Forum Post: SOPA is a perfect example of how warped our political system has become
Posted 12 years ago on Jan. 19, 2012, 7:31 p.m. EST by francismjenkins
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Enough has been said about how and why SOPA & PIPA represents censorship, so I won't "preach to the choir" so to speak. But the commentary I'm hearing from congressmen speaks volumes about what's wrong with our political system.
I read a comment by a congressman, who said something like my constituents have "legitimate concerns" regarding SOPA legislation, and that's it right there. Talk about not getting it. He thinks he gets to decide what a "legitimate concern" is.
A legitimate concern is whatever the people who elected you into congress decides it is. Congress, you don't decide what a legitimate concern is, you REPRESENT the views of your constituents.
Many congressmen are saying oops, we're sorry, we didn't read the legislation before deciding to co-sponsor it. In their warped world this is apparently a legitimate excuse. Oops, sorry, we don't read the laws we pass, I mean, how can anyone become so detached from objective reality that they would think this serves as a valid explanation? Fucking surreal.
Of course we know what really happened. Backroom deals, campaign contributions (or promises of campaign contributions and some super-PAC advertising), cozy relationships with staffers, maybe promises of a nice job after they leave federal service, etc.
Mitch McConnell is urging democrats to shelve the bill for now. What he's really saying is let's put it on the back burner, until we have a better opportunity to sneak it through.
What the federal government does is not authorized by the Constitution. Now, when you say that, you get political responses like, you want to do away with this and you want to do away with that? Or we are adding WHAT? I'm not talking about that. Much of what goes on in the federal government has no constitutional basis whatsoever.
Woodrow Wilson didn't make any bones about his contempt for the declaration of independence and individualism and that's what statism, utopianism, socialism, communism, intertwined with bought off politicians LEFT AND RIGHT corporatism, or whatever you want to call it really is. It is an attack on the individual. He made no bones about his contempt for the Constitution. Woodrow Wilson said in a speech before he became president that the government is like a body, you can't have one organ working against the other. In other words, you can't have separation of powers. So he spent his presidency, as did subsequent Democrats, trying to evade the Constitution or rewrite it.
FDR, of course, did the same thing. FDR attacked the Constitution. And Cass Sunstein, who now works for Obama, he made the point that we now live under FDR's Constitution. You know what that means? A powerful centralized government, exactly what the framers of the Constitution rejected. This is the source of much of our problems going back 50 years or more...We are not a truly constitutional republic anymore. We are not a representative republic really in the true sense anymore. We have this massive administrative state with, you know, hundreds of thousands if not several million bureaucrats who are making laws and issuing them every day, 80,000 pages last year. So that's not a representative republic. So what are we? We are a nation that has heavy centralized power. It's getting more centralized by the day. Every so-called reform is said to require more government, more bureaucracy, and more taxation in pursuit of what? Liberal utopianism is a fantasy of arrogant philosophers and philosopher kings who believe their vision is superior to those of other lowly mortals. The latest and most prominent being President Barack Obama and his cadre of utopian elitists. They believe they are proponents of enlightenment thinking and rationalism who could construct the ideal society if deniers and other obstructionists would just get out of their way. In reality, however, they couldn't be more irrational, as they reject human nature, history and all empirical evidence that contradicts their vision.