The Chief Justice's Goof

The otherwise perfectly awesome inauguration of our new President hit an embarrassing speed bump when Chief Justice Roberts messed up the oath of office he was to administer to the President. He apparently tried to recite the 35 words from memory, and as my grandmother used to say, 'got his tongue wrapped around his eye tooth and couldn't see what he was talking about." Mr. Obama tried to correct the awkward incident but seemingly didn't recite the words exactly. I learned in 40 years as a minister to never try to remember ceremonial words like wedding vows, the mind plays tricks.

The beauty of the inauguration and the great speech the President delivered seemed to cover what had happened in the confusion of the recital of the oath. By the next day however, some people, mostly of conservative persuasion, raised questions of the legality of the inauguration. Chris Wallace of Fox News was shown saying that he doubted that Mr. Obama had really become President. Yesterday, the Chief Justice hauled himself and his robe down to the White House, and without using a Bible, but I imagine a typed index card, administered the oath of office in a private but photographically recorded ceremony. The law of the land has been followed.

In the first attempt at doing the oath Mrs. Obama held the Bible that Abraham Lincoln had used when he was sworn in by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. That set me to thinking. Taney was not only Chief Justice but a chief political enemy of Lincoln and the principal author of the Dred Scott Decision, one of the most shockingly dismal documents of the American government and probably a major cause of the Civil War. A footnote is that Senator Obama voted against the confirmation of Roberts as Chief Justice. Taney gave the majority decision in the Dred Scott v Sandford decision that ruled among other issues that African Americans could never be citizens of the United States. "They were," he wrote, "altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Now of course. one of them is our Commander in Chief and President of the United States.

A fine book on the subject is "Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney," by James F. Simon, a wonderful Civil War and Lincoln historian who died this last summer.

This isn't a case of history repeating itself, Roberts certainly doesn't sink to the level of Taney (pronounced Tawny) but an interesting comparison. Anyway, Barack Obama is our President, legally signed, sealed and delivered by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

I thought a deficit was a debt

When the Bush/Cheney administration finally admitted that we are in a recession or economic turn-down, or whatever it can be called, they proposed and Congress passed a so-called bail-out package of $700 billion dollars. This was to be given primarily to the mortgage bankers and used to help the tens of thousands of people who were in trouble with these complicated mortgage plans that supposedly made it possible for people to buy million dollar homes when they thought they could only afford a couple of hundred thousand. Now it turns out that apparently the bankers haven't chosen to use the money they had been given (about 1/2 of the 700 billion) for that mortgage relief. They have decided instead to give the money to other banks and financial institutions. They also report that they don't think it's anyone's business what they did with the money and chose not to tell us. Forget whose money they were given. Mr.Paulsen has done with it what he pleased.

Now the new administration is talking about using another 300 billion mostly for tax relief for those who make less than two-hundred thousand a year. This so called stimulus package is intended to make life easier for the tax payers and it is hoped will cause people to spend more money, helping the economy. As a footnote, all of this will increase the deficit to 10 or is it 12 trillion dollars? Of course most of this money will continue to be borrowed from China, some from India and perhaps Brazil. Those countries of course are the nations with the fastest growing middle classes and are outpacing us at a rapid rate. In addition our new administration plans on presenting a massive and much needed national health plan which will cost many more billions but bring us up with other nations.

All of this makes about as much sense to me as most current economic discussion. If anyone of us found ourselves in serious debt with no known way to work our way out of it, how would we react to the advice that we need to go out and borrow as much money, or charge as much on credit cards as we can? Go to whoever will loan us funds and then spend all that we can? I know, bail out plans are supposed to make the sluggish economy work, but the debt also piles up. Unlike the government we can't just print more money without becoming counterfeiters, while apparently Uncle Sam can.

The sad thing for Mr. Obama is that he is inheriting this mess and we all know that deficit spending goes back to the Reagan administration and has been added to by many trillions by Dubyah. With the American public's inability to remember facts for very long, however, it will soon become Obama's deficit and mess.