Kennedy’s Hate Crimes Amendment

RUSH: Defense appropriations bill: Good old Teddy Kennedy has plugged an amendment in this bill, a hate crimes amendment, and the amendment includes ‘gender identity’ as a protected class against hate crimes, and even ‘perceived gender-related characteristics.’ Now, the original Kennedy language didn’t go that far, but it has been marked up to include that now. But the term ‘perceived’ in the amendment makes it really difficult to say that there’s any class of individuals affected. Anybody could be a hate crime victim, depending what a judge concludes was ‘perceived’ in the mind of the person at the time.

But our buddies at RedState.com have accurately pointed out here, via Ed Meese at the Heritage Foundation, that the ‘hate crimes’ measure is unconstitutional. ‘Congress only has express constitutional jurisdiction over three crimes: treason, counterfeiting and piracy on the high seas. Because the federal government is one of limited and enumerated powers, Congress must find authority in other constitutional clauses to federalize particular crimes or such acts would violate federalism principles, the Tenth Amendment, or other structural limits in the Constitution.’ So essentially they’re holding up the defense bill and a number of others with amendments like this, which leads me to think that maybe they don’t want these bills signed. Now, why would they not want the bills signed? Why would they not want the education bill, the defense authorization bill, or any of the ten others that fund the government starting the new fiscal year?

Why would they not want them signed? Well, let’s see. Let’s examine what one of the possibilities might be. If none of these bills are signed, what would have to happen is a continuing resolution would have to be signed as an emergency authorization to keep the governing running. If that didn’t happen, you could get a government shut down. At the threat of a government shutdown (which nobody wants, sadly), you could put in that continuing resolution a fixed withdrawal date from Iraq, say, and force the president to veto that or sign it — and, thereby, if he vetoes it, then, of course, he’s shutting down the government and doing it for the war and he’s not getting his defense authorization budget. There could be any number of things at work here. But they know that this hate crime amendment is unconstitutional. The federal government has no power, constitutional or otherwise, to put that kind of amendment to this legislation. So it will be fascinating to see what happens over the weekend here. While the Democrats are talking about, ‘We’ve gotta get these passed!’ I’m not convinced that they want any of these bills signed in time for the new fiscal year.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want you to hear a sound bite from Senator Kennedy on his hate crimes amendment to the defense appropriations bill. He is equating supposed hate crimes against Muslims in America, to the attack of 9/11. This is on the Senate floor yesterday.

KENNEDY: Since September 11th attacks, we have seen a shameful increase in the number of hate crimes committed against Muslims. Six Americans of Middle East descent. In Iraq and Afghanistan our soldiers are fighting for freedom and liberty. They are on the front line fighting against evil and hate. We owe it to our troops to uphold those same principles here at home. We’re united in our effort to root out the cells of hatred around the world. We should not turn a blind eye to acts of hatred and terrorism here at home.

RUSH: ‘Hatred and terrorism acts committed by Americans against Americans of Middle Eastern descent,’ Muslims and Sikhs. This hate crime amendment, normally when the Democrats attach this kind of stuff and talk about it, they talk about in terms of women or homosexuals or what have you. But now Senator Kennedy is implying that there are all kinds of hate crimes being perpetrated against Muslims and Sikhs and Americans of Middle East descent in this country. This is just shameless. You get back to that, ‘America is at fault. It’s America is the problem. We are bad people,’ and we somehow need to rein ourselves in, ladies and gentlemen, because we are the ones who need more control from the federal government, to make sure that we stop acting so bad and so mean to people who have nothing but love and peace aimed at us.