About the $.09

From Justin Raimondo:

We can stop the next war before it starts – but only if we catch the War Party at their game while they're playing it, and not after the fact, as in the case of Iraq. The Democrats are keen to cut off funding for a war that should never have started and could not have started without their cooperation: will they have the foresight and courage to defund the covert war against Iran before it becomes overt? I am not at all optimistic about this, but I'd be glad to be proven wrong.

If the U.S. does launch a war on Iran, the case that there's not a dime's worth of difference between the Two Parties will have its clinching argument.

But what about ... what? Abortion? Same sex marriages? God in the Pledge? If not a dime's worth of difference, there must be something. There must be 9 cents, isn't there?

There is one thing the Republicans could have done to establish that they are substantively different from the Democrats. In the last Congress, Ron Paul introduced the We the People Act, which says:

The Supreme Court of the United States and each Federal court--

(1) shall not adjudicate--

(A) any claim involving the laws, regulations, or policies of any State or unit of local government relating to the free exercise or establishment of religion;

(B) any claim based upon the right of privacy, including any such claim related to any issue of sexual practices, orientation, or reproduction; or

(C) any claim based upon equal protection of the laws to the extent such claim is based upon the right to marry without regard to sex or sexual orientation; and

(2) shall not rely on any judicial decision involving any issue referred to in paragraph (1).

If you have Constitutional objections to this, read the Section 2 Findings of the bill.

This bill would have returned questions of abortion, religion, and sex to the states - that is, to the pre-Warren Court status quo in America that the Religious Right has been pining for. Unlike other candidates, then, Ron Paul came through for the Religious Right, and did so on solid Constitutional grounds.

Yet, this bill did not have a single co-sponsor among any "conservative Christian" members of Congress. The bill was introduced in November, 2005 and was referred to the Judiciary Committee, where it died.

Had this bill moved forward, we may have seen at least one area of sharp disagreement between the Democratic and Republican parties. But the Republicans ignored Paul, because Republicans don't want Roe v. Wade overturned. They would rather play politics with judicial nominations, as do the Democrats. Indeed, one Republican front-runner believes abortion is a "Constitutional right."

Approaches are sometimes different, but the Two Parties have identical governing philosophies: more laws, more war, more spending, more central government.

Now, if the Democrats do stop the War on Iran, perhaps I'll reconsider these statements.