Today POLITICO Arena asks:
Does Senator Grassley’s tweet, that the American people “r not stupid as this x prof of con law,” make an important point or was it disrespectful? Is this a sign that Obama’s Supreme Court comments won’t be going away?
There’s enough disrespect to go around – for the president (Grassley), for the Supreme Court (Obama). It’s the larger question about Obama’s comments on the Court and the Constitution that’s more important, because it’s not going away, and for good reason. Look no further than to this morning’s Washington Post, where E.J. Dionne Jr. is falling all over himself in defense of Obama. After the Court’s oral arguments over ObamaCare, it’s finally dawning on modern liberals that their project for ubiquitous government is under serious political and even legal attack, so they’re fighting back.
Like others in the liberal establishment last week, Dionne links Obama’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s attacks on the Court. But he links those in turn to Obama’s ”social Darwinism” attack next day on the Ryan-Romney budget – a budget, Dionne writes, that would cut back “student loans, medical and scientific research grants, Head Start, feeding programs for the poor, and possibly even the weather service.” Indeed, it’s “so far to the right,” Obama said, that it makes the Republicans’ 1994 Contract With America “look like the New Deal.”
What Obama and his liberal apologists fail to accept, of course, is that their welfare-state project is spent, literally. They pose as defenders of welfare programs for the poor and, now, the middle class, while either ignoring the deficits and debt those programs have run up or, at best, arguing that taxing the rich will solve the problem, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Thus the Democratic Senate has failed to pass a budget in over a thousand days, and no one gives the administration’s budget a moment’s thought. Their pose is just that, because unless we come to grips with these systemic problems, there will be no student loans, Head Start, and all the rest, because “entitlements” and service on the debt will consume everything, until they too will go by the way.
Our Constitution for limited government was written to avoid this dilemma. Roosevelt and his “Brain Trust” thought they were wiser than the Framers, much like today’s liberals. Grassley’s mistake was in choosing the wrong word. It’s not “stupid,” it’s “irresponsible.” Santa Claus comes only once a year. The rest of the year we have to behave like adults.