Interview Shows Obama Radical Ideas on Constitution and Weath Redistribution

Below is a video/audio recording of Barack Obama in a 2001 interview talking about a 'reparative' strategy for wealth redistribution.

There is also a transcript of the audio available here, thanks to Power Line News.

This interview is a remarkable insight into what Obama thinks about taking your hard-earned dollars and giving them to someone else (he obviously knows better than you who needs your money and how it should be spent).

Notice how Obama thinks the constraints the Founders put on government through the Constitution are a "tragedy" and that he regrets that even radical Supreme Court makeups have failed to "break free" from those constraints the founders put there.

Some of those limits are exemplified in comments like these from the Founders:

A wise and frugal government...shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. – Thomas Jefferson

Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated. - Thomas Jefferson

With respect to the two words 'general welfare,' I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators. – James Madison

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. – James Madison

Notice Obama doesn't talk about whether it's right or wrong to take one person's property and give it to another.

Notice Obama doesn't even so much talk about whether, since we are legally blocked from doing this by the Constitution, we should work on an amendment to the constitution, but rather how best to ignore and get around the Constitution, either through the courts, or legislatively, or administratively.

The sad irony here is that wealth redistribution is already happening, and has been in this country for decades. Obama and the socialists like him are only dissatisfied at the slow pace of it and the meager level of redistribution--meager in terms of where they'd like to see it, at least.

Obama's ideas of wealth redistribution are unAmerican (i.e. they run counter to the ideals of our Constitution and our American heritage of personal responsibility and private property rights). Rather, they are Marxist ideas. They are the ideas of nations that have opposed us and sought to destroy us for decades.

How can we possibly be considering allowing someone who believes this unAmerican rot to lead the country?


TRANSCRIPT:
MODERATOR: Good morning and welcome to Odyssey on WBEZ Chicago 91.5 FM and we’re joined by Barack Obama who is Illinois State Senator from the 13th district and senior lecturer in the law school at the University of Chicago.

OBAMA: If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.

But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted. One of the I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that.

MODERATOR: Let’s talk with Karen. Good morning, Karen, you’re on Chicago Public Radio.

KAREN: Hi. The gentleman made the point that the Warren court wasn’t terribly radical with economic changes. My question is, is it too late for that kind of reparative work economically and is that that the appropriate place for reparative economic work to take place – the court – or would it be legislation at this point?

OBAMA: Maybe I’m showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way.

You just look at very rare examples during the desegregation era the court was willing to for example order changes that cost money to a local school district. The court was very uncomfortable with it. It was very hard to manage, it was hard to figure out. You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time.

The court’s just not very good at it and politically it’s very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally. Any three of us sitting here could come up with a rational for bringing about economic change through the courts.


In this newly uncovered radio interview from 2001, Barack Obama charts a 'reparative' strategy for wealth redistribution