Born in Liberty, Drowned in Govenment

The conservative blogosphere is full of the possibility that the President will shortly release a new set of executive actions designed to infringe on the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

Patience and fortitude have their place.

But, as Thomas Jefferson quite directly stated, "the tree of liberty must be watered, from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

A President must remain within the bounds of the Constitution.

A President that trespasses on the natural rights of men during his adventure outside of constitutional bounds commits impeachable "high crimes and misdemeanors."

A Congress that observes a criminal and tyrant in office and fails to impeach him for doing so foments conditions of revolution.

Obama is our new King George III.

The Republican Congress is our new Parliament.

The time to say, "enough" and "no more" certainly comes, if it has not passed already.

The very Declaration of Independence that is the fundamental document of this Nation's founding declares the unalterable principle, "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

That fundamental right -- to remove, by force if necessary, those agents of government and forms of government, that are destructive of liberty -- is as fundamental an aspect of the American experiment as any that claims to be such.

The question remains. Does our George III dare to impose on the great mass of the American people, who will, rather than surrender arms, remove him and do so, if necessary, by force and violence?

Our Nation knows no king. Our Declaration recognizes no right in government to deform or destroy liberty. I do not yearn for revolution, I yearn for the restoration of the American republic as a limited government answerable to the People and compliant with the Constitution.

But the long trail of abuses of this administration, together with the failure to attend to the pleas of the People to rectify these abuses, and to bring the President to heel, will either produce revolution, or serve as our sad epitaph:

Born in Liberty, Drowned in Government.

Terror Attack as Pretext to Dictatorship?

A newly discovered friend and fellow lover of liberty put this question to me:

Could the President use the pretext of a terrorist attack to become a dictator in the United States?

Of course, there are many approaches one could take to answering the question. I suppose the first step would be to reach agreement on the meaning of that term, "dictator." Pick your poison, most dictionaries will offer these definitions for the term:

"a person exercising absolute power, especially a ruler who has absolute, unrestricted control in a government without hereditary succession."

"a person invested with supreme authority during a crisis, the regular magistracy being subordinated to him until the crisis was met."

With those definitions of "dictator" in mind, we could restate the question just slightly this way:

Could the President use the pretext of a terrorist attack to assume supreme authority, that is, absolute, unrestricted control in the United States?

Of a legal mind, and more particularly, a constitutional one, I take the question to mean:

• Do the Constitution and laws of the United States admit the possibility of a dictatorial President?
• Do the Constitution and laws of the United States provide solutions to a dictatorial President?

Both questions can be easily answered. Yet, the underlying question touches a raw nerve of Americans who have watched the Nation unravel at the hands of the current administration. As to the easy answers:

No, the Constitution and laws of the United States do not admit the possibility of a dictatorial President. 

Yes, the Constitution and laws of the United States do provide solutions to a dictatorial President. Having laid those bare answers down, I will address some points of our history and our Constitution in the balance of this post.

The late Tom Clancy produced a series of riveting novels that often brushed too close to real life. Clancy's 1994 novel, Debt of Honor, features an act of vengeance in which a Japanese national crashes a Boeing 747 commercial jet into the Capitol Building. In a decapitating twist, the crash occurs during an address to Congress by the President.

The President, most members of Congress, and most of the President's cabinet are all killed. The attack occurs just moments the President obtained the assent of both Houses of Congress (as required by Section Two of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment) to his selection of perennial Clancy hero Jack Ryan as his Vice President. That put Ryan in the driver's seat of a badly damaged nation.

Of course, Debt of Honor was fiction.

On September 11, 2001, however, that fiction came to life when terrorists hijacked commercial jet liners and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. [If you are inclined to think that the accepted explanation -- that terrorists organized and succeeded in this planned attack -- is simply cover-up to hide a homegrown plan that would justify American military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan -- I hope you will continue to read. I am not taking on the issue of what caused 9/11. I am addressing what risk there is that, in the face of a future similar attack, we could find ourselves drawn under a domestic dictatorial regime.]

Now, the aftermath of Debt of Honor's fictional attack is told in Clancy's novel, Executive Orders. Interestingly, Clancy's President Ryan undertakes the role of Chief Executive and proceeds to govern principally through executive orders. President Ryan, in Clancy's scheme of things, validly governs by Executive Order because, in the absence of a Congress, necessary legislation to respond to threats and crises is unavailable. Unfortunately, Ryan's orders include at least one that is deeply troubling for a liberty minded People, namely a ban on interstate travel.

Seven years passed from publication of Debt of Honor to the destruction of the Twin Towers. The actual attack did not effect a decapitation of the federal government. President Bush, his Cabinet, the Congress, and the Courts were all secured against harm. As a nation, though, we reeled in stunned horror at the staggering devastation of the attacks. We were bereft of thought from the barrage of heart-rending images resulting from the terrifying and intimate attack.

Although imperfectly, the federal government -- President Bush and the Congress -- principally looked outward from the Nation and turned the energies of the government to the external homes and safe places of terrorists in order to secure the Nation from attack. [***Of course, the attack inflicted a substantial economic impact that needed correction, and the security implications of the 9/11 attack required evaluation, principally in the form of the 9/11 Commission.] There were domestic reactions, including the adoption of the PATRIOT Act, and the detention and interrogation of American Nationals within the United States.

In particular, the adoption of the PATRIOT Act constituted a dangerous assault on rights to personal liberty and property, by expanding categories and instances in which the surveillance apparatus of the federal government would be turned against Americans in their own homes and places of employment. The ACLU offered this brief, but pointed, explanation of the Fourth Amendment problems of the PATRIOT Act:

The Patriot Act increases the government's surveillance powers in four areas:

• Records searches. It expands the government's ability to look at records on an individual's activity being held by third parties. (Section 215) 
• Secret searches. It expands the government's ability to search private property without notice to the owner. (Section 213) 
• Intelligence searches. It expands a narrow exception to the Fourth Amendment that had been created for the collection of foreign intelligence information (Section 218). 
• "Trap and trace" searches. It expands another Fourth Amendment exception for spying that collects "addressing" information about the origin and destination of communications, as opposed to the content (Section 214). 

From my legal practice -- consisting principally of defending the exercise of rights to freedom of speech, press, assembly and free exercise of religion -- I could see how, as a consequence of the attacks, courts became overly sympathetic to governmental claims that national security required what were, until then, unthinkable intrusions on the exercise of important liberties. The use of "Free Speech zones" to provide physical distance between protesters and government officials became a commonplace.

For example, each October, on the Sunday prior to the start of a new Term of Court, it is typical to see several Supreme Court Justices and other dignitaries attending the "Red Mass" held at St. Matthew's Cathedral in downtown Washington, DC. Catholic justices, including John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy often attend. When he was alive, Chief Justice Rehnquist attended, although not Catholic. Other non-Catholic justices that have, or do, attend, include Justice Stephen Breyer. The Red Mass is a tradition going back to Merry Olde England, in which prayers are offered for the guidance of the Holy Spirit as courts began their sessions.

A friend, and longtime client, Reverend Patrick Mahoney, wanted to express his views about court decisions prohibiting displays of the Ten Commandments on public property, so he went to the public sidewalk across from St. Matthew's to pray and express support for public displays of the Decalogue. Police threatened to arrest Mahoney. We litigated the closure of the sidewalks to demonstrators while they were being left open for use by other pedestrians, and while those attending the Red Mass were not stopped from their incidental exercise of First Amendment freedoms.

You could see the judge's eyes glaze over as the Government laid out its case for the supremely important interest in protecting the lives of these dignitaries. That interest, they argued quite successfully, required the suppression of constitutional liberties for the period of the Red Mass. The federal district court sustained the government's creation of a massive "speech free" zone next to the Cathedral, offering Mahoney and others the weak sop that the government would allow their activities in the "free speech zone" a block away.

Not one to simply surrender his rights, Reverend Mahoney and a stalwart band of like minded folk returned the next year for the Red Mass. As you can see in the accompanying photo, and read in the account by one of those who joined the event, federal police arrested everyone that stood and prayed on the sidewalk across the street from the Cathedral.

This incident is one example of the encroachments made on public demonstrations and protests after 9/11. I know of dozens of others.

Still, post 9/11, ours had not become a nation under the grip of a dictator. Americans remained free. If you doubt that assertion, consider the fact that we remained free to criticize and castigate verbally the President and the Nation's policies. Just take the example of Jon Stewart and his Daily Show. Send ups, like this one:

were common fare throughout nearly the entire two terms of the Presidency of George Bush. Yet, there were no nighttime disappearances of comics, or news readers, or critics.

This safe reality for Jon Stewart, David Letterman, and lesser comedic lights, readily contrasts with the fantastical dictatorship in the 2005 movie, "V for Vendetta." Here's the scene in which Stewart's cinema twin takes a comedic poke at that story's dictator, Chancellor Sutler:

And, of course, in the movie, as in real-life repressive regimes, the outcome for a defiant comic is at least painful. "Gordon Deitrich," the comic who roasted the Chancellor in "V for Vendetta" ultimately, off screen, pays the price for making light of the Chancellor.

And, again, contrasting how unlike a dictator George Bush behaved during his tenure in office, word is just recently out that a well-liked TV personality in Communist China, Bi Fujian, will likely suffer harsh punishment for an indiscretion. He was videotaped singing a spoof version of a Communist Chinese anthem for dinner guests. Unfortunately for him, the video shows him referring to Mao Zedong as "that son of a b*tch" that made the nation miserable.

That's All Well and Good, But What Makes You Think that The President Could Not Assume Dictatorial Powers

Remember, the essence of dictatorship is absolute control.

Our frameworks of government, both at the State and federal level, proceed on the basis that government operates essentially in three capacities. First, governments make laws. Second, governments enforce laws. Third, government interpret the laws to insure that the enforcement of them is proper.

Our State governments are fractured into three divisions, governors, legislatures, and courts, just as the federal government is fractured by the Constitution into three nearly identical divisions, president, Congress, and judiciary. Of course, there is also a complete division of power of another kind between the States and the federal government. The States are the residual sovereign enterprises. Aside from certain express, precise powers granted by the States to the federal government, the States retain a large body of governmental power.

Bearing in mind that the fracturing of power is the normal state of affairs here, to succeed at the assumption of dictatorial power, the President would have an impressive "to do" list to complete:

You can see the difficulty that real dictatorship designs would present in the United States. The distrust of power in the Crown and Parliament that energized our fight for independence was given deep roots in our State forms of government, and those State government forms were the models on which the federal framework of the Constitution was based.

I do not dispute that circumstances could arise in which many Americans would look for strong leadership from Washington.

That, of course, is part of the terrible testament of the Great Depression and its severely burdensome legacy of federal government solutions and programs. Just looking back to the Great Depression, to the federal programmatic responses that Franklin Roosevelt and the Congress sought to impose, we can see how distant yet we were then from dictatorship.

The following excerpt describes the conflict between Roosevelt and Congress on the one hand and the Supreme Court on the other. Roosevelt and Congress enacted an alphabet of programs designed to pump money into the hands of those struggling to stay afloat after the Depression struck. The Supreme Court did not need an alphabet to grade the constitutionality of these programs, persistently giving an "F" to the recovery programs of the Administration:

The election-night jubilation was tempered, however, by an inescapable fear—that the U.S. Supreme Court might undo Roosevelt’s accomplishments. From the outset of his presidency, FDR had known that four of the justices [] would vote to invalidate almost all of the New Deal. They were referred to in the press as “the Four Horsemen,” after the allegorical figures of the Apocalypse associated with death and destruction. In the spring of 1935, a fifth justice [] began casting his swing vote with them to create a conservative majority. 

During the next year, these five judges, occasionally in concert with others, especially Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, struck down more significant acts of Congress—including the two foundation stones, the NRA and the AAA, of Roosevelt’s program—than at any other time in the nation’s history, before or since. In May 1935, the court destroyed FDR’s plan for industrial recovery when, in a unanimous decision involving a kosher poultry business in Brooklyn, it shot down the blue eagle. Little more than seven months later, in a 6 to 3 ruling, it annihilated his farm program by determining that the Agricultural Adjustment Act was unconstitutional. Most of the federal government’s authority over the economy derived from a clause in the Constitution empowering Congress to regulate interstate commerce, but the court construed the clause so narrowly that in another case that next spring, it ruled that not even so vast an industry as coal mining fell within the commerce power.

Roosevelt, buoyed with a landslide 1936 election victory, devised the "Court packing" plan. "Court packing" would require Congress to enlarge the total number of Justices on the Court each time a sitting justice reach 70 years of age. In his radio address defending the plan, Roosevelt put the entire plan down as a method of improving judicial efficiencies, and denied he was seeking results by appointing reliable votes to the Court to change the Court's prevailing philosophy toward federal governmental programs for the recovery.

The Senate did not proceed with consideration of the proposed legislation. The need for the plan abated, however, when in the soon aftermath of Roosevelt's proposal, in a series of decisions, the Court sustained New Deal programs and minimum wage laws.

The important take away from the episode, for our purpose, is that, even at the apogee of his popularity, when Roosevelt might correctly have concluded that he could act unilaterally, he chose not to do so. Yes, he made effective use of the "bully pulpit" of his office. He did not seize dictatorial control.

Nor did John Kennedy, when he might have under the veil of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nor did Andrew Johnson, Chester A. Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, nor Lyndon Johnson, although each succeeded to the presidency as the consequence of an assassination of the President under whom they served. Nor did James Madison when the British attempted to reconquer her former colony, including burning the District of Columbia, during the War of 1812.

Still, we have not yet had such a complete breakdown of order in the Nation that space has been made for, and a dictator did in fact arise. We have had close calls. The Civil War brought us close to the brink.

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended writs of habeas corpus. While the capture of spies might be expected to elicit military detention, reporters and public persons were subject to detention, even a St. Louis minister was seized and held without access to the writ of habeas corpus. The Great Writ is part of our heritage from the English common law.

When granted by a court, the writ of habeas corpus compels executive officers to come before the issuing court, bringing with them the prisoner or detainee that sought the writ, so that the court can examine the reasons for the arrest and detention of the prisoner. Suspending the Great Writ certainly has the feel of dictatorial excess, but is typical under martial law. Lincoln's excesses, however, extended to tolerating arrests, unlimited detentions, and executions of deserters. Perhaps Lincoln's most crass act of was his order for the mass hanging of 38 Sioux Indians, to take place two days after Christmas, 1862.

During war, Presidents are, it seems, most tempted to impatience with the political process, and most likely to assume that the Constitution has rested in their hands, rather than with Congress, the determination of national policy.

Harry Truman, after attempting to use regulatory methods to restrain inflation, faced the possible suspension of steel manufacturing during the Korean Conflict. To avoid that outcome, Truman ordered privately owned steel manufacturing facilities seized by the government, to be operated by the government in place of the owners of the companies. Truman's decision was roundly rejected:

The public reaction was swift and savage. The great majority of newspapers rejected this sweeping doctrine of executive power. An editorial in the New York Times rebuked Truman for creating "a new regime of government by executive decree," a system of government that was inconsistent "with our own democratic principle of government by laws and not by men."[] The Washington Post predicted that Truman's action "will probably go down in history as one of the most high-handed acts committed by an American President."[] Other newspapers weighed in with various forms of denunciation, excoriating Truman for trying to exercise "dictatorial powers."[] The Atlanta Constitution called Truman's order "dangerous"; the Boston Herald objected to Truman's effort to "dictatorially" bypass Congress by making his own law; the Christian Science Monitor accused him of precipitating "a constitutional and political crisis"; and the Detroit Free Press warned that unless someone stopped Truman's exertion of power "our whole constitutional system is doomed to destruction."[]

Truman's decision resulted in litigation that came to the Supreme Court. In Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the Supreme Court rebuked Truman's overreach and rejected the power of the President to engage in the unilateral seizure of private industry.

Even short of war, when sufficient unrest has existed in regions of the country, Congress has granted limited authority in special circumstances to the President to impose martial law. In the aftermath of the Civil War and after ratification of the Reconstruction Era Constitutional Amendments, Congress passed a series of statutes, each of which was called "The Enforcement Act." One of those acts, adopted April 1871, addressed the rank lawlessness into which several South Carolina counties had descended. The key provision of the Enforcement Act, authorizing the President to take all necessary steps to restore order, stated:

That in all cases where insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combinations, or conspiracies in any State shall so obstruct or hinder the execution of the laws thereof, and of the United States, as to deprive any portion or class of the people of such State of any of the rights, privileges, or immunities, or protection, named in the Constitution and secured by this act, and the constituted authorities of such State shall either be unable to protect, or shall, from any cause, fail in or refuse protection of the people in such rights, such facts shall be deemed a denial by such State of the equal protection of the laws to which they are entitled under the Constitution of the United States; and in all such cases, or whenever any such insurrection, violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy shall oppose or obstruct the laws of the United States or the due execution thereof, or impede or obstruct the due course of justice under the same, it shall be lawful for the President, and it shall be his duty to take such measures, by the employment of the militia or the land and naval forces of the United States, or of either, or by other means, as he may deem necessary for the suppression of such insurrection, domestic violence, or combinations; and any person who shall be arrested under the provisions of this and the preceding section shall be delivered to the marshal of the proper district, to be dealt with according to law.

During the administration of President Grant, in fact, ten counties in South Carolina devolved into such a condition of insurrection and violence that Grant declared martial law and deployed military forces to restore order.

Now, there are other occasions, in answer to riots and civil disturbances in which governors call out their State's National Guard and reserve units. Recent unrest in Baltimore, Maryland, and in Ferguson, Missouri, has led to deployment of such State assets. Still, that does not amount to dictatorial power in the President, or in the Governors that make such use of assets.

What Remedy Would Answer Such a Seizure of Power by a President?

An immediate remedy to every presidential excess, to every presidential abuse of power, lies in the Congress, the directly elected representatives of the People. I speak of the three pillars of constitutional authority of the Congress: budget, oversight, and impeachment.

The Congress alone has the power to lay taxes and to make expenditures. In respect of taxing and spending, the President serves the policies and plans of Congress. The beauty of our system is that in the absence of express authority, no money may be expended by the government. In every case, the willingness of Congress to stand firm on its design for taxing and spending will result, must result, in capitulation by the President. If he does not give place to the designs of Congress no new expenditures would be authorized, and the government would go out of operation.

It is a position of inferiority and weakness from which the President proceeds. The Framers designed these two powers, to tax and to spend, in just this way with the view that the body most responsive to the desires of the People should be the place where such powers were reposed. So, to the extent that a dictatorial-like President would seek to give effect to his designs by taxation and spending, Congress has immediate and effective power to obstruct.

Congressional oversight power is also considerable. To call to account the officers and agents of the government, to require that particularized detail of function be provided, and provided under oath, on pain of contempt of Congress, these are important tools of the Congress.

We do know, with respect to oversight, that to some extent, the value of this tool is lessened by the necessary give and take that we usually witness between Congress and the Executive. Disputes over whether Cabinet officers will appear to testify on a matter, whether their testimony will be given under oath (ostensibly giving rise to a risk of criminal prosecution for lying in cases in which a witness does so) are common place in each instance in which the two branches are in the hands of opposing political parties.

Finally, in the ultimate moment of dispute between the branches, Congress possesses the power to impeach the President, officers of the United States government (including members of the cabinet and others), and judicial officers. That power is absolute. There is no aspect of it that is subject to consideration and approval by the President. There is no aspect of it that is subject to review by the Supreme Court.

Let us suppose, though, that the President, in dictatorial fashion, disbanded the Congress. Clancy's Ryan did not disband Congress, it had been virtually extinguished by a terrorist attack. Hitler's Nazi Party did not disband the Reichstag, the Reichstag itself granted autocratic power to the German Chancellor. King George III did, in fact, disband colonial legislative bodies. The Declaration of Independence lists that act among several justifying the severance of our ties with the English Crown and Parliament.

So, suppose that a dictatorial President co-opts the Congress, as Hitler did the Reichstag, or disbanded the Congress as did King George III. What further measures would remain to protect the People from the depredations of a dictator?

The resistance of the Depression era Court to the New Deal programs of Roosevelt show that the Court possesses the necessary goods to deny legitimacy to the conduct of the President in such cases. Moreover, the Civil War era Supreme Court denied legitimacy to the use by Lincoln's military of military tribunals for the trial of civilians so long as the civil courts of the State were available for the purpose. Even going back to the administration of Thomas Jefferson, the Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison, chastised the President for withholding certain judicial commissions issued by President Adams but not delivered to the appointed officers prior to the expiration of Adams' term.

In each of these cases, the Court demonstrated a will to preserve its sphere of authority against Executive invasion. Of course, the President could as easily then disband a Court hostile to his actions.

Still, multiple layers of resistance to tyranny remain.

The States are not the President's to own, to direct, and to control. Each of them would be in a position to resist such action. Democratic Governor Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to resist federal court ordered integration of the Little Rock schools. That action worked but only until the Arkansas National Guard complied with an order from President Dwight Eisenhower, federalizing the Guard, and ordering them to supervise the peaceful integration as ordered by the federal court.

Still, the States remain a substantial dispersed bastion for resistance to dictatorship. The entire enterprise of the federal government tends to depend on cooperation. How the venture could be carried forward in the case of a malign dictator is too unlikely to imagine.

Finally, there is that one further layer of security against tyranny. The Daily Caller reported on firearms ownership statistics in the United States in a post in November 2014. That post suggested that Americans owned, then, approximately 240,000,000 guns, rifles, pistols, and shotguns, including 47,000,000 guns purchased after 2008. Our nation was born in blood, aided in its labor and delivery by the militia: armed men who brought their own firearms to the cause, and who were convinced of the right of their cause against a tyrannical regime that struck at their legislatures, their courts, and their rights as free men.

One simply hopes that we never need to rely on the private American arsenal for such a reason as internal tyranny.

Looking Back: July 2014 on JimsJustSayin

He's George Takei and It's Okay ... For Him to Be Wrong 

Ensign Sulu, I won't tell you how the Enterprise slipped into a worm hole, and you don't tell me  how the Free Exercise Clause and Religious Freedom Restoration Act work.

A False Claim and A True Bill 

Like all sensible folk, I wasn't watching the Sunday morning talk shows when UN Ambassador Susan Rice appeared on all FIVE network shows.  So, until it was reported later that day and in subsequent days, I did not know that the Administration was asserting that the attacks on our Benghazi compounds resulted from a spontaneous response by people of Islamic faith who were offended by a YouTube video deemed blasphemous of Islam.

Boehner's Boner: Ineffectual Parenting of the Boyking 

If Boehner wants to do his job, he needs to forget about suing the President. Even if he can get every Republican in the House to authorize the suit, the federal courts will, ultimately, throw the suit out (a) because of lack of legal standing to sue, or (b) as presenting a non-justiciable political controversy.

Devising a Code of Conduct for the Supreme Court? 

Adopting yet another federal law -- the resort of scoundrels as a general rule -- rather than deploying the law as it exists now, is not the answer.  It is, however, in keeping with the temper tantrums of our times.  Rather than proceeding on Articles of Impeachment, the proposed solution is to adopt a statute.

DREAM Act Birds Come Home to Roost 

We are three days past Independence Day.  I hope, nonetheless, that you will recognize that usurpation of legislative authority by King George III constituted the principal basis for our rebellion against English tyranny.  Obama's tyranny is no less offensive to the republican self-government to which our Declaration aims, our State Constitutions frame, and our National Constitution commits.

Stolen Page from the Obama Diary, July 9, 2014 

Dear Diary, I visited the border today.

Why Having Two White Parents That Remain Together Through Life Is Sucky 

The fact is, having one black parent is good enough to make Barack Obama America's first "black president."  So what that he didn't know his father?  So what that his father bedded and illegally wedded Barack's mother?  So what that his father's influence in his life is an after the fact construct for a book ghost written for a future president by a past domestic terrorist?

Bob Goodlatte vs. Alexander Hamilton: Why Obama Can Be Impeached 

That Goodlatte believes that the basis for impeaching Obama does not exist leaves me with a dread sense that the one truly representative body of our federal government is captained by the ignorant or the damned.

Senate Prefers Pandering Over Responsibilities of Office 

Not heard in the background of that noise are the soft crunching of gravel under boots as American service members walk into, through and beyond dangers on virtually every continent.  Ignored in the press to do this entirely sophistric act of legislative Kabuke theater are the pleas of communities along the southern border to act to reduce the tidal wave of illegal entries into the United States, along with the warnings of those with reason to know that the flood is not just of those seeking a better life here, but also includes, or is at risk of including, those who meld into the flood, so that, on entry into the best and brightest hope of mankind on earth, they can bring terror to the people whose interests have been sacrificed in the Senate in the interest of partisan politics.

A Tale of Two Courts 

With news of federal appeals court decision out of Washington, DC, in the morning on July 22nd, I thought, "this is the best of times."  By the time the day had ended, and word came of another appeals court's decision on the same issue out of Richmond, Virginia, I thought "this is the worst of times." 

ACTION ITEMS: A Tear Sheet of Congressional Responses to Obergefell v. Hodges

The Supreme Court says the Fourteenth Amendment requires States to license same sex marriages. Senate Majority Leader McConnell says its the law of the land. House Speaker Boehner wishes the Court had respected the People. From the failing voices of Republican Leadership in Washington to the celebratory hoopla at Rainbow House (formerly the White House), one gets the definite impression that NOTHING will be done to respond to the unlawful decision of the Supreme Court on the question of same sex marriage.

I have noted the problem here, and provided a full explanation of Congressional power here.

Today, I'm just offering you a checklist of Congressional actions, think of it as a "To Do List" for your representatives. Use this list to challenge your Representative and Senators. Use it to demand action from them.

The list is broken out in four parts. Those parts correspond with the mnemonic: B.O.I.L. Those four letters stand for four different kinds of action CONGRESS should take in response to the Supreme Court. Those actions are BUDGETING, OVERSIGHT, IMPEACHMENT, and LEGISLATION. Tell your elected representatives you are BOILing mad at the Supreme Court's usurpation, and that you will be BOILing mad if they do not take seriously their power to act:

BUDGET ACTIONS:

1. Strip Supreme Court Justices of paid law clerkships.

2. Impose building temperature controls to save heating costs in winter and cooling costs in summer.

3. Eliminate any subscription payments on behalf of the Court, its justices, or its library, to any publication not directly related to the work of the Supreme Court (newspapers, weekly or monthly magazines, etc.)

4. Freeze judicial salaries exactly where they are, eliminate any COLA provision in law that would increase judicial pay.

OVERSIGHT ACTIONS:

1. Conduct hearings on the constitution and demographics of the Supreme Court

2. Conduct hearings on Obergefell v. Hodges
     a.  Examine the Court's treatment of the Fourteenth Amendment
     b.  Examine the standards used by the justices to determine whether they should recuse themselves from particular matters and examine whether Justices Ginsberg and Kagan should have recused themselves for officiating at same sex marriages while Obergefell was pending.
     c.  Examine the Court's treatment of the Defense of Marriage Act, and its treatment of the Article IV power of the Congress respecting Full Faith and Credit.

3. Conduct hearings on the response of the Internal Revenue Service to the decision in Obergefell to determine whether the IRS takes a position regarding the status of Obergefell as deciding a question of public policy for the Nation, from which the IRS could then take negative action against the tax exemptions of religious organizations, churches, and their affiliates, based on a determination by the IRS that policies of such religious organizations, churches and their affiliates that do not recognize or provide equal treatment to same sex marriages are contrary to public policy (Bob Jones University v. United States).

4. Conduct hearings on any change proposed by the Obama administration to federal contracting programs that seek to coerce federal contractors to comply with Obergefell in their HR services to qualify as contractors, including the availability of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to protect contractors from negative actions by the administration.

5.  Conduct hearings to assess the state of accommodations law in the United States, the interplay of such accommodations law and the religious and economic liberties of individuals, businesses, religious organizations, churches and their affiliates.

IMPEACHMENT ACTIONS:

1. Impeach Justices Ginsburg and Kagan based on the participation in, and decision of, Obergefell v. Hodges despite obvious personal interest in the determination and outcome of the case, based on their having officiated at same sex weddings while the case was pending at the Court.

2. Impeach Justices Kennedy, Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan based on their lawless invasion of the Tenth Amendment reserved rights of the States to define marriage, along with their lawless disregard for the singular role of Congress under Article IV to define how States comply with the requirement of Full Faith and Credit.

LEGISLATION ACTIONS:

1. Propose a constitutional amendment to the States
    a. defining marriage as between one man and one woman; or,
    b. reserving expressly to each State the power to define marriage according to its State laws and constitution, and determining for itself whether to afford Full faith and credit to same sex marriages recognized under the law of a sister State.

2. Enact restrictions on the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and the jurisdiction of federal trial and appeals courts to restore the determination of issues related to the creation and dissolution of marriages solely to the courts of the States.

3. Enact a provision of the Internal Revenue Code expressly stating that the decision of the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges does not state a public policy of the United States and expressly stating that the IRS is not authorized to deny or revoke 501(c)(3) exemption based on its determination that a policy or practice of a 501(c)(3) exempt organization is inconsistent with Obergefell or its conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees a right to same sex marriage.

4. Enact a provision amending RFRA expressly to provide that the Act protects religious persons and organizations from federal governmental actions that interfere with, or deny, their religious freedom rights to teach and practice their faith, with respect to the nature of marriage.

* * * *

Share this action list with your social media contacts. Tweet a link to this post to your Senators and Representative. Tell them you expect action and will remember theirs at election time.

Sure, Hillary Has Resigned from Office ... But The Government Says She Can Still Be Impeached

Well, well, well, hadn't thought about this possibility.

The United States government asserts that a civil officer of the United States CAN BE IMPEACHED even after resignation from office.

Impeaching Hillary Clinton would weigh her down in the defense of apparently indefensible wrongs against the public interest in security of government communications, the public interest in maintenance of records of the government, the public interest in disclosure of records subject to production and disclosure.

Barry, Barry, Who the Heck is Barry?

With our good friend, Lou Sharp, my wife and I spent more than a few Friday or Saturday evenings at Kate's Irish Pub in Springfield.  Those were nights when the music was live and "professional" (as opposed to open mike nights earlier in the week when the music was live and often just as good).

One staple performer, Dave Berry, would presage his transition from the family portion of his show to the bluer, adult portion with his rendition of "Alice, Who the Heck is Alice."  Some of you would recognize the song if I changed the word "Heck" to something that rhymed with "duck."

As I read the news, day after day, now some seven years into Obama's public campaigning for President and subsequent election to that office, I hear Dave Berry, leading the crowd over and over again, only in my head, an enraged crowd is yelling, "Barry, Barry, Who the Heck is Barry?"

Well, let's see:

He's the President whose administrtion praised the Oklahoma mosque that sheltered and taught a black man whose moment of fame came in beheading a grandmorther whose apparent crime was not to express submission to Islam.

He's the President that leaves open the borders to those traveling from Ebola-plagued corners of Africa, resulting for the first time, in American history, in the presence of Ebola-infected patients in American communities and hospitals.

He's the President that can erect a second, interior fence to insure that he's protected from would-be invaders, but REFUSES to erect the authorized border fence to protect us from actually-are invaders.

He's the President with the erasable red crayon for drawing lines on the world stage, whose word is not a bond, not even a post-it note kind of bond that will stick unless it gets wet or a good wind comes along.

He's the President who figured out how to turn 3,000 American military casualties in Iraq into proof of a wasted venture by preferring immediate disentanglement to appease home supporters over stabilizing that nation.

He's the President that allows Federal law enforcement agents to export guns to Mexico in a hare-brained scheme allegedly to track their re-importation to the USA, but which resulted in those weapons being used to murder more than 100 people, including American federal law enforcement officials.

He's the President that sides with al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist groups ... in Libya, in Egypt, in Syria, and elsewhere.

He's the President whose rocket-running in Libya was covered up with the blood and death rattles of America's first openly gay US Ambassador and three other Americans.

He's the President whose administration called the murder of Americans aboard a stateside military base "workplace violence, not terrorism," despite the cries of Alluah Ahkbar by the murderer during his rampage.

He's the President that led the USA apology tour, bowing and scraping before tin-pot potentates and has been leftists around the world.

He's the President that promised you could keep your healthcare insurance and your doctor, then signed a law that took away your healthcare insurance and your doctor, then signed an executive order to protect some of you from immediately losing your healthcare insurance and your doctor to prevent an election annihilation of the Democratic Party in 2012 and again this year, but who will allow that healthcare law to have full effect and take away your healthcare insurance and your doctor after the November 2014 election.

He's the President without a record of accomplishments to which he could point when seeking office, having no record of private accomplishments in business, industry, science, research, education, philosophy, or any other field.

He's the President without a paper trail, setting aside one sophomoric editorial from his college days, he is that wonderment of wonderment, the man without evidence of a college transcript, a law school transcript, an employment record.

He's the President who lied about his origins to get a scholarship for foreign students (after all, Obama is a native-born American, right? so how does he qualify for foreign student assistance?)

He is not a cipher, as in a zero.  Because, while a zero adds no positive value to anything to which it is added, Obama brings NEGATIVE value to everything he touches:  he is the hair in your soup, the odd smell of sulpher in your tap water, the dent on the hood of your new car, the flat tire on your way to work, the unsettling call in the middle of the night bearing terrible news, the drop in your stocks, the theft of your identity.

He is the autocrat de fe.  He is a veritable dictator whose targeting of political opponents and uncooperative military officers and private industry makes Richard Milhouse Nixon look like a playground piker.  No mere tosser of taunts, the Machiavellian Obama turns loose the dogs of the IRS and the DOJ on those who express opposition to his ideology and his policy.

He tends the American garden the way rabbits tend your garden, eating what is not his, trampling what he does not own, leaving ruin in his wake.

Under his liar's tenancy in the White House, the number of permanently despairing unemployed Americans has breached 92 millions -- including 55 million American women, the numbers of hungry Americans dependent of Supplemental Nutritional Assistance from the fedgov has past 45 million on its way to 50 million, and the number of uninsured Americans has grown, not declined, as the abomination of Obamacare forces private employers to discontinue private health plans because what was a perfectly fine plan as far as employer and employee were concerned does not satisfy the standards set by a law that Obama had to sign into law to discover what was in the law.

Obama is the light at the end of the tunnel.  No.  Not daylight.  The train heading toward you at seventy miles an hour with a drunk in charge.

Now you understand why I have dreams of a nation rising to its feet and thundering its refrain, "Barry, Barry, who the heck is Barry?"

Sadly for America, Barry is the President.  Barry is the man who should realize that Speaker John Boehner is "his best friend."  Of course, as Barry's friend, Boehner proves himself no FRIEND of America or its People. The President of the United States is worse than a cancer. A cancer will kill you. But Barry will kill you, your family, your future, your hopes, dreams and aspirations as he works like mold, like termites, like disease, to destroy everything with which he has concourse.

All the while, Republicans in the US House of Representatives leave this disease, this whirling dervish of destruction, in power.  They have the power to stop the government until Barry submits. They have the power to put the asterisk of impeachment next to Barry's name in the history books as a testament to THEIR rejection of his decidedly incompetent, decidedly evil, and decidedly destructive policies, yet, with Barry's best friend Boehner at the helm, THEY DO NOTHING.

I hope you're getting the rhythm of this song.   I want it pounding in your brain.  I hope that before too awful long, you'll join in and sing that refrain:

Barry, Barry, Who the Heck is Barry.

Not in a drowsy drunken slur, but in the indignant, demanding and revolutionary tones of those who drove a wedge between the English Crown and our prized liberties.  The time is coming when what can be tolerated from that useless defecation in the White House will be surpassed.  In the absence of concise Congressional action to TERMINATE the Obama presidency, it may fall to the hands of good people, you, your families, your friends to POUND away at the tyranny until it falls to the floor.

Then, with derision, and slight remembrance, but soothed anger, we can go back to a more desultory refrain of

Barry, Barry, Who the Heck was Barry?

Bob Goodlatte vs. Alexander Hamilton: Why Obama Can Be Impeached

So the thinking is, among some Republicans, including Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, that Obama has not committed acts that warrant impeachment, that his record is free of the kinds of crimes warranting impeachment.

Beg pardon, but the Constitution is where Congressman Bob Goodlatte should start a search for the scope, meaning, and application of the Constitution’s provisions regarding impeachment. There, in plain language, impeachment is allowed for treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors. And if Goodlatte demurs that he cannot find a meaning of "high crimes and misdemeanors," then I would direct him to a source undoubted in its standing as the First Word, if not the last one, on the meaning of the Constitution. That source, of course, is the Federalist Papers.

In The Federalist No. 65, Alexander Hamilton, writing as Publius, turns to a question of the decision by the Constitutional Convention to assign to the Senate the power to serve as the "Court for the Trial of Impeachments." He wants it to be understood why the Senate, not the House, not the Courts, not some other body was to be preferred for trials of persons impeached by the House. To move to that question, he first takes note of what manner of questions and conduct would bring an officer of the United States, even the Chief Executive, before such a court.

And it is answering the answering of that question that Publius clarifies the matter for Goodlatte:

"those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself."

If you don't have your own copy of the Federalist Papers, but want to scope out Hamilton's argument in full, it is available online in many locations, including at Yale University's online Archive, The Avalon Project. You can view The Federalist No. 65 here.

For now, though, I thought it sufficient to begin re-thinking the error of Goodlatte's assertion with Publius/Hamilton's own careful construction of the offenses that fall within the scope of impeachment. Publius explained, again, that impeachable offenses are ones that "proceed from the misconduct of public men ... from the abuse or violation of some public trust[, t]hey are of a nature which may be ... denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself."

While Goodlatte seems focused on the absence of some video of Obama taking a multi-billion dollar bribe from George Soros or the like, or of using an electrical prod on a helpless child as a means of feeding some twisted sense of sexual delight, or perhaps even of swiping candy from a baby, THAT IS DECIDEDLY NOT with what the impeachment power is principally concerned.

Instead, in the view of Publius/Hamilton, the nature of the wrongs to be accounted for in impeachment are those that:

1. proceed from misconduct
2. of public men
3. by the abuse of some political trust or
4. the violation of some public trust, acts that can and will be, in the main,
5. denominated POLITICAL in nature and which
6. relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to our society itself.

Now, if Goodlatte thinks that Obama's actions do not qualify for impeachment, then, to be honest, the voters of Virginia can do nothing better to improve the common lot of us all than to vote for someone other than Goodlatte in the fall.

So what injuries, denominated as political, has Obama inflicted on our society?

Begin with the retooling of the Internal Revenue Service as a tool for the suppression of disagreement with the President, as a tool for the prevention of education about the Constitution, its meaning and its application to our times and troubles.

Continue with the likely actual crime of the destruction, not of one or two IRS computer hard drives, but of SEVEN; the naked cover up of criminality by the Chief Law Enforcement officers of the United States is a grave injury to society itself.

Continue from there.

What about Obamacare, the so-called Affordable Care Act. Even if all that it represents is the bumbling and abysmal stupidity of putting in charge of the start up of a national program for the federal insurance exchange a Canadian company that lost contracts in their home country for the same reasons of unpreparedness, indolence, and failure, it is too much.  Having as our Chief Executive one who hires buffoons and incompetents suffices to state the ground of injury to society itself.

Do not stop with the terribly incompetent roll-out of Obamacare. Because there is more to the problem than that sign-ups for Obamacare were frustrated by the fifth-rate incompetence of the website designers. We were, as a Nation, sold this bill of goods on the claim of its essentiality to our national economic health. We were told of the importance of this NATIONAL MANDATE, of the harms that having such uncertainty govern the affairs of an economic enterprise that constitutes one sixth of our entire national economy. As it turned out, however, the Chief Executive immediately began doling out exceptions and exclusions from mandates in the act, and delaying implementation of provisions of it.

Exclusions and exceptions went to industries and unions whose cooperation are/were essential to the success of the Administration's ongoing enterprises. A simple matter of quid-pro-quo lifting of requirements based on claims of need. Delays, as we know, were imposed in order to give the Democratic Party what it really needed: a time machine. They needed then, and need now, NOT TO HAVE a bruised and broken electorate going to the polls on November 4, 2014, remembering who it was, which party it was, that single-handedly delivered our health insurance, our health care, into the maws of the great leviathan, the federal government. So delay, delay, delay.

What is missed for many though is the meaning for the whole enterprise of Obamacare to be drawn from delays, exceptions and exclusions. An enterprise that is so swiss-cheesed on the basis of partisan interests of industries, unions and politicians may be many things, but it is hard to argue that it is an essential one.

No sense stopping at Obamacare, given this Administration's decisions to run guns. Fast and Furious, of course, run by Attorney General Holder, put guns into the hands of Mexican cartel drug lords. Some of those guns came back to the United States and were even used to kill American federal employees. Just as evil, others of those guns stayed in Mexico; in one of the most heart-rending instances, the guns were used to slaughter 12-, 13- and 14-year old girls attending a birthday party. 

But Obama's gun running extends beyond Fast and Furious. The Benghazi story, when it is fully told, will detail the movement of arms from us, to Libyan based affiliates of al Qaeda, and across the northern coast of African to al Qaeda affiliates in Syria responsible for killing other Muslims, Christians and Christian clerics, occasional beheadings, the bizarre scene of man taking a bite out of another man's heart, and the rest.

There is more. Frankly, there is too much more. That Goodlatte believes that the basis for impeaching Obama does not exist leaves me with a dread sense that the one truly representative body of our federal government is captained by the ignorant or the damned.

Stolen Page from the Obama Diary, July 9, 2014

Barack Obama's Diary, Wednesday, July 9, 2014:

I visited the border today. 

Of course, when I say I visited the border today, I don't mean that I gave in to pressure from those idiot Republicans and actually went to the physical border of the United States with Mexico.

What I did was, I visited a State that shares a border with Mexico.

I am very concerned about the humanitarian crises the influx of unaccompanied children represents. The dangers of their travel, the crimes committed against them, the diseases to which they have been exposed. That's why I visited the border today.

Of course, when I say I visited the border today because of my compassionate concern for those poor little stateless waifs, I don't mean that I gave in to pressure from those idiot Republicans and actually visited with those poor little stateless waifs.

What I did was attend some very important meetings with folks who also care very deeply about this humanitarian crisis. In fact, because they care so deeply about the humanitarian crisis, and trust my vast knowledge, skills and wisdom, they gave me large amounts of money.

Of course, when I say they gave me large amounts of money because they trust my knowledge, skills and wisdom, I don't mean that I've given in to pressure from those idiot Republicans and am diverting the funds they donated to aid the poor stateless waifs.

No. That money, it goes to insure the election of more great Americans of compassionate heart, like me, like Harry Reid, like Nancy Pelosi.

I visited the border today.

Devising a Code of Conduct for the Supreme Court?

Why the Constitution -- its words, its framework for government, and its patent principles such as separation of powers -- is so incomprehensible to the Senators that have proposed legislation adopting a code of judicial conduct for the judges of the Supreme Court is beyond my ken.

The sole arbiter of whether conduct constitutes an impeachable offense under the U.S. Constitution is a majority of the United States House of Representatives.  Article I, section 2 of the Constitution provides, "The House of Representatives ... shall have the sole Power of Impeachment." In that body alone lies the power to impeach constitutional officers, including the President, his cabinet and judicial officers of the United States, including judges of the Supreme Court.

The Constitution does NOT provide a laundry list of conduct warranting impeachment.  Article II provides only that impeachment shall be based on “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.”  Setting aside acts constituting treason or bribery, there is no constitutional guidance to the meaning of "other high crimes and misdemeanors."  As a consequence, in a drunken soiree, if the House of Representatives decides that wearing a frilled robe, or speaking French during oral argument, or driving a Prius, constitute impeachable offenses then, frankly, that judgment alone is of constitutional significance and dimension.  A majority of the House could discharge its entire responsibility in regard to any offense it decides is within the ambit of "other high crimes and misdemeanors," simply by voting in the affirmative on an Article of Impeachment so providing.

Deciding that judges of the Supreme Court -- whose wives have partisan political affiliations, whose off bench time includes speaking to law schools, think tanks, or a television audience, whose vacations include pheasant hunting with officers and directors of large corporations -- should or should not be impeached is the prerogative of the House.  Were the House to impeach on any of these bases, whether considered by me or others to be silly or frivolous, then the Senate could determine whether to convict the impeached.  Thus, even the House's judgment regarding what constitutes an impeachable offense can be tempered by the Senate's action on approved Articles of Impeachment.

Adopting yet another federal law -- the resort of scoundrels as a general rule -- rather than deploying the law as it exists now, is not the answer.  It is, however, in keeping with the temper tantrums of our times.  Rather than proceeding on Articles of Impeachment, the proposed solution is to adopt a statute.  But the Constitution does not empower the Congress to direct and control the conduct and lives of the judges of the Supreme Court ... EXCEPT by impeachment and removal.

The time for tantrums in regard to impeachable conduct is passed.  If Democrats in the Senate want to remove Judges Scalia and Thomas because of their actions, or those of their family members, including speaking to conservative groups (Scalia) or working with Tea Party groups (Thomas' wife), then let them gain the House and begin proceedings, or convince their Republican counterparts to do so.  An accretion of two hundred years of federal laws serves only to demean the value and purpose of existing law, and to advise those whose conduct (President Obama) actually warrants impeachment that they are safe, because, though the Congress is in session, it is undisturbed repose.

Boehner's Boner: Ineffectual Parenting of the Boyking

We've all seen those instances we immediately recognize as illustrations for a life class called Ineffective Parenting 101. You know the scene: a child is insolently and sullenly refusing to comply with an instruction from a parent; or a child is having a tantrum. The parent turns to the child and says, "if you do that again, I'm going to . . . ."

We know this is a pointless exercise.

The parent has already declared allegiance ... to entropy ... to inertia ... to couch-potatoism. The child, though no wiser than the parent, certainly is smarter in this instance. There will be NO repercussions, no consequences of merit.

That's how it feels to watch Speaker John Boehner threaten to sue the ‪#‎boyking‬Barack Obama. You definitely don't see Boehner giving Obama the constitutional butt-smacking he deserves, and, in fact, the only one of two constitutional disciplines of the President that belong to the Congress. If Boehner wants to do his job, he needs to forget about suing the President. Even if he can get every Republican in the House to authorize the suit, the federal courts will, ultimately, throw the suit out (a) because of lack of legal standing to sue, or (b) as presenting a non-justiciable political controversy.

No. If Boehner doesn't want to be the face of a thousand scenes of abandoned responsibility and duty undone, he will direct the House to turn its attention before any other business to drafting, investigating, and voting on Articles of Impeachment. The only just answer to the tyranny of this President is his impeachment, his removal, his indictment, and his conviction.

Book Review: B.H. Obama's Citizens in the Attic

Not since VC Andrews first penned "Flowers in the Attic" has a tale of such chilling cruelty been told.

Real life publications presents B.H. Obama's first book, "Citizens in the Attic."

Read the true life tale of a nation whose citizens are an embarrassment to its socialist/Marxist President. A nation of citizens that are inconvenient. A nation of citizens that remind a President of his own inadequacies, his own weaknesses.

Follow with horror as the Citizens in the Attic are fed a melange of poisons, presented as treats, each powdered sugar coated to disguise the poisonous tang of political arsenic: government bailouts of banks and motor companies; tax increases; hijacking of the health care industry.

Who will live? Who will die?

Will those that should care, that should intervene, that should stop the madness of the nation-o-cidal maniac act? Or will the Citizens in the Attic wilt, droop, die?

Beware his powdered sugar!

Kerry Will Leave No Stone Unturned ... Obamaroaches Will Scurry

Folks with a bit of grey at the temples will remember who it was that sought to preserve future political viability.

I think John Kerry's statement that the State Department will leave no stone unturned in seeking out the truth of what happened with Benghazi reflects a profound awareness on his part that Barack Obama has cleared his glide path to the 2016 Democratic Presidential nomination and that Hillary has stupendously failed to "preserve future political viability."

Let's face it:  Hillary Clinton's presidential aspirations are dead, after the latest Benghazi revelations (State Department micro-editing and control of the Susan Rice talking points).  ABC News has talking points as they evolved prior to Susan Rice's quintefecta of fabrications.

If the stink of this scandal leads to Obama's resignation or impeachment, I think Joseph Biden will see a short shelf life as President, purely comical caretaker, and if Kerry takes a serious (at least for the public) stand, he would be rightly perceived by Democrats as the mop and bucket needed to clean up their party's disastrous White House implosion.

Just sayin!