Senator Cruz’s Filibuster Should Be About Obamacare Ushering In An Oligarchy

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – It makes it a national one, or even more dangerously, it makes it an oligarchical system, meaning the rulers make the rules the rest of us live by while exempting themselves from same.  There is nothing that prevents them, nothing that prevents them from inserting their opinion and altering the course of human history in any way, manner, shape, or form that they deign to be necessary.  That is not how a federal system can operate.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Marco Rubio of Florida and Senator Ted Cruz are still tag-teaming there on the filibuster that is raging.  I took the liberty of going to find one of, and there were several, the great John C. Calhoun filibuster speeches.  There was a book that came out in 1890, somewhere around there, before the turn of the century.  It was called The Speeches of John C. Calhoun.  In several of the speeches are the surviving transcripts from the reporter of the Senate, as they would have been called in that day.  You will note as you read the speeches that the Senate or House reporter, if you get your speeches from the Congressional Globe, you will note they write down who is doing what.  In other words, if Calhoun walks across the floor, the reporter will write down that Mr. Calhoun crossed the floor of the Senate.  If someone crosses the floor to the dais, the reporter will write that down.  He will do his best to try to record the transcript or record what it is that’s being said by that particular senator, but they won’t always get it right.  We have to rely on the speaker’s version of the speech, if they bother to write it down.

In this particular speech I have here, “Speech on the Subject of the Removal of the Deposits from the Bank of the United States,” what they were trying to do was set up a situation where the Bank of the United States didn’t have any money in it so it could be closed.  Of course, if you’re an opponent of the Federal Reserve, as am I, and if you do not believe the Constitution empowered the Congress to create or charter a bank, as I do not, then I’m going to go with the 1791 James Madison.  I know that Madison contradicted himself, but in 1791 I think he was correct, and so was Jefferson, in opposing the formation of the first bank.  We’ll get into the speech a little later in the program.  All I did was find the speech and word search the speech for Constitution.

What Senator Cruz is doing here, and what ought to be at center stage, is the preservation of the Constitution and of the constitutional order.  Nowhere is it written in the actual text of the Constitution that this thing called the Supreme Court gets the final say-so on the great matters of State.  That’s why we have a legislature.  If you wanted to have the court give the final say-so, then you would have said that in Article III and given them, by definition, a veto over the acts of the Congress.  You know who was given a veto over the acts of the Congress — this is where nullification and interposition come in — the states were given the ultimate veto, not the Supreme Court.

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For those of you and your friends and all those in the media out there and in the punditocracy who think that because the Roberts Court spoke from on high – they showered down upon the common man and upon the Earth their rationale and reasoning for the Obamacare decision, for the decision that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional because John Roberts and company said so.  I know that we have precedent here.  There are those that will argue [mocking] “Mike, if we don’t have precedent, you’re a traditionalist, don’t you want to stick with the precedent?”  Not if the precedent is rotten, I don’t.  As a matter of fact, if a precedent is rotten, is it folly to call it a tradition?  I would use a more pejorative term, maybe like ritual.  It’s more ritualistic than it is traditional because the tradition is that the court only gained the power to make these distinctions and to allegedly have the final say-so in the great affairs of state thanks to the construction — this is the term that 18^th and 19^th century men would have used for those that were nationalists and for those who did not want to be bound by the, as Jefferson called them, the chains of the Constitution.  The constructionists are the ones that said the court had this power.  No one in the Philadelphia Convention said the court had the power.

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You want to know the greatest irony of all ironies?  The great chief justice that invented this power and invented this supremacy of the court, John Marshall, actually told the Virginia Ratifying Convention in June of 1788 that the court would not have this power.  He was asked point blank by George Mason whether or not the State of Virginia could ever be keelhauled and brought before the federal tribunal.  Marshall said there was no case, no instance whatsoever that that could ever happen, never.  Of course, the State of Maryland, AG’s state, was brought before the federal tribunal in the famous McCulloch versus Maryland case, which was argued for the state, I do not know by whom, but I know who argued for AG’s home state of Maryland, and that was the great Luther Martin in the bank case.  This is where this whole thing got off the rails and where the courts claim the superiority and supremacy here, claimed to have review power over the affairs of the legislative branch of the federal government.

If you think this is just sour grapes on my part, [mocking] “Come on, Mike, everybody knows there’s always been this judicial review.  No one opposed it at the time.  They all went along with it.”  That is not true.  That is not the case.  There was a very vigorous and robust opposition to what Marshall had done.  The most famous of those is handed down to us in the form of the protest from Spencer Roane, William Brockenbrough, John Taylor of Caroline, and some other Virginians that operated under the pseudonym the Richmond Junto.  Jefferson was also a member, although he asked for them to not use his name publicly.  I think we have it on pretty good authority that what the Roberts Court did — I understand this has been happening for a long time.  It’s not just the Roberts Court. Before that it was the Rehnquist Court and before that it was the Burger Court and before that was the Warren Court and on and on.  I realize this has been going on for an awful long time and that there is precedent here.  The precedent is a poor precedent.

To sum all this up, and the reason I began this conversation, is because last hour we talked at the end of the hour about how the filibuster going on in the Senate right now is just political.  It’s just for Senator Cruz and Rubio and whoever else to showboat and forestall actual debate on the Affordable Care Act and on the funding of it and whether or not it’s going to go forward.  My only reason for bringing up the filibuster and the history of it and a little bit of the history of the Court’s review of constitutional cases is because what Cruz actually is doing and what he should be saying and what I’d love to hear he did say overnight is that the constitutional order has been upended.  Because the constitutional order has been upended and has been edited and altered without any amendment thereto, that someone has to continue to make the case that what has transpired needs to be reversed.

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I’d like to hear, and maybe he did because I was sleeping last night, I’d like to hear a lot more about the unconstitutional nature of the Affordable Care Act.  We’ve been going over this for almost four years now, so I’m not breaking any news and there’s really, truly nothing new under the sun, but just to reiterate, if Congress has the ability to compel you to buy something like an insurance policy and then can tax you or fine you if you do not do so, then there is no limit to Congress’s power.  It has the power to do anything it wants to do.  There’s nothing that you could not then say that Congress or the federal leviathan does not have the power to do to you.  That is not how a federal system can operate.  I’m sorry, it isn’t.  It makes it thus not a federal system.

It makes it a national one, or even more dangerously, it makes it an oligarchical system, meaning the rulers make the rules the rest of us live by while exempting themselves from same.  There is nothing that prevents them, nothing that prevents them from inserting their opinion and altering the course of human history in any way, manner, shape, or form that they deign to be necessary.  That is not how a federal system can operate.  You can’t even design a federal system to operate like that.  If I were to tell you to design me a federal system and you came back with what I just said, you would flunk the course.  You would flunk Federalism 101 and you’d flunk Constitution 101.  If I told you to go design a dictatorship or an oligarchy or an aristocratic system loosely based on monarchy and you came back and told me what I just told you, then I would give you an A+.  Without written and adhered-to limits, then there is no constitution that is in force here.

What Senator Cruz is hopefully doing is calling attention to that.  I’m watching Senator Rubio speak right now and that’s not what I’m getting out of them.  They’re still talking about the merits of the Affordable Care Act.  It’s interesting to me that if I were to pore over the speeches of John C. Calhoun that I have cued up, there are over 130 references in this one speech in 1834 to the Constitution / constitutional.  There are 130 references in one speech that Calhoun made.  He was not using a teleprompter.  Put that in our proverbial pipes and smoke it.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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