Five to One: Let’s Fix Voter Fraud For Good!
The concern over voter fraud and the honesty and integrity of the national voting system has been called into question by every candidate for POTUS this election cycle. The left is screaming that the minority vote will be suppressed because state’s that have exercised their 9th and 10th Amendment rights as defined by the Constitution say that they are violating the 15th Amendment in doing so.
With amount of electronic involvement in voting and the inability of the federal govt. to secure and defend the cyber security of the federal data bases they have, in their infinite wisdom, called for federalization of the voting process to make it more secure. This is the same group that had 22.1 MILLION employees, vendors and applicants to the federal govt. recently stolen by un-identified individuals. Of course the Russians were blamed immediately, then the Chinese. It is disconcerting that in the nation where the computer was invented and the internet was invented (not by Al Gore) and most programming languages were created that it cannot or will not determine who is responsible. So their idea is to centralize the voting to a single national system, which in their minds would be far less vulnerable than 50 singular systems that report their individual voter results. And those 50 are also broken down by county and each county may use one of several voting systems to record the vote. Many use a ballot scanner which reads the paper ballot and then records the vote. I am a fan of this method because it leaves a paper trail with every single cast ballot cast. You have the physical copy of that individuals cast votes to verify the system recorded it properly and if not can then input that vote to correct the tally and ensure each American citizen who did exercise their right to vote was honestly assessed and recorded for the candidate they voted for. As a former asst. clerk and clerk for the past 8 years in my county of residence, I have taken a great deal of pride choosing to be involved in the process at a level that ensured that no one who was entitled to vote was denied that vote and that those who were of questionable legality were handled accordingly by rules governing their cast vote.
But the problem exists, in 2012 not a single vote was cast in the city of Philadelphia for Mitt Romney. That’s 19605 votes cast and all were for Obama. By the way Philly there were 1,099,197 voters registered to vote then and that is the entire turnout that felt it necessary to exercise their civic duty. For the city that gave birth to our Republic a .17% voter turnout is beyond shameful. Maybe it was because the Black Panthers were blocking the polling places again.
Now as a Physicist and engineer I have studied and calculated both long chain and long chain lateral mathematical equations and even using the Markov Chain you cannot mathematically determine that at least 1 vote would not have been cast for Mitt Romney. As Mr. Spock would say it does not compute.
We have a problem Houston and that is our voting system is corrupted and dishonest and the individuals in charge will never correct the problem without reciprocity. The threat of jail does not dissuade these individuals from committing voter fraud. Those individuals are either denied or celebrated.
So how do we fix this now and not throw out the baby with the bath water. It’s really kind of simple: the punishment must have a meaningful effect on the individual and or party that is benefiting from the criminal action since very little if any criminal prosecution occurs when voter fraud is committed.
Punish those that benefit: If any vote is questioned and then determined to be fraudulent the beneficial party or individuals to whom the illegal votes were cast losses 5 votes. When voter fraud occurs the results are never adjusted removing the fraudulent votes until it is either too late or the re-tally would not affect the outcome as has been restated on hundreds if not thousands of times. The re-tallying of votes and their verification occurs anyway and would not duly delay the FINAL RESULTS. And it would now place the responsibility on those that have the most to lose should fraudulent votes be cast. It would require every candidate and both major parties to be more directly involved in vetting voter rolls and removing ineligible voters or suffer from your own criminality. If 20,000 illegal votes were cast then the corresponding punishment would be 100,000 votes lost to every candidate who received them.
I think that might just make a few sphincters pucker hard enough that the nation might hear the sigh of air movement, don’t you!
In Liberty,
Dr. Keith C. Westbrook Ph.D.
Chmn. Conservative Party of Florida
National Party Pres.
The Alien and Sedition Act circa: 2016
The original Alien and Sedition Acts were enacted in 1798 by the Federalist Party majority in Congress and signed by President John Adams. They have been dissected over the 218 years since being passed with the resulting bias: “to the victors belong the spoils”, by the surviving political party’s ideologies. Under a pending war with France and France in the midst of a revolution and French Americans demanding action from the new fledgling nation an attempt was made to prevent war.
This is not a defense of those laws, but in the intervening 2+ millennia (and a more comprehensive and unbiased) a study of the effect of the stigma intentionally attached by the academic interpretation. And more importantly, the modern day void intentionally created and used to destroy America’s sovereignty by a small faction of the citizenry who do not honor or support the Constitution of the United States or any of its founding principles.
To understand this first we must understand their motivation which was provided by the Hegelian movement and the philosophy of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. (Please note the link is the least biased available for information on Hegel)
The following is from an article by Niki Rapaana and Nordici Friedrich published on Crossroad in 2005.
“…the State ‘has the supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State… for the right of the world spirit is above all special privileges.'” Author/historian William Shirer, quoting Georg Hegel in his The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
In 1847 the London Communist League (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels) used Hegel’s theory of the dialectic to back up their economic theory of communism. Now, in the 21st century, Hegelian-Marxist thinking affects our entire social and political structure. The Hegelian dialectic is the framework for guiding our thoughts and actions into conflicts that lead us to a predetermined solution. If we do not understand how the Hegelian dialectic shapes our perceptions of the world, then we do not know how we are helping to implement the vision. When we remain locked into dialectical thinking, we cannot see out of the box.
Hegel’s dialectic is the tool which manipulates us into a frenzied circular pattern of thought and action. Every time we fight for or defend against an ideology we are playing a necessary role in Marx and Engels’ grand design to advance humanity into a dictatorship of the proletariat. The synthetic Hegelian solution to all these conflicts can’t be introduced unless we all take a side that will advance the agenda. The Marxist’s global agenda is moving along at breakneck speed. The only way to completely stop the privacy invasions, expanding domestic police powers, land grabs, insane wars against inanimate objects (and transient verbs), covert actions, and outright assaults on individual liberty, is to step outside the dialectic. This releases us from the limitations of controlled and guided thought.
When we understand what motivated Hegel, we can see his influence on all of our destinies. … Hegelian conflicts steer every political arena on the planet, from the United Nations to the major American political parties, all the way down to local school boards and community councils. Dialogues and consensus-building are primary tools of the dialectic, and terror and intimidation are also acceptable formats for obtaining the goal. The ultimate Third Way agenda is world government. Once we get what’s really going on, we can cut the strings and move our lives in original directions outside the confines of the dialectical madness. Focusing on Hegel’s and Engel’s ultimate agenda, and avoiding getting caught up in their impenetrable theories of social evolution, gives us the opportunity to think and act our way toward freedom, justice, and genuine liberty for all.
Today the dialectic is active in every political issue that encourages taking sides. We can see it in environmentalists instigating conflicts against private property owners, in democrats against republicans, in greens against libertarians, in communists against socialists, in neo-cons against traditional conservatives, in community activists against individuals, in pro-choice versus pro-life, in Christians against Muslims, in isolationists versus interventionists, in peace activists against war hawks. No matter what the issue, the invisible dialectic aims to control both the conflict and the resolution of differences, and leads everyone involved into a new cycle of conflicts.
We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore.
This is the foundation and birth place of our modern day political correctness which suffocates and bastardizes the First Amendment of our Constitution. It is the cornerstone of the progressive socialists who have understood and effectively used Marx’s Communist Manifesto to infiltrate and dominate in our education system, driving it from locally based to a statist centrally controlled and funded system.
A better dissertation can be found here: The Techniques of Communism:
“IN UNDERMINING a nation such as the United States, the infiltration of the educational process is of prime importance. The Communists have accordingly made the invasion of schools and college’s one of the major considerations in their psychological warfare designed to control the American mind. By such “cultural” work, the Soviet fifth column obtains an influence, directly or indirectly, over at least a portion of American youth. Some of the young men entering our armed forces, and some of the young women who must support them, are brought within the orbit of pro-Communist thinking, to the detriment of our national security. Future community leaders are also affected. Many by-products beneficial to the conspiracy arise from this infiltration, since concealed Communists in education or their friends become sponsors of Communist fronts, aid in financing Communist causes, and sometimes play a part in influencing the attitudes of certain scientists, specific church circles, and government agencies.
As early as 1924, in lectures delivered at the Sverdlov University in Moscow, Stalin specified “cultural and educational organizations” as valuable allies in the Communist battle for world dictatorship. These Stalin lectures are now the famous Foundations of Leninism, published and studied widely by the Communists. It was in 1933, however, that extensive infiltration began in the schools and colleges of this country-encouraged by American recognition of Soviet Russia, and stimulated by the Open Letter to the Party. The Trojan horse policy of the People’s Front, which had been initiated at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International in 1935, gave added impetus to this activity. By May, 1937, the conspiracy considered that enough progress had been made in the schools and colleges to justify a special article of directives in that month’s issue of The Communist, then the official theoretical organ of the Party. This article, “The Schools and the People’s Front,” laid it down as a necessity that “Marxist-Leninist analysis must be injected into every class.” In order that this might be accomplished successfully, “the Party must take careful steps to see that all teacher comrades are given thorough education in the teachings of Marxism-Leninism.” It was stressed that “Communist teachers are faced with a tremendous social responsibility.” They must affect the children’s thinking, and they must mobilize other teachers. But all of this was to be done from the work in the classroom to the agitation among other teacher.”
INVADING EDUCATION: CHAPTER X: 208-248 (1954) by Louis F. Budenz
As you can see there can be no competing educational theories or counter-ideological viewpoints presented that would quickly and clearly identify the failings of Communism. Nor that it is contrary to every fundamental founding principle that this Republic has held dearly for 240 years. That the central core to the American Ideal is self-determination. That the individual right to Freedom and Liberty shall not be infringed by the government as long as they do not infringe on another’s.
Communism is mob rule directed from a centralist government controlled by an oligarchy of selected individuals by their “enlightened” peers.
For close to 100 years the secular progressive socialist left have been tearing that apart with lies, misinformation and propaganda directly by indoctrination in our education system, that has now manifested itself throughout society. You cannot turn on any form of broadcast media or traditional print media without seeing this manifested in the fellowship of ideological sameness in the media coverage of almost all their broadcasts and publishing’s. It is well known that there is a media organization called JournoList that was started by Ezra Klein an avowed progressive socialist working for Barack Obama. Their obvious intent was a media propaganda infrastructure to align all political coverage to the benefit of then candidate Obama and the Democrat party. It was supposedly disbanded in 2010 but the evidence in the media speaks otherwise. And as is the case with cockroaches they do not die when you turn on the lights, they just scurry behind the walls out of the direct light.
The lack of integrity and diversity in both the classroom and the press room at the direction of the most radical elements of our society who have gained power by manipulating the system, using this propaganda infrastructure created over the past century does not serve or honor our Constitutional Rights, only their statist means to an ends destruction of those rights.
The intentional propagandizing of information meant not to inform but direct an intellectual thought process is indoctrination not education.
When the Founding Fathers included the press in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights it was with the clearest of intent that the press was to be the voice of the people in mass. Not the complete opposite which is exactly what has been occurring and multiplying over the past decades.
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Thomas Jefferson, letter to Col. Edward Carrington, Jan. 16, 1787
Obviously Thomas Jefferson could never have envisioned that a “free and open press” would transition into the propaganda arm of the most dangerous ideologue’s this Republic would ever face.
In Philadelphia, the Freeman’s Journal published the following opinion, which left no room for compromise:
“As long as the liberty of the press continues unviolated, and the people have the right of expressing and publishing their sentiments upon every public measure, it is next to impossible to enslave a free nation. Men of an aspiring and tyrannical disposition, sensible of this truth, have ever been inimical to the press, and have considered the shackling of it, as the first step towards the accomplishment of their hateful domination, and the entire suppression of all liberty of public discussion, as necessary to its support. For even a standing army, which grand engine of oppression, if it were as numerous as the abilities of any nation could maintain, would not be equal to the purposes of despotism over an enlightened people. An abolition of that grand palladium of freedom, the liberty of the press, in the proposed plan of government, and the conduct of its authors, and patrons, is a striking exemplification of these observations. The reason assigned for the omission of a bill of rights, securing the liberty of the press, and other invaluable personal rights, is an insult on the understanding of the people.”
The secular progressive socialists have bastardized that freedom using the very freedom that protects them to desecrate and destroy individual liberty. They have used the classroom to indoctrinate multiple generations of American youth with lies and distortions. They have continued to spread those lies throughout their supposed news media outlets that serve only themselves and their in-doctrinaires. They have used every dishonest method at their fingertips or lips, to twist the truth with manipulation of the language, to completely manufacturing facts, to justify and support their lies.
They have demonstrated behavior un-American and seditious in act and intent, to the level of treason.
And now because the majority of Americans see through their lies, they push to add to the population illegal aliens who have never been born to or educated in American Exceptionalism or its ideals in advance of their progressive socialist agenda.
“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Abraham Lincoln
It is time to stop playing the fools game America.
We have the tools in our laws if we have the fortitude to use them.
We have the Truth in Advertising Act:
When consumers see or hear an advertisement, whether it’s on the Internet, radio or television, or anywhere else, and federal law says that ad must be truthful, not misleading, and, when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence. The Federal Trade Commission enforces these truth-in-advertising laws, and it applies the same standards no matter where an ad appears – in newspapers and magazines, online, in the mail, or on billboards or buses. The FTC looks especially closely at advertising claims that can affect consumers’ health or their pocketbooks – claims about food, over-the-counter drugs, dietary supplements, alcohol, and tobacco and on conduct related to high-tech products and the Internet. The FTC also monitors and writes reports about ad industry practices regarding the marketing of alcohol and tobacco.
When the FTC finds a case of fraud perpetrated on consumers, the agency files actions in federal district court for immediate and permanent orders to stop scams; prevent fraudsters from perpetrating scams in the future; freeze their assets; and get compensation for victims.
Well let’s carry this law into the classrooms, news rooms and govt. offices of America!
In the classroom:
Any educator at any level who intentionally violates the first Amendment rights of a student to speak of different ideas or theories in any classroom is in violation of their own mandates and is an act of sedition. It is in direct conflict with this Republic’s founding.
A liberal education is a system or course of education suitable for the cultivation of a free (Latin: liber) human being. It is based on the medieval concept of the liberal arts or, more commonly now, the liberalism of the Age of Enlightenment. It has been described as “a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with broad knowledge and transferable skills, and a stronger sense of values, ethics, and civic engagement … characterized by challenging encounters with important issues, and more a way of studying than a specific course or field of study” by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Usually global and pluralistic in scope, it can include a general education curriculum which provides broad exposure to multiple disciplines and learning strategies in addition to in-depth study in at least one academic area.
So based on education own professed doctrine the cloistering of information from only pre-approved ideological viewpoints is in direct opposition to their avowed professional standards and conduct.
They are in essence breaking their own canonical law with the direct intent to indoctrinate and not educate our children for the express intent of creating misanthropic, myopic, Marxist, Muppets which they have been very successful for at least the last 2 if not 3 generations of Americans.
In the news room:
Any supposed journalist that wishes be protected under the First Amendment must first be a journalist not an editorialist. Far too many in the media express opinion, either their own or those given to them, as fact.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan who is credited with using this statement first said it best: “You have your right to your own opinions but not your own facts”.
One story written by one individual but expressed in similar terms by multiple news agencies for the express outcome of directing a singular conclusion is propaganda not journalism.
When you have every supposed television news outlets in America devote a majority of their resources to promoting and propagating information that is not factual at best and a created lie at worst, it is not journalism it is outright deception.
When you have thousands of words written without a scintilla of fact to support their conclusion this is dissemination of a lie and it is fraud.
When you have any journalist in any media format call for illegal acts of behavior because they’re ideological core is in disagreement with what they are reporting on, it is an act of sedition.
When they refuse to report the news that is paramount to the people knowing, for making an informed decision, that is fraud.
When the media colludes with any government entity to create misinformation to further their agenda to the detriment of the people that is fraud.
If a journalist or news media outlet wants to have their First Amendment rights then they must first support that right by honoring its intent. If they wish to hide behind it like cowards and destroy the Constitutional representative form of government that we currently still hang on to by a very thin thread, then they damn well better serve it and the people or lose it completely.
We can no longer continue to give these treasonous actors the benefit of the first Amendment if they will not honor or protect it.
In the Govt. Offices/Aliens:
The secular progressive socialists in government believe we have stolen this country from everyone, blaming mostly the English settlers when in fact they conveniently leave out a major portion of every country that was here from 1492 and earlier. And that we should be punished no matter when our ancestors arrived as mine did in the early part of the 20th. Century. My ancestors came here not to be Irish Americans but Americans! They came here to have their children and future generations prosper under the God given blessings of being an American and all that entailed.
The secular progressive socialists in government have destroyed that with the language of division. By forcing everyone here by govt. regulations into a sub-group based on racial history, we are no longer of, by and for the people but many groups divided. By eliminating the common shared experience of one language, one heritage and one dream they have made it easy for these groups to be manipulated towards their desired results. The results are, their entrenched power proliferates and control of the population is maintained.
Every govt. administrative office has a dept. head that takes an oath of office.
Every employee does the same.
If you intentionally violate your oath of office or take that oath of office with forethought or malice to violate any Constitutional right of any American you are guilty of sedition.
The Penalty:
If found guilty of sedition or treason for violating the law that you be honest and forthright when given a position of importance in either the classroom, newsroom or government office, we will make this very accommodating for you the secular progressive socialist.
GET THE HELL OUT!
If found guilty by a trial of your peers or by a judge that is not of your secular progressive socialist persuasion you will be given 30 days to get your affairs in order.
You will be electronically monitored or physically supervised during this period so as not to disappear within our borders. Far too many in positions that they should never have attained have profited by our lack of resolve for criminal behavior. (Bill Ayers/Bernadine Dorn/Weather Underground member’s et.al.)
You will be allowed to leave to any country other than those that are on our direct borders.(Canada and Mexico for the liberals reading this)
You will be allowed to take with you the funds that you have earned honestly after a thorough vetting of your personal wealth and its means of creation.
You will not be harassed or vilified by the government as long as you reciprocate in kind, you have been found guilty of either sedition or treason and any further acts in kind will violate your probationary arrangement and voluntary expatriation of your United States citizenship.
This will be immediately enforced by a 10 year minimum sentence with no opportunity for parole in a federal penitentiary followed by your immediate exile to whatever country you can be sent to that will accept you. If you cannot be removed because no other country will take you, you will be remanded back to prison for life.
This is what your actions have wrought and I know would be supported by 120 million adult Americans who have come to recognize you as the threat you are to the future of this Constitutional Republic and their liberty and freedoms.
You are a cancer and the only way to destroy cancer is to remove it or kill it. I prefer the former to the latter if effective.
Dr. Keith C. Westbrook Ph.D.
The Rule of Law- NOT the Rule of Man/Men.
Constitutional Conservatism. –
The Regulators Anti-Socialism Vigilance Committee
Is an Opinion of the Supreme Court the ‘Law of the Land’? Let’s ask Thomas Jefferson
Did our founders, after drafting a Declaration of Independence, fighting a war with England, and then sitting down to pen a national governing document (the Constitution) put in that document the right of a majority of federal judges to make laws for the entire nation?
Read more at http://godfatherpolitics.com/24785/is-an-opinion-of-the-supreme-court-the-law-of-the-land-lets-ask-thomas-jefferson/#Kd6rMfFXOVsVpzhs.99
So Long as We the People Control the Gun, We the People Will Control Our Government By Jonathan Henderson, on June 2nd, 2015
By Jonathan Henderson, on June 2nd, 2015
So Long as We the People Control the Gun, We the People Will Control Our Government
Ah, gun control ― one of the great debates of our time — the debate of course regarding the age-old questions with answers long-since provided. The spirit of the Second Amendment is not only unambiguous, but void of semantical validity. Such inquiries include: Should guns be legal to own? Does the ownership of guns serve as a deterrent to tyranny? By owning guns, does this make Americans safer from violent crime? Finally, is the Second Amendment obsolete or quite to the contrary?
As a good conservative, need I waste precious syllables on my answers to questions bothering the Left so?
With the exception of the Brady Crime Bill President Bill Clinton rammed through Congress in 1994 the status of the Second Amendment has remained mostly unscathed. In December 2012 however, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting allegedly transpired, prompting many liberals to take action to curtail liberties for all Americans by calling for expanded background checks, a national firearms registry and a ban on a class of semi-automatic rifles. Of course we conservatives, led by the National Rifle Association (NRA), stood our ground. And though Republicans in the Senate voted to block passage of post-Sandy Hook gun control legislation, the attempt by Democrats to engage in this was the first of many future measures to undermine the American Dream. As Saul Alinsky imparted upon ACORN disciples like Barack Obama, never let a good crisis real or manufactured go to waste. So desperate is Obama to exploit a false positive, he illegally signed the United Nations (UN) Arms Treaty on December 24, 2014. Aside his innate corruption as any anticolonialist bigot from Africa living on the South Side of Chicago while we watch angst-ridden news of disturbing trends as part of Operation: Jade Helm 15, he at least admits his grotesque incompetence by attempting to hand over We the People’s sovereignty to the UN.
Democrats frequently assault the Constitution by crafting legislation in such fashions that there appears a system of laws for them as elitists and one for their intended serfs strongly resembling British Common Law. The British government has no true hard-copy constitution, but rather a list of laws built upon many others on the merits of their tradition. Democrats would love nothing more than to invoke hard common law. They could then pass legislation with total impunity. There would be no systems of checks and balances such are present in the Constitution. The purpose for the Founding Fathers in creating the Constitution was simple: to limit government overbearance through federal republicanism. The Constitution’s system of checks and balances balance delicately between three branches of government, accompanied crucially by a list of ten guaranteed rights intended never to be violated by the likes of them.
Our forefathers accepted the Constitution as its social contract binding our elected employees to govern judiciously; Americans were also far more independent during the first century of the republic than today. An article by Bill Fortenberry of The Federalist Papers describes the phenomena behind the great change in the American people’s expectations of government’s role. Americans in the early republic were keenly aware of civic responsibilities and therefore performed these duties without question as to their importance. They knew government constrained by the contents of the Constitution provide the greatest chance of the preservation of their liberties. The Bill of Rights guarantee liberty for all from government tyranny.
America was founded upon the principles of God, gold, and glory. The first permanent settlement in British America was in 1607 at Jamestown, Virginia for the purpose of cultivating tobacco. Thirteen years later, Plymouth, Massachusetts was established by English separatists for the purpose of religious liberty, and for over 400 years, Americans have lived by this creed. The one binding characteristic of these settlements is what made it possible for their establishment: the presence of firearms to provide the greatest deterrent against tyranny.
In the New World during the 17th Century, owning firearms was a necessity. There were no previously-built cities, towns or villages awaiting new settlers. The first societies in British America relied on their abilities to hunt and cultivate land. Settlers had to defend the colony against Indian raids. The foundation of America occurred due largely to religious persecution, seeking to settle in a new land in which to achieve economic success for the individual. And all this was possible because men bore their rifles and muskets (guns) to hunt and protect their families and property.
The Spirit of ‘76 has waned slowly ever since. Americans now identify more with the principles of the French Revolution than its inspiration, ours, the first of its kind in human history. Let us never forget either that brave patriots fought to secure our blessings of liberty inscribed in our Constitution and Bill of Rights include the Second Amendment right to bear arms, which the Founders considered a natural right of man.
Now, we have never armed bears just so you know, but chimpanzees were just granted the same privilege of habeas corpus as human beings by the New York Supreme Court.
John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson explaining his opinion of what were the key differences in philosophy between the two key pivotal events in the history of Western civilization.
“No man is more sensitive than I am of the service to science and letters, humanity, fraternity, and liberty, that would have been rendered by the encyclopedists and economists, by Voltaire, D’Alembert, Buffon, Diderot, Rousseau, La Lande, Frederic and Catherine, if they had possessed common sense… And what was their philosophy? Atheism, — pure, unadulterated atheism. Diderot, D’Alembert, Frederic, La Lande, and Grimm, were indubitable atheists. The universe was master only, and eternal. Spirit was a word without meaning. Liberty was a word without meaning. There was no liberty in the universe; liberty was a word void of sense. Every thought, word, passion, sentiment, feeling, all motion and action was necessary. All beings and attributes were of eternal necessity; conscience, fate, were all nothing but fate. This was their creed, and this was to perfect human nature, and convert the earth into a paradise of pleasure.”
In the same letter, Adams explained why French revolutionaries failed to establish their will of an atheist society when he said, “…they had not considered the force of early education on the minds of millions, who had never heard of their society.” He also said “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence, were… the general principles of Christianity and the general principles of English and American liberty.”
Shortly after the American Revolution, James Wilson, a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, taught his law students this important fundamental principle.
That law, which God has made for man in his present state; that law, which is communicated to us by reason and conscience, the divine monitors within us, and by the sacred oracles, the divine monitors without us. This law has gone through several subdivisions, and has been known by distinct appellations, according to the different way in which it has been promulgated, and the different objects which it respects. As promulgated by reason and the moral sense, it has been called natural; as promulgated by the holy scriptures it has been called revealed law… That our Creator has a supreme right to prescribe a law for our conduct, and we are under the most perfect obligation to obey that law, are truths established on the clearest and most solid principles… Human law must rest its authority, ultimately, upon the authority of that law, which is divine.
Two members of the fraternity of America’s Founders confirmed their non-revisionist truth: the key plank of our great republic’s foundation is manifest destiny, our inalienable right to life and property begetting our happiness. Thus the majority of Americans identify with the element of the French Revolution that deflowered the old society of its duty to live responsibly. Faith in God requires constant attention to detail and much practice, as the platform upon which God’s authority begets to all liberty and the rights of man is in fact, “the laws of nature and Nature’s God”. Americans see in their mirrors Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract,1762), not Jefferson nor De Tocqueville.
In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence. In this lies the key to the working of the political machine; this alone legitimises civil undertakings, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to the most frightful abuses.
All the sacrifices of America’s patriots, minutemen and every soldier have since been forgotten. Few grasp the very essences over which those audacious British colonials fought the bloody American Revolution and won. Today, atheism drives a collectivized ethos as opposed to the two qualities about which Fortenberry discussed. This culture was fostered meticulously over the past 50 years by those who learned the French revolutionaries failed to account how the French people ― peasants, sans culottes, or the figures making up the First, Second, and Third Estates ― were devout Catholics. The American Atheists promise contemporary Americans a society free of God and all moral restrictions in rejecting responsibilities to neighbors and our families Christianity teaches are our sacred duties. It is no coincidence these platforms promoted by the American Atheists are supported by Democrats who control the bulk of the media and, therefore, the cultural dynamics of America favoring rape, human trafficking, pedophilia, eugenics, organized crime, gang warfare and slavery in perpetuating the continuity of Jim Crow-era statutes.
The American Atheists tainted the fundamental directives of the Constitution ― the free exercise of one’s religion ― in launching its design for a total revocation of the right to choice to suit their own devious agenda. This is typical for all left-wing lunatic fringes to bastardize liberty by separating justice from the law, always applying the art of semantics in achieving what is antithetical to their original intent. Atheists like Madalyn Murray O’Hair killed the right for subsequent public school children to choose to pray as the inches granted have expanded beyond the U.S. Supreme Court rulings in Engel v. Vitale and Abingdon School District v. Schempp. Throughout the past two generations, they successfully forced federal courts to remove Judeo-Christian likenesses due to the fallacy it violates the Establishment Clause. As socialists never acknowledge the existence of morality, they instead wage war on the American Dream by bastardizing our heritage while denying their past, only to argue for the sake of agreement. We must therefore preserve the Second Amendment because for true Americans, our God grants our liberty and the rights to life and the happiness of a property-owning democracy, not Washington or the UN. Our power is wielded by the barrels of our guns; government is slowly taking it away. They are our government, our employees, and we are the scales of justice balancing our Constitution’s checks when our government violates the rule of law we voted for them to create and enforce.
After this past Tuesday what additional proof does a Conservative need?
What more is it going to take to realize that you are not being represented you are being ruled. Even when we send real representation to the District of Corruption it is rebuked, reviled and castigated by lies from both parties out of fear. They have repeatedly demonstrated that they will do anything and everything to remain in power. They have demonstrated this again this week in Mississippi. They’re abject fear of losing power and money from the corrupt system of legislation and regulation that is used pro-actively to extort billions of our $$$ from you and I through their cronies in the seats of power on wall street and k street, is killing main street and we continue to invest our time and monies keeping them in power.
In 1854 the Democrat/Republican party split into 2 parties and by 1860 the Republicans won control of the federal govt. including POTUS. And this was done with mail being delivered by stream trains and on horseback and newspapers as the primary method of communication. It is time to end they’re 2 party political reign of terror. Help us change the course of history, it is not too late, but the clock is ticking and we are in sudden death overtime.
http://home.conservativepartyusa.org/
And the argument that voting for a 3rd. party will automatically give the election to the demo-commies………….after this past Tuesday, what demonstrable difference is there between the 2 parties that it is worth this Nations immediate future. 52% of Americans in a recent poll self-identified as Conservative not Dem., not Rep., and over 50% have registered as Independent because neither party represents their values or even respects them. We are the majority and yet a select few in the seats of power in govt., education and the media have created the greatest illusion in the history of mankind that 168 million Americans do not exist.
Ready to exist again, ready to be in charge of yours and my future, are you ready to take back what is yours as defined by the following:
” We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these Rights are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”. “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”! Thomas Jefferson
That is our birth right, that is our call to arms to end the tyranny of our time and every time we face the oppression of a ruling class system created by a small group of self proclaimed elites!
There is not a single govt. position from the local dog catcher to the Presidency that we could not hold if we would rally ourselves to one banner and a single cause……restoring this Republic to its preordained destiny. Our forefathers saw the potential in the future of the United States of America. When are we going to see it, or better yet, when are we going to fight for it?
http://home.conservativepartyusa.org/
Come Home America!
Dr. Keith C. Westbrook Ph.D Chairman / Conservative Party of Florida
The Real Dysfunction: A $17 Trillion National Debt
A Guest Blog By David Boaz
Gentlemen may cry default, default, but there will be no default. (With apologies to Patrick Henry.)
Once again the media are full of talk about dysfunction and default, as the partial government shutdown threatens to linger until the federal government hits the limit of its borrowing capacity, possibly on Oct. 17. The parties in Congress are still far apart on passing a budget bill to keep the government running, and Republicans are also promising not to raise the debt ceiling without some spending reforms.
If in fact Congress doesn’t raise the ceiling by mid-October—or by November 1 or so, when the real crunch might come—then the federal government would be forbidden to borrow any more money beyond the legal limit of $16.699 trillion. But it would still have enough money to pay its creditors as bonds come due. The government will take in something like $225 billion in October, but it wants to spend about $108 billion more than that. You see the problem. If it can’t borrow that $108 billion—to cover its bills for one month—then it will have to delay some checks.
Now the U.S. Treasury isn’t full of stupid people. Back in 2011, when the debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion was about to be reached, the Washington Post reported:
The Treasury has already decided to save enough cash to cover $29 billion in interest to bondholders, a bill that comes due Aug. 15, according to people familiar with the matter.
You can bet they’re making similar plans today.
Back in that summer of discontent I talked to a journalist who was very concerned about the “dysfunction” in Washington. So am I. But I told her then what’s still true today: that the real problem is not the dysfunctional process that’s getting all the headlines, but the dysfunctional substance of governance. Congress and the president will work out the debt ceiling issue, if not by October 17 then a few days later. The real dysfunction is a federal budget that doubled in 10 years, unprecedented deficits as far as the eye can see, and a national debt bursting through its statutory limit of $16.699 trillion and heading toward100 percent of GDP.
We’ve become so used to these unfathomable levels of deficits and debt—and to the once-rare concept of trillions of dollars—that we forget how new all this debt is. In 1981, after 190 years of federal spending, the national debt was “only” $1 trillion. Now, just 33 years later, it’s headed past $17 trillion. Traditionally, the national debt as a percentage of GDP rose during major wars and the Great Depression. But there’s been no major war or depression in the past 33 years; we’ve just run up $16 trillion more in spending than the country was willing to pay for. That’s why our debt as a percentage of GDP is now higher than at any point except World War II. Here’s a graphic representation of the real dysfunction in Washington:
Those are the kind of numbers that caused the Tea Party movement and the Republican victories of 2010. And many Tea Partiers continue to remind their representatives that they were sent to Washington to fix this problem. That’s why there’s a real argument over raising the debt ceiling. It’s going to get raised, but many of the younger Republicans are determined to set a new course for federal spending in the same bill that authorizes another yet more profligate borrowing.
And where did all this debt come from? As the Tea Partiers know, it came from the rapid increase in federal spending over the past decade:
Annual federal spending rose by a trillion dollars when Republicans controlled the government from 2001 to 2007. It rose another trillion during the Bush-Obama response to the financial crisis. So spending every year is now twice what it was when Bill Clinton left office a dozen years ago, and the national debt is almost three times as high.
Republicans and Democrats alike should be able to find wasteful, extravagant, and unnecessary programs to cut back or eliminate. And yet many voters, especially Tea Partiers, know that both parties have been responsible for the increased spending. Most Republicans, including today’s House leaders, voted for the No Child Left Behind Act, the Iraq war, the prescription drug entitlement, and the TARP bailout during the Bush years. That’s why fiscal conservatives have become very skeptical of bills that promise to cut spending some day—not this year, not next year, but swear to God some time in the next ten years. As the White Queen said to Alice, “Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.” Cuts tomorrow and cuts in the out-years—but never cuts today.
If the “dysfunctional” fight that has sent the establishment into hysterics finally results in some constraint on out-of-control spending, then it will have been well worth all the hand-wringing headlines. The problem is not a temporary mess on Capitol Hill and not a mythical default, it’s spending, deficits, and debt.
David Boaz is the executive vice president of the Cato Institute and has played a key role in the development of the Cato Institute and the libertarian movement.
The Third American Revolution has begun.
A Guest Blog by Jeffery Lord
The Third American Revolution has begun.
Mark Levin’s The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic is the revolutionary blueprint millions of Americans have been waiting for. Released today, Levin leads the charge for “restoring constitutional republicanism and preserving the civil society from the growing authoritarianism of a federal Leviathan.”
Carefully and powerfully written, the book uses the Constitution itself to illustrate how to reform the Constitution itself. To finally turn the tables on progressives and liberals — Statists, to use the term Levin has brought back to life — who have spent the last century slowly and not so slowly transforming America into the aforementioned “federal Leviathan.”
Levin knows his subject. The nationally syndicated talk-radio host is also the lawyer heading the Landmark Legal Foundation, and, among his string of credentials a former chief of staff to Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese III. Levin also has three earlier best sellers that have set the stage for The Liberty Amendments: Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America, in which Levin examined the role of judicial activism and the subversion of democracy in favor of the liberal agenda (hint: think slavery, segregation, abortion, the importation of laws from other countries, the role of a Klan member in erecting the so-called “separation of church and state). Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto in which Levin detailed the “modern liberal assault on Constitution-based values…that has steadily snowballed” since FDR’s New Deal. And Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America. In which Levin reveals the role of the liberal ideal of utopia, the never-never land of human perfection that is always possible with just one more use… just one more… always just one more use… of power. A power that in harsh reality becomes a weapon “to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature…a tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal governing ideology.”
Liberty and Tyranny, written before the dawn of the Obama presidency but published just as the Tea Party burst onto the scene, in fact became what Congresswoman Michele Bachmann lauded as the “intellectual foundation” of the movement. As noted in this space at the time, the response to L&T was so overwhelming (as captured in this remarkable video of a Levin book signing in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia) it was waved in the air at Tea Party rallies, with former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin photographed holding a copy as she waited to speak.
The problem thus understood and discussed in detail in Levin’s earlier books — not to mention experienced in daily life by millions of Americans — the question is clear: What to do?
Levin’s answer is now at hand in The Liberty Amendments, the bookend to Men in Black, Liberty and Tyranny and Ameritopia.
Levin’s research into the Constitution, the debates of the 1787 Constitutional Convention as well as those of the state ratification conventions are beyond thorough. As is his sharp eye for the extensive writings of Founders famous — James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Mason — and lesser known: Virginia’s Edmund Randolph, Pennsylvania’s Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson along with Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts and others. Levin has plunged into the contemporaneous thoughts and writings of all the Founders to document precisely what reasoning lay behind the creation of the nation’s founding document.
Writes Levin in his opening chapter of the nation’s current state of affairs:
Social engineering and central planning are imposed without end, since the governing masterminds, drunk with their own conceit and pomposity, have wild imaginations and infinite ideas for reshaping society and molding man’s nature in search of the ever elusive utopian paradise.
How in the world did America ever get to this place?
How did a country so carefully crafted as a constitutional republic by thoughtful men who had experienced tyranny up close and personal ever get to the point where the federal administrative state runs wild, Supreme Court justices, the president and the Congress disdain the Constitution they are all sworn to uphold and the nation, in Levin’s words, “is teetering on financial ruin due to the unconscionable profligate spending, borrowing, taxing and money printing by the federal government”? How does America wake up every day to find its government exercising unlimited power over the private economic behavior of every American? How is it possible that a federal government designed to operate from a defined “enumeration of grants of specific power” is now:
…the nation’s largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor….with aggrandized police powers…(that) for example…regulates most things in your bathroom, laundry room, and kitchen, as well as the mortgage you hold on your house. It designs your automobile and dictates the kind of fuel it uses. It regulates your baby’s toys, crib, and stroller; plans your children’s school curriculum and lunch menu; and administers their student loans in college. At your place of employment the federal government oversees everything from the racial, gender, and age diversity of the workforce to the hours, wages, and benefits paid.”
And that’s before it regulates your light bulbs and toilets.
In effect, over a century after the original American Revolution of 1776, followed by the writing and adoption of the Constitution after exhaustive debate in both Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention and in the various states that then had to vote up or down on ratification — a Second American Revolution took place.
A revolution that wasn’t termed as such, that was for the most part non-violent and in fact presented itself as just ordinary-politics-of-the-day. A “reform” that would, Americans of the day were assured, modernize the nation. This Second American Revolution — the Progressive Movement — burst onto the American scene in the 1880s. Progressives directly opposed the underlying principles of America. Where the Founders believed man was an individual — as Levin says a “unique, spiritual being with a soul and a conscience ….free to discover his own potential and pursue his own legitimate interests, tempered… by a moral order that has its foundation in faith….” the Progressives believed something else altogether.
Progressives believed man was not born free, that freedom was not a gift from God but a gift dispensed from the hand of the state. Freedom was redefined as the quest for utopia — or as Levin has termed it, Ameritopia. And in the endless quest for that utopia the social re-engineering of America, the Second American Revolution — the effective nullification of the Constitution — began.
Scornful of the Founders’ belief in limited government, out poured constitutional amendments that restructured the original design of the American government. Next up was the construction of an administrative state, and Levin quotes Alexis de Tocqueville — who was eerily prescient about what was to come in America long after his death in 1859. America, said the famous French philosopher, could be at risk of being consumed by a system that
…covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
Alas, this is exactly the effect of the Statist or Progressive movement, taking a century to lead the nation into what Levin calls a “post-constitutional soft tyranny” through an endless series of “inventions and schemes hatched and promoted openly by their philosophers, experts, and academics, and the coercive application of their designs on the citizenry by a delusional elite.”
It is remarkable how many commentators, without knowing of Levin’s coming book, have expressed some version of the same sentiments that both Levin today and Tocqueville long ago have expressed. A look back through the last few months and one finds the following headlines:
“Let’s Get Skeptical: America Is In Need Of A James Madison Moment” (Austin Hill in Townhall); “Government Gone Wild” (Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal); “The Rise of the Fourth Branch of Government” (George Washington University Professor Jonathan Turley in teh Washington Post); “Why There’s a Deficit Trust” (Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post); “Losing America” (U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow in National Review Online); “Our Masters, the Bureaucrats” (Jay Cost in the Weekly Standard); “Slipping the Constitutional Leash” (George Will in The Washington Post); “The Great Disconnect” (Ross Douthat in the New York Times); “Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Contempt” (Rich Lowry in National Review Online); “Is America in a Pre-Revolutionary State this July 4th?” (Roger L. Simon at PJ Media); “Celebrating Liberty As It Slips Away” (Michael A. Walsh in the New York Post); “From the Constitution to Pandora’s Box” (Mario Loyola in National Review Online); “How Free Are We on This July Fourth?” (Editorial Board of the Las Vegas Review-Journal); “Obama Suspends the Law” (Former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Michael McConnell in the Wall Street Journal); “Big Government Implodes” (Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal); “ The Perils of Dispensing With the Law” (Michael Barone in theNew York Post); “Our Broken Checks and Balances” (Henry I. Miller in National Review Online).
And that doesn’t even take into account the emergence of the Tea Party, the grassroots surge of interest in the Constitution and the writings of the Founders.
What Levin is proposing in his usual well-researched thorough fashion is, as the subtitle of his book suggests, a Constitutional path to restore the American Republic. He is nothing if not specific — and most assuredly this book and its contents will infuriate the American Left. One is willing to bet there may even be some “conservatives” out there who, already balking at defunding ObamaCare, will balk as well at the idea of putting a full stop to the pernicious doctrine that Progressivism has shown itself to be. Who cares about the Constitution when you have the New Deal?
So let’s get to this.
Writes Levin:
…I propose that we, the people, take a closer look at the Constitution for our preservation. The Constitution itself provides the means for restoring self-government and averting societal catastrophe (or, in the case of societal collapse, resurrecting the civil society) in Article V.
And there it is. The Constitutional way-out of the Statist nightmare — or, as Levin calls it the “Achilles’ heel” of Statism. Article V of the United States Constitution. Levin reprints the relevant portion of Article V with his italics for emphasis:
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress….
Levin notes a very important point. Article V does not provide for a constitutional convention. It provides for a process of proposing amendments. Article V:
…provides for two methods of amending the Constitution. The first method, where two-thirds of Congress passes a proposed amendment and then forwards it to the state legislatures for possible ratification by three-fourths of the states, has occurred on twenty-seven occasions. The second method, involving the direct application of two-thirds of the state legislatures for a Convention proposing Amendments, which would thereafter also require a three-fourths ratification vote by the states, has been tried in the past but without success. Today it sits dormant.
Which is to say, a new Constitutional Convention and the subsequent ratification process would begin the long overdue process of shifting power out of the hands of the federal Leviathan — balance — and handing it back to the states. The states that created the federal government — a much different federal government — in the first place.
Admits the author:
I was originally skeptical of amending the Constitution by the state convention process. I fretted it could turn into a runaway caucus. As an ardent defender of the Constitution who reveres the brilliance of the Framers, I assumed this would play disastrously into the hands of the Statists. However, today I am a confident and enthusiastic advocate for the process. The text of Article V makes clear that there is a serious check in place. Whether the product of Congress or a convention, a proposed amendment has no effect at all unless “ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States or by Conventions in three fourths thereof…” This should extinguish anxiety that the state convention process should hijack the Constitution.
Thus Levin in The Liberty Amendments lays out in clear, concise language eleven proposed amendments to the Constitution. They are:
An Amendment to Establish Term Limits for Members of Congress
An Amendment to Restore the Senate
An Amendment to Establish Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices and Super-Majority Legislative Override
Two Amendments to Limit Federal Spending and Taxing
An Amendment to Limit the Federal Bureaucracy
An Amendment to Promote Free Enterprise
An Amendment to Protect Private Property
An Amendment to Grant the States the Authority to Directly Amend the Constitution
An Amendment to Grant the States the Authority to Check Congress
An Amendment to Protect the Vote
We’ll focus here on our favorites — actually they are all favorites. But some deserve a particular focus.
An Amendment to Restore the Senate
SECTION 1: The Seventeenth Amendment is hereby repealed. All Senators shall be chosen by their state legislatures as prescribed by Article 1.
This amendment may well be, as Levin notes, considered to be “the most controversial and politically difficult to institute.” A rare Levin understatement. But repealing the 17th Amendment, which provides for the popular election of U.S. Senators, would decidedly begin to right the balance in the American governmental ship of state.
The 17th Amendment was sold to Americans by Progressives as, in Levin’s words, “a cleansing and transforming expansion of popular democracy” when in fact it has turned out to be “an object lesson in the malignancy of the Progressive mind-set and its destructive impact on the way we practice self-government in a twenty-first century, post-constitutional nation.”
The United States Senate, as its name indicates, was designed to represent — the states. For 124 years it did so, producing along the way some of the nation’s greatest legislators including Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, Kentucky’s Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. But as Levin points out, the idea in the early 1900’s was that since electing members of the House of Representatives by direct popular vote was working as designed — why not do this with senators?
The obvious answer brushed aside in the day was that the Framers had a reason for making the lower House chosen by popular vote and the Senate by state legislatures. The reason? They wanted both individuals and state governments to have “direct input in the national government” — the states that had, of course, created the federal government in the first place. To prevent, in the words of George Mason, the possibility that “the national Legislature will swallow up the Legislatures of the States.” The Founders wanted a direct flow of power from the institutions of state government into the process of making federal law.
The 17th Amendment decidedly undid this bedrock principle — and all too predictably the federal government did in fact “fill whatever areas of governance and even society it chooses.” Translation?
In point of fact, United States Senators today are not representative of the interests of their state governments — which are elected directly by the people. Instead they are beholden to, as Levin accurately notes, “Washington lobbyists, campaign funders, national political consultants, and other national advocacy organizations.” Or in other words: goodbye Boston, Albany, Harrisburg, Springfield, Lincoln, Little Rock, Atlanta, Austin, Sacramento, Carson City, Juneau and Jackson — hello K Street. And who, exactly, elected K Street lobbysists? No one, of course.
The fact of the matter is that the responsibility of the states in the national government as envisioned by the Founders has been stripped away, taking power once reserved specifically for states and turning it over to, as Levin notes, Washington’s “governing masterminds and their disciples.” Indeed, there is considerable irony in the furious anger from President Obama and liberals over the recent defeat of gun control legislation by the U.S. Senate. Who did they blame for the defeat? That’s right — the NRA. Not an elected state government. They blamed a lobby.
The repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment effectively created K Street and the modern “lobbyist/consultant industrial complex” America has come to know and hate today. To repeal the Seventeenth Amendment would effectively become an attack on that thoroughly “bipartisan” and distinctly well-heeled complex. Most assuredly, as Levin indicates, launching a battle royal between Washington elites and the rest of America.
An Amendment to Establish Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices and Super-Majority Legislative Override
SECTION 1: No person may serve as Chief Justice or Associate Justice of the Supreme Court for more than a combined total of twelve years.
[…]
SECTION 4: Upon three-fifths vote of the House of Representatives and the Senate, Congress may override a majority opinion rendered by the Supreme Court.
SECTION 5: The Congressional override under Section 4 is not subject to a Presidential veto and shall not be the subject of litigation or review in any Federal or State court.
SECTION 6: Upon three-fifths vote of the several state legislatures, the States may override a majority opinion rendered by the Supreme Court.
There’s more in this amendment, but these sections listed above — designed to rein in what many perceive as an out-of-control federal judiciary will alone doubtless cause an uproar only marginally less vivid than the battle to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment.
Levin notes the concerns various Founders and others had with the idea of the federal judiciary (to use a modern phrase) “going rogue.” He cites the prescient writings of New York Judge Robert Yates, an articulate opponent of the Constitution. As supporters of the Constitution rallied around The Federalist Papers, Yates and others writing under pen names authored The Anti-Federalist Papers. In Anti-Federalist 11 Yates warned:
The real effect of this system of government, will therefore be brought home to the feelings of the people, through the medium of the judicial power…..They are to be rendered totally independent, both of the people and the legislature…No errors they may commit can be corrected by any power above them…nor can they be removed from office for making ever so many erroneous adjudications…
And so it has turned out. Yates died in 1801, two years before Chief Justice John Marshall famously wrote in 1803’s Marbury v. Madison:
The judicial power of the United States is extended to all cases arising under the constitution.
Levin notes importantly that Abraham Lincoln took the occasion of his first inaugural address in 1861 to speak out in favor of limits to judicial power. Lincoln went on at length that he did not “forget the position assumed by some that national questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court….” But as a staunch opponent of the Court’s fateful 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford — in which Democrats led by Andrew Jackson appointee and slave-owner Chief Justice Roger Taney attempted to write slavery into the Constitution — Lincoln believed the Court had arranged affairs so that “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”
Contrast this with that exemplar of the Progressive movement and a liberal hero to this day — the Democrats’ Woodrow Wilson. Wilson the Progressive — and staunch segregationist — “endorsed flat-out judicial tyranny” says Levin. Wilson believed “the federal judiciary was to behave as a perpetual constitutional convention,” rewriting the Constitution at will and “nearly always promoting the centralization and concentration of power in the federal government.” Indeed, things are now so far off track with the federal judiciary that the liberal Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has urged the Court to “look beyond one’s shores” to international law when writing and justifying Court rulings. The Constitution? What’s that?
Levin writes that by “claiming authority not specifically granted by the Constitution, abuses of power would certainly follow, as they have.”
The notion that, for example, Roe v. Wade might have been overturned by three-fifths of the state legislatures had Levin’s amendment been in place in January of 1973 will doubtless cause a frenzy on the left. On the other hand, there is no doubt the Left would love for this particular Liberty Amendment to be in place right now — so they could try and repeal Citizens United.
Giving the Congress and the States veto power over Supreme Court decisions will surely roil the waters political.
We won’t run through all the other amendments in detail here. It’s safe to say that each in their own fashion will arouse considerable controversy.
Limiting taxation to 15% of income? Abolishing the death tax and prohibiting a value-added (VAT) tax? A failure by the Congress and the President to adopt and sign a budget no later than the first Monday in May mandates “an automatic, across-the-board, 5 percent reduction in expenditures” from the previous year’s budget? Individually reauthorizing “all federal departments and agencies….individually in stand-alone reauthorization bills every three years by a majority vote of the House…and the Senate” — or said departments and agencies automatically expire? Finally reining in the much abused Commerce Clause? Securing “the fundamental right to own and maintain property” from government regulatory takings by forcing the government to “compensate fully” any financial loss over $10,000?
Oh the howls to come.
Another favorite in this corner is Section 2 of Levin’s Taxing Amendment, which reads:
The deadline for filing federal income tax returns shall be the day before the date set for elections to federal office.
Can you imagine the furor from certain quarters when they realize April 15th — tax day — would now be shifted from April to November? Specifically “the first Monday before the first Tuesday” of November? This ingeniously ties the paying of taxes tightly to the tail of those in the federal government who are out there pounding the drums for election. Leaving voters with a fresh next-day memory of the link connecting the amount of taxes paid to votes to be cast.
Ouch.
While the Liberty Amendments are the heart of Levin’s book, it is critical to go back to the reason for this book — and the undoubted reaction to his proposals that is surely about to rain down on the book and its supporters, not to mention the author himself. Writes Levin in his Epilogue, appropriately titled The Time for Action:
No doubt, in a twist of logic, the state convention process and The Liberty Amendments will be assaulted by the governing masterminds and their disciples as an extreme departure from the status quo and, therefore, heretical, as they resist ferociously all efforts to diminish their power and position. Paradoxically, it is they who distort the Constitutions’ text and trespass its purpose by actively pursuing its nullification and abandonment. History demonstrates that republics collapse when demagogues present themselves as their guardians to entice the people and cloak their true intentions…..Indeed, the closer the approach to constitutional restoration, should that day arrive, a torrent of fuming and malevolent rage will, predictably, let loose, alleging perfidy by the true reformers.
The Liberty Amendments — all eleven of them — are a serious work of restoration and reform. They are ironically the very embodiment of that current liberal favorite: “Hope and Change” — turned back on the entire progressive concept of government. There is in fact no reason whatsoever that Americans must accept what Levin calls the “obtuse and defeatist notion of moderation that accepts the disposition of inevitable societal self-destruction without recourse to an available escape. Its irrationality is self-evident.”
It is all too apparent after a hundred-years plus of the Progressive “Second American Revolution” that the revolution is not only failed but dangerous. Exceptionally dangerous. Dangerous to everything from the larger financial underpinnings of America to the individual lives of Americans who must daily face this, that or the other onslaught from their own government.
The plethora of scandals from recent years — tellingly in both the Obama and Bush administrations —speaks to the fundamental recognition that the problem is the inevitable out-of-control nature of a massive, intrusive federal government apparatus. From the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused financial crisis of 2008 to recent headlines about the IRS, FEC, DEA, SEC, EPA, State Department, Food Stamps and more, all in a very real sense are nothing but the latest confirmation of just how massive and irrational the federal government has become. Indeed, the defense of President Obama by liberal allies in the IRS scandal is that surely one cannot expect the President to have any idea about what’s going on in his own government because the government is in fact so huge.
Bingo.
All the way back in 1964 in that famous speech A Time for Choosing (found here) that introduced Ronald Reagan to America as a political figure, Reagan saw all this coming. Said the future president in those famous closing lines:
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us that we justified our brief moments here. We did all that could be done.
The challenge Mark Levin’s Liberty Amendments now poses to millions of Americans is exactly Reagan’s challenge.
Will we preserve the last best hope of man on earth?
Will, in Levin’s words, “we the people restore the splendor of the American Republic”?
Ronald Reagan’s A Time for Choosing has now become Mark Levin’s The Time for Action.
And Mark Levin has provided the blueprint.
The battle is joined.
The Third American Revolution has begun
America’s Tyranny Threshold
A Guest Blog by:Eileen F. Toplansky
As he finishes up his Martha’s Vineyard vacation, Barack Obama would be well-served to recall the fiery words of Jonathan Mayhew, who is famous for his sermons “espousing American rights — the cause of liberty, and the right and duty to resist tyranny.”
Mayhew, born at Martha’s Vineyard on October 8, 1720, was “bitterly opposed to the Stamp Act and urged colonial liberties.” Though he did not live to see the American Revolution (he died on July 9, 1766), his “sermons and writing were a powerful influence in the development of the movement for liberty and independence.”
And they need to be revisited as the Obama presidency continues its legacy of lawlessness.
First published in Boston in 1750, “A Discourse concerning the unlimited submission and non-resistance to the high powers” was a sermon delivered on the 100th anniversary of the execution of Charles I. It was so powerful that it was published in London in 1752 and again in 1767. In fact, this sermon was the “first volley of the American Revolution, setting forth the intellectual and scriptural justification for rebellion against the Crown.”
The following words from the Discourse fly off the page in light of the continuing unconstitutional acts of President Obama.
Civil tyranny is usually small in its beginning, like ‘the drop in a bucket,’ till at length, like a mighty torrent of raging waves of the sea, it bears down all before it and deluges whole countries and empires.
Although the president cannot write or rewrite laws, this president thinks he is above the law. The “entire system of separation of powers … is designed to limit governmental power,” but Mr. Obama continually makes it clear “that he won’t respect these basic constitutional limits on his power.”
Tyranny brings ignorance and brutality along with it. It degrades men from their just rank into the class of brutes. It dampens their spirits. It suppresses arts. It extinguishes every spark of noble ardor and generosity in the breasts of those who are enslaved by it.
And American young people are being dampened in their enthusiasm for their futures because of the actions emanating from this White House. A millennial caller on the Rush Limbaugh radio show recently made the astonishing comment that her generation is being told there is no hope for the future. Like the serfs of the feudal system, young people in Obama’s America “are predestined to misery and failure,” because they no longer have “any free will,” and only the government can provide and coddle this generation because upward mobility is no longer possible. The Horatio Alger belief in hard work bringing rewards is being destroyed by this administration as it deliberately burdensgenerations of Americans, some not even born.
Thank you, Mr. Obama, for $17 trillion in debt, increasing unemployment, prohibitions against genuine American energy-independence, and onerous regulations on critical aspects of life.
[Civil tyranny] makes naturally strong and great minds feeble and little and triumphs over the ruins of virtue and humanity. This is true of tyranny in every shape. There can be nothing great and good where its influence reaches.
Concerning ObamaCare alone, Obama’s tyranny has grown incrementally. Delaying provisions of the ACA law does not lie within the purview of the executive branch. This authority is with the Congress. But we have a president who has repeatedly stated that he “can do this without Congress.” In April Obama “delayed a provision…to cap out-of- pocket health care costs.” He also decided to delay the employer mandate for a year. This exceeds his authority. The president continues to ignore the court’s ruling that his National Labor Relations Board recess appointments were unconstitutional since they were not approved by Congress.
Further acts by the Obama administration that are inconsistent with the laws of America include:
- This administration was displeased with Congress’s failure to enact the DREAM Act. So in 2012 he “implemented portions of legislation he could not get through Congress … and acted in ways blatantly at odds with the existing immigration laws [.]”
- Concerning the “No Child Left Behind” law, Obama, “unable to convince Congress to revise key provisions of the law, simply authorized waivers from many requirements of the law — except that the ‘No Child Left Behind’ does not provide for such waivers.”
- Furthermore, Obama waived a “central tenet of the Clinton welfare-reform law” by eliminating the requirements that recipients of welfare either work or prepare to do so through approved education or training. This federal work requirement is not subject to waiver, but Obama ignored the law.
- More recently, Obama is working “to unilaterally impose a tax on cell phones,” maintaining that “where Congress is unwilling to act, I will take whatever administrative steps that I can in order to do right by the American people.” But “[c]onstitutionally, it’s Congress that decides how federal funds should be spent.” Yet this president uses his bully pulpit to circumvent the proper safeguards that the Founding Fathers built into our system.
In 1765, with the Stamp Act fresh in everyone’s mind, Mayhew stated that the “essence of slavery, consists in subjection to others — ‘whether many, few, or but one, it matters not.'”
Thus, he wrote:
Those nations who are now groaning under the iron scepter of tyranny were once free. So they might probably have remained by a seasonable caution against despotic measures.
Though “seasonable caution” is being heard in the country, there are still Americans who do not sense the looming danger that this president represents as he ignores the Constitution, appoints people who continue to break the law with impunity, and has overweening contempt for America and her ideas and ideals. He flouts the law as he sees fit.
Mayhew asserts:
Since magistrates who execute their office well, are common benefactors to society; and may, in that respect, be properly stiled the ministers and ordinance of God; and since they are constantly employed in the service of the public; it becomes you to pay them tribute and custom; and to reverence, honor, and submit to, them in the execution of their respective offices.” This is apparently good reasoning. But does this argument conclude for the duty of paying tribute, custom, reverence, honor and obedience, to such persons as (although they bear the title of rulers) use all their power to hurt and injure the public?
Yet:
For what can be more absurd than an argument thus framed?. Common tyrants, and public oppressors, are not intitled to obedience from their subjects[.]
Although he was writing with reference to the oppressiveness of the kingly or monarchical government, Mayhew reminds his readers that:
The essence of government (I mean good government); ….consists in the making and executing of good laws–laws attempered to the common felicity of the governed. And if this be, in fact, done, it is evidently, in it self, a thing of no consequence at all, what the particular form of government is;–whether the legislative and executive power be lodged in one and the same person, or in different persons;–whether in one person, whom we call an absolute monarch;–whether in a few, so as to constitute an aristocracy;–whether in many, so as to constitute a republic; or whether in three co-ordinate branches, in such manner as to make the governmentpartake something of each of these forms; and to be, at the same time, essentially different from them all. If the end be attained, it is enough.
But he reminds his readers:
… nothing can well be imagined more directly contrary to common sense, than to suppose that millions of people should be subjected to the arbitrary, precarious pleasure of one single man; (who has naturally no superiority over them in point of authority) so that their estates, and every thing that is valuable in life, and even their lives also, shall be absolutely at his disposal, if he happens to be wanton and capricious enough to demand them. What unprejudiced man can think, that God made ALL to be thus subservient to the lawless pleasure and frenzy of ONE, so that it shall always be a sin to resist him!
Continuing regulations emanate from this White House on a daily basis. We will soon have no control over our health decisions; businesses are being burdened in oppressive ways. IRS and NSA scandals are nonchalantly described as “phony scandals.”
A man who has no shame has no right to be a leader. Obama has abused the trust of the American people.
But it is equally evident, upon the other hand, that those in authority may abuse their trust and power to such a degree, that neither the law of reason, nor of religion, requires, that any obedience or submission should be paid to them: but, on the contrary, that they should be totally discarded; and the authority which they were before vested with, transferred to others, who may exercise it more to those good purposes for which it is given[.]
We already have the necessary means to resist the assault on our republic. But we must be unrelenting in demanding that the Congress meet its obligations and restore the checks and balances our Founding Fathers created. If legislators do not adhere to the Constitution, they have no right to be in Washington, D.C.
Certainly Obama has taken on the trappings of an emperor, despite his protestations, but are we not obliged to resist? He has broken the pledge to uphold the Constitution. He has been derelict in his duty. The National Black Republican Association (NBRA) has filed articles of impeachment against Barack Obama. And other calls forimpeachment are increasing.
It was with “unfeigned love” for his country that Mayhew wrote. In his sermon entitled “The Snare Broken,” he wrote of the joy that Americans felt when Great Britain repealed the onerous Stamp Act in March 1766. However, on the same day, “Parliament passed the Declaratory Acts, asserting that the British government had free and total legislative power over the colonies.” Mayhew died less than two months after this event, and, though eminently prescient, he was not privy to the continuing intrusions of Great Britain into America’s well-being that ultimately led to the American Revolution.
Will we take to heart these words of Mayhew, or will we, too, “groan under the iron scepter of tyranny” in the not too distant future?
Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/americas_tyranny_threshold.html?utm_source=08-19-12&utm_campaign=AT+Newsletter+08-19-13&utm_medium=email#ixzz2cPrbKZuS
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