Looking at the events of the last few years, it’s tragically obvious that the would-be dictators of the elitist faction, who seek to overthrow constitutional government of, by and for the people, have been the victorious on practically every front. The American people are being defeated in the political war against their liberty because so many of them aren’t even aware that it is under way. They remain oblivious thanks especially to the mock combats lavishly staged by the impresarios of the sham two-party system. Ironically, the real world assaults they are made aware of (terrorist attacks and atrocities, for example) are emphasized partly in order to foment a fear-clogged atmosphere perfectly suited to the stratagies of tyranny-minded demagogues.
The list of liberty’s defeats is lengthy. The American people’s sovereignty over their borders has been systematically contemned. Their hard-earned income has been pirated for the benefit of the money masters who, on one side and the other of the partisan sham, fund the elitist faction’s campaign against their constitutional self-government. Elitist faction politicians, judges, bureaucrats, academics and media celebrities have ever more openly attacked and disparaged the God-endowed family, which is the institutional building block of the people’s education, moral character and economic self-sufficiency.
For years I and others like me have tried to get people to understand the serious implications of allowing anyone in government to get away with treating any portion of the U.S. Constitution like waste paper. This was my main reason for participating in efforts to get a verified and serious response to questions about Obama’s eligibility for the presidency.
It’s the reason that for twenty years and more I have stressed the importance of the Tenth Amendment, and refuted the specious 14th Amendment jurisprudence mainly relied upon by those who disregard its unambiguous language. The 14th Amendment was adopted to make sure that a particular group of Americans would not be deprived of the privileges and immunities of U.S. citizenship. It’s patently illogical to pretend that this can rationally be construed as a basis for federal court decisions that deprive all Americans of rights and powers the Tenth Amendment plainly reserves “to the States, respectively or to the people.”
No matter what the lawyers say, such irrational decisions are not a long list of precedents, which the people are bound to respect. They are “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object … to reduce them under absolute Despotism,” which the people are bound to resist until the tyranny those abuses promote has been undone.
The need to safeguard the Constitution’s integrity is also the reason I have consistently emphasized the indispensable, organic import of the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence. From the beginning the Constitution’s authority over the people has mainly depended on the claim that its provisions respect the requirements of just government. It was in the name of justice that the American people resisted British sovereignty, even at the price of war. The Declaration’s principles point to and summarize the understanding of right, unalienable rights, and justly constrained government power from which the authority that informs the U.S. Constitution (the consent of the governed) derives.
The U.S. Constitution’s use of words such as right and freedom cannot be properly understood without reference to the principles of the Declaration. This is particularly true of the language of the Ninth Amendment, which says that “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Apart from the Declaration’s logic of God-endowed rights, this reference to rights antecedent to government is practically devoid of meaning.
At the time of the Founding, the people of the United States embarked upon a voyage to explore the expanse of liberty wherewith God has made us free. The Constitution is the mainstay of their statecraft. The character of the people (including their faith, enterprise and courage) is the engine that provides its motive power. But the understanding expressed in the Declaration’s principles is the stuff that it is made of, the substance and meaning of the words and ideas in which the common sense of the people is expressed, and in terms of which the common standard of their will and judgment guides and informs their deliberations.
Without that common standard, what becomes of the United States? Apart from that common standard, what becomes of the identity of the America people? Indeed, apart from that common standard, what becomes of the community of nature and aspiration that allows us to see our identity as a people in terms that recognize and embrace our identity as human beings? It was their willingness to act on the conscience and consciousness of shared humanity that, in past generations, led the best of us to call the best we have within us into the service of a vision that looks beyond the narrow boundaries of conventional nationality, toward the responsibility to care for the hope and better destiny of all.
The American people must recover that sense of that responsibility which has ever been the glow of the fire of liberty, giving off heat and light beyond the precincts of our narrow selfish interests and aggrandizement. We still share the heart for that responsibility, across the lines of phony partisanship, and the real disputes of purpose and ideology that otherwise divide us. But we seem to have lost the humility that came of acknowledging the source of being, right and truth that lies beyond our will, and even beyond our best imagining. Taken all in all, that is the meaning of the name of God, the willing provender of all Creation — the name that was the focus of our shared good faith, our common trust, our common coin of moral and spiritual advantage.
What was it like when, once upon a time, Americans did not shrink from hearing that “on this earth, God’s work must truly be our own”? Beyond the factious fictions of partisanship and the divisive obsessions of greed and sensual loves, there was a time we knew ourselves to be one nation; we knew that the real goods for which our warriors died were those that could be grasped forever, even beyond the grave. Why is there now no home for that communion of our spirit as a people; no place from whence it still may call from our hearts to the heart of all of humanity? Could it be that in our rush to abandon God’s vocation, we are losing ourselves as well as our true liberty?