5 Reasons Liberal Attacks On The Redskins Are Dumb

There was a time when you could afford to ignore insane ideas in America, but these days you can barely manage to blurt out, "Nobody can be that stupid," before some liberal starts calling for them to be made into laws on MSNBC. So it is with the demands that the Redskins change their name, but this time 50 Democrat senators and bureaucrats at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office are tagging along with the Left-Wing loon patrol. That really shouldn't surprise anyone because it has become the standard modus operandi for liberals. Pick a group of people (In this case, Indians), choose some trivial wedge issue that does nothing of significance to improve their lives, and declare that's the only issue that matters to them and that anyone who doesn't agree, hates them. It's division, it's hatred, it's destruction, and it's what liberals are all about. While it's impossible to critique every dumb liberal idea in any one article, it's not hard to explain why pushing the Redskins to change their name is foolish.

1) The word "Redskin" isn't a racial slur: "Redskin" began as a descriptive term just like "black" or "white." No one uses the word "Redskin" as a racial slur for Indians -- and there's debate over whether anyone EVER did. On the other hand, if someone drops the "N-bomb," Jessie Jackson talks about "Hymietown," or Chris Rock talks about "crackers," those are recognized as racial slurs. So in essence, what liberals are trying to do is create a racial slur out of thin air. Maybe conservatives should try that some time. "(Gasp) You said Joe Biden? Why do you hate white people so much?"

2) Redskin apparently isn't offensive to most Native Americans: In modern America, you can find people who are offended by just about anything. So, it's no surprise that there are some Indians who don't like the term Redskin. However, in 2004 a National Annenberg Election Survey found that 90% of Native Americans had no problem with the name. Furthermore, there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that shows Native Americans don’t find the word “Redskins” offensive. In Anadarko, Oklahoma, which is often billed as the "Indian Capital of the Nation" where seven tribes make their home, there has been a Redskin Theatre there for 60 years. Red Mesa High School, which is located on a Navajo reservation in Arizona has a Redskin mascot and logo. Is the idea here supposed to be that these Indians are too stupid to know that they’re being insulted?

3) It’s not the government’s business: At the end of the day, the Redskins are going to be fine whether they change their name or not, Daniel Snyder is still going to be filthy rich, and the liberals who claim to be horribly offended by this will claim to be horribly offended by something else. However, it’s grating to have the government involved in this issue. We have an illegal alien invasion happening on our southern border, the debt is out of control, IRS employees are taking the 5th, Iraq is falling apart, the economy still stinks, we have a record number of Americans that have dropped out of the labor force, and the Senate Majority Leader and many of his colleagues are obsessively focusing on the Redskins while the patent office is playing political games with the name of the team. It’s like our house is burning down with the kids upstairs and the government is too busy obsessing over who Jennifer Anniston is dating these days to do anything about it. Who cares? Take care of the real problems we have and if the fans decide they don’t like the name of the Redskins enough to stop buying tickets and merchandise, the name will take care of itself.

4) The Redskins are more in touch with Native Americans than the people complaining about them: When the Left CREATES an issue like this, the implication is always that these terrible, insensitive people are treating someone badly and liberals are going to come along and make things right because they’re so sensitive and in touch with what people want. Except, the Redskins HAVE BEEN sensitive and in touch with Native Americans right from the get-go. As Daniel Snyder of the Redskins has noted in a public letter,

As some of you may know, our team began 81 years ago -- in 1932 -- with the name “Boston Braves.” The following year, the franchise name was changed to the “Boston Redskins.” On that inaugural Redskins team, four players and our Head Coach were Native Americans. The name was never a label. It was, and continues to be, a badge of honor.

In 1971, our legendary coach, the late George Allen, consulted with the Red Cloud Athletic Fund located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and designed our emblem on the Redskins helmets. Several years later, Coach Allen was honored by the Red Cloud Athletic Fund. On the wall at our Ashburn, Virginia, offices is the plaque given to Coach Allen -- a source of pride for all of us. “Washington Redskins is more than a name we have called our football team for over eight decades. It is a symbol of everything we stand for: strength, courage, pride, and respect -- the same values we know guide Native Americans and which are embedded throughout their rich history as the original Americans.

The Redskins have done more to reach out, consult with, and take into consideration the feelings of Native Americans than 99% of the people criticizing them – and certainly more than any of the Democrats in the Senate. They’ve also created the Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation, which actually does something to help Native Americans, unlike all these demands that the Redskins change their name.

5) There is no end to this: When liberals make insane demands like this, some people are tempted to give in to them in hopes that it will shut them up and they’ll go away. “Oh, just change the name of the Redskins and then we won’t have to hear about this anymore.” It NEVER works like that. Just to name one example of what comes next, there are already liberals demanding that the military change the name of Apache helicopters because that’s supposedly racist. There are also already demands being made that the Braves, Indians, Blackhawks and Chiefs change their names as well. Just to give you an idea of how far the liberals would go with this if they were able, when James O’Keefe was at Rutgers, as a goof, hemanaged to get Lucky Charms temporarily banned at his college by claiming they were racially insensitive to the Irish. If you want to spend your whole life placating the world’s most easily offended people, keep rewarding whiners for whining.

http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2014/07/12/5-reasons-liberal-attacks-on-the-redskins-are-dumb-n1861405/page/full

Left Wing Liberal’ Politician in Virginia Posts Shocking Offer Involving Nude Photos of Texas Cheerleader Who Loves to Hunt

Mike Dickinson, the Virginia liberal Democrat seeking the House seat currently held by Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., despite not being on the ballot, offered a $100,000 reward for nude photos and videos of Kendall Jones, the 19-year-old Texas Tech cheerleader who recently made news with a series of hunting photos on her Facebook page.

"I have 100k to anyone who has nude photos or videos of #kendalljones at Texas tech (sic)," Dickinson tweeted. "She deserves to be a target."

"I hope you're arrested for this," one person said in response. Dickinson, however, claimed his action is "perfectly legal" and suggested the critic be arrested "for stupidity."

"If #KendallJones is old enough to be in college&kill elephants/giraffes/rhinos she's old enough to be a target (sic)," he said in a tweet earlier in the day. "100k to anyone w nude photos (sic)."

"I'm sure she's sent a nude selfie to some random guy out there who's just waiting to expose her," he said in another tweet. "She kills animals on tape for kicks, we expose her for kicks."

Wednesday's tweets aren't the first messages he's issued offering a reward for lewd photos of Jones. He posted the same message on Saturday, prompting criticism from a number of people.

Dickinson's campaign, if one can even call it that, has consisted primarily of unhinged, inappropriate rants on Twitter, attacking critics and declaring war on those with whom he disagrees, which is pretty much anyone to the right of Josef Stalin. He routinely refers to members of the Tea Party as terrorists, saying in a recent tweet that a "dead teabagger is a good teabagger."

Rejected by local Democrats in part because of his ties to strip clubs and his overheated rhetoric, Dickinson often attacks Jack Trammell, the Randolph-Macon College employee selected by Democrats to run in November's election as "weak." According to Dickinson, only Democrats who engage in unhinged hatred of the NRA and the Tea Party should run for office, and he's not minced any words on the subject.

Dickinson first came into the public eye when he said Fox News lies, calling for Soviet-style monitoring of the network. He appeared on Fox News twice, giving less than stellar performances both times. Ironically, he was forced to admit to Greta van Susteren that he lied about statements he once made regarding his business ties to strip clubs.

http://www.examiner.com/article/va-dem-offers-reward-for-nude-photos-of-hunter-cheerleader-kendall-jones

Assault and Flattery: The Truth About the Left and Their War on Women

Women of America, you are being lied to. Manipulated. Used. By the mainstream media and the Democratic Party – as if there’s a difference – both of which tell you they have your best interests at heart. They don’t. The reason I know this is because I’ve seen firsthand how they treat women who don’t toe their line,” I write in my new book Assault and Flattery: The Truth About the Left and Their War on Women, in bookstores today. “Many of you have been persuaded that there is a ‘war on women’ being waged by the other political party. In fact, the real story is very different.”

It’s time someone pointed out the hypocrisy and lies coming from the left about women. Democrats have run the conversation for too long and I'm out to debunk the sacred cows of the so-called Republican War on Women.

If liberals really believe women can protect themselves, then why do they oppose a woman’s right to carry a handgun for self defense? If Hillary Clinton is the ultimate female role model, then why has she built her political career on her husband’s philandering while silencing his many female whistleblowers? If Barack Obama is the most pro-woman president in history, then why does he seek to make women completely dependent on the government? If the right to an abortion gives women personal autonomy and sexual freedom, then why are its debilitating aftereffects overlooked? And finally, if Republicans are so insensitive to women, then why is the sexual lechery of politicians from Ted Kennedy to Bill Clinton defended, justified, covered up, or ignored?

Those on the left love to talk about women in one way, but in reality treat women in an entirely opposite, demeaning way full of broken promises and false hope. Through research, in-depth interviews and personal stories, I reveal the shocking truth about the Democratic Party’s anti-woman agenda on issues like gun control, healthcare, the economy, sexual assault and more.

When President Obama ran for reelection in 2012, he didn’t do so based on his record but instead he propagated one of the left’s most damaging and egregious offenses against women by promoting the false idea that reliance on government is empowering. I watched the 2012 campaign up close and the Democratic strategy hinged on women, more than any other campaign in history, by distorting the truth and lying about contraception bans. After spending weeks on the campaign trail, one thing was clear: Democrats don’t want women to be independent, they want them to be dependent. Like many Democrats before him, Obama sold victimhood as empowerment for votes by scaring women into thinking government is the answer to their problems and that they probably can’t survive without it. Democrats will do the same in the 2014 and 2016 elections.

Here's the reality. Reliance on government doesn’t provide a life of success and independence, instead it provides one of disappointment, hopeless dependency and broken promises. Democrats won’t tell women that because after all, it would expose their phony platform.

The way Democrats have repeatedly defined women by the pills they take, by their body parts and as victims of their gender, is abhorrent. Women should be appalled at liberals classifying them in such a blatantly sexist, repulsive way and they should fight back.

I encourage women, fathers, husbands, sons, and boyfriends, to read my book so they can understand the true manipulation of women and exactly what side of the political aisle it’s coming from. If you want to know the truth about the Left andtheir war on women, that's what Assault and Flattery is all about.

http://townhall.com/columnists/katiepavlich/2014/07/08/assault-and-flattery-the-truth-about-the-left-and-their-war-on-women-n1859775?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm

• Topics:
• WAR ON WOMEN
• ASSAULT AND FLATTERY

Progressive looking to rewrite America's Founding.

he Founding Fathers and the American Revolution, we can tell a lie—and we have been, ever since before the musket-fire stopped. We tell lies of exclusion, of exaggeration, of complete fabrication. Scholars tell them to our young people in textbooks; politicians tell them to adults in an unending stream of rhetoric. Such mythologizing is not surprising. Especially when it comes to origin myths, we humans love stories with clear heroes and villains and neat endings. But as two new books published for Independence Day show, it is dangerous. If we get lazy about our historical facts, we risk accepting at face value the interpretations of those facts we’re being fed.

According to Ray Raphael's Founding Myths, a collection of primary-source documents assembled to counter the too-simple stories found in elementary and secondary school textbooks, we have the American Revolution wrong literally from beginning to end—mistakes that reveal a lot about American attitudes toward radicalism and military intervention. We think of the beginning as the “shot heard round the world” at the Battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775. However, Massachusetts farmers had already shaken off British rule in a popular uprising in 1774. Raphael contends that because we could find no individual face to attach to that earlier rebellion, we leave it out. (We love to distrust a leaderless movement. See: Occupy Wall Street.)

The Revolutionary War’s traditional finale at the Battle of Yorktown is likewise arbitrary: In the 18 months after Yorktown, 365 people were killed, more than at Bunker Hill, Lexington, Concord, and Quebec combined. But extending the end date, Raphael argues, would require explaining the Western battles against Native Americans, and young America’s awkward role as a proxy between Europe's two great powers, England and France. (Americans, he writes, “have always done their best to avoid European entanglements.” We certainly tried to stay out of World War II until it arrived on our doorstep at Pearl Harbor.) The very existence of this book attests to the perennial appeal of such mythology: It’s a tenth-anniversary reissue.

Where Founding Myths is meant as a broad corrective to the historical record, Matthew Stewart'sNature’s God: The Heretical Foundations of the American Republic bets all its chips on a founding myth that, studies by the Public Religion Research Institute have shown, more than half of Tea Party members believe: that our Founding Fathers were religious men, and that America is therefore a “Christian nation.” Actually, writes Stewart, in deism, the philosophical school of Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and John Adams, values and rights are granted to individuals not by the whims of a supernatural, transcendent authority, but by the natural, immanent laws of the universe. “We are and always have been the source of our own authority ... we govern ourselves not through acts of faith but through acts of understanding.” To think otherwise opens up a path to fascism and dictatorship. “If we should find ourselves beholden to some other imagined authority, this can only mean that we have constructed the conditions of our own servitude.”

Many founding documents are, to be sure, dressed up in Christian language. The opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence, for one: “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people… to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them.” But just who is this “Nature’s God”? That is, to what degree did the Founding Fathers consider themselves loyal to the version of Christianity that prevailed in America at their time? Not much, Stewart concluded after a decade of research. Deism, he argues persuasively, “is in fact functionally indistinguishable from what we would now call 'pantheism'; and pantheism is really just a pretty word for atheism.” Them’s fighting words.

It’s a fight that matters. Since 1997, the right has been making a coordinated and persistent effort to pass varieties of a species of law that redefines the term “religious liberty” in a way that is directly contradictory to this understanding of the founders' intentions. Rhetorically, these laws just provide extra protection for the freedom of religion and apply to everyone, be they evangelical, Catholic, Spiritualist or Bahai. But in practice, as observers in the 18 states that have passed variants of the law have noted, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act would allow people to claim religious exemptions from all kinds of laws meant to protect everybody. (A Center for American Progress report cites “an organized coalition comprised of conservative evangelicals, the Catholic bishops, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and others [who] are engaged in a campaign to claim a monopoly on religious liberty.")

Before the Hobby Lobby ruling, perhaps the most salient example of this redefinition was in Texas in 2010, where the Pat Robertson–founded American Center for Law and Justice defended a municipal bus driver who sued the government on civil rights charges when he was forced to resign after refusing to drop off a woman at Planned Parenthood, on his scheduled route, because he claimed it violated his religious beliefs as a “Christian minister.” The founders purposely relegated religion to the private sphere, as every individual’s natural right to freedom of mind would compel. But by diligent effort, the right has effectively translated “religious liberty” as "the right of conservative Christians to impose their private religion on the public discourse." Now, the Supreme Court has handed the right a huge victory for this understanding of the term.

o conclude that America is a “Christian nation,” as numerous Christian conservatives insist, underestimates both the radicalness of the ideas on which the republic was founded and, more crucially, the source of our continuing national strength. That power, according to Stewart, is the ability of liberalism to effect progress—however slowly—through ideas like equality, freedom, and popular sovereignty.

Stewart, best known for his philosophical history of Leibniz and Spinoza,The Courtier and the Heretic, gives deism the gift of serious historical roots. He traces this strain of radical philosophy from Epicurus, via Lucretius, to Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and through to the ideas of Jefferson, as evidenced in the Declaration of Independence. Nature’s God is an enormous, ambitious philosophical history that works to redefine the very building blocks of our American society. That’s exactly what the religious right has been up to for decades now: redefining the terms of the debate. For those of us terrified by the resulting perversion of the idea of “religious liberty” that led to the Hobby Lobby decision, Stewart’s efforts are impassioned, noble, and necessary. It's just that they feel a little late now.

Ray Raphael is well aware that the canonical Revolutionary War stories are not going anywhere. “Collectively, the litany is our identifying American story, our heritage," he writes in Founding Myths. And heritage is important. “But heritage is not history, even if they sometimes overlap. Heritage places the past in service of the present; history receives the past on its own terms.” Understanding the past on its own terms has never been simple, though, and we acquiesce to one interpretation of history at our peril. It would be foolish to think that there’s only one set of terms with which to interpret the facts.

The question is not whether we should use the past to understand the present, or to imagine the future. We must use the past as a resource, if only because it's all we have. The question is: What do we use it for? To improve our adolescent republic, or to justify our perversions of liberty and equality?

Read More: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118561/american...

When Liberal Politics Get in Way of Scientific Facts

Here we go again. The New York Times publishes an op/ed piece claiming that beliefs get in the way of accepting science–naming the usual suspects, e.g., human-caused global warming and evolution.

Boring! We’ve seen the same article written so many times. 

But there is some truth to be found in the article. From, “When Beliefs and Facts Collide,” by Brendan Nyhan:

Mr. Kahan’s study suggests that more people know what scientists think about high-profile scientific controversies than polls suggest; they just aren’t willing to endorse the consensus when it contradicts their political or religious views.

I agree. For example, here’s a scientific fact we never see presented accurately in the New York Times: A human embryo is human organism, e.g. a “human life.”

Indeed, we continually see unscientific assertions among the Times’ own writers about this simple matter easily discerned from any embryology text book. Take Gail Collins’ recent column worrying about Hobby Lobby and a political movement to declare embryos “legal persons.” From, “The Eggs and Us:”

Many Americans are repelled by late-term abortion, but they don’t necessarily feel the same emotional affinity for a fertilized egg. The fact that this is actually a debate about theological dogma gets a lot clearer when you’re closer to the start of the gestational saga.

Junk biology alert! A “fertilized egg” is no longer an egg, but an embryo. Indeed, “fertilized egg” in the human context is an oxymoron.  An embryo is a human life.

That’s as far as the science can takes us, because whether that developing and unquestionably “human” life has moral value–and if so, its extent–isn’t a scientific question. 

But surely, ideologues like Collins’ can at least get the science part right! She can continue to be a good liberal and acknowledge the science that an embryo is a nascent human being. All she has to do is say that scientific fact doesn’t matter morally.

It’s hard to have a reasoned debate about that when so many on the political left allow their ideology to interfere with the scientific facts, isn’t it?. For as Nyhan put it:

Unfortunately, knowing what scientists think is ultimately no substitute for actually believing it.

I hope Collins reads the piece in her own paper and looks in the mirror. But I am not holding my breath.

http://www.nationalreview.com/human-exceptionalism/382060/when-liberal-politics-get-way-scientific-facts-wesley-j-smith

Liberals Hate Religion Because Government Is Their God

The liberal attack on religion stems from envy, greed, anger and hate, just like every other precept of liberalism. Liberals envy the loyalty and devotion that religion inspires. They hunger greedily to have it for themselves.

Mostly, they are angry because the religious dare to defy them and to reject the ugly and inhuman tenets of collectivism. And they hate God for having the temerity to define right and wrong. They consider that their sole prerogative.

The liberal freak-out over the Hobby Lobby decision is just the latest example of the left coming out of the closet and embracing its anti-faith bigotry.

It’s interesting to see how liberals approach the controversy, and how they fail to even accurately describe it. In the big picture, the Hobby Lobby case basically pitted the right of individuals to practice their religion even when they combine into closely-held corporations against a newly-minted pseudo-right of women to receive free birth control insurance coverage. Now, the right of religious liberty has been recognized for over two hundred years in the First Amendment. The pseudo-right of free birth control insurance coverage came into being when bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services decided to mandate it following passage of Obamacare in 2010.

Naturally, the liberals side with the government bureaucrats’ four year-old whim over the established principle of religious liberty.

Of course, liberals won’t say that. Take Hillary Clinton. Please.

Hillary was outraged by the ruling which, legally speaking, focused on the applicability of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act’s (RFRA) requirement that any infringement on religious liberty must serve a compelling governmental interest and consist of the least restrictive means to achieve it. RFRA is hardly part of any #WarOnWomen. It passed with overwhelming majorities in Congress. In fact, Ted Kenney was one of the driving forces behind RFRA – uh, that was probably a bad metaphor.

And, of course, Bill Clinton signed it, making it yet another of the sexist, homophobic and otherwise awful laws Bill Clinton signed that Hillary now rejects. Hillary, of course, portrays the decision as some sort of violation of a woman’s constitutional rights while failing to mention where such a right to free stuff is hiding among the amendments. In doing so, she applies the same keen legal insight that led her to failing the D.C. bar exam.

All this is not to say that liberals hate every aspect of religion. They don’t – they just want to harness some of its aspects in the service of their agenda. Or, to be more exact, some of what they thinkare aspects of religion, like mindless obedience and blind faith. For example, only some sort of quasi-religious, childlike faith in trans-rational truth would allow one to stand in a snowdrift outside the Koch Brothers’ offices shivering as he holds up a placard reading, “The End Is Near! Repent Your Global Warming!”

And there are creepier parallels. In ancient Carthage, they worshipped a god called Baal of the Fiery Furnace who demanded the sacrifice of young children. Today, salty feminist grad students play hooky from their classes on how patriarchy kept boys from liking them to shout slogans about how their abortions empowered them as womyn. Apparently, only the death of countless babies can atone for the cruel patriarchy of western civilization. Or something.

Some, embracing the “New Atheism” of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Bill Maher, attack religion directly. Back on August 29, 2013, Matty Yglesias, a liberal blogger known only for his experience in the field of being a liberal blogger, tweeted: “I take an old-school Jacobin-style line that religion should be stamped out.”

Here’s a helpful hint, Matt. The end with the hole is the one that goes “bang.” That’s the end you’ll want to point at those religious people whose religion you want to stamp out. I know a bunch of people who would die to preserve their religion. I’m not sure Matt would be willing to die to stamp it out – or that he could find any other sucker willing to lose his life trying to fulfill that liberal fantasy.

What Matt reveals is the not-so-hidden desire of the left to wipe out every competing power center in society, and religion is a competing power center. He, and his goosestepping brethren, hate the idea that people might hold and act upon beliefs other than those he and his pals cooked up at some D.C. cocktail party or in some faculty lounge at the local university’s Oppression Studies Department. This is why they must break religion to their will. Some, like the alleged Presbyterians who recently divested in Israel, are only too eager to obey by choosing leftism over God’s chosen people.

But where they can’t stamp faith with their brand, they will seek to stamp it out. My new book,Conservative Insurgency, is a speculative history of the future struggle against the false religion of liberalism, and it anticipates that this war on those of faith will only get worse before it gets better. But then oppression is something the religious (and secular people who defend religious liberty) have faced throughout history. Yet today, the religious have tools they did not necessarily have in the past – first and foremost, a Constitution that protects our right to practice our religion as we see fit. Moreover, we also have social media that allows us to bypass the secular gatekeepers to spread information and organize.

http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2014/07/07/liberals-hate-religion-because-government-is-their-god-n1858846/page/full

The New Progressive Constitution, iI's No Longer A "The Living Constitution,Now Progressive What A Constitution of Opportunity

WASHINGTON -- You cannot talk for very long to a conservative these days without hearing the words "constitutional" and "constitutionalist."

Formulations such as "I am a constitutional conservative" or "I am a constitutionalist" are tea party habits, but they are not confined to its ranks. Many kinds of conservatives contend that everything they believe is thoroughly consistent with the views and intentions of our 18th-century Founder

Wielding pocket-sized copies of the Constitution, they like to cite it to settle political disputes. Writing in the YG Network's recently issued conservative manifesto, "Room to Grow," Ramesh Ponnuru argues that there is a new and salutary "popular interest in constitutionalism."

"Instead of treating the Constitution as the property of lawyers and judges," he notes, "it proposes that legislators, and even citizen-activists, have an independent duty to evaluate the constitutionality of legislation."

One plausible progressive response is to see Ponnuru's exercise as doomed from the start. The framers could not possibly have foreseen what the world would look like in 2014. In any event, they got some important things wrong, most glaringly their document's acceptance of slavery.

Moreover, because the Constitution was written primarily as a foundation for government, it can answer only so many questions. David Strauss of the University of Chicago Law School authored a book called "The Living Constitution" to make plain that there is a lot more to this concept than its detractors suggest. He notes that "a great part of the framers' genius lay exactly in their ability to leave provisions general when they should be left general, so as not to undermine the document's ability to serve as common ground."

The problem with "originalists," Strauss says, is that they "take general provisions and make them specific," even when they're not. One might add that the originalists' versions of specificity often seem to overlap with their political preferences.

Nonetheless, progressives should take Ponnuru's proposal seriously and think constitutionally themselves. In doing so, they would challenge conservative claims about what the Constitution really demands.

In the May issue of the Boston University Law Review, Joseph R. Fishkin and William E. Forbath of the University of Texas Law School show that at key turning points in our history (the Jacksonian era, the Populist and Progressive moments, and the New Deal), opponents of rising inequality made strong arguments "that we cannot keep our constitutional democracy -- our republican form of government -- without constitutional restraints against oligarchy and a political economy that maintains a broad middle class, accessible to everyone."

Their article is called "The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution," though Forbath told me that he and Fishkin may give the book they're writing on the topic the more upbeat title "The Constitution of Opportunity." Their view is that by empowering the wealthy in our political system, Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens United directly contradict the Constitution's central commitment to shared self-rule.

"Extreme concentrations of economic and political power undermine equal opportunity and equal citizenship," they write. "In this way, oligarchy is incompatible with, and a threat to, the American constitutional scheme."

While their overarching vision contrasts sharply with Ponnuru's, they make a similar critique of what they call an excessively "court-centered" approach to constitutionalism. "Constitutional politics during the 19th and early 20th centuries" was very different and the subject of democratic deliberation. In earlier eras, they say, the Constitution was seen as not simply permitting but actually requiring "affirmative legislation ... to ensure a wide distribution of opportunity" and to address "the problem of oligarchy in a modern capitalist society."

The authors remind us of Franklin Roosevelt's warning that "the inevitable consequence" of placing "economic and financial control in the hands of the few" would be "the destruction of the base of our form of government." And writing during the Gilded Age, a time like ours in many ways, the journalist James F. Hudson argued that "imbedded" in the Constitution is "the principle" mandating "the widest distribution among the people, not only of political power, but of the advantages of wealth, education and social influence."

The idea of a Constitution of Opportunity is both refreshing and relevant. For too long, progressives have allowed conservatives to monopolize claims of fealty to our unifying national document. In fact, those who would battle rising economic inequalities to create a robust middle class should insist that it's they who are most loyal to the Constitution's core purpose. Broadly shared well-being is essential to the framers' promise that "We the people" will be the stewards of our government

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/07/07/our_progressive_constitution_123213.html#ixzz36oixF6g6
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