While Republicans’ attention is distracted
The Democrats have quietly slipped a lot of changes into law. Changes the WSJ says are piling up.
Here’s the money quote:
Senior White House political adviser David Axelrod said his opponents in Congress are absorbed with defeating Mr. Obama’s health-care overhaul, what he calls “the shiny object that they’ve chased.” As a result, he contends, other measures have been left to pass into law.
Like a shell game, maybe? That’s the idea that even some Republicans admit has worked.
Rep. Tom Price (R., Ga.), a conservative leader in the House, concedes that, in some cases, Republicans are being outflanked. “The administration is pushing so many things so rapidly it’s difficult to concentrate on all of them,” he said.
Like what?
Last week, Mr. Obama signed defense-policy legislation that included an unrelated measure widening federal hate-crimes laws to cover sexual orientation and gender identification — 12 years after it was first introduced. The same legislation also tightened the rules of admissible evidence for military commissions, an issue that consumed Congress in debate in 2007 but received almost no attention this go-round…
The legislation gives the Justice Department the power to investigate and prosecute an expanded definition of hate crimes and to pre-empt local police when Washington decides too little is being done about a crime. The legislation has long been controversial. In fact, it took 14 votes in Congress to pass it. Opponents believe the measure is an unwarranted expansion of federal power. They also say it creates a new category of violent crime that isn’t necessary because the acts it addresses would be crimes regardless of motivation. Mr. Price, the congressman, called it an “unconstitutional thought-crimes law.”
Which is why it had to be slipped in under cover of the Defense Authorization Act.
Sen. Harry Reid slipped the hate-crime legislation into the defense authorization bill to avoid having to have senators consider the controversial bill on its own.
It’s for good reason that Democratic legislators wanted to hide under a rock while passing this terrible piece of legislation. It may help them with the far-left wing of their party. But weakening and damaging our country is not something to be proud of. And that is exactly what this new law does.
As the WSJ said, it wasn’t necessary.
Equal protection for every individual American under the law is what the Fourteenth Amendment to our Constitution, passed after the Civil War, guarantees. That this nation takes this guarantee seriously – that there are no classes of individuals that are treated differently under the law – has been a justifiable obsession of blacks.
A society in which all life is not valued the same, where murder of one citizen is not the same as murder of another citizen, is a horror which black Americans have known too well.
Ironic, isn’t it?
Is it not a sign of our own pathology that we now have codified that it is worse to murder a homosexual than someone who has committed adultery, even with your husband or wife, or who has slandered or robbed? Isn’t the point murder?
It should be clear that hate-crime legislation has nothing to do with improving our law but rather with creating favored political classes. This should be hateful to everyone who cares about a free society – particularly to those, such as blacks, who have been so victimized by politicization of law.
As Parker points out, the same moral relativism drives both racism and politicized laws like this one. And these lawmakers are mistaking the disease for the cure.