Has This Person Read The Constitution?

If he hasn't, what is he doing in Congress?

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) told a gathering of Democrats, "The bottom line is we’re not broke, there’s plenty of money, it’s just the government doesn’t have it."

Ellison was discussing his 'Inclusive Prosperity Act' measure at the July 25th Progressive Democrats of America roundtable in Washington.

"People like, George Soros, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sax, Dean Baker, Robert Poland, Larry Summers have said they all support a transaction tax," Ellison said.

"The bottom line is we’re not broke, there’s plenty of money, it’s just the government doesn’t have it," Ellison continued, "The government has a right, the government and the people of the United States have a right to run the programs of the United States. Health, welfare, housing – all these things." [Emphasis added]

Keith Ellison (D, MN) isn't just any old Congressvermin, of course; he's also one of the two professing Muslims sitting in the House of Representatives. From that fact we can reliably infer all sorts of things about his intentions for these United States...foremost among them, as the Koran demands, that its Supreme Law shall no longer be the Constitution but Islamic shari'a.

But let me return to my main point. I emphasized a phrase in Ellison's lunacy for a specific reason. Perhaps you already know what it is. But if you don't, answer me this:

Where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that "the government" has any rights?

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The Founding Fathers understood rights. They knew them to be counter-propositions to the use of force, which is the characteristic method of the State. That's why they wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights: to make clear that individuals' rights should be secure against government's forcible intrusions and infringements.

Congress's legislative powers were explicitly stated as protection for individual rights.
The powers of the other two branches were made explicit for the same reason.
Every clause of the Bill of Rights speaks of individual rights.
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments say plainly that the powers of the federal government are strictly limited. By contrast, the rights of individuals are not.

Needless to say, "progressives" reject all of that. Nancy Pelosi, one of the darlings of the Left on Capitol Hill, said openly that she believes that the "necessary and proper" clause grants Congress unbounded power to legislate on any subject, and to any effect, whatsoever. But it took Keith Ellison, who might be the least skillful dissembler in Congress, to claim that "the government has a right" -- an unlimited right -- to your money and property.

The taxing power isn't enough for this clown. But then, he's just developing a line of thought introduced long before him. Some years ago, the Dishonorable Barbara Mikulski (D, MD) openly stated her own version of Sutton's Law. In raving about Congress's need for more revenue, she noted that the middle class was "where the money is," and that Congress should simply "go in there and get it."

It wasn't original with Mikulski, either. It's a prime tenet of all collectivist notions that the State owns everything, just like an absolute monarch. The State merely permits us groundlings to retain a fraction of our earnings out of "legislative grace."

That phrase "legislative grace" appears in some rather important Supreme Court decisions about the extent of Congress's taxing powers under the Sixteenth Amendment. When the question was put before the Court whether there is any limit on how high income tax rates could be set, the majority decision was that no such limit exists -- that whatever percentage of one's income Congress allows one to retain is an act of "legislative grace."

And you thought you had property rights.

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Nothing on Earth is quite as certain as the voracity of the State. It wants everything. It will take whatever isn't nailed down. If it can, it will pry the nails loose and steal them as well. Frederick Douglass pinned this some years ago:

Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they have been resisted with either words or blows, or with both.

The time has come to deny the State its pretensions to legitimacy. The "progressives" will eventually get the upper hand once again -- indeed, the whole point of the Obama Administration's expansions of government is to bring that about and make it irreversible -- and now that their intentions are out in the open, they will act on them.

As difficult as the first step will be:

Simply think of the State as a criminal band, and all the libertarian attitudes will fall automatically into place. [Murray Rothbard, For A New Liberty]

...it's only the first step.

Are you ready for the ones that would follow?