Obama's Constitutional Subversion

A new report (PDF) written by Second Amendment lawyer Dave Hardy of Of Arms and the Law finds that while constitutional law professor Barack Obama was serving on the Joyce Foundation's Board of Directors from 1994-2002, Joyce set out to corrupt the availability of academic scholarship concerning the Second Amendment. The goal was to control published research so that the U.S Supreme Court would be influenced as much as possible by the overwhelming preponderance of recent scholarship favoring the collective rights interpretation favored by gun control advocates and firearm prohibitionists.

Hardy summarizes:

The Joyce Foundation years ago realized that a Supreme Court case on the Second Amendment was likely, and decided to use its millions to buy the case indirectly. It created a supposed academic research center as its wholly-owned subsidiary. It corrupted law reviews, dictating their content, and even trying to dictate who could speak at universities accepting Joyce's money. It laundered its money through its Center and thru a University’s Foundation.

An attorney named Barak Obama was right in the middle of the plan.

The foundation poured millions of dollars into buying influence in cash-starved law reviews, foundations, and universities, providing that they would only publish the collective rights interpretations approved by Joyce, and that they would refuse to publish scholarship that provided an individualist rights interpretation.

This underhanded attempt by Obama and Joyce to influence the Supreme Court--essentially attempting to "buy" an anti-gun interpretation of the Second amendment by manipulating legal scholarship--flies in the face of the revisionist history recently offered up by Annenberg's FactCheck.Org, which recently and dishonestly portrayed Obama's newly-minted individual rights interpretation as authentic. IT is also a tactic that Joyce continues in Obama's absence, as the list of university and "public heath" grants targeting firearms on the Foundation's own web site reveals.

How far was Joyce willing to go under Obama's leadership to provide the Supreme Court with slanted scholarship?

According to Hardy, Joyce paid Ohio State University to create a Second Amendment Research Center, and used the Center to manufacture scholarship only favorable to the collectivist interpretation. Joyce then used OSU's Center as a shell organization to purchase influence at other law reviews, including Fordham and Stanford. Fordam and Stanford then dedicates review issues to articles advocating the collectivist, anti-gun scholarship. In short, constitutional scholar Obama attempted to undermine the interpretation of the Constitution.

The Hardy report is just the latest in a disturbing trend of information trickling out about Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama that suggests he is not only radically aligned, but that he is comfortable with using subterfuge to undermine both the Judicial and Executive in the pursuit of political power and influence.

Stanley Kurtz has done and continues to do yeoman's work in sifting through the available archives trying to uncover exactly what transpired before and while Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama was the chairman of the failed Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge (hereafter, "Challenge" or "CAC") began as a successful grant application from University of Illinois at Chicago education professor Bill Ayers. Outside of Chicago, Ayers is best known as a domestic terrorist who operated in the in the late 1960s and 1970s as one of founders, leaders and reputed bomb builders and designers of the Weather Underground.

The Annenberg Foundation (yes the same parent group that funds FactCheck.org and misrepresented Obama's Second Amendment record), provided the Challenge with a charter grant of $49.2 million in 1995, and the Challenge raises and spend more than $100 million in total with Barack Obama as the CAC Chairman. The tens of millions of dollars raised by the foundation was funneled not into proven educational programs, but laundered into grants for radical left wing organizations that spent the money on efforts to agitate and indoctrinate students and their families to use them as cannon fodder in a battle Ayers and his ideological allies were having over the fate of Chicago's public schools with the teachers union and school administrators. By any measure--and most tellingly by the Challenge's own research arm--the challenge was a educational failure.

The failure of Chicago Annenberg Challenge under Barack Obama and it's laundering of funds to further the goals of aging radicals instead improving the Chicago Public Schools as was their promise, has been avoided as much as possible by most media organizations who don't want to jeopardize his candidacy with the inconvenient record of his failure as an executive.

Barack Obama's willingness to scheme in an attempt to corrupt scholarship and deceive the Supreme Court, his role in laundering money to aging terrorists (while stealing the education promised to a generation of schoolchildren), and current bid impose totalitarian free speech restrictions (more here) indicates that Barack Obama is precisely the kind of deceptive authoritarian thug liberals claim to see and hate in President George W. Bush.

Barack Obama has thus far spent nearly unimaginable amounts of money in an attempt to wrest control of the First and Second Amendments. If he becomes President in November, will any of the Constitution be safe?