If there's one constant refrain to American politics, it's that liberals are more giving and conservatives are selfish and greedy. It's a theme the Democrats have honed to a fine point and exploited over and over again. We've heard again and again this year that Republicans who seek to preserve the Bush tax cuts are doing so as a payoff to the nameless, faceless "rich"; that Republicans who wanted to stop additional unfunded unemployment benefits from passing merely hated that specific poor single mother from the ghetto; that Republicans who worry about the budget deficit are shills for corporate America who couldn't care less about the future of the country.

More broadly, the Democratic position can be summed up as President Obama did this week during a lucrative fundraising tour for the 2010 general election: Republicans, he said, are "more concerned with the next election than the next generation." It is more than a tad ironic that Obama would say this at a rally in Milwaukee designed to pour cash into Democratic National Committee coffers -- wouldn't the millions presumably raised at that event be better directed at the brutalized poor Obama and his ilk moan about? Or even better, used to pay back the national debt that will cripple the next generation?

No. According to Obama, monetary donations should be funneled into Democratic Party bank accounts.

It's a point Obama hammered home while visiting Los Angeles this week to do a fundraiser at the home of John Wells, the producer of "ER," "Southland" and "The West Wing." At that $30,400 per couple dinner, Obama shamelessly told his patrons: "I hope you understand why we're here tonight. It's not to take a picture with the president. We're here to make sure those who took the tough votes are rewarded." Why not reward those Americans who are out of work and hurting, rather than the legislators who live on cushy salaries and have full medical and dental?

Because those Americans are pawns, that's why. Democrats cite to the poor to tug at the heartstrings of the limousine liberal class, but Democrats rarely encourage those limousine liberals to give their money directly to those in need. When's the last time you heard an active liberal politician tell a rich potential donor to send cash to the Red Cross or the Salvation Army without a major natural disaster to spur that politician along? Has it ever happened?

No, because that would show that the private sector charities can do a better job than the government. It would demonstrate that the poor could be given care by the private sector in an efficient way. In other words, it would put the lie to the Democratic notion that government is always the solution to social inequalities.

There's another reason, too, why Democrats would prefer we send our money to them as opposed to the poor who need it. Democrats, as we can see in virtually every bill, are more concerned with sending taxpayer cash to their political allies than they are in sending cash to those who need it. That's because for every dollar they send to their political allies, they receive a substantial portion back in the form of campaign donations. It's an easy trade: pretend to care about the poor, grab money from the taxpayers to pay off your buddies, let your buddies pay you back, rinse, wash and repeat.

It's no wonder that this week alone, we found out that a new housing program designed to help the unemployed will in fact go to the benefit of the banking system from which Obama received millions, and that heavy-spending unions were poised to receive billions of dollars more from government -- dollars that come from cutting food stamps. If Democrats were advocates for the poor, it would be nice if they would act like it rather than simply using the poor as a convenient political bloody flag.

Liberals say they want money out of politics. Fine. Let's do that by proposing that no politician take public money. All public money will be funneled instead into a charity to benefit the underprivileged. How far could $650 million -- the amount raised by President Obama during the 2008 election cycle -- have gone to alleviate the needs to those in need? How far could the total $5.3 billion spent by candidates during that election cycle have gone?

Until the liberal politicians put their money where their mouth is and actually start promoting programs that help the poor rather than raiding the rich for their own personal benefit, their class warfare should be dismissed out of hand. It's posturing, pure and simple, and it's ugly posturing at that.

Quick quiz: What do we call a system of government in which an unelected cadre of self-professed wise men make decisions for a nation of millions, all the while insulting those millions as ignoramuses?

We used to call it tyranny. Now, apparently, we call it an "independent judiciary."

At least that's the way the left sees it. The role of the judiciary in this country, according to liberals, is to act as a sort of super-Senate, qadis on the hill who decide based on whim and fancy how the rest of us should live. The American people are benighted morons; the judiciary is full of brilliant moral thinkers. They must rule us.

This perspective, of course, would have sickened the Founding Fathers, who established an independent judiciary in order to adjudicate legal disputes, not to rewrite laws at will. In fact, the founders recognized the threat of judicial omnipotence, which is why they wrote the Constitution so as to limit the judiciary: The judiciary cannot control its own purse strings, nor can it even define its own jurisdiction. Under Article III of the Constitution, Congress' power over the judiciary doesn't end with up-or-down judicial nominee votes -- Congress actually has the power to take whole areas of law away from the judiciary completely.

Congress can create inferior courts, which means it can eliminate them, too. As to the jurisdiction of those courts, Congress can define it. Congress can even define the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court: "In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make." In other words, Congress can carve out exceptions and regulations taking full swaths of judicial oversight away from the judiciary.

This is not an accidental inclusion in the Constitution. It was an integral part of the document's construction. The Founding Fathers built the government around the principle that powers would check one another; the supposed exception to that rule has always been the judiciary, which remains unchecked. But it wasn't supposed to remain unchecked -- Congress was supposed to have the power to check the judiciary. Anti-federalist Robert Yates feared that Congress would not be able to do anything about such a usurping judiciary: "There is no power above them, to control any of their decisions. There is no authority that can remove them, and they cannot be controlled by the laws of the legislature. In short, they are independent of the people, of the legislature, and of every power under heaven. Men placed in this situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself."

Alexander Hamilton answered that if judges "should be disposed to exercise WILL instead of JUDGMENT ... [that] would prove that there ought to be no judges distinct from that [legislative] body." In other words, the legislature could trump the judiciary just as easily as the judiciary could issue rulings trumping the legislature.

It's time for the legislature to trump the judiciary. A simple, two-step process would do it. First, Congress need only invoke its power over appellate jurisdiction and remove it for all federal cases involving issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage and immigration -- in fact, Congress has already limited federal judicial jurisdiction in certain immigration cases. When the courts declare such legislation unconstitutional, Congress can simply ignore them or defund the courts accordingly.

This is hardly a radical suggestion. It is well within the constitutional scheme, which foresaw gridlock and friction as a central goal to checking the growth of government.

No doubt liberals will be dismayed. After all, they worship the judiciary that magically creates liberal-agenda "rights" out of whole cloth. Their chief counterargument to the populist constitutional argument will be Brown v. Board of Education, which, they feel, justifies all intrusive judicial intervention into the republican system for all time. Brown v. Board was, of course, a morally correct decision. It was also utterly ineffective; only the Civil Rights Act of 1964 truly desegregated America, as liberal legal scholar Gerald Rosenberg wrote in his seminal work, "The Hollow Hope." And for every Brown v. Board, there is a Plessy v. Ferguson and a Dred Scott.

The true defenders of the Constitution must be the people. The courts pretend to care about the Constitution, but in truth, they care only about their own political preferences. Our elected officials aren't much better -- but at least we elect them. Our only hope for a true republic of limited government and popular sovereignty lies in ourselves. Any delegation of that ultimate constitutional power to an oligarchy of unelected lifetime tenure politicians means that we no longer live under a system that retains the consent of the governed.

Last Tuesday morning, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner "welcomed" us to the recovery. Seriously. "[A] review of recent data on the American economy shows that we are on a path back to growth," he assured us. "The recession that began in late 2007 was extraordinarily severe, but the action we took at its height to stimulate the economy helped arrest the freefall, preventing an even deeper collapse and putting the economy on the road to recovery."

This is what we call whistling through the graveyard. It's Geithner channeling Groucho Marx circa "Duck Soup": "Who're you gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?"

The Obama administration wants us to believe them. What evidence do they provide to the effect that they "saved" the economy? Vagaries heaped upon vagaries; meaningless phrases piled atop meaningless phrases. No hard numbers of any value.

In fact, the Second Great Depression is just beginning. And just as during the First Great Depression, economic liberals are declaring that it doesn't exist. "The depression is over," President Herbert Hoover told a group of clergymen in 1930. "I am convinced," he said in 1931, "we have passed the worst and with continued effort we shall rapidly recover." In 1930, the national unemployment rate -- which was a true unemployment rate, not today's watered down version, which doesn't count people who have totally dropped out of the job market -- was 8.7 percent. In 1931, it was 15.8 percent. Today, our real unemployment rate is somewhere near 20 percent.

Hoover was wrong and so are Obama and his lackeys. And just like Hoover, Obama will take measures that are economically feasible in a strong economy but absolutely disastrous in a weak one.

After declaring the economy on the rebound, Hoover pursued three economic measures: raising tariffs, raising spending and raising taxes. Despite his personal opposition to the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, Hoover signed it into law, stating, "With returning normal conditions, our foreign trade will continue to expand."

He raised government spending as well; between 1929 and 1933, Hoover raised real per capita federal spending by 88 percent. He forced through the construction of the Reconstruction Finance Corp., an agency designed to lend money to banks and building and loan associations, among other businesses. "I have been called a socialist, a Bolshevik, a communist and a lot of other terms of similar nature," fumed Rep. Fiorello La Guardia (R-N.Y.), "but in the wildest flights of my imagination, I never thought of such a thing as putting the government into business as far as this bill would put it in."

Even as he raised spending, Hoover hypocritically called for tamping down the deficit. His solution: raising taxes. "Nothing will contribute more to the return of prosperity than to maintain the sound fiscal position of the federal government," he declared in 1931.

Sound familiar?

President Obama's supposedly rosy view of the economy is designed to justify further intrusion into the economy. And the measures he seeks are eerily reminiscent of Hoover's favored policies. Cap and trade, Obama's environmentalist plan, nearly started a trade war when it was merely introduced in Congress. Like Hoover, Obama opposes a carbon tariff that would level the playing field for American businesses disadvantaged by cap and trade -- and like Hoover, he has made no suggestion that he would veto cap and trade were it to include such a provision.

Obama clearly favors more spending -- in all of his talk about bringing down the deficit, he has never embraced wide-ranging cuts in federal expenditures. Rather, he attempts to blame President Bush for spending that created deficits, despite the fact that in Obama's first two years, he will have raised the national debt more than President Bush did in all eight years of his presidency.

Obama has focused, as Hoover did, on raising taxes. This week, Obama warned Republicans that he would "call them on their bluff" with regard to deficits. By that, he meant that he would push Republicans to raise taxes in order to prove their dedication to a balanced budget.

Obama justifies all of this, as Hoover did, with empty bravado about the strength of the U.S. economy. The difference between Obama and Hoover is that Obama knows that the economy remains weak. Hoover wasn't an ideologue; he was ignorant. Obama has Hoover's example to examine -- and he's willfully imitating it for redistributionist ideological reasons.

We're entering the Second Great Depression. Unlike the first one, our current administration is pushing America knowingly into the pit, all the while singing, "Happy Days Are Here Again."

Last week, Andrew Breitbart's Big Government website released a heavily edited video of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Georgia State Director of Rural Development Shirley Sherrod speaking to the NAACP. That video appeared to show Sherrod talking about how she had, in the past, discriminated against a white farmer seeking help to save his land. The clip ignored Sherrod's further statement that working with the white farmer "made me see that it's really about those who have versus those who don't, you know. And they could be black, and they could be white; they could be Hispanic."

Based on the edited clip, the Obama administration quickly fired Sherrod from her position. When the rest of the tape was released by the NAACP, however, the administration blamed Breitbart and Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack for the screw-up, and then offered her a new job position.

The media's narrative immediately crystallized: right-wing blogger releases out-of-context quotes as a purposeful smear; Shirley Sherrod is a martyred saint; President Obama is not black enough because he fired Sherrod.

There's only one problem with that narrative: It's wrong on every single count.

First, the quote from Sherrod was out of context. But the context the media found was also out of context. The speech makes clear that Sherrod is a Marxist rather than a racist, but that she has racial tendencies nonetheless. In that NAACP speech, Sherrod encouraged black people to find jobs at the USDA because "Have you heard of anybody in the federal government losing their job?" She claimed that white elites created racism out of whole cloth in order to maintain their class status. Then she went even further, characterizing resistance to President Obama's health care overhaul as racist. As Sherrod herself put it, "it is about white and black, but it's not."

Second, Sherrod is no saint. Yes, she suffered an extraordinarily horrific childhood -- her father was murdered by racist whites, she watched a cross being burned on her lawn. But she has spent her life acting as a racial separatist and quasi-shakedown artist.

Shirley has stated that she believes school integration is one of the "worst things that happened to black people," since integration supposedly undermined black self-sufficiency. She has also stated that she believes that "the government is supposed to be a force for keeping blacks on the land, but it hasn't at all."

She has acted on that latter statement in a dramatic way. Along with her racist husband Charles Sherrod ("We must stop the white man and his Uncle Tom from stealing our elections"), Shirley founded New Communities, Inc. in 1969 with money from the Office of Economic Opportunity. New Communities was essentially a commune-style black farm that failed to turn any sort of profit. The USDA didn't give it further loans. So, the Sherrods sued as part of the Pigford v. Glickman class action suit, an enormous lawsuit against the USDA by black farmers. The government settled the case for billions of dollars, awarding New Communities $13 million, including $150,000 each for Charles and Shirley for "pain and suffering." It was the single largest payout in the settlement.

Pigford itself is, at least in large part, a scam. According to Rep. Steve King, who I interviewed on my radio show, the vast majority of payouts under Pigford are fraudulent. In excess of 80,000 "black farmers" have taken advantage of the Pigford settlement, despite the fact that during the period the lawsuit covers, there were only 16,000 black farmers in the entire country.

Only days after Sherrod and her husband were awarded cash by the USDA, Obama asked her to join it. This despite the fact that she believes the USDA should be a lender of first resort for black farmers, particularly "poor" black farmers. Shirley Sherrod's lending philosophy is the racially-motivated subprime mortgage philosophy that has destroyed the U.S. economy.

And Obama wanted her in charge of USDA lending. That puts the lie to the media's hilariously disprovable "Obama is too white" meme, a meme most recently articulated by the ever-idiotic Maureen Dowd, who suggested that Sherrod's firing meant that Obama needed more truly black advisers. The fact that Obama hired Sherrod in the first place demonstrates that Obama isn't "too white." The fact that the Obama administration's new job offer to Sherrod includes oversight of ending the USDA's discriminatory practices with regard to Pigford -- the case from which she just received a bucketload of cash -- shows that Obama is just as racially motivated as all of his mentors and friends, from Frank Marshall Davis to Jeremiah Wright to Van Jones.

Overall, the story of Shirley Sherrod is a story of media malfeasance. They didn't check Breitbart's original story, and they certainly didn't check Sherrod's background. It is the media, not Americans at large, who are the cowards on race.