Obama's 2001 Interview about Using Court to Redistribute Wealth [Wendy Long]
In a 2001 WBEZ Chicago radio interview (available here), Barack Obama said that one of the "failures of the civil rights movement" was that "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."
Obama lamented that he was "not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change by the courts" — but not because he didn't want to. Rather, he said that the Warren Court "didn't break free from the essential constraints" in the Constitution — "at least as it's been interpreted" — that prevent the Court from being an engine of redistributive economic justice. But Obama the liberal legal theorist said that he — unlike the Warren Court — could "craft theoretical justifications" for "legally . . . bringing about economic legal change through the courts."
Presumably, an Obama administration would try to interpret the Constitution to advance those radical legal arguments — and an Obama Supreme Court would presumably uphold them — that would bring about "economic legal change through the courts."
To ice the cake, Obama said in the same interview that the Warren Court "wasn't that radical." Most Americans would certainly disagree with that view of a Court that drastically undermined democracy, expanded rights for criminals with no justification in the Constitution, and implemented the most liberal social mores of the 1960s as though they were part of the text of the Constitution.
10/27 02:54 PM
bench.nationalreview.com
Re: Obama and Judicial Redistribution [Matthew J. Franck]
Wendy Long is right to be alarmed about what that 2001 radio interview reveals about Barack Obama's thinking. I would add that this impulse to stuff "positive rights" into the Constitution, and to attempt to enforce them judicially, is one of the pet projects of Cass Sunstein, now at Harvard Law but one of Obama's colleagues at Chicago Law, and one of Obama's most ardent (one might even say sycophantic) admirers. The admiration appears to be mutual, to judge from that radio interview. Here is a review in NR from 2004 by Tom G. Palmer of Sunstein's book advancing this argument. The Obama-Sunstein view is logically a mess, constitutionally a trip through the looking glass, and politically a prescription for tyranny.
10/27 04:48 PM
bench.nationalreview.com
Sunstein on Obama and "Redistribution" [Jonathan Adler]
It is somewhat ironic that Cass Sunstein is defending Barack Obama against accusations that he supports a constitutional mandate for economic redistribution, as Sunstein himself has embraced this position. Indeed, he wrote a whole book about it, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever, endorsing Roosevelts vision for the adoption of various positive rights and suggesting that such rights could "migrate" into the Constitution with sufficient public support. For more, see Tom Palmer's review for NRODT here.
10/28 08:52 AM
bench.nationalreview.com
Obama's 'Redistribution' Constitution
The courts are poised for a takeover by the judicial left.
online.wsj.com |
