They revere and respect the law (except the ones they don’t like)
by digby
Via Raw Story, at a town hall meeting with Rep. Scott Desjarlais (R), this happened:
During a question and answer session at the meeting, [11-year-old Josie]Molina stepped up to the microphone and, with a quavering voice, asked, “Mr. DesJarlais, I have papers, but I have a dad who’s undocumented. What can I do to have him stay with me?”
Rather than make any attempt to assuage the girl’s fears, Desjarlais said, “Thank you for being here and thank you for coming forward and speaking,” but “the answer still kind of remains the same, that we have laws and we need to follow those laws and that’s where we’re at.”
The tea party crowd whooped and applauded wildly as the little girl took her seat, head down.
Right, we have laws and we need to follow those laws. Well, some of them anyway:
On October 1st, millions of Americans will be required to enroll in Obamacare and could lose access to their doctors and be forced to pay higher premiums and higher taxes. But there’s still time to stop it.
Republicans in Congress can stop Obamacare if they refuse to fund it.
Right. It’s “the law” but they don’t like it. They don’t like this either:
Congress has imposed a strict limit on how much debt the federal government can accumulate, but for nearly 90 years, it has raised the ceiling well before it was reached. But since a large number of Tea Party-aligned Republicans entered the House of Representatives, in 2011, raising that debt ceiling has become a matter of fierce debate. This summer, House Republicans have promised, in Speaker John Boehner’s words, “a whale of a fight” before they raise the debt ceiling — if they even raise it at all.
The debts incurred by the government are all a result of laws that were passed by congress. They are now refusing to pay for them.
A Guttmacher Institute study found that 135 abortion restrictions were enacted at the state level in 2011 and 2012.
There have been quite a few attempts to limit abortion rights at the federal level, as well.
At the March for Life in Washington, D.C. on Friday, Jan. 25, John Boehner told the crowd “making abortion a relic of the past” is “one of our most fundamental goals this year.”
Conservatives don’t care that they are tearing that little girl’s family apart and are refusing to change the immigration laws. They do care about stopping women from controlling their own reproduction, not paying bills that have already been incurred by the government and stopping implementation a law that was passed in spite of their opposition. So that’s fair game. They don’t like immigrants so sorry kid. No immigration reform for you.
(Oh, and by the way, the people who cheered that little girl’s comeuppance are the lowest form of scum. They didn’t have to do that. They enjoy it.)
Meanwhile, we have NRO carrying on about how the progressives are “legal revolutionaries” and a threat to the natural order. The projection here is mind-boggling:
Perhaps the most alarming fact about contemporary progressivism is that it is a movement led by radical lawyers. The use of the law to undermine our constitutional tradition is in effect the use of the law to undermine itself. But worse than that, it is the use of the legal profession as a kind of revolutionary instrument. That is a particular problem because the legal profession has always had a special role in the Anglo-American common law tradition as precisely an anti-revolutionary instrument–a repository of cautionary precedent and prudent mulishness. “The English or the American lawyer inquires into what has been done, the French lawyer into what one ought to wish to do,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835.
Media Matters sets the record straight:
Spurred on by right-wing media, the conservative legal movement has steadily increased its challenges to established precedent on topics ranging from the ability of the federal government to regulate the economy, the protection of the right to vote from racial discrimination, the ability for workers to effectively advocate, access to justice for plaintiffs other than well-funded corporations, prohibitions on the corruptive influence of money on elections, the ability of the country to offer equal opportunity in education for all, and the president’s centuries-old power to appoint officials during recesses, just to name a few.
And then, of course, there is abortion.
If they can’t change, repeal or ignore laws they don’t like, they just hold their breath until they turn blue.
Getting lectures from these radical obstructionists about “the rule of law” is like getting lectures from Dick Cheney on pacifism.
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