It would be a world where Clarabelle Cow could sue Ronald McDonald. And it gets worse from there.
The fact is, Cass Sunstein is an incredibly dangerous man. And if Barack Obama has his way, he will be the OMB’s Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—a position responsible for review and oversight of all draft agency regulations. Which means his bizarre worldview would find its way into countless thousands of regulations.
The threat Mr. Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, poses may not directly be to life and limb, but to the liberty of the American people. His nomination is a shot across the bow of no less than the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, due process—and the list goes on.
For example, giving new meaning to the need for tort reform, Mr. Sunstein has advocated that government could—indeed, should—grant animals the right to bring suit, and that even under current law have the legal standing to do so. Apparently, since animals cannot talk or write, Sunstein believes that an army of lawyers should be able to bring suit on their behalf.
In reality, this means that in Sunstein’s Orwellian world, where the animals take over the farm—PETA or other do-gooders would have the right to bring suit against cattle ranchers, butchers, fans of Big Macs and even Ronald McDonald himself.
Sunstein has even gone as far as to liken the treatment of animals by humans as “morally akin” to slavery and genocide. And one can only imagine poor Jack in the Box making a guest appearance at the Hague sometime in the future.
He would even ban animal testing, a critical practice to testing the safety—for humans—of everything from drugs to space exploration. It’s a practice that has saved countless millions of human lives. But that seems secondary to the pixilated Mr. Sunstein.
But the absurdity of Sunstein’s views does not stop there as he cruises to confirmation from the Rubber Stamp Senate.
This is a man who does not believe in the individual right to bear arms, and who, in fact, so despises the Second Amendment as to suggest it is the only one of the Bill of Rights not “incorporated” to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment. In his book, Radicals in Robes, he casually observes that “almost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine.”
Adding to this nominee’s negatives is his support for the so-called “Fairness” Doctrine—the practice of forcing radio broadcasters to air “alternative” points of view. And in his pursuit of it, he shows his utter disdain (or, perhaps ignorance) of the First Amendment. He even wrote, “A legislative effort to regulate broadcasting in the interest of democratic principles should not be seen as an abridgment of the free speech guarantee.”
Mr. Sunstein even went as far as to write a book named, Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech, in which he outrightly rejects Justice Oliver Holmes’ “marketplace of ideas” doctrine that has protected the free communication of ideas for over a generation. He writes, “a system of limitless individual choices with respect to communications is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government and efforts to reduce the resulting problems ought not to be rejected in freedom’s name.” And, of course, he espouses regulation of the Internet.
One could go on. Mr. Sunstein does not believe that the money people earn really belongs to them—and not a bloated government. He writes, “Without taxes there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth defending.”
He even supports a Second Bill of Rights guaranteeing the “rights” to employment, food, clothing, shelter, education, recreation, and health care.
And keep in mind: This is the man who would have oversight and review on every government regulation for the next four to eight years. Time and again, he has proven himself to be an incredibly dangerous person who has positively no respect for the supreme law of the land, has an activist view of it, and will implement his ideological views into federal regulation given the opportunity.
Indeed, taken all together, he believes in a charter, not to protect the people from government encroachment, but in one that guarantees government encroachment—into the production of food, into the individual right to self-defense, into the freedom of the airwaves and the Internet, into the rights of wealth, property, and individual prosperity, and into agriculture, fashion, housing, schools, entertainment, and of course, Americans’ health care providers.
In short, there would be no limit to what government could regulate.
Indeed, it would be a world where Clarabelle Cow could sue Ronald MacDonald. And the rest of us, as well.
Robert Romano is the Senior Editor of ALG News Bureau.
