The filibuster (actual, not according to “Senate Rules”) by Senator Rand Paul on 06 March regarding the president’s or the attorney general’s apparent refusal for weeks to indicate whether or not the president could have a non-combatant American citizen assassinated on American soil has been the latest big news-item. When Obama had an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, wasted by drone in Yemen in September 2011, the question became of interest.
Shed no tears for al-Awlaki, a homegrown American in league with al Qaeda. Major Hasan of Ft. Hood-massacre fame was one of Awlaki’s pupils vis-à-vis the offing of Americans while in homicide/suicide mode. Strangely, even though the Ft. Hood atrocity took place 3.5 years ago in plain sight of a plethora of witnesses, the major has never been brought to trial, the current reason (at least as of last notice) being that he refused to shave his beard and thus be “religiously” defiled.
Army regulations (he’s still in the army) require that he shave but the army (meaning Obama, the commander-in-chief raised in childhood as a Muslim) seems to have caved. According to Hasan’s religion, murdering citizens in cold blood is spiritually correct but (gasp) shaving is not. Never mind that Hasan has been well-shaved all the years he’s been in the army, apparently without a thought of going to hell account of not being bewhiskered.
Obama could order the man tried immediately, shaved or not, and would not let any Baptist male take this line, particularly if the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah (God damn America) Wright said to get on with it. This explains, however, the apparent disregard the president has of the U.S. Constitution. And, it explains Senator Paul’s mission, to wit, that the president cannot violate that document in any way. Currently, the president operates on the theory that he governs the United States of Monarchy, rather than the U.S. of A. Operative in this regard is the use of executive orders to bypass the Congress and the Courts.
Under the duress of his filibuster, Paul received a letter (after many weeks of requests for clarification) from the attorney general stating that the president may not commit such a murder, something that could have been done in five minutes back then. The episode, however, points up Obama’s disregard for the Constitution, starting in his first year in office, as well as the fact that he harbored the rationale that he could actually work his will on an American citizen in this country.
Flash back to 2008-09, when Obama and Illinois Senator Durbin (and a bunch of other democrats) decided that Roland Burris, the man appointed by Illinois then-governor Blagojevich to take Obama’s vacated Senate seat, would not be allowed to take the seat. Obama had favored Valerie Jarrett for that seat and Durbin is just a loose cannon, who once compared American GIs to keepers of the Russian Gulags, Hitler’s storm troopers and Pol Pot’s butchers of the “killing fields” in Cambodia. He proves that subversives can be senators.
According to the U.S. Constitution, a state legislature can determine how a vacant Senate seat can be filled. In Illinois, the legislature determined that the governor makes an appointment and the appointee will serve the remainder of the term at issue, in this case two years. It was Obama’s job to uphold that determination. In fact, Burris was “locked out” until days after the official swearing-in of senators took place. So much for Obama and the Constitution! Windbag Durbin didn’t matter, nor did Majority Leader Reid, who should have had the guts to do his job.
Obama’s role in the Burris matter comprised grounds for impeachment. Obama, reversing his position in 2008 regarding marriage, declared later that his Judicial Department (Holder) would not enforce the Defense of Marriage Act. The president is sworn to uphold the laws, so he committed an impeachable offense, made more egregious by the fact that most states, such as Kentucky, have laws and/or Constitutional amendments upholding the DOMA.
Obama’s Judicial department sued Arizona for essentially enforcing FEDERAL laws regarding immigrants – another impeachable offense account trampling states’ rights. Recently, the department has joined a matter before the courts in California that would nullify a referendum- approved Constitutional amendment banning “gay” marriage – another impeachable offense.
The most egregious impeachable offense was Obama’s unprovoked and Constitutionally un-approved attack on Libya in 2011, completely bypassing Congress and announcing the attack not in the U.S. but in Brazil as he began a vacation not including his presence as commander-in-chief in Washington. That malicious attack resulted in seven months of relentless bombing by the U.S. and NATO, with no telling how many Libyan civilians killed. No one in the administration has ever offered a number…and never will.
In addition, Obama approved the furnishing of weapons to the Libyan insurgents (it was a civil war like Vietnam in the 60s). Those weapons and their terrorist users are now in the Syrian conflict, while Libya was left in a massive quagmire divided into the West and East, with four Americans including a U.S. ambassador murdered in Benghazi on 11 September 2012.
Ostensibly, Rand Paul was all about the “droning” of Americans, but his real effort was applied to calling out the president and his lackeys vis-à-vis the requirements of the Constitution. In this, he was successful but it remains to be seen if Congress has the guts to make it stick. The guess here: NO.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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