AJ DiCintio

Where Bill O’Reilly’s Going Wrong
January 27, 2009
 

Revealing a much-unacknowledged ability to combine graciousness with his beloved pithiness, Bill O’Reilly frequently asks guests brought on to counter his Talking Points, "Where am I going wrong?”

The meister of the No Spin Zone hasn’t asked me that question, but I’m responding anyway — not with respect to a Talking Point but to statements he’s made about how much of a traditionalist President Obama is regarding topics such as the Second Amendment and gay marriage.

So, here, pithily, is my answer:

Bill is going wrong because like every other Democratic president from JFK on, Obama talks a traditionalist game but will nominate activist judges who will make liberal views the law of the land.

Not wishing to be critical without offering something constructive, I’m providing the following information to help Bill O’Reilly get going right.

The Second Amendment. It is true that Obama has frequently affirmed his support for the idea that the Amendment guarantees an individual’s right "to keep and bear Arms” — as opposed to the liberal interpretation, whereby the right applies only to government.

That support explains why Obama has said he agrees with the ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller (June ’08). However, Heller came down on the side of the individual right 5-4, with the Court’s four liberals condemning the majority decision as "law-changing” and creating "a dramatic upheaval in the law.”

"Law-changing.” What chutzpah — but then judges of the stripe Obama has promised to nominate never tire of arguing that the Framers were so hot to grant the right to bear arms only to government entities that they — with the full support of Frank and Fannie Farmer — proposed an amendment which stands as the only part of the Bill of Rights that does not grant a right to the people.

As the facts stated above reveal, every honest person (including Bill O’Reilly) must admit that what Obama says about the right to bear arms means nil while what he intends to do about the judiciary means everything — an everything that reduces the traditional view of the Second Amendment to nothing.

Gay marriage. People across the political spectrum hold a variety of opinions about this issue. However, lying beyond opinion is this: Wherever gay marriage is legal, it has been made so not by a legislative act or referendum but by a ruling issued by the kind of judges Obama has promised to nominate.

So much, then, for any practical meaning in Obama’s assertion that he regards marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Frighteningly, however, the irrelevance of Obama’s words about marriage pales when compared with the fact that liberal judges are using gay marriage cases to raise the dictatorial nature of liberal judicial activism to an entirely new level.

In this regard, O’Reilly ought to educate his audience about Schulman v. Attorney General (July, ’06), in which the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that a petition by the commonwealth’s people for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman was legal but added this:

"A positive vote enacting the initiative, however, might not be the end of the story. If the initiative is approved by the Legislature and ultimately adopted, there will be time enough, if an appropriate lawsuit is brought, for this court to resolve the question whether our Constitution can be home to provisions that are apparently mutually inconsistent and irreconcilable.”

Yes, in those astonishing words, the liberal judges plainly assert the power to declare a constitutional amendment duly enacted by the people unconstitutional, a concept to which the liberals of the California Supreme Court recently gave credence when they agreed to hear a case against Proposition 8.

And when Pride induces five power loving liberals of the U. S. Supreme Court to embrace this jurisprudential abomination, American democracy will truly be finished.

Imagine, for example, that the Court declares the death penalty unconstitutional and then does the same to a constitutional amendment restoring capital punishment.

Or imagine the passage of a constitutional amendment limiting federal taxes, only to have it declared unconstitutional by liberal justices for running afoul of the Due Process Clause and a dozen other clauses (not to mention their thousand "penumbras”) with which it is "inconsistent and irreconcilable.”

Of course, liberal activists may not yet have the votes to achieve this ultimate power grab. (We shall see in the case of Proposition 8.)

But as much as anyone, O’Reilly knows that since the days of the Warren Court, liberal judges have advanced their oligarchical cause with an insidious, relentless stealth.

Indeed, to impress his audience about the danger of this dirty, high-booted foot that has been insinuating itself in the door of American democracy with increasing arrogance and insistence during the past fifty years, O’Reilly will find this quote, in which Jefferson speaks of the judicial activists of his day, invaluable:

"The great object of my fear is the Federal Judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting with noiseless foot and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step and holding what it gains, is engulfing [the other branches of government] insidiously . . .”

Instead of naively praising Obama’s "traditionalism,” there’s much more O’Reilly can do for the folks — including providing substantive analysis of the fact that for half a century the Republican Party has sold out the American people regarding the issue of liberal judicial activism.

Although details of that betrayal of principle are so voluminous that an enumeration and analysis of them must wait for another time, I cannot end without asking the man behind "The Factor” to consider the significance of the fact that more than 40 Republican Senators voted to confirm Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the Supreme Court as a "consensus” nominee.