Unconstitutional State Constitutions

Texas' Bill of Rights Section 4:
" RELIGIOUS TESTS: No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being."

Tennessee's Bill of Rights: Article 9:
Section 2. " No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this state."

South Carolina's Constitution, Article 4 Section 2:
"Person denying existence of Supreme Being not to hold office. No person who denies the existence of the Supreme Being shall hold any office under this Constitution."

North Carolina's Constitution, Article 6 Sec. 8:
" Disqualifications of office. The following persons shall be disqualified for office: First, any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God...."

Maryland's Bill of Rights: Article 36:
" That as it is the duty of every man to worship God in such manner as he thinks most acceptable to Him, all persons are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty; wherefore, no person ought by any law to be molested in his person or estate, on account of his religious persuasion, or profession, or for his religious practice, unless, under the color of religion, he shall disturb the good order, peace or safety of the State, or shall infringe the laws of morality, or injure others in their natural, civil or religious rights; nor ought any person to be compelled to frequent, or maintain, or contribute, unless on contract, to maintain, any place of worship, or any ministry; nor shall any person, otherwise competent, be deemed incompetent as a witness, or juror, on account of his religious belief; provided, he believes in the existence of God, and that under His dispensation such person will be held morally accountable for his acts, and be rewarded or punished therefore either in this world or in the world to come."

Why these are all unconstitutional:
Article VI, section 3 of the United States Constitution

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

Anyone Think This is Good News?

Even though President Obama promised BP will cover 100% of the cost of repairing and cleaning up the Gulf Oil Disaster, the Wall Street Journal reports that BP will force taxpayers to pick up at least $9.9 billion of the bill.

How will this happen? BP is planning to use tax-code provisions that allow companies to get refunds on losses. Since the disaster will cost BP at least $32 billion, they want almost $10 billion dollars from taxpayers -- effectively cutting BP clean-up costs by a third.

POTUS and VP Schedule Now Online

Just a quick post to share the online schedule of the president and VP.

It is available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/schedule/complete.

Again... sorry for the lack of posts around here lately. Hopefully I'll crawl out from under the work avalanche and be more active here again soon...

Boycott BP!

Although I haven't blogged about the BP oil spill here, most of you probably know my thoughts about it. Of course, nobody is in favor of an oil spill, right? But then there are lunatics like that crazy libertarian Rand Paul, whose position is basically "shit happens, lay off of BP."

So we get eleven oil workers dead. The largest oil spill in U.S. history getting larger every day. The Gulf of Mexico (and even the East Atlantic Coast) will be feeling the ecological effects of this disaster for years to come. And for you Republicans, there is an economic impact, too, as this debacle destroys fisheries and the livelihoods of people who fish and shrimp in the Gulf, or rely on the Gulf for tourism business.

BP CEO Tony Hayward is sanguine about the whole problem. The Financial Times quotes him saying, “I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest.”

The time to boycott BP is now.

Go here: www.beyondbp.org

Teddy Roosevelt on Immigration

There is an e-mail spreading around the Internet that most of you have probably seen. It purports to give a quote from Teddy Roosevelt about immigration.

The e-mail gets some of the wording wrong... and the date of the quote wrong... but it gets the essence of Roosevelt's position essentially correct.

Here is the correct quote, from a letter by then former president Roosevelt on January 3, 1919 to the president of the American Defense Society. It was read publicly at a meeting on January 5, 1919. Roosevelt died the next day, on January 6, 1919.

"We should insist that if the immigrant who comes here does in good faith become an American and assimilates himself to us he shall be treated on an exact equality with every one else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed or birth-place or origin.

But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American. If he tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin and separated from the rest of America, then he isn't doing his part as an American. There can be no divided allegiance here. . . We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house; and we have room for but one soul loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people."

This seems like a very sensible position to me. I think there are things in it that both the far left (one language) and the far right (perhaps too open on allowing immigration) may disagree with... but it seems like a good, high-level statement to me.

Finally... A Great Use for a Bible

Authorities in Ohio said a 16-year-old arrested for drug possession allegedly used a page torn from his Bible as a marijuana cigarette rolling paper.

The Erie County sheriff deputy's report said the teenager's mother called authorities at about 11:35 p.m. Tuesday and asked deputies to meet her at a car wash on Ohio 101 in Margaretta Township, the Sandusky (Ohio) Register reported Monday.

The mother told deputies she had seen her son smoking in his room and discovered a small bag of marijuana in his nightstand.

The report said the woman told deputies the boy "was smoking a marijuana cigarette using a page from his Bible."

Deputies confiscated the marijuana and the boy was arrested and charged with drug possession.

What an intrepid young man! I've never found the bible to be useful for much of anything, but he found an interesting use...

I wonder if the page was from Exodus 3?

National Day of Prayer?

Today, the government's observance of the National Day of Prayer goes forward despite the recent federal court ruling that deemed the event unconstitutional. Two bills are currently making their way through the House of Representatives that aim to protect the National Day of Prayer--as if it needed protection--one of which has over 80 co-sponsors, about one-fifth of the entire House.

On Presidential Signing Statements

Presidential signing statements thwart Congressional oversight and should be outlawed.

Every once in a while, a news story crops up about yet another lie or omission regarding the briefings the CIA gave to Congressional intelligence committees on their interrogation aka torture program during the Bush years. Marcy Wheeler has been assiduously covering this for months, even years now, gathering together the disparate reports from a mostly disinterested mainstream press.

A few examples will suffice.

There was the time in July 2009 when House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes complained that his committee “has been misled, has not been provided full and complete notifications, and (in at least one occasion) was affirmatively lied to.” Only months before, in a well-publicized press conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the CIA of lying to Congress. “They didn’t tell us everything,” Pelosi complained. The Speaker’s complaints followed CIA’s release of a list (PDF) that purported to show how it had briefed Congress over the years on the interrogations program. The list, in Marcy Wheeler’s words, was illustrative of CIA “playing around with its obligation to inform the intelligence committees.” Her deconstruction of the list is juicy reading.

Sometimes, as Wheeler also recently reported, the efforts to sabotage Congressional oversight came from within, as in early 2003 when then-new Senate Intelligence Committee chair Pat Roberts scotched all plans to send a committee staffer to review CIA interrogation sites on behalf of the committee.

What isn’t often mentioned was how the CIA was given the green light to lie and obfuscate by their superiors in the Executive Branch. It’s well known that former President Bush used an unprecedented amount of signing statements during his administration, nullifying dozens, if not hundred of provisions in the bills he signed. A Pulitzer Prize winning account of this was written up by Charlie Savage in the Boston Globe in 2006. One should read the entire article (as well as others on the subject by Dahlia Lithwick and John Dean), but I’m only going to mainly concentrate on the signing statements that targeted Congressional oversight demands.

Although presidential signing statements had been used before George W. Bush's reign of (t)error, this turd of a practice is laying squarely at the feet of our former president. For all of his other failings (real or perceived), President Barack Obama has kept his word, when he indicated he would not rule by presidential signing statement.