Is Kagan radical like Obama, and unfit for Supreme Court?

It would surprise no one if Barack Obama is trying to place on the Supreme Court a radical, pro-abortion academic leftist, who is also a champion of so-called ‘gay rights’.  In this regard, is Elena Kagan the spitting image of Obama himself?  Contrary to the pudding headed reactions that followed his speech to the Democrat National Convention in 2004 (Does that seem like centuries ago, or what?) there is not now and there never was anything even slightly ‘moderate’ about Obama.  That is, unless you’re talking about his very moderate regard for truth.

When it comes to the U.S. Constitution, Obama rejects the idea that governments exist to secure God given and unalienable human rights.  Consequently, he rejects the idea that to be lawful the use of government power must be limited and constrained by respect for those rights.  Like other Marx influenced activists, Obama takes the view that, where ‘history’ demands government action, government is free to assemble and use whatever power it takes to meet the demand. In fact, once those who ride in the vanguard of history manage to take control of government, the aim is to gather in their hands all possible power. Particular policies and programs; particular issues and causes, have no significance beyond the contribution they make to this consolidation of total power.

This view of government is entirely incompatible with the concept of constitutional government. In fact, it is entirely incompatible with any concept of government that would limit the actions of those who embody the logic of ‘history’.  That’s why Karl Marx’s ideological debtors treat all notions of moral or formal, legal constraint as the transient by-products of the stratagem that perpetuates the rule of the class in power at a given stage of history. Moral notions and legal formalities have their uses, but they have no real substance, no permanent claim to truth. Apart from the outcomes of ‘history’, there is no truth, and even then, truth has no permanence as long as the dialectical advance of ‘history’ continues.

For ideological heirs of Karl Marx like Obama the U.S. Constitution is one of these transient by-products. So too are all the ideas of God given equality and unalienable rights in view of which its provisions were crafted. In light of the goals of history, all people cannot possibly be equal. Some embody and serve its advance toward those goals; others are useful fodder in pursuit of them. And still others embody the antithesis that at any given stage falls short of and impedes its purpose. These latter must be discarded, crushed or otherwise overcome.

For the members of the Marxist tribe there is no ‘right’ but the right side of history. Except as dialectical props, all other ‘rights’ are without significance. Of course, they may be useful as rallying points for the advancing forces of ‘history’. They can serve as the magnifying lenses that bring into focus the political energy needed to burn away the antithetical forces reacting against its ineluctable will.  But any permanent claims of action or permission these ‘rights’ represent will themselves be burnt out as ‘history’ moves to its next stage, its next victory, its next overcoming of any who stand in its way.

There can be no common ground between those willing to trample any right that does not serve the present advance of human ‘history’; and those who serve the will that at every moment of history defines the right, and makes all human being possible. Those who define right in terms of history worship the process whereby humanity supposedly creates and recreates itself, as sole master of its own nature and destiny.  Those who define right, as the American founders did, in terms of the will of the Creator, worship the Spirit of God and His incarnate word, by whom all things were made, including all humanity.

The idea that the Obama faction’s ‘history’ worshiping ideology can somehow be reconciled with an oath to preserve and defend the U.S. Constitution is therefore self-evidently absurd.  Their ideology utterly vitiates the very idea of constitutional government. Why? Because where ‘history’ is the author, the constitution of government cannot be contained in words on paper.  It is a living reality that cannot be known except in action, as an historical result.  Like that other infamous usurper, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, those who now mean to usurp and overturn the U.S. Constitution have “strange things…in head that will to hand; which must be acted ‘ere they may be scann’d.” But where law can only be known after the fact, (i.e., after the judge’s words or the executive’s actions tell us what it is) there is an end of constitutional government.  Indeed, there is an end to the whole idea that justice requires the prior arrangement and constraint of power through the words of written law.   What may be at stake, therefore,  in the decision about Elena Kagan’s suitability for the Supreme Court is not only American liberty but the very idea that government as such must be constrained by respect for law.

This means that the decision ought properly to turn on the question of her commitment to the radical ideology that Obama and his preferred associates have imbibed and espoused throughout their careers.  Is there anyone in the U.S. Senate capable of defining the decision in these terms?  Are there any GOP leaders with enough of a grasp on the principles of constitutional government to move beyond catchphrases and seriously articulate the issues involved? We shall see.

More From Alan Keyes is Loyal to Liberty

• Obama’s social security number-another little anomaly
• Call Obama bad- It’s the Christian thing to do
• A meditation on the undoing of America’s sovereign power

Related posts:

1. Iowa Supreme Court Joins Judicial Insurrection
2. Kagan also disqualified by ignorance of Ninth Amendment
3. The GOP’s uncivil union-pro-life voters, pro-abortion money
4. Kagan’s reflexive bias will disfigure the USSC’s impartial appearance
5. No President “entitled” to appoint any SCOTUS Justice he wishes

Tagged as: Elena Kagan, Marxist, radical, U.S. Constitution, U.S. Supreme Court