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Will ACTA Be Found Unconstitutional?
DustyShadow writes "Harvard's Jack Goldsmith and Lawrence Lessig have an interesting op-ed in Friday's Washington Post, arguing that it would be constitutionally dubious for President Obama to adopt the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) as an executive agreement. '[T]he Obama administration has suggested it will adopt the pact as a "sole executive agreement" that requires only the president's approval. ... Joining ACTA by sole executive agreement would far exceed these precedents. The president has no independent constitutional authority over intellectual property or communications policy, and there is no long historical practice of making sole executive agreements in this area. To the contrary, the Constitution gives primary authority over these matters to Congress, which is charged with making laws that regulate foreign commerce and intellectual property.'"
I believe the only hope in passing ACTA was to keep it secret. The cat's out of the bag with the leaked and commented document. Yes, I've read it and yes it's very scary. Much of it goes way beyond countering counterfeiting and piracy.
Now that the public has access to the leaked document, hopefully a lot of people will read it, make their own conclusions, and let their representatives know how they feel about it. That's the way to defeat this. At least here in the EU, our MEP's have said wait a minute, let's take a deeper look into this.
If ACTA passes as it is today, we are all going to be screwed. Keep up the pressure on your elected representatives.
Not really. It just suggests that cases where the law is clear (and thus would have larger majorities) don't tend to make it to the Supreme Court.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
To start, I checked into your Teddy J quotes and discovered the following:
#1 is a lie. Jefferson never said that and I challenge you to show me the original publication where he did.
#2 is found in his First Inaugural Address. It was probably a slap at John Adams' Alien and Sedition Act, a law that looked a lot more like the Patriot Act than the health care bill.
#3 is from another private letter. It's regularly trotted out during any controversial social legislation. Read Hirschfield (The Power of the presidency: concepts and controversy, 1982, p.311) on how this is a red herring.
#4 is from a political tract from 1779. You will note that it could just as easily be applied to the Patriot Act, the military-industrial complex, or just about any other Republican-built object of left-wing derision as it can be to social legislation.
#5 is a paraphrase of a section in a letter from 1802. The true quote reads "If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy." Here is the following quote: "Their finances are now under such a course of application as nothing could derange but war or federalism. The gripe of the latter has shown itself as deadly as the jaws of the former." In other words, he would have winced had he seen the bill for Iraq War II, or read the justifications of the neocons.
#6 was in a letter shortly before his death about how the federal government was "consolidating power" by, get this, using the power granted to it by the Constitution (namely the commerce clause). The states are not individual republics. We tried that under the Articles of Confederation and it went over like a a lead balloon. Like it or lump it, they are subordinate in power in the regards enumerated in the Constitution to the power of the federal government. If the Fed chooses to wield that power in a heavy-handed way, it's probably stupid and possibly unethical but not unconstitutional.
The present deficit is a function of the fact that the Republicans by and large write the tax laws whereas the Democrats by and large write the social legislation. The Republicans refuse to raise taxes to pay for the social legislation, and the Democrats refuse to cut spending in the social legislation to match the current tax income. It's being caused by the present political climate of obstructionism, not by your insane theories about the gradual communization of the US. If FDR had wanted to make the US into a socialist state he would have done nothing, waited for the economic climate to bottom out, then blame all the Wall Street fat cats, order their imprisonment, seize their assets, and nationalize them. Poof. Now we're a socialist state, and it didn't take all that sneaking around!
Do you know why Roosevelt created the social safety net? It was partly to stabilize society so we didn't have happen here what happened in Germany and the Soviet Union, where agitators appealed to the people's suffering to gain their complicity in revolutionary policy. It was partly to expand the number of consumers to encourage a restart in the production economy. But mostly it was because it was the right thing to do, because a lot of average Americans were starving to death, working like slaves, and your beloved "free market" wasn't doing a goddamned thing to help them. FDR's problem was actually that he didn't spend enough -- it took the massive deficit spending associated with the war to finally terminate the crisis.
The present health care situation is a national crisis on the order of the food and work crisis provoked by the Great Depression. Thousands of people die every year because they can't afford basic medicines like penicillin and Nitrostat, or they can't afford to see a doctor to prescribe these medicines. Health care decisions are being made by bureaucrats whose only concern is protecting the value of the shareholders, and this excuse rubber-stamps their denial of benefits to thousands more Americans who then go bank