HURT: Obama’s naked thuggery

OPINION:

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

After all these years it took a great constitutional scholar who had spent a life cloistered in academia and street work to utterly rape our most cherished Constitution.

This business of bypassing the Senate to pick “recess” appointments to positions most Americans have never heard of may seem trivial. It is anything but. What Barack Obama has done has been to disembowel the U.S. Senate and shred the most carefully worded document in the history of civilized society.

Recess appointment powers were designed by the Founders as a way to fill important Senate-confirmed positions back in the days when the Senate would be out of session for months at a time. It was never intended as a way to skip confirmation in a Senate so deeply divided on a president’s nominees that it simply could not agree to confirm them.

Shattering precedent, Mr. Obama is now installing his henchmen to Senate-confirmed positions without the “advice and consent” of the Senate as explicitly stipulated by the Constitution and explicitly directed by the very laws that created those positions.

The very constitutional tenets he tossed out to make these appointments are the only tenets that require the president to seek Senate approval of Supreme Court nominees. What is to stop Mr. Obama now — or any future president — from simply “recess appointing” thugs to the Supreme Court in order to uphold his socialist platform?

During the previous administration, a minority of Democrats in the Senate stalled dozens of nominees to the federal courts. For some, they steadfastly refused for years on end to give a final up-or-down vote.

There was endless idle chatter in Senate hallways of breaking the impasse in various ways that would strain the Constitution. But it always came down to a deep reverence for the document and a larger system that slavishly protects the minority. And Republicans knew that one day they would again be in that minority.

What Mr. Obama has done here, though, doesn’t just strain the Constitution. He has torn right though it. When he says it is all supportable by the Constitution, he is lying. There is simply no other explanation for such a learned scholar to say such a thing. Unless he is learned, yet illiterate, which is entirely possible considering the perniciousness of affirmative action at places like Harvard Law School.

Whether it is staining our Constitution, killing U.S. citizens with his beloved drones, or drowning us in taxes and Orwellian health regulations, Barack Obama has become our homegrown enemy.

He shreds the Constitution with the unflinching calmness of a suicide bomber, uncaring that he is destroying the only system on Earth that could have given him the life and success he has enjoyed, thinking only of the martyrdom that will come through his annihilation of what is most important to others.

So, where are the so-called liberal voices of outrage? Are they so high on the elixir of power that they no longer care for the minority or the only refuge on Earth where they are protected? Or have their principled souls been lost in partisan blood thirst?

It was no mistake that Mr. Obama chose the very day of the Iowa Republican caucuses to leak word of his decision to rescind the Constitution. It was a hellfire warning of what is to come and that he will stop at nothing to advance his socialist agenda.

Now come this crew of hopeless pikers with their little wooden arrows and plastic swords debating endlessly about which one will be chosen by Republicans to slay the monster. With every passing day, confidence drains away.

Is Mitt Romney capable of meeting such ruthlessness? Does Rick Santorum have the sinful hatred in his heart to match this? Is it possible Newt Gingrich won’t self-destruct in the face of such diabolical scheming? Can Ron Paul’s heart of gold survive another five minutes watching as the Constitution is ripped asunder?

It is hard to imagine that any of them as capable of such deviousness.

• Charles Hurt may be reached at charleshurt@live.com.