Sunday, February 2, 2014

A sorry State of the Union...Judge Napolitano


NAPOLITANO: A sorry State of the Union
Obama has a lot to answer for

By Andrew P. Napolitano
January 29, 2014

What if the state of the union is a mess? What if the government spies on
all of us all of the time and recognizes no limits to its spying? What if
its appetite for acquiring personal knowledge about all Americans is
insatiable? What if the government uses the microchips in our cellphones to
follow us and listen to us as we move about?

What if the Constitution expressly prohibits the government from doing this?
What if the government has written laws that are interpreted in secret by
judges who meet in secret and are applied by federal agents who operate in
secret and their secret behavior doesn't even resemble what the laws say
they can do?

What if the feds have seized the content of every text message, email,
mobile and landline telephone call, utility bill, credit card bill and bank
statement of everyone in America for the past four years? What if no law has
authorized them to capture this?

What if, when asked by members of Congress, in public and under oath,
high-ranking officials, at least one with ribbons on his chest and stars on
his shoulders, lied about what the government is doing?

What if the government's spies have so insinuated themselves into our
computers that they can capture every keystroke we press on all of our
computers before we hit "send"? What if the feds have hacked into the
servers of every major computer-service provider in the country, and they
know what we have typed before we even make corrections?

What if the feds have a copy of what we have deleted? What if our typed
innermost thoughts and even second thoughts that were never sent in emails
nevertheless reside in the government's data bank?

What if the president knows all this and supports what his spies are doing?
What if he secretly authorized all this, but only admitted to some of it
when he got caught? What if he uses his spies to tell him what he wants to
know about those who oppose him?

What if the president sold Congress and the country a Trojan horse called
Obamacare? What if he promised that under Obamacare you could keep the
health insurance you had before Obamacare, and he lied, and he knew it? What
if he promised that under Obamacare you could keep the same physicians who
treated you before Obamacare, and he lied, and he knew it?

What if Obamacare made insurance coverage so expensive that some people lost
their jobs because their employers could not afford to pay for it? What if
under Obamacare more than 6 million Americans lost their insurance coverage
overnight and most haven't gotten it back yet? What if this was the
president's plan all along so that he could orchestrate a government
takeover of the health insurance industry?

What if the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff told the president one night that our consulate in Benghazi was under
attack by organized al Qaeda troops while the attack was taking place?

What if the president did nothing about it? What if the president knew the
truth about the Benghazi attack, but for three weeks claimed that the attack
was just an out-of-control political demonstration by fanatics who were
upset about a cheap, 15-minute, low-grade movie that never made it into
theaters?

What if our ambassador to Libya died in that attack and the president
covered up the facts surrounding his death? What if the president dispatched
our U.N. ambassador to all major TV networks to hide the truth? What if he
tried to promote the lying U.N. ambassador to secretary of state?

What if, in five years, the president has borrowed more than $6 trillion and
spent it all on his favorite industries and risky bailouts and fruitless
wars, and now has nothing to show for it but the debts that will one day
come due? What if the government claims the unemployment rate is 6.7
percent, but so many people have stopped looking for jobs that it is really
10.2 percent?

What if the president alone has increased the number of people on food
stamps and increased the amount of money they each receive? What if half of
the adults in the nation are now receiving material assistance from the
government in the form of money the government has borrowed? What if
generations of Americans as yet unborn will be obliged to pay back the money
the president has borrowed and given away?

What if nearly two-thirds of Americans simply don't trust the president's
judgment? What if the president alone raised the minimum wage to be paid to
workers on federal projects? What if the president has threatened to use his
pen and his phone to operate the government in ways the Constitution
forbids?

What if the Constitution makes clear and the courts have underscored the
truism that the president cannot modify or amend or postpone the effective
dates of federal laws? What if the president has modified and amended and
postponed federal laws so as to help his friends and wound his foes?

What if the president has tried to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to
pay for contraceptive services that they cannot use and that are prohibited
by the Roman Catholic Church? What if the Sisters sued the president and
asked the court to relieve them of the burden of paying for contraception?

What if the president resisted the Sisters' lawsuit and questioned the
sincerity of their religious beliefs? What if the Supreme Court stopped the
president from forcing the nuns to pay for contraception before it even
heard their case?

What if the president has discussed none of this in his State of the Union
address? What if the president thinks that during his second term in office
he answers to no one? What if the president lives and works surrounded by
those who reinforce his beliefs? What if he has rejected his oath of
fidelity to the Constitution? What will he do next? What will we do about
it?


Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is
an analyst for the Fox News Channel. He has written seven books on the U.S.
Constitution.

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