The Conservative Revolution

In a 2001 interview with Chicago Public Radio, Barack Obama argued that the Supreme Court should have redistributed wealth as part of Civil Rights reforms. He laments the fact that the founding fathers placed restraints on the courts to advance “economic justice.” Obama doesn’t think the Warren Court was radical enough, and says “redistributive change” would have to be accomplished through legislative means.

This bombshell audio tape has just been posted on the Drudge Report.

Hot Air has the full transcript of the comments on Chicago Public Radio in 2001.

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.

To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.

Barack Obama’s words are frightening. Bill Whittle over at National Review has it right:

We have, in our storied history, elected Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives and moderates. We have fought, and will continue to fight, pitched battles about how best to govern this nation. But we have never, ever in our 232-year history, elected a president who so completely and openly opposed the idea of limited government, the absolute cornerstone of makes the United States of America unique and exceptional.

Tags: socialism

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 8:56 am and is filed under Barack Obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.