It's been all over Fox News and the conservative radio talk shows: Obama complaining that the Founding Fathers did not put in and, later, the Supreme Court did not find in the Constitution the ability of government to redistribute wealth, which he termed "economic justice." The only people who use terms like wealth redistribution and economic justice are Marxists. Seriously. He's not a socialist. He's a full-scale Marxist. And he said that he would put people on the Supreme Court who would interpret the Constitution to have redistribution in it. I say "interpret," but in fact he wants to put people on the court who will invent things whole-cloth and claim it is in the Constitution -- much like the "right to privacy" in the 14th Amendment. I read the 14th Amendment, and that simply isn't in there. Not even remotely. Obama wants to put people on the court who will do more of the same, but do it in regards to political economy. The really sad thing is that he doesn't understand that the only just economic system that has ever existed was the free market, and that all deviations from it have resulted in deviations from a just economy -- with the least just economies being those founded in Marxist thought.
You may note that an Obama spokesperson says Obama was saying the opposite of what he actually said. But here's the transcript:
MODERATOR: Good morning and welcome to Odyssey on WBEZ Chicago 91.5 FM and we’re joined by Barack Obama who is Illinois State Senator from the 13th district and senior lecturer in the law school at the University of Chicago.
OBAMA: If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.
But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted. One of the I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that.
MODERATOR: Let’s talk with Karen. Good morning, Karen, you’re on Chicago Public Radio.
KAREN: Hi. The gentleman made the point that the Warren court wasn’t terribly radical with economic changes. My question is, is it too late for that kind of reparative work economically and is that that the appropriate place for reparative economic work to take place – the court – or would it be legislation at this point?
OBAMA: Maybe I’m showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way.
You just look at very rare examples during the desegregation era the court was willing to for example order changes that cost money to a local school district. The court was very uncomfortable with it. It was very hard to manage, it was hard to figure out. You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time.
The court’s just not very good at it and politically it’s very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally. Any three of us sitting here could come up with a rational for bringing about economic change through the courts.
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So Obama is saying that he believes that "economic change" -- "redistributive change" -- was not brought about because it has been politically difficult, not because one cannot justify it legally, through the Constitution. He implies, in that last comment, that one of the problems is "separation of powers issues." What do you think he might have in mind to "solve" that "problem"?
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