Rand Paul Has Long Way To Go Before He Becomes a Real Patriot

Rand Paul Has  Long Way To Go Before He Becomes a Real Patriot

Lochner v. New York is widely viewed as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history. It is taught in law schools, alongside decisions upholding segregation and permitting Japanese detention camps, in order to instruct budding lawyers on how judges should not behave. Even Robert Bork, the failed, right-wing Supreme Court nominee who claimed women “aren’t discriminated against anymore”, called Lochner an “abomination” that “lives in the law as the symbol, indeed the quintessence of judicial usurpation of power.”

Lochner fabricated a so-called right to contract in order to strike down a New York law preventing bakery owners from overworking bakers, but its rationale has implications for any law intended to shield workers from exploitation. In essence, Lochner established that any law that limits any contract between an employer and an employee is constitutionally suspect. If desperation forces someone to agree to work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for a dollar a day in a factory filled with toxic air, then courts must treat that law with heavy skepticism. Not every workplace law was struck down during the so-called Lochner Era — the justices of that era sometimes valued sexism more than they valued exploiting workers, for example — but Lochner placed any law benefiting workers on constitutionally weak footing. Needless to say, the “right to contract” it invented appears nowhere in the Constitution.

Nevertheless, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) took several minutes out of his lengthy talking filibuster yesterday to praise this “abomination” of a decision on the Senate floor:

    You get to the Lochner case. The Lochner case is in 1905. The majority rules 5-4 that the right to make a contract is part of your due process. Someone cannot deprive you of determining how long your working hours are without due process. So President Obama’s a big opponent to this, but I would ask him — among the other things I’m asking him today — to rethink the Lochner case. . . . I think it’s a wonderful decision.

Watch it:

Although its not entirely clear what exploiting workers has to do with drone strikes, the primary subject of Paul’s filibuster, the senator seemed to think that Lochner was relevant because that case claimed that its fabricated right to contract flowed from the Constitution’s “due process” guarantee.

Paul’s speech also includes a somewhat rambling attempt to claim that Lochner helped “end Jim Crow,” a claim that would cause anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of civil rights history to scratch their head. Lochner was decided in 1905, and, while Paul is correct that the Lochner Era justices very occasionally struck down discriminatory laws, Jim Crow was still very much alive when Lochner was overruled in the 1930s. The Supreme Court decision that did the most to eradicate Jim Crow — Brown v. Board of Education — rested on the Constitution’s guarantee that no person shall be denied the “the equal protection of the laws,” not on some fabricated right to contract. And Brown alone was insufficient to overcome the campaign of “massive resistance” segregationists mounted in defense of Jim Crow.

What finally killed American apartheid was big, centralized government of the kind Paul and his fellow tea partiers love to hate. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 required business owners to contract with minorities — something that would undoubtedly been unconstitutional under Lochner. And, of course, the same Voting Rights Act that is now endangered in the Supreme Court tore down Jim Crown voter exclusions. Sen. Paul, for his part, has incorrectly suggested that the Civil Rights Act violates the Constitution.

Paul’s endorsement of Lochner reflects a disturbing evolution in Tea Party thought. For much of Obama’s first term, Tea Party conservatives rallied behind “tentherism,” the false belief that most of what the federal government does is unconstitutional. Unlike tentherism, which applies only to federal laws, Lochnerism prevents both the federal government and the states from enacting necessary legislation. Although a handful of the most radical federal judges openly embrace Lochnerism or similar reasoning, this particularly virulent misreading of the Constitution was largely absent from elected officials’ rhetoric until Paul’s speech yesterday.

Rand is a like a pig. Sometimes he gets up out of the mud and finds a mushroom. At the end of the day he is still a creature of anti-American muck.

Mitt Romney - The Weirdest, Richest and Most Clueless Clown To Ever Run For King of The Anglo-Saxons

Mitt Romney - The Weirdest, Richest and Most Clueless Clown To Ever Run For King of The Anglo-Saxons

Something is wrong with Middle Easterners, Muslims, people with Muslim names, dark-skinned immigrants and their children, and other non-whites, according to the narrative established by the right, particularly after September 11, 2001.

When President George W. Bush addressed the nation in the days following the attacks, and said “They hate our freedoms,” he was talking about the terrorists responsible for 9-11. But somehow that phrase became part of a rallying cry and general inquisition against innocent brown-skin citizens wrongly suspected of terror.

Now a policy advisor to Mitt Romney has another diagnosis of what’s wrong in America: President Barack Obama, b.k.a. the Foreigner-in-Chief, fails to appreciate the white man’s America’s mythical Anglo-Saxon heritage.

The anonymous advisor reportedly told the Daily Telegraph:

    “We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”

Way to rally the Ku Klux Klan base.

Romney’s camp told the Washington Post this conversation never occurred. “It’s not true,” Romney spokeswoman, Amanda Hennenberg, said in a statement. “If anyone said that, they weren’t reflecting the views of Governor Romney or anyone inside the campaign.”

But the Daily Telegraph insists that it’s true, the Post reported. And one of Romney’s European advisors, who says he isn’t the culprit, is particularly fond of the phrase Anglo-Saxon.

Look: I know some people are still harboring suspicions and nursing dreams that Obama’s birth certificate is fake. But let’s assume for a moment that some random black man hasn’t used a fake birth certificate to pull off the greatest conspiracy to usurp power in American history. Let’s assume that Obama is qualified by his birth in Hawaii to be president and won his election by campaigning better than his opponent and by being — gasp — favored by voters. Then we start to see how ridiculous it is to accuse him of not ‘fully appreciating’ America’s “Anglo-Saxon heritage.” Obama’s just as Anglo-Saxon as the rest of America, which fortunately, isn’t very much.

Like most of us, he inherited English — the biggest legacy of Anglo-Saxon culture — as his first language and I would venture to guess that he’s  studied more than a little English literature and history. Maybe he didn’t do it every school year that he lived abroad, but how many years do you need to do it get the picture? Or does Obama need to be born in England itself to be president?

The ludicrousness of challenging Obama’s bonafides as an Anglophile — or is it Anglo-Saxon-phile – is underscored by America’s bloody severance of its ties to its European overlords in 1776. Wasn’t Mitt Romney just celebrating his independence July 4th?
Who Were the Anglo-Saxons Anyway?

The myth that America is an Anglo-Saxon country is dangerous and un-democratic. Whites only came to think of America that way in the decades before the Civil War and continued to perpetuate the myth because it justified white supremacy and slavery.

Deep, right?

Angles and Saxons were two of three barbarous Germanic tribes who began invading Britain in the 5th century A.D., when it was under Roman rule. They colonized it and the Saxons set up England. For obvious reasons — like the non-English ancestry of many white colonists and settlers and the bloody overthrow of English rule during the American Revolution – white Americans didn’t think of themselves as Anglo-Saxons for their first 200 years here. That idea started to catch on in the middle of the 19th century after three white American historians — William H. Prescott, Francis Parkman, and John Lathrop Motley — wrote books suggesting it. According to the late Stanford University historian George Frederickson, the books credited the Anglo-Saxon ancestry of the English for helping  the English to push the French, Spanish and Dutch out of north America:

The Anglo-Saxon was represented as carrying in his blood a love of liberty, a spirit of individual enterprise and resourcefulness, and a capacity for practical and reasonable behavior, none of which his rivals possessed. – The Black Image in the White Mind

Almost immediately, America’s mythical Anglo-Saxon heritage took hold as an alternate justification for slavery and basis for white superiority, Frederickson wrote. Even critics of slavery, including prominent abolitionists of the day such as Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, believed it.

The early settlers of Massachusetts Bay, [Parker] announced in 1854, “had in them the ethnologic idiosyncrasy of Anglo-Saxon — his restless disposition to invade and conquer other lands; his haughty contempt of humbler tribes which leads him to subvert, enslave, kill and exterminate; his fondness of material things, preferring these to beauty; his love of personal liberty, coupled with his most profound respect for peaceful and established law; his inborn skill to organize things to a mill, men to a company, a community, tribes to a federated state; and his slow, solemn, inflexible, industrious and unconquerable will.” Only in America, he continued, “did the peculiar characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon” come to full development. – The Black Image in the White Mind

First of all, this mythical Anglo-Saxon sounds like a rapist. Second of all, ew. Is this the heritage that Mitt Romney’s policy advisor appreciates?

I don’t know how Obama constructs his identity relative to England and I’m pretty sure that loyalty to the crown shouldn’t be a presidential litmus test. But for my part, I’ll just say it. “Appreciate” is not the word I’d use to describe the mythical Anglo-Saxon identity. “Regret” is more like it.

 Some have suggested that the Anglo-Saxon reference was a dog whistle to the white southern political strategy used by Saint Ronnie Reagan. That might be why having sen the reaction to the comments of his spokesperson, Romney has denied anyone said anything. Too late now, the dog whistle has rallied the radical anti-American base of conservatives - those who hang on every word racists like Rush Limbaugh says.


Romney camp features Tampa govt. contractors who say they don't need... government. One has to be capable of the deepest self delusions to be a Republican. Conservatives, whose businesses rely n government contracts for the majority of their business ( government contracts are by definition contracts paid for out of public tax funds) swear they don't need gov'mint.

Because the last Republican president did not break the economy good enough, Romney Struggles To Distinguish His Economic Policies From Bush’s