Scott Johnson
PowerLine
12/9/2010
…Professor Sunstein was the right man to call on to explain away Obama’s remarks. They derived directly from Sunstein’s advocacy of Roosevelt’s so-called second Bill of Rights. Sunstein devoted a book to the subject in 2004 — The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever. Roosevelt set forth his second Bill of Rights in his 1944 State of the Union Address; I wrote about it in “Whatever happened to the Constitution?”
Tom Palmer usefully explicated the political thought underlying Sunstein’s argument in his review of the book. By contrast with the doctrine of rights conferred by God and nature set forth in the Declaration of Independence, Sunstein holds: “You owe your life — and everything else — to the sovereign. The rights of subjects are not natural rights, but merely grants from the sovereign. There is no right even to complain about the actions of the sovereign, except insofar as the sovereign allows the subject to complain. These are the principles of unlimited, arbitrary, and absolute power, the principles of such rulers as Louis XIV.”
Thus Palmer deemed Sunstein a “new intellectual champion of absolutism” who advances “the radical notion that all rights — including rights usually held to be ‘against’ the state, such as the right to freedom of speech and the right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned or tortured — are grants from the state…
Read the entire article at PowerLine.
