding the Court’s image. I don’t know if that is true. I won’t say it is; neither am I going to launch a personal attack on his character. What he has done, though, is deal a blow to the rule of law, which is always one of my main concerns.

Conservative commentators, looking for whatever silver linings they can find, have come up with at least one. Since the Court rejected Obama’s rationale for the law, they say that’s a win. Obama sold this monstrosity as being valid under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. The majority said that was untenable, thereby hopefully curtailing future attempts to use that clause to do anything the government would like to do. So yes, that is a positive. But it’s the proverbial double-edged sword. Justice Roberts instead called it acceptable as part of the taxing power of the Congress, so now all we have to worry about is IRS enforcement:

If that doesn’t give you the warm fuzzies, you’re not alone.

When the president was “selling” this package at the beginning, he was adamant it was not a tax. He knew the American people would recoil at that. There’s a key interview he did with George Stephanopoulos back in 2009 that’s making the rounds again on the internet. In that interview, Obama absolutely claimed it wasn’t a tax. Yet when his people made their arguments before the Court, they tried to peddle it as a tax there, which reveals the hypocrisy and cynicism behind the law. This time they won a convert in Justice Roberts.

Here’s where I’m going to offer an argument that I saw only one writer even mention yesterday: the Court got it wrong on the power to tax. Although most of the negative comments about the ruling talked about the fear of greater taxation, they weren’t based on the Constitution’s enumerated powers. Rather, they went along with the idea that Congress has the authority to tax whatever it chooses. Wrong. The enumerated powers in Article I are there to limit the areas in which Congress can legislate and collect taxes. I challenge anyone to find a provision for legislating and collecting taxes for healthcare.

Of course, this is nothing new. Ever since the 1937 Helvering case, which declared Social Security constitutional, Congress has acted with little restraint at all. That case essentially said the enumerated powers don’t really exist—they’re just examples of the virtually unlimited power of Congress to legislate as it sees fit. Roberts should know better. I believe he has some background with the Federalist Society, an organization of lawyers and other political types who are trying to revive the concepts of constitutionalism and federalism.

Yesterday’s decision does tremendous damage to the future of freedom in this nation:

This brings me to another silver lining, though. When freedom is threatened, people awake and rise up to defend their freedom. Already this awful ruling has awakened a sleeping giant. The Romney campaign, in the hours just after the decision was made public, received an immediate influx of cash—the last I heard the amount was close to $2 million. And that was without any prodding, except for the Court’s ruling. Tea Party faithful are already organizing; the Republican Governor’s Association has declared that Republican governors are not going to go along with this ruling until they see what happens in November. Now that Obamacare has been called a tax by the highest court in the land, it has become the largest tax increase in American history. Somehow, the president has to defend that after famously claiming that no one, under his administration, making less than $250,000 per year would see their taxes raised.

One comment Roberts made in his ruling was quite accurate. He said the Court’s job is not to protect the people from the political decisions they make. By choosing Obama, the people brought this on themselves. They have no one to blame but themselves. But the nice thing is that they can change their minds. Just because the Supreme Court wrongly issued a decision saying Obamacare is constitutional, that doesn’t mean we have to live with it. Obamacare is the creation of Congress, and a new Congress can repeal it. In fact, the House has already scheduled a vote on that very thing after the Fourth of July. It will pass, and then die in the Democrat Senate. It will be symbolic, but it also may be a harbinger of what will happen if the Republicans can recapture the Senate and the presidency.

Back in 1857, the Supreme Court said that no black person was a citizen of the United States. It was wrong, and a Civil War corrected that wrong decision. In 1896, it declared the doctrine of separate-but-equal to be valid in racial matters. The nation eventually rejected that rationale as well. There is hope that yesterday’s abominable decision will also be cast into the dustbin of foolish Supreme Court pronouncements.

But it depends on the intelligence and vigilance of the electorate. How determined are we to protect our liberty?