BREAKING: Senate Voting on Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein Today

According to the legislative calender posted on the Republican Policy Committee website, the Senate will be rushing to vote today to approve Cass R. Sunstein's nomination to be Obama's Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

If you thought Van Jones was extreme, Sunstein is just down-right kooky.

In his own words:
---In a 2007 speech at Harvard University, Sunstein said "We ought to ban hunting."

---From his book Radicals in Robes: "[A]lmost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine. And if the Court is right, then fundamentalism does not justify the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms.

---From 2004 book Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions: "Animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives..."

---2007 speech at Harvard: "[Humans'] willingness to subject animals to unjustified suffering will be seen ... as a form of unconscionable barbarity... morally akin to slavery and the mass extermination of human beings."

---Arguing for a Fairness Doctrine of the Internet in his book Republic.com 2.0: "A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government."

---In an article he co-authored entitled, "Why We Should Celebrate Paying Taxes": "In what sense is the money in our pockets and bank accounts fully 'ours'?

Did we earn it by our own autonomous efforts? Could we have inherited it without the assistance of probate courts? Do we save it without support from bank regulators? Could we spend it... if there were no public officials to coordinate the efforts and pool the resources of the community in which we live?"

---Same article: "[T]ax day is not a day of national mourning. Without taxes there would be no liberty. Without taxes there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth defending. Indeed, property owners are more deeply “dependent” on government than food-stamp recipients."

Seriously? Where did this guy come from? Oh yeah, Chicago and Harvard. Sound familiar?

Sunstein wrote a book called Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech. First of all, it's troubling that a "constitutional scholar" would describe the First Amendment as a "problem" of democracy. In the book, Sunstein argues, America needs to "reinvigorate processes of democratic deliberation by ensuring greater attention to public issues and greater diversity of views."

Sunstein's worried about the present "situation" in which "like-minded people speak or listen to mostly one another," and thinks "we must doubt whether, as interpreted, the constitutional guarantee of free speech is adequately serving democratic goals."

Sunstein favors a "New Deal for speech" that would draw on an "insistence on the role of free speech in promoting political deliberation and citizenship." Hm... this sounds like a RESOUNDING endorsement of the so-called "fairness doctrine."

More lunatic quotes of Cass Sunstein can be found here.

Majority Leader Harry Reid is considering a cloture vote--against the objective holdings of three U.S. Senators. If you value your First Amendment rights, your Second Amendment rightsand/or pay any taxes, you might want to contact your Senators about this one--Click here to urge your Senator to oppose Stalin's Sunstein's nomination today! Or call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121.