“... a piece of legislation I introduced into Congress..."

 “... a piece of legislation I introduced into Congress in late 2007 concisely reflects my views on civil liberties and executive power in light of the war on terror.  I am referring to the American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007.  Among other things, the legislation 

• repeals the Military Commissions Act of 2006 

• forbids the use of statements extracted by torture as evidence in any civilian of military tribunal; 

• subordinates the executive’s surveillance activities to the requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA); 

• gives the House of Representatives and the Senate legal standing to contest in court any presidential signing statement that indicates the executive’s intention to disregard any provision of a bill; and

• provides that nothing in the Espionage Act of 1917 prevents any journalist from publishing information received from the executive branch or Congress “unless the publication would cause direct, immediate, and irreparable harm to the national security of the United States.”

[......]

Any individual detained as an enemy combat by the United States “shall be entitled to petition for a writ of habeas corpus under section 2241 of title 28, United States Code.”

The Act also says, “No officer or agent of the United States shall kidnap, imprison, or torture any person abroad based solely on the President’s believe that the subject of the kidnapping, imprisonment, or torture is a criminal or enemy combatant; provided that kidnapping shall be permitted if undertaken with the intent of bringing the kidnapped person for prosecution or interrogation to gather intelligence before a tribunal that meets international standards of fairness and due process.”  Knowing violations of this section are to be punished as felonies.” -Pages 123 & 124 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"And let us not forget that the Constitution grants Congress..."

"And let us not forget that the Constitution grants Congress, and Congress alone, the authority to regulate trade and craft tax laws.  Congress cannot cede that authority to the WTO or any other international body.  Nor can the president legally sign any treaty that purports to do so.  Our Founders never intended for America to become entangled in global trade schemes, and they certainly never intended to have our domestic laws overridden by international bureaucrats." -Pave 99 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"Congress has changed American tax laws for the...."

"Congress has changed American tax laws for the sole reason that the World Trade Organization decided that our rules unfairly impacted the European Union.  I recall a congressional session in which, with hundreds of tax bills languishing in the House Ways and Means Committee, the one bill drafted strictly to satisfy the WTO was brought to the floor and passed with great urgency.

In one case, the WTO sided with the Europeans against American tax law, which offered tax breaks to American companies doing business overseas.  According to the European Union, the Foreign Sales Corporation program, established under President Reagan in 1984, is now an "illegal subsidy," a view that a WTO appellate panel shared  The WTO's Orwellian ruling declared that allowing a company to keep more of its own money through lower taxes was a "subsidy."  As a matter of fact, the program was moreover really just compensating (and only partially at that) for unfair U.S. taxes on corporations for profits earned overseas, a disability that our foreign competitors do not have to confront from their own governments. 

What this means, in plain English, was that high-tax Europe, upset at lower-tax America, decided that the way to level the playing field was to force America to raise her taxes.  Pascal Lamy, the trade czar of the European Union, actually visited with influential members of Congress in order to determine whether a new tax bill was being crafted to his satisfaction.   If Mr. Lamy, a member of the French Socialist Party, had been unsatisfied with the changes made to our tax code, he threatened to unleash a European trade war against U.S. imports.  In effect he was a foreign bureaucrat acting as a shadow legislator by intervening in our lawmaking process.  And to no one's surprise, Congress raced to comply with the WTO ruling that American tax rules must be changed in order to bring them in to harmony with "international law." -Pages 97 & 98 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"In my strong support for free trade, I have felt compelled to..."

"In my strong support for free trade, I have felt compelled to oppose many of the trade agreements that have appeared in recent years.  For instance, although I was not in Congress at the time, I opposed both the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization, both of which were heavily favored by the political establishment.  Initial grounds for suspicion was the sheer length of the text of these agreements: no free-trade agreement need to be 20,000 pages long." -Page 95 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"The story behind the creation of the HMOs is a classic..."

"The story behind the creation of the HMOs is a classic illustration of what economist Ludwig von Mises once said: government interventions create unintended consequences that lead to calls for further investigation, and so on into a destructive spiral of more and more government control. During the early 1970s, Congress embraced HMOs in order to address concerns about rising health care costs. But it was Congress itself that had caused health care costs to spiral by removing control over the health care dollar from so many consumers in the 1960s, and thus eliminating any incentive to pay attention to costs when selecting health care. Now, Congress wants to intervene yet again to address problems caused by HMOs, the product of still earlier interventions.

Now the HMO's are all but universally unpopular, the very politicians who brought them to us are joining the bandwagon to denounce them, hoping the American people will forget, or never be told, that the federal government itself virtually mandated HMOs in the first place.

Consumer complaints about insurers and HMOs compel politicians to draft new laws and more regulations to curry voter favor. More regulations breed more costs, limiting more choices, causing more anguish- and the cycle continues.

The most obvious way to break this cycle is to get the government out of the business of meddling in health care, which was far more affordable and accessible before government got involved. Short of that, and more politically feasible in the immediate run, is to allow consumers and their doctors to pull themselves out of the system through medical savings accounts. Under this system, consumers could save pretax dollars in special accounts. Those dollars would be used to pay for health care expenses, with patients negotiating directly with the physicians of t heir choice for the care they choose, without regard for HMO rules or a bureaucrat's decision. The incentive for the physician is that he gets paid as the service is rendered, rather than having to wait months for an HMO or insurance provider's billing cycle.

With the cash for the MSAs coming from pretax dollars, most Americans could afford deposits that would cover routine expenses that families experience in a year. Insurance would tend to return to its normal function of providing for large-scale, unanticipated occurrences, and would become far more affordable." - Pages 85-89 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"When Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973..."

"When Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973, striking down abortion laws all over the country, even some supporters of abortion were embarrassed by the decision as a matter of constitutional law.  John Hart Ely, for instance, wrote in the Yale Law Review: "What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers' thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation's governmental structure."  The decision, he said, "is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try and be."

The federal government should not play any role in the abortion issue, according to the Constitution.  Apart from waiting forever for the Supreme Court justices who will rule in accordance with the Constitution, however, Americans who care about our fundamental law and/or are concerned about abortion do have some legislative recourse.  Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution gives Congress the power to strip the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, of jurisdiction over broad categories of cases.  In the wake of the 1857 Dred Scott decision, abolitionists spoke of depriving the courts of jurisdiction in cases dealing with slavery.  The courts were stripped of authority over Reconstruction policy in the late 1860's. 

If the federal courts refuse to abide by the Constitution, the Congress should employ this constitutional remedy.  By a simple majority, Congress could strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over abortion, thereby overturning the obviously unconstitutional Roe.  At that point, the issue would revert to the states, where it constitutionally belongs, since no appeal to federal courts on the matter could be heard. (I have proposed exactly this in H.R. 300.)

Let us remember, though, that the law can do only so much.  The law isn't what allowed abortion; abortions were already being done in the 1960s against the law.  The courts came along and conformed to the social and moral changes that were taking place in society.  Law reflects the morality of the people.  Ultimately, law or no law, it is going to be up to us as parents, as clergy and as citizens- in the way we raise our children, how we interact and talk with our friends and neighbors, and the good example we give- to bring about changes to our culture toward greater respect for life."  -Page 60 & 61 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"During my public life I have earned the nickname Dr. No....."

"During my public life I have earned the nickname Dr. No, a reference to my previous occupation as a physician combined with my willingness to stand against the entire Congress if necessary to vote no on some proposed measure. (I am told I have been the sole "no" vote in Congress more often than all other members of Congress put together.) As a matter of fact, I don't especially care for this nickname, since it may give people the impression that I am a contrarian for its own sake, and that for some reason I simply relish saying no.  In those no votes, as in all my congressional votes, I have thought of myself as saying yes to the Constitution and to freedom." -Pages 49 & 50 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"Now, isn't our Constitution a "living" document that evolves..."

"Now, isn't our Constitution a "living" document that evolves in accordance with experience and changing times, as we're so often told?  No- a thousand times no.  If we feel the need to change our Constitution, we are free to amend it.  In 1817, James Madison reminded Congress that the Framers had "marked out in the [Constitution] itself a safe and practicable mode of improving it as experience might suggest" - a reference to the amendment process.  But that is not what advocates of the so-called living Constitution have in mind.  They favor a system in which the federal government, and in particular the federal courts, are at liberty - even in the absence of any amendment- to interpret the Constitution altogether differently from how it was understood by those who drafted it and those who voted to ratify it. 

A "living" Constitution is just the thing any government would be delighted to have, for whenever the people complain that their Constitution has been violated, the government can trot out its judges to inform the people that they've simply misunderstood:  the Constitution, you see, has merely evolved with the times.

That's why on this issue I agree with historian Kevin Gutzman, who says that those who give us a "living" Constitution are actually giving us a dead Constitution, since such a thing is completely unable to protect us against the encroachments of government power." -Pages 48 & 49 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"The power of the executive branch, for instance, has expanded far beyond.."

"The power of the executive branch, for instance, has expanded far beyond what the Framers of the Constitution envisioned.  One mechanism that has strengthened it is the executive order, an instrument by which presidents have exerted powers that our Constitution never intended them to have.  An executive order is a command issued by the president that enjoys his authority alone, not having been passed by Congress.  Executive orders can have legitimate functions.  Presidents can carry out their constitutional duties or direct their subordinates by executive order, for instance.  But they can also be a source of temptation for ambitious presidents, since they can always try to get away with using them as a substitute for formal legislation that they know they cannot get to pass.  He can thereby circumvent the normal, constitutional legislative process. 

Executive orders were rare in the nineteenth century; for a president to issue even several dozen was unusual.  The first twentieth-century president to serve a full term, Theodore Roosevelt (who served two, in fact), issued over three thousand. 

This is a travesty against our constitutional system, and any president worthy of the office would absolutely forswear the use of executive orders except when he can show express constitutional or statutory authority for his action."  -Pages 41-43 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"In early American history the Constitution figured heavily..."

"In early American history the Constitution figured heavily in political debate.  People wanted to know, and politicians needed to justify, where the various schemes they debated in Congress were authorized in the Constitution.  In the twenty-first century, by contrast, the Constitution is like the elephant at the tea party that everyone pretends not to notice." -Page 41 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"... it is essential not to lose sight of the moral dimension of war..."

"... it is essential not to lose sight of the moral dimension of war, and the lengths to which Christian and later secular thinkers have gone over the centuries to limit and restrict the waging of war.  For well over a thousand years there has been a doctrine and Christian definition of what constitutes a just war.  This just-war tradition developed in the fourth century with Ambrose and Augustine but grew to maturity with Thomas Aquinas and such Late Scholastics as Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suarez.  The requirements for a just war varied to some extent from commentator to commentator, but those who wrote on the subject share some basic principles.  The war in Iraq did not even come close to satisfying them. 

First, there has to be an initial act of aggression, in response to which a just war may be waged.  But there was no act of aggression against the United States.  We are 6,000 miles from Iraq.  The phony stories we were told about unmanned drones coming to get us were, to say the least, not especially plausible. 

Second, diplomatic solutions had not been exhausted. They had hardly been tried.

Traditional just-war criteria also demand that the initiation of war be undertaken by the proper authority.  Under the U.S. Constitution, the proper authority is neither the president nor the United Nations.  It is Congress - but Congress unconstitutionally delegated its decision-making power over war to the president." -Pages 22 & 23 of The Revolution, A Manifesto