Das Udall Manifesto

Marxists

Das Udall Manifesto

The tale of two Udalls

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            My uncle lives in Colorado.

            He is watching the Colorado Udall’s senatorial race with similar interest as we are watching the New Mexico version. He believes Coloradoans are disgusted with Mark Udall’s tedious party line adherence to the Obama agenda. As a consequence, he is scrambling.

            Cousin Tom, who finds New Mexico’s welfare state more tolerant of his liberalism, doesn’t think he faces the same threat. He can troll the backwaters of Rio Grande colonias promising the goods and be greeted in a manner reminiscent of his counterparts south of the border.

            He remains confident his brand of politics works in the Land of Enchantment. As long as he keeps the state on the receiving end of wealth transfers, he will be cheered by his constituency of permanent dependency.

            Udall moniker

The Udall clan is a prolific band of politicos.

They have placed family members into positions in California, Arizona, Oregon, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. The family of Mark and Tom’s cousin, Nick Udall, could, alone, provide the margin for successes in many precincts. Nick’s great grandfather, Heber Kimball, had 63 children, 176 grandchildren, and 564 great-grandchildren.

Aside from the current family legislators (including Utah’s Mike Lee and former Oregon senator, Gordon Smith), the best known Udalls were Mark and Tom’s fathers, Morris and Stewart, respectively. Those two environmentalists set the stage for all things green. That remains the prevailing theme with their über liberal sons.

Neither son worked in the private sector. They were slung out of the environmental turnstiles into a mapped foray into politics.

Mark spent his early adulthood in the Outward Bound School. He indulged in a smoky version of Rocky Mountain high and was busted on marijuana possession. Between the blue haze and his name, progressives from Colorado elected him to the senate to defend their state’s rights.

Tom attended law school in New Mexico and committed his life to government ultimately filling New Mexico’s attorney general role. After mixed campaign successes, he was elected to the House and then, in 2008, filled the slot vacated by long time New Mexico senator, Pete Domenici.

The rest is current history. Both cousins are embarking on attempts to further ensconce their names in extreme liberalism.

The purported manifesto

The cousins’ approval ratings by liberal support hover above 95%. Those scores tie them inexorably to this president.

Tom is the more liberal of the two being scored by the National Journal (and tied with Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut) as America’s most liberal senator. That puts him in some lofty competition pushing aside Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Al Franken, Barbara Boxer, and Robert Menendez for the honor. His stance is interesting on several fronts that should run counter to New Mexico’s heritage, but times are changed. He has heralded his image by a self imposed manifesto he calls, “A new Agenda for a new Decade”.

 In his mission, he elevates support for inmates, smart growth, and equal justice to the extreme. The best example is his so called ‘Udall amendment’ which even the ACLU warns will “break the Constitution”. It is the first time an amendment attempt has been openly debated to directly limit specifically enumerated rights and freedoms of a segment of Americans. In particular, it is framed not to expunge money from politics. It is framed to expunge conservative money from politics through a constitutional amendment.

Unlike New Mexico, Colorado is starting to hesitate on overt conservatism cleansing and Mark is finding his obstacle course more challenging. He is wavering on controversial positions, but claims, like his cousin, to be in lockstep with Barack Hussein Obama. What those three share can be painted in broad strokes.

They demonstrate little loyalty to private property. They embrace restrictive land designations that include state and private land holdings embedded in their proposals although Mark has recently elevated his stated concern for heritage enterprises. That probably reflects his reelection difficulty.

The have never met a tax they didn’t like. Standing fiercely on the side of taxing the rich, they are advocates of heavier tax burdens.

When the opportunity has arisen to lessen the burden of inheritance taxes, they look the other way. They remain attached to political agendas rather than generation to generation business stability.

When decisions were made regarding centralized credit controls through financial giants like Freddie Mac, they remained firmly entrenched with Barney Frank in defense of the mortgage giants. They support that proxy for centralized banking.

Although both cousins have attempted to deflect public opinion of their support for NSA actions in recent days, their natural inclinations always trend left. Their loyalty to the state has always taken precedence over citizenry.

They invariably support the expansion of restrictive federal land designations. That tendency must be interpreted as supporting consistent land planning manuscripts, or, in other words, wide swaths of restrictive, agency driven land use planning.

Labor unions assured the president’s reelection and they rate both of the senators close to 100%. That support by unions does not equate to right to work and or nonunion camps. The two positions cannot exist positively in juxtaposition. Labor unions are their priority.

Taking the natural default position from the president, both senators have demonstrated advocacy, tolerance, and funding support for progressive community planning. They support every community effort in the advocacy and coerced installation of Agenda 21 projects.

Free education and expanded welfare snares are first nature to these men. In fact, matters of federal give-a-ways chain right back to the near 100% ratings. The ratings and the promises are mutually inclusive.

So, nine broad strokes of commonality are demonstrated by the president and the Udall cousins. To the astute, those nine points are parallels of the grand plan outlined in 1848 just before the duo’s great great grandfather, David Udall, was born. From Germany, two characters by the name of Marx and Engel wrote their own Manifesto. In Das Komnunistische Manifest, they set forth ten planks of what became known as the Communist Manifesto. The nine points hereinabove are nine tenths of those actual planks when paraphrased from the language of the two Marxists.

Only plank number four remains missing. That plank, the confiscation of emigrant and rebel property, was left out for discussion.

Das Udall Manifesto … the real comparison

Unlike his cousin, Mark pledged to maintain protections for heritage industries in his recent protective land legislation in Colorado.

In his New Mexico legislative version and continuing in his support for the subsequent action by President Obama designating the Organ Mountain Desert Peaks National Monument through usurped authority from the Antiquities Act, Tom Udall never once extended similar empathy to the land owners with embedded private lands within the designation. Those 40 allotment holders representing 90 families pleaded for consideration.

There was silence.

At the same time, the New Mexico senator embraced the State of New Mexico for support for exchanging 100 square miles of state trust lands within the footprint. There was public commiseration to maintain the educational funding responsibilities inherent in those lands. As such, there was acknowledgement that land trades were necessary. Educational funding was a higher priority than permanent protection.

Meanwhile, private lands in the measure, equating to the footprints of the nearby communities of Deming, Hatch, and Mesilla didn’t rate the same priority. By acclimation, Udall demonstrated permanent protection had a higher priority than private land rights.

In fact, there is odious language in the proclamation that suggests exactly that. “Lands and Interests in Lands with the monument’s boundaries not owned or controlled by the United States shall be reserved as part of the monument upon acquisition of ownership or control by the United States.”

To those who face the likelihood of wrested control of their lands by the Udall-Reid-Obama juggernaut, the confiscation of emigrant and rebel property has an eerie ring to it. The ranchers in the debate don’t qualify as emigrants, so, perhaps, Senator Udall has a more clearly defined and personal bias equating us to rebels. The definition of rebel (v) is challenge, resist, confront, and nonconformity. The noun version is simply “he who” carries out the action of the verb.

If those who face the devastation of heritage investments in this matter are arrayed with “he who” challenged the wisdom of the action, resisted the threat of our demise, confronted the unilateral action of the leaders of question, and demonstrated nonconformity in our willingness to give up our life’s work, customs, and culture, then categorize us as rebels. We cannot offer an apology for the defense of all that we are and all that we know.

But, Tom Udall has a problem. He has now demonstrated he has fulfilled the demonstrative achievement of embracing … all ten planks of the Communist Manifesto.

Das Liberal

My friend, the Westerner, has chided me suggesting the foregoing is simply singing to the bunkhouse choir in the key of C. Perhaps it is, but there is a wider loop of despair being thrown.

As land stewards in a private business, we pay for insurance out of our own pocket. For many years, our health insurance has been sourced from New Mexico BCBS. There is nothing Cadillac about the policy. To keep costs down, we have continued to increase the deductible. It now stands at $5,000. Only once did we reach it hence we basically pay for all medical expenses. Such an approach would seem to suggest that our selection would be not only simplistic, but safe.

Not so …

Since the Udall sculpted Obamacare was passed, our insurance has gone up 23% even with the buy downs implicit in the increasing deductible. What adds anger to insult is the fact this month we were notified our policy does not meet the Affordable Care Act guidelines and it will be terminated January 1, 2015.

What a nice Christmas present, eh?

To heighten the insult, my personal physician, a professional I depend upon, told me he will retire if mandated to convert all his files to electronic form. He will not be told how to practice medicine or how to maintain records of his patients. I dread the loss of my doctor. He has been my counselor, my advisor, and my friend.

Tom Udall is a central figure and key influence in this debacle. As the most liberal senator in the Chamber, he is complicit, and has become… an outright danger to our society.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “Tom Udall has .not only put my ranching future in peril he has put my health future in peril. He needs to go.”

Wilmeth mentions the Udall Amendment.  So just what was that?  It was Tom Udall's proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution in an effort to overturn a Supreme Court decision generally referred to as the Citizens United decision.  Writing in the Washington Times, a research fellow at the Center for Competitive Politics explains:

The most common refrain from supporters of the amendment is that it would “overturn Citizens United.” That’s partially right. This amendment would actually overturn every Supreme Court ruling in the past 40 years that protected our right to criticize and speak out about our elected officials, including Citizens United. But while some on the left have demonized the Citizens United decision as allowing unlimited corporate money, secret money and foreign money into our elections (it does none of these things), the actual facts of the case are that the federal government thought it had the power to ban a political movie.

The government’s position, quite explicitly, is that it was allowed to ban a documentary (“Hillary: The Movie”) from appearing on paid cable TV because it spoke about a politician within 60 days of an election, and the nonprofit conservative group that made the movie (Citizens United) was a corporation. This case could just as readily have been about a Michael Moore documentary released by his production company critical of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in September 2012, or a Paramount political thriller in which the characters mention who they are voting for, released in late October of an election year. The government’s position would remain the same: It could ban the films for mentioning these political candidates.

That is what the Udall Amendment authorizes Congress to do. The explicit effect of “overturning Citizens United” would be to allow the federal government to ban movies that malign (or praise) incumbent politicians and their challengers running for office. More frightening still are the arguments the government made advocating for this radical position. Deputy Solicitor General, Malcolm L. Stewart was asked during oral arguments in Citizens United to consider a scenario where a single sentence of a 500-page book advocated for a candidate. He responded, “we [the government] could prohibit publication of the book.” That statement caused such a stir that a second round of oral arguments was scheduled, and Elena Kagan, then solicitor general, walked back the book-banning claim. Her new argument, however, found that a “political pamphlet” could be banned. She made no mention of how to distinguish between a political pamphlet and a book.

From the left, the ACLU notified Congress it "strongly opposes" the Udall amendment because it:

...would severely limit the First Amendment, lead directly to government censorship of political speech and result in a host of unintended consequences that would undermine the goals the amendment has been introduced to advance—namely encouraging vigorous political dissent and providing voice to the voiceless, which we, of course, support . As we have said in the past, this and similar constitutional amendments would “fundamentally ‘break’ the Constitution and endanger civil rights and civil liberties for generations.” Were it to pass, the amendment would be the first time, save for the failed policies of Prohibition, that the Constitution has ever been amended to limit rights and freedoms.

The ACLU also called the Udall amendment “deceptively complex,” “dangerous for liberties,” “vague,” “overbroad,” and“exceedingly dangerous to democratic processes.”

And from the right, a National Review columnists wrote: 

it would mark a significant step away from the nation’s First Amendment tradition that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech” and toward a system where incumbent politicians could heavily regulate any speech they deem to “influence elections.”

Wilmeth also mentions ObamaCare.  As a person with multiple sclerosis I've been run through our healthcare system for the last 24 years, and believe me, the last thing a person in my situation wants is more government regulations, guidelines and dictates that limit my healthcare choices or lessen the opportunity for research.  Tom Udall advocates just that with his support of ObamaCare.  Not only does he support ObamaCare, he recently led the charge to amend the rules of the Senate to make it easier for Obama appointees to be cleared by that body.  The result is more Obama judges sitting on the various courts that will rule on the Constitutionality of the act.

This is all about power.  The power to limit access to federal lands. The power to limit or ban our political speech.  The power to limit our healthcare choices.  Tom Udall wants that power to be centralized in DC and to be taken away from you and I.