Published: September 22, 2009 09:15 pm      

Picking and choosing?

In the wake of the burgeoning scandal with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — in which ACORN workers were caught on hidden camera advising individuals who they thought were a prostitute and a pimp on how to hide a prostitution ring involving underage girls — Republicans in the House of Representatives have introduced the Defund ACORN Act, which would sever all funding to the organization and its affilliates. New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler blasted the bill as a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against bills of attainder, acts of a legislature declaring a group guilty of a crime and punishing it without a trial.

While Nadler’s concern for the constitutionality of the law is duly noted, one wonders where his concern about the unconstitutionality of certain laws disappears to whenever certain other legislation comes up; for just one example, Nadler was one of the leading backers of the Clinton-era “assault weapons ban,” and he supported a new, stronger assault weapons ban earlier this year — one that banned actual firearms as opposed to merely certain features of said firearms. Such a ban is in direct violation of the Constitution’s Second Amendment, yet Nadler and his fellow leftists still advocated it.

To be fair, it should be noted that those on the left aren’t the only ones who pick and choose which parts of the Constitution are worth preserving and which are worth throwing away; many on the right, for example, continue to advocate the idea of the War On Drugs, which has led to all sorts of undermining of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, in spirit if not the direct letter of those amendments.

It should be examined, however, how funding to ACORN and other groups is sanctioned by the Constitution in the first place. To argue that it is sanctioned by that document is to imply that those other groups are entitled to the fruits of someone else’s labor, which on its face would seem to be blatantly contradictory to the ideas of the Constitution’s authors. On what constitutional basis exactly would ACORN’s backers argue the group is entitled to one red cent of taxpayer funds? If there were any justice in this nation this whole scandal would prompt a re-examination of all such funding. Sadly this will most likely not happen, and the unjust redistribution of wealth will continue — and again, we ask: How much more of this will Americans take?