The attorney from Springfield, Illinois who became the 16th President of these United States had a lifelong dedication to the Declaration of Independence. Early and late in his political career Abraham Lincoln was quoted as saying
•”Let us revere the Declaration of Independence.”
• “Let us readopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it the practices and policy which harmonize with it.”
Senator Coburn tossed Elana Kagan a softball at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Had she been of the same mind as Lincoln she would have hit it over the fence.
She instead let it scream past her, a choice that should count as a strike. Added to her slavish devotion to the culture of death and political correctness, Kagan should be back on the bench at this time.
Here is Kagan refusing the hit a pitch that Abraham Lincoln would have sent out of the ball park:
KAGAN: Senator Coburn, t-t-to be honest with you, I — I — I don’t have a view of what are natural rights, independent of the Constitution. And my job as a justice will be to enforce and defend the Constitution and other laws of the United States.
COBURN: So you wouldn’t embrace what the Declaration of Independence says, that we have certain God-given, inalienable rights that aren’t given in the Constitution? That they’re ours and ours alone and that government doesn’t give those to us?
KAGAN: Senator Coburn, I believe that the Constitution is an extraordinary document, and I’m not saying I do not believe that there are rights pre-existing the Constitution and the laws, but my job as a justice is to enforce the Constitution and the laws.
COBURN “Well, I understand that.” As a justice you’re going to do this and do that, but, “Well, I’m not talking about as a justice. I’m talking about Elena Kagan. What do you believe? Are there inalienable rights for us? Do you believe that?”
KAGAN: Senator Coburn, I — I think that the question of what I believe as to what people’s rights are outside the Constitution or the laws, that you should not want me to act in any way on the basis of such a belief if I had one or –
COBURN: I would want you to always act on the basis of a belief of what our Declaration of Independence says.
KAGAN: I — I think you should want me to act on the basis of law, and, uh — and that is what I have upheld to do if I’m fortunate enough to be confirmed is to act on the basis of law, which is the Constitutions and the statutes of the United States.
SO, the “law” stops, the nominee Kagan assures us, begins and ends with the federal statutes and Constitution of these United States.
One of Lincoln’s biographers, Harry Jaffa,, wrote in Crisis of the House Divided that
“Lincoln did not appeal to the Declaration of Independence merely because it was our first and foremost founding document. It was, he said, the immortal emblem of man’s humanity and the father of all moral principle because it incorporated a rational, nonarbitrary moral and political standard.”
How then might Lincoln have replied to Senator Coburn? Probably in a similar fashion as he did in his debate against Democrat nominee (for U.S. Senate) Stephen Douglas in Lewiston, Illinois in 1858:
These … representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: ‘We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures.
Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. The erected a beacon to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.
Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began — so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.
The Declaration of Independence existed eleven years before the United States Constitution or any federal statutes. It is our American Creed. A creed that the nominee Elana Kagan runs from, just as the slave holders did in Lincoln’s day.
His advice to her would likley fall along these lines …. from the same 1858 debate ….
Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflict with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated in our charter of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the revolution. Think nothing of me — take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever — but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles.
There can be little doubt that the Great Emancipator, the father of the Grand Ole Party in most respects, would have had little use for a Solicitor General and academe who was embarrassed to claim the Declaration of Independence as her own creedal statement.
There can be little doubt that a Senator Abraham Lincoln would have voted against putting Elana Kagan on the High Court given her lack of allegiance to the “sacred” document that he considered the most preeminent in our national heritage. Alas, he lost the 1858 election to Stephen A. Douglas, a man pledged to the abortion industry of his day — the slave system. It appears that America is about to lose out once again as the Democrat Party’s affinity with the culture of death bears its awful political fruit, and puts on the High Court a tool slavishly loyal to the abortion industry.
Worse than slavery? Ask the baby. Or ask Elana Kagan, she defends this as a constitutional right.
The question is only this — who will stand in the shoes of the Great Emancipator? Senator Richard Lugar’s feet have proven way too small for that task.
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God Help Us!
