Griper Blade: What Country is it Exactly that Wingnuts "Want Back?"

"I want my country back!"

That phrase has come up at the tea party protests and from the town hall mobs. It's not a new phrase; it was used by anti-Bush protesters during America's darker years. But where the anti-Bush folks used it to mean "I want to live in a country that doesn't torture, start wars of naked aggression, stifle free speech, or treat the majority of Americans as a support system for the wealthy," it's a lot less clear what these fools mean. Do they want the Bush years back? Not if we assume they're honest. If Obama's spending is a bad thing, then Bush's was worse. After all, Bush took a booming economy and a budget surplus and turned it into a smoking wreck and a trillion-dollar deficit. If that's the country they "want back," they already have it. It'll be a year at least before there's any danger of the economy coming out of the recession. They've got a while yet before they'll be forced to live in a socialist nightmare of prosperity.

Of course, it may be that they want the country to return to what they think of as constitutional principles. But the fact is that these people have the constitution bass-ackward; you don't get to torture people or wiretap without a warrant. You don't get to arrest people and keep them without a writ of habeas corpus. You don't get to pretend that the office of the vice president is neither executive nor legislative. The Constitution's actually pretty clear on those kinds of things.

Yet you hear them say, "Show me where in the Constitution it says health care is a right!" The statement itself shows a deep misunderstanding of the founding document. The Constitution doesn't grant rights, it recognizes them. In fact, the founders went out of their way to spell this out by adding the Ninth Amendment to the Bill of Rights; "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

In other words, "Just because a right isn't listed in this document doesn't mean you don't have it." So they can't be talking about wanting their Constitution back. Recognizing a right to health care is entirely constitutional... {CLICK TO READ FULL POST]