Legal Commentary

Consitutional Questions for Barack Obama

By Jeralyn

Nat Hentoff, writing in the Village Voice, has some constitutional questions for Barack Obama.

Once in a while, Obama makes a passing reference to our diminishing individual liberties, but hardly ever in his stump speeches. At an early-morning rally the day of the New Hampshire vote, he told some 300 students at the Dartmouth College gym: "My job this morning is to be so persuasive . . . that a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany, and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Barack." One of the reasons to vote for him, he continued, was his pledge to end the Bush-Cheney era of "wiretaps without warrants."

He didn't add that Bush wants to make this spying on us permanent. And when he's not in front of a roomful of students with the television cameras on him, Obama hardly ever shows the urgent passion for restoring the Constitution that he exhibits on other issues. Hillary Clinton also invokes "change" as if it's a medicine to cure all ills, but she too largely ignores the incremental disappearance of the Bill of Rights—including the last rites for our guarantees of personal privacy.

Hentoff's questions for Obama:

So what are Obama's plans to restore the Constitution—especially regarding the activities of our domestic and international intelligence agencies? And in view of Bush's legacy with the Roberts-Alito Supreme Court, what would President Obama's criteria be for filling any vacancies during his time in office? It would help if he would tell us now which Supreme Court justices, past and present, he most respects, and why.

More...

Hentoff notes that Obama used to teach constitutional law, and in his book, Audacity of Hope, he wrote:

"if there was one impulse shared by all the Founders, it was a rejection of all forms of absolute authority, whether the king, the theocrat, the general, the oligarch, the dictator, the majority. . . . George Washington declined the crown because of this impulse. . . . "

Hentoff ends with:

Is Obama ready to commit himself to bringing that "impulse" back to our government? Although he insists that his candidacy will be an engine of change, to paraphrase Duke Ellington, it won't mean a thing if ain't got that constitutional swing. He quotes Martin Luther King on "the fierce urgency of now": Show that where it most counts, Barack.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on January 22, 2008 (boomark / email).