Liberty and the Constitution

This article is right on the money...

Reasserting Federalism in Defense of Liberty
Ken Cuccinelli Attorney General of Virginia
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 1, 2011, in the "First Principles on First Fridays" lecture series sponsored by Hillsdale College's Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C.

Some favorite Virginians of mine who inspired and crafted our federal Constitution—Mason, Madison, Jefferson, and Henry—also drafted the Constitution of Virginia. And in the latter, they included a critical statement that said, "No
free government, nor the blessings of liberty, can be preserved . . . but by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."
Our founders well understood that our liberty could not be preserved without frequently referring back to first principles. But while they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to defend those principles, we have often taken them for granted, as we have become complacent in thinking that government will take care of every problem.
We have asked government to do more for us, and all the government asks for in return is a little bit more of our liberty. Over the decades, we kept asking. And because the courts and the politicians were all too happy to oblige, regardless of what the Constitution said, we no longer have a federal government of limited powers. We have
an overreaching central government—a government that seeks to plan and control virtuallyevery aspect of our lives and our economy, from health care, to energy, to automobile manufacturing, to banking and insurance.
Thankfully, though, in the last several years, people have woken up and are pushing back. With this pushback, we are
seeing the idea of federalism reemerge.
People want to return to a government of limited, enumerated powers, and an arrangement in which states serve as a
check when the federal government oversteps its constitutional bounds.
In the current lawsuits brought by the states over health care and against the EPA, state governments are pushing
back and reasserting federalism as the Founders intended them to do. Indeed, I am not aware of a time in history when
this many states have sued the federal government to rein in its power: Today, more than half are parties to lawsuits
against the new health care act and its individual health insurance mandate.
Virginia was the first state to argue in federal court that the new health care law is unconstitutional. When we brought the suit in March 2010, most media outlets and many legal experts said we stood no chance. One law professor said our
argument about constitutionality was, if not frivolous, close to it. Another legal expert said our case relied on a "controversial reading of the Constitution."
Apparently, it is controversial to apply the Constitution as it was written. But back in December, when a federal judge ruled in Virginia's favor that the mandate is unconstitutional, assertions that we did not stand a chance faded fast.

Let me explain a bit about our lawsuit.
Our first legal argument is that the government's attempt to use the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to mandate
the purchase of a private product—in this case, health insurance—goes beyond Congress's power. The reason there has
never been a mandate like this in all of American history is because, up until now, everyone knew Congress lacked the
power to impose one.
I often give the example of the colonial period, when the colonists were boycotting British goods while demanding that King George III and Parliament repeal the Stamp Act and the Intolerable Acts. I am sure it was to the king's dismay, but his own lawyer— the solicitor general—told Parliament that the boycott was legal under British law.
In other words,the colonists could not be forced to buy British goods. Yet in 2010, we had a president and a Congress who believed they could compel Americans to buy a private product even when the king of England, whom we rebelled against, knew he did not have that power. And back then, we were merely subjects!
The federal government has argued in court that not buying health insurance is as much of an economic activity as buying it, and therefore that it can regulate a citizen's decision not to buy government-approved health insurance under
the Commerce Clause.
Nonactivity is the same as activity in the government's argument. Clearly, someone in Washington needs a dictionary.
That same reasoning could be used to force us to buy cars, vegetables, or gym memberships. If Virginia loses this suit
and the federal government is allowed to cross this line, Congress will be granted a virtually unlimited power to order us to buy or do anything. It would be the end of federalism—not to mention individual rights—as we have known it for
more than 220 years.
There is also a secondary argument made by defenders of the health care act. The Obama administration's fallback
position if it loses its Commerce Clause argument is to say that the fine for not buying government-approved health insurance is not a penalty, but a tax. The administration is asserting this because a tax to pay for a health care scheme would be constitutional under Congress's taxing authority. We argue in response that the government cannot all of a sudden start calling a penalty a tax to try to make the law legal. In fact, every court that has heard the government's
tax argument has rejected it.
When Congress and President Obama debated the health care law, for political reasons, they repeatedly said that the fine for not buying health insurance was a penalty, not a tax. And indeed, under the law they passed, they structured it as a penalty. So now the administration is both flip-flopping and misrepresenting facts.
We will soon see which arguments the appeals court agrees with, because we will be arguing the case in the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on May 10th. Whatever that ruling, the case will end up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. That is why we are also running a second track and asking the Supreme Court to skip the Fourth Circuit and take the case directly. We have asked the court for this expedited review because states are already spending huge sums to implement their portions of the health care act, businesses are already making decisions about whether to cut or keep employee health plans, and real health care reform is on hold until the Supreme Court rules. If we do not get this suit resolved as quickly as possible, we impose crippling uncertainty on the states, businesses, individuals, and our entire economy.

Liberty as an Environmental Principle
As bad as the federal health care law is, the economic consequences of what the EPA has in store for us will be equally
damaging to our freedom and our economy. Thus the EPA is another front in Virginia's federalism fight.
In December 2009, the EPA declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants dangerous to public
health because they are alleged to cause global warming. This finding gave the agency the immense power to regulate
CO2 emissions—and remember, this dangerous pollutant, carbon dioxide, is what we exhale from our bodies every second of every day.
For the ruling, the EPA relied primarily on data from a United Nations global warming report. Emails leaked in 2009
in the Climategate scandal showed that some of the world's prominent climatologists manipulated data to overstate the
effects of carbon dioxide on the environment.
Much of the U.N. report relied on that questionable data, and the EPA relied on that report. Since the revelations from
the leaked emails became public, some scientists involved in the report have had to back off some of their positions and
research. Renowned climate researcher Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, a longtime proponent of the global warming
theory, admitted recently that there is noquestion that data in the U.N. report was misleading, and that "it is obvious that there has been deletion of adverse data" that would work against the theory of rapid global warming in the last century.
Pursuant to this, in February 2010, my office petitioned the EPA to reopenits hearings on greenhouse gases and review new evidence. Instead it ignored our request—in fact, it ignored the law. So we filed a federal lawsuit to force the
hearings to be reopened, and we are still awaiting our day in court. If the EPA is allowed to move forward with its regulation of carbon dioxide, costs to every American household are projected to increase by $3,000 a year due to higher prices for energy, food, clothing, and any other goods that require energy to manufacture or transport. Talk about taxing the poor!

In a document the EPA published on regulating greenhouse gas emissions in cars and light trucks, it admits that its
new rules would add about $950 to theprice of each new vehicle. And buried deep in the report, the EPA's own models
show that over the next 90 years these regulations would only reduce temperature increases by less than 0.03 degrees
Fahrenheit. Lisa Jackson, head of the EPA, in testimony before Congress, called this amount of temperature difference
"immeasurable." But that has not stopped the agency from trying to move the new auto regulations forward.
Greenhouse gas regulations will also cost businesses hundreds of millions of dollars in increased energy costs, and
could price several industries out of business or force them overseas, resulting in permanent job losses.
These are serious consequences of decisions made by unelected bureaucrats. All we are asking the EPA to do is to look at all the data, not just the data that supports the pre-conceived views of the people in charge.
For my challenges to these rules and to the federal government, I am accused of being a flat-earther and an enemy of
science. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am not only an attorney; I was also an engineer. As a former engineer, I have a certain trust in science: the math, the scientific method, the certainties of the laws of physics, and the objective quest for new answers. But when science gets tainted by politics and money, andfacts are set aside in the name of advancing a political agenda, it is no longer science.

And contrary to the image some in the media have created, I do not have a battle with environmental protection. In fact,
my office works in close coordination with our Virginia regulatory agencies to enforce environmental laws. I also have
seven children who will be on this earth for the better part of this century, and Ihave a vested interest in seeing that they
have clean air, water, and land.
But I also have a vested interest in seeing that my children have the opportunity to get good jobs and achieve at least the same standard of living we have today. That means we have to balance care for our environment with care for our economy.
We also have to recognize that economic growth underwrites environmental protection. Wealthy countries pay for environmental improvement, and healthy economies are critical to it. The only places on earth that have strived
for a clean environment share two key characteristics: free people and free markets. Economic success will help deliver
environmental improvement far more effectively than any number of forcibly applied regulations. Yet we are gradually
suffocating our free market economy with command-and-control regulations from our federal government.

Freedom in the Balance
With the EPA's attempts to regulate our lives by regulating the by-products of practically everything we buy and
everything we do, and with the federalgovernment's attempt to assume the power to command us to buy its chosen health insurance, we face some of the most significant and unprecedented erosions of liberty in our lifetimes.
And federalism—that tension between state sovereigns and the federal government—was designed for the very purpose of helping to preserve that liberty.
While we can derive some satisfaction from last November's election results as a backlash against the centralization and growth of raw federal power, we cannot repeat the mistakes of the past where conservative victories were followed by liberal policies. We must ensure that the newly elected officeholders have learned from past mistakes. We must hold the representatives we put into office accountable to first principles, and then demand from them concrete action. For the failure of conservative principles has not been due to the principles themselves, but to the failure to fight for them.
At a time such as this, when principled conservatives do not control the reins of power in Washington, state attorneys general become the first line of defense against federal government overreach. When I ran for Attorney General of Virginia, I said that if the federal government crossed certain lines, I would challenge it.
Unfortunately, we have a federal government that is giving us more opportunities to challenge it than I would like. But we are keeping our promise. With fellow Virginians and the American people, we have planted our flag and we are taking a stand. And if we are successful, future generations of Americans will have achance to enjoy the liberty that has made America the envy of the world.
Success in this fight for federalism is critical, for as Ronald Reagan warned us:
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We did not pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men
were free.

Fall reflectshuns

Been a while but I have done some reflectin' and I have a lot to be grateful for. Friends, family and sooo much more. Just had to say it! Just a few examples for ya'all to check out.

America-The cradle of Humanity.

Words of hope and promise to live by:

Harold B. Lee’s Quote on America

“Men may fail in this country, earthquakes may come, seas may heave beyond their bounds, there may be great drought, disaster, and hardship, but this nation, founded on principles laid down by men whom God raised up, will never fail. This is the cradle of humanity, where life on this earth began in the Garden of Eden. This is the place of the new Jerusalem. This is the place that the Lord said is favored above all other nations in all the world. This is the place where the Savior will come to His temple. This is the favored land in all the world. Yes, I repeat, men may fail, but this nation won’t fail. I have faith in America; you and I must have faith in America, if we understand the teachings of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We are living in a day when we must pay heed to these challenges.
I plead with you not to preach pessimism. Preach that this is the greatest country in all the world. This is the favored land. This is the land of our forefathers. It is the nation that will stand despite whatever trials or crises it may yet have to pass through.

(Ye Are the Light of the World, 350-51)

Update

Been a while and several things to post. Ryan Matthew Akers was killed 15 years ago today while serving in the Malaga Spain Mission. Lookin' forward to that reunion.. Hallie Denney was born 6 days ago. Check out my facebook profile for pic's. Lowry will be home from Washington Tacoma mission on Nov 10....Colvin on his way home from Alabama today. It's all about family!

Checkin' in

Been a while since I posted anything. Got busy with the new house in Sterling and with life in general. That woman that i live with, never rests. she has kept us both hooked up in the yard and garden and such. I'll try to get some photo's. Just got called as the 2nd counselor in the Bishopric in the Sterling Ward! So much for hidin' from the Lord. I'm starting to get my faith back in America as I listen to Pres. Obama's popularity fading in all the polls and his trouble getting his nationalized health care plan passed. He sounds a lot like Hitler did before everybody realized what kind of a monster they had in place. Case in point is the national volunteer (mandatory for all youth) force he is proposing. I've heard anywhere from 3 months or more. Anyone remember Hitler's version? Volunteering should be just that, voluntary, period....Oh well, back to the grind. Check with ya'all later.

I want my country back...

Just wantin' to share some of mine and some of my friends thoughts on America.. If you agree please feel free to pass these thoughts on to others who are like-minded and especially to those who are way to comfortable and like to complain about all the freedoms we enjoy..
  
I'M A BAD AMERICAN

I Am the Liberal-Progressives Worst Nightmare. I am an American.
I believe the money I make belongs to me and my family and the Lord, not some Liberal governmental functionary be it Democratic or Republican! I'm in touch with my feelings and I like it that way!
I think owning a gun doesn't make you a killer, it makes you a smart American.
I think being a minority does not make you noble or victimized, and does not entitle you to anything.
I believe that if you are selling me a Big Mac, do it in English.
I believe everyone has a right to pray to his or her God when and where they want to.
My heroes are John Wayne, Babe Ruth, Jimmy Stewart, Audie Murphy and whoever canceled Jerry Springer.
I don't hate the rich. I don't pity the poor.
I know wrestling is fake and I don't waste my time watching or arguing about it.
I've never owned a slave, or was a slave, I haven't burned any witches or been persecuted by the Turks and neither have you! So, shut up already. I believe if you don't like the way things are here, go back to where you came from and change your own country! This is AMERICA .
If you were born here and don't like it you are free to move to any Socialist country that will have you.
I want to know which church is it exactly where the Reverend Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton preache, where they get their money, and why they are always part of the problem and not the solution. Can I get an AMEN on that one? I think the cops have every right to shoot your sorry rear if you're running from them..
I also think they have the right to pull you over if you're breaking the law, regardless of what color you are. It's not racism, it's profiling stupid!
And, no, I don't mind having my face shown on my drivers license. I think it's good..... And I'm proud that 'God' is written on my money.
I think if you are too stupid to know how a ballot works, I don't want you deciding who should be running the most powerful nation in the world for the next four years.
I dislike those people standing in the intersections trying to sell me stuff or trying to guilt me into making 'donations' to their cause.
I believe that it doesn't take a village to raise a child, it takes two parents.
I believe 'illegal' is illegal no matter what the lawyers think.
I believe the American flag should be the only one allowed in AMERICA !
If this makes me a BAD American, then yes, I'm a BAD American.
I had 4 uncles who fought in WWII, for the freedoms we enjoy today. Even the freedom to complain and even thought we are still the most blessed people on the face of this rock…If they hadn't been willing, would I be speaking Japanese or German today? Germanese maybe…How soon we forget, but that is the price of prosperity..
I want my country back!

And then……

Our young college people start the day early having set an Alarm clock (MADE IN JAPAN ) for 6am.
While a coffeepot (MADE IN CHINA ) Was perking, they shaved with an
Electric razor (MADE IN HONG KONG ). Put's  on a Dress shirt or a new dress
(MADE IN SRI LANKA ),
Designer jeans (MADE IN SINGAPORE ) And Tennis shoes (MADE IN KOREA )
After cooking  breakfast in a new Electric skillet (MADE IN INDIA )
They sit down with a Calculator (MADE IN MEXICO )
To see how much available to spend today. After setting a Watch (MADE IN TAIWAN )
To the radio (MADE IN INDIA ) They get in a car (MADE IN GERMANY )
Filled with GAS (from Saudi Arabia ) And continues a search For a good paying AMERICAN JOB.
At the end Of yet another discouraging And fruitless day Checking a Computer (Made In Malaysia ),
They decide to relax for a while. They put on sandals (MADE IN BRAZIL ) turn on their TV (MADE IN INDONESIA ), And then wondered Why they can't find A good paying job In AMERICA ....

And then…….


Most in this country seem to concentrate on the problems we're having in this country lately; illegal immigration, hurricane recovery, alligators attacking people in Florida …
It's time to concentrate on solutions for the problems. It's a win-win situation. (Not my idea, but judge for yourself-it has merit)..

+ Dig a moat the length of the Mexican border.

+ Send the dirt to New Orleans to raise the level of the levies.

+ Put the Florida alligators in the moat along the Mexican border.

Any other problems you would like for me to solve today ?

PART OF THE PROBLEM

Think about this: If you aren't willing to read and or share for fear of offending someone-- YOU' RE PART OF THE PROBLEM! The vocal minority doesn't worry about offending, just being heard!!!

It is Time for America to Speak up!!!

soooooooo


I'm speaking up even though these aren't all my own words but they do convey the way I and some of my friends feel about the situation we face in this great country. We can't bury our heads in the sand any longer. This is a political season and our chance to voice our concerns and make sure they are heard!!! I want to thank those who feel like I do for some of their thoughts (mingled with mine in the above narrative).

Willy Akers

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Round 1 to the good ol boys

Well, round 1 in the political arena goes to the good 'ol boys, with Mitt Romney's announcement that he is bowing out of the race. To "Mormon, conservatives, It boils down to " we'll take your money, we'll take your votes but we won't back your candidate!" I admire him for recognizing and being willing to do this for the good of the conservative movement and for the American people!!!. I don't know if any of ya'all got the chance to listen to his speech just a few minutes ago, I did and my admiration for the man(not the Mormon) grew by leaps and bounds. I'm thinkin' that if he made this speech a month ago when he was still in the campaign, it may not have come to this today. He is a very brilliant, insightful, unselfish leader. I'm not sure where the conservative wing of the republican party is going to find their man because McCain is way to quick to side with the liberals to be called a true conservative and Huckabee has not shown me any reason to call him a conservative other than his Christian faith. I have to ask myself, what if, what if Sean Hannity and some of the other talk show hosts would have thrown their endorsements to Romney a month ago instead of so recently? What if Mitt Romney was a Methodist, or a Lutheran or even an agnostic? What if more of the "conservatives in America" would have supported what most political experts call the best man for the job, when looking at qualifications, experience, ideas and most of all values..What if.........

Willy Akers

All around Good Guy
Mid-Utah Radio / SanPete County Broadcasting
Cell---- 435-979-9801   or    willyakers@yahoo.com

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