| | Cass Sunstein, an Obama's regulatory czar, is the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Beck considers him the most dangerous man in America. He is a law professor and a political science professor who has taught at Columbia, University of Chicago Law School, and Harvard.
He believes that people make poor choices, that they need to be protected from making these choices, and that the best way to do it is through regulation. He is an advocate of the "living constitution" theory where you just interpret it to suit what you believe is needed in modern America.
He will work to skate past 'constitutionality' and to seek huge, ambiguous legislative packages that represent 'comprehensive reform' for large segments of American life, and from those thousands of pages he will craft volumes with hundreds of thousands of pages of regulation, hundreds of agencies and an army of bureaucrats to transform American life. I see a control freak on steroids, a secret dictator, a man who sees freedom as too messy.
---------------
On executive power he is very much an authoritarian and you can see his hand behind our current history of bypassing congress and side-stepping the judiciary and ignoring constitutionality (or in his case, re-framing what 'constitutionality' means):
"The interpretation of federal law should be made not by judges but by the beliefs and commitments of the U.S. president and those around him, according to Sunstein. 'There is no reason to believe that in the face of statutory ambiguity, the meaning of federal law should be settled by the inclinations and predispositions of federal judges. The outcome should instead depend on the commitments and beliefs of the President and those who operate under him,' argued Sunstein.'" From Wikipedia
-------------
He works hard to blur the differences between Individual rights and entitlements:
"Rights to private property, freedom of speech, immunity from police abuse, contractual liberty and free exercise of religion—just as much as rights to Social Security, Medicare and food stamps—are taxpayer-funded and government-managed social services designed to improve collective and individual well-being." From Wikipedia
--------------
Much of the current campaign for healthy food regulations that the First Lady is pushing come from Sunstein's book, "Nudge."
-----------------
I copied other quotes of his from an online document. Take a look.
-------Second Amendment---------
"Consider the view that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to own guns. The view is respectable, but it may be wrong, and prominent specialists reject it on various grounds. As late as 1980, it would have been preposterous to argue that the Second Amendment creates an individual right to own guns, and no federal court invalidated a gun control restriction on Second Amendment grounds until 2007. Yet countless Americans politicians, in recent years, have acknowledged that they respect the individual right to bear arms, at least in general terms. Their views are a product of the energetic efforts of meaning entrepreneurs – some from the National Rifle Association, who have press a particular view of the Second Amendment."
--Cass R. Sunstein, A Constitution of Many Minds, Princeton University Press,
2009, p. 172-173
"The National Association of Broadcasters and others with similar economic interests typically use the First Amendment in precisely the same way the National Rifle Association uses the Second Amendment. We should think of the two camps as jurisprudential twins. The National Association of Broadcasters is prepared to make selfserving and outlandish claims about the First Amendment before the public and before the courts, and to pay lawyers and publicists a lot of money to help establish those claims. (Perhaps they will ultimately succeed.) The National Rifle Association does the same thing with the Second Amendment. In both cases, those whose social and economic interests are at stake are prepared to use the Constitution, however implausibly invoked, in order to give a veneer of principle and respectability to arguments that would otherwise seem hopelessly partisan and self-interested."
--Cass R. Sunstein, Republic 2.0, Princeton University Press, 2007, p. 173
“[A]lmost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine. And if the Court is right, then fundamentalism does not justify the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. ”
- Cass Sunstein, writing in his book, “Radicals in Robes”
"How did the individual rights position, so marginal and even laughable among judges and lawyers for so long, come to be treated as a respectable view--and even to be described as the standard model by 2007? It is certainly relevant that the National Rifle Association, and other like-minded groups and individuals, have sponsored and funded an endless stream of supportive papers and research. The Second Amendment revolution has been influenced by an intensely committed social movement with political and legal arms. But it is also true that for many decades lawyers and law professors paid hardly any attention to the Second Amendment."
-- Cass R. Sunstein, “The Most Mysterious Right,” National Review, November
12, 2007
----------Animal Rights----------
"We ought to ban hunting"
- Cass Sunstein, in a 2007 speech at Harvard University
“[Humans’] willingness to subject animals to unjustified suffering will be seen … as a form of unconscionable barbarity… morally akin to slavery and the mass extermination of human beings.”
- Cass Sunstein, in a 2007 speech at Harvard University
"But I think that we should go further. We should focus attention not only on the “enforcement gap,” but on the areas where current law offers little or no protection. In short, the law should impose further regulation on hunting, scientific experiments, entertainment, and (above all) farming to ensure against unnecessary animal suffering. It is easy to imagine a set of initiatives that would do a great deal here, and indeed European nations have moved in just this direction. There are many possibilities."
--Cass R. Sunstein, “The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer,” John M. Olin - Law & Economics Working Paper No. 157, The Law School, The University of Chicago
"If we understand "rights" to be legal protection against harm, then many animals already do have rights, and the idea of animal rights is not terribly controversial... Almost everyone agrees that people should not be able to torture animals or to engage in acts of cruelty against them. And indeed, state law includes a wide range of protections against cruelty and neglect. We can build on state law to define a simple, minimalist position in favor of animal rights: The law should prevent acts of cruelty to animals."
--Cass R. Sunstein, Martha C. Nussbaum. Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions. (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004). Introduction
“We could even grant animals a right to bring suit without insisting that animals are persons, or that they are not property. A state could certainly confer rights on a pristine area, or a painting, and allow people to bring suit on its behalf, without therefore saying that that area and that painting may not be owned. It might, in these circumstances, seem puzzling that so many people are focusing on the question of whether animals are property. We could retain the idea of property but also give animals far more protection against injury or neglect of their interests.”
--Cass R. Sunstein, Martha C. Nussbaum. Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions. (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004). P. 11
"Now turn to some quite radical suggestions. Suppose that we continue to believe that animal suffering is the problem that should concern us, and that we want to use the law to promote animal welfare. We might conclude that certain practices cannot be defended and should not be allowed to continue, if, in practice, mere regulation will inevitably be insufficient—and if, in practice, mere regulation will ensure that the level of animal suffering will remain very high. To make such an argument convincing, it would be helpful, whether or not necessary, to argue not only that the harms to animals are serious, but also that the benefits, to human beings, of the relevant practices are simply too small to justify the continuation of those practices. Many people who urge radical steps—who think, for example, that people should not eat meat—do so because they believe that without such steps, the level of animal suffering will be unacceptably severe."
--Cass R. Sunstein, “The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer,” John M. Olin - Law & Economics Working Paper No. 157, The Law School, The University of Chicago
----------Free Speech-----------
"A legislative effort to regulate broadcasting in the interest of democratic principles should not be seen as an abridgment of the free speech guarantee."
--Cass R. Sunstein, Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech, The Free Press, 1995, p. 92
"I have argued in favor of a reformulation of First Amendment law. The overriding goal of the reformulation is to reinvigorate processes of democratic deliberation, by ensuring greater attention to public issues and greater diversity of views. The First Amendment should not stand as an obstacle to democratic efforts to accomplish these goals. A New Deal for speech would draw on Justice Brandeis’ insistence on the role of free speech in promoting political deliberation and citizenship. It would reject Justice Holmes’ “marketplace” conception of free speech, a conception that disserves the aspirations of those who wrote America’s founding document."
--Cass R. Sunstein, Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech, The Free Press,
"A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government."
--Cass Sunstein, arguing for a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet in his book, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton University Press, 2007), p.137
----------Taxes-------------
“In what sense in the money in our pockets and bank accounts fully ‘ours’? Did we earn it by our own autonomous efforts? Could we have inherited it without the assistance of probate courts? Do we save it without the support of bank regulators? Could we spend it if there were no public officials to coordinate the efforts and pool the resources of the community in which we live?... Without taxes there would be no liberty. Without taxes there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth defending. [It is] a dim fiction that some people enjoy and exercise their rights without placing any burden whatsoever on the public fisc. … There is no liberty without dependency. That is why we should celebrate tax day …”
-- Cass R. Sunstein, “Why We Should Celebrate Paying Taxes,” The Chicago Tribune, April 14, 1999 1995(?), p. 119
-------- Second Bill of Rights----------
"My major aim in this book is to uncover an important but neglected part of America’s heritage: the idea of a second bill of rights. In brief, the second bill attempts to protect both opportunity and security, by creating rights to employment, adequate food and clothing, decent shelter, education, recreation, and medical care."
-- Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More Than Ever, Basic Books, New York, 2004, p. 1
"Much of the time, the United States seems to have embraced a confused and pernicious form of individualism. This approach endorses rights of private property and freedom of contract, and respects political liberty, but claims to distrust 'government intervention' and insists that people must fend for themselves. This form of so-called individualism is incoherent, a tangle of confusions."
-- Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More Than Ever, Basic Books, New York, 2004, p. 3
--------- On OIRA, Which Sunstein now heads------------
"The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has been entrusted with the power to coordinate regulatory policy and to ensure reasonable priority-setting. In the Clinton Administration, OIRA appears to have become an advisory body, more limited in its power than it was in the Bush and Reagan administrations. In view of the absence of good priority-setting, and the enormous room for savings costs and increasing regulatory benefits, this is highly unfortunate."
-- Cass R. Sunstein, Free Markets & Social Justice, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 315
----------------------------------------------------------------
A Sunstein Quote that I don't have a source for:
“When you think commerce clause, don't think technical and meaningless. Think in what ways can the elected representatives of the people provide protection against serious harm.”
(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 9/27, 3:03pm)
|
|
Some conservative legal thinkers like Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas think that the Constitution means what it originally meant. That means we should understand the document by going into a kind of ‘Time Machine’ and capturing the public understanding of the public that ratified the document a century or more than a century ago.
