Posted on 06/01/2014 12:03:35 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
—Martin Niemoller
Despite what some may think, the Constitution is no magical incantation against government wrongdoing. Indeed, it’s only as effective as those who abide by it. However, without courts willing to uphold the Constitution’s provisions when government officials disregard it and a citizenry knowledgeable enough to be outraged when those provisions are undermined, it provides little to no protection against SWAT team raids, domestic surveillance, police shootings of unarmed citizens, indefinite detentions, and the like.
Unfortunately, the courts and the police have meshed in their thinking to such an extent that anything goes when it’s done in the name of national security, crime fighting and terrorism. Consequently, America no longer operates under a system of justice characterized by due process, an assumption of innocence, probable cause and clear prohibitions on government overreach and police abuse. Instead, our courts of justice have been transformed into courts of order, advocating for the government’s interests, rather than championing the rights of the citizenry, as enshrined in the Constitution.
Just recently, for example, the Supreme Court refused to hear Hedges v. Obama, a legal challenge to the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), thereby affirming that the President and the U.S. military can arrest and indefinitely detain individuals, including American citizens, based on a suspicion that they might be associated with or aiding terrorist organizations....
(Excerpt) Read more at tenthamendmentcenter.com ...
Appealing Obamacare should only be 2nd in priority: this has to be #1.
A true American is willing to die on his feet than live on his knees.
Government, like bearing arms, is supposed to be an incidental of everyday business under our strict regulations of how it is to proceed.
Now the judges are corrupt and want to rule us with their business instead of being ruled...
Funny how those clamoring for rule of law all the time just happen to flaunt it.
Of course, things like public education dismissing parental authority in favor of following the voice and decisions of bureaucrates is a big component to this... the progressist theology, that is.
ok, only ‘cause i’m in the mood for this point of view. the quotes about Nazi Germany, and any other previous examples of totalitarian regimes throughout history, have two HUGE differences between us and all of them.
one, they weren’t armed to the teeth, and two, and maybe more important, we’ve had 300 hundred years of tasting real freedom. the old countries of Europe, specifically Germany, lived under something akin to monarchies.
things may change as the schools indoctrinate in Marxism, but not quite yet.
No one thought it would happen in Germany either until it did so do not be caught off guard.
The framers didn’t expect federalism to be protected by Scotus. They set up a constitutional structure which enabled the states to secure their interests and the rights of their people.
Spot on!
In 1913, America was transformed overnight from a federal republic into a democratic republic consolidated in DC.
Not quite, but who am I to judge?
In 1913, America was transformed overnight into a representative Democracy with the passage and ratification of the seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution. Followed in the same year by two other incidents that helped cement the transformation. The sixteenth Amendment and the Central Bank called the Federal Reserve. The fact that we were able to WIN WWII in the same century speaks volumns about the American People.
The Republic was lost in the last century and IMHO we are operating on borrowed time and borrowed money. Which one runs out first, is the question.
What isn’t in question is the resiliance, tenacity, and will of the real American people to preserve what this country truly represents to the rest of the world, land of LIBERTY.
The republic actually died in the period 1861-1865 and immediately following when the group of states favoring a strong national government by force of arms eliminated the right of independent states to leave a union they had voluntarily joined. During the Civil War and Reconstruction period following the war the central government, through force of arms, forced the conquered states to approve amendments to the Constitution and appropriated private property for central government purposes without compensation to the property owners. While the objective of eradicating slavery may have been good, it was still done in violation of the Constitution, the rights of states, and the rights of the people.
Since that time the federal government has been supreme and the 10th Amendment to the Constitution has been effectively neutered through legislative action, Constitution Amendment, and the Supreme Court taking the power to overturn rulings by state courts. Woodrow Wilson’s progressive amendments, early in the 20th Century, were a continuation of a process that began in 1861 when the southern states were prevented from leaving the union they voluntarily entered.
Ultimately this is all about economics. The merchants and bankers of the large urban areas, located primarily in the northeast through 1865 and now including the upper Midwest and West coasts, benefit from a strong central government that regulates commerce in their favor (hence high tariffs in the 19th Century), controls the resources of the nation, and maintains the armed forces. By the 1860’s the bankers and merchants of Boston and New York had become wealthy enough financing the cotton trade to diversify their capital investments to funding the settling of the west and industrialization. They had accumulated enough capital to afford to be morally outraged at the slavery in the South that up to that time made possible the cotton and slave trade from which their wealth originate. By subduing the South and ending slavery the owners of wealth accomplished 4 objectives:
1) They claimed secular moral superiority over their religious southern brethren. We continue to see this secular moral authority exerted today.
2) They asserted federal dominance of state governments by effectively ending the right of states to secede.
3) They ensured they would control the resources of the west as it developed.
4) They secured economic domination of the southern states and complete control of agriculture.
By the beginning of the 20th Century the west was settled and the nation unified. The northeastern banking cartel, centered in New York was firmly in control of the nation’s economic system with the exception of the money supply which was controlled by the central government (Treasury and Congress). The investment bankers wanted to utilize the resources of the United States to expand internationally but to do that they needed a stronger and large central government to fund standing armies and a navy with global dominance. Tariffs were no longer sufficient to fund a government of the size required to fund armed forces capable of projecting power internationally. Hence Wilson, the globalist intellectual passed the Federal Reserve Act, turning over the nation’s money supply to the New York banking cartel, and passed the amendments levying an income tax on the people as well as further diluting the powers of the previously independent states by moving to direct election of the Senate.
Wilson and the northeastern banking cartel knew that once political power was centralized in the federal government, and not dispersed among the many states, they could completely control the nation’s economy and use its resources for their purposes. Ultimately the central government would become entrenched due to its ability to allocate resources to buying votes and its police power to stamp out opposition (as proven during the Civil War). The evolution to a dictatorial central government, started by Lincoln, accelerated by Wilson, and ultimately controlled by the northeastern banking cartel is almost complete.
It seems you are right on the money, time is running out fast. Most likely events will start to fall together soon to help us understand how much time is left, not much more than two or three years tops.
No, America was transformed in 1861 when Lincoln invaded the South. The notion that the states could be coerced at gunpoint by the all powerful federal government started with him.
Detention Camps?
So everybody held at Gitmo gets a trial, right?
I have seen the history you relate but just couldn’t bring myself to end the Republic less than a hundred years from the beginning. Lincoln was torn I’m sure with do I or don’t I attempt to preserve the Country, but I gave him credit for good intentions with too much muscle. Suspending Habeus Corpus was not Constitutional. You have history pretty much on your side, especially when you reach 1913 and Woodrow Wilson our worst President pre-Obama.
Of course it was the Congress, pre Wilson that passed the sixteenth and seventeenth Amendments.
Maurice Ogden, “Hangman” http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZSS3yxpnFU
How can we expect to enjoy freeedom when we denied it to the most vulnerable among us?
First they came for the children of the poor and dark skinned, they declared that the best way to get rid of an N-Word is to stop him from ever being born in the first place. Maafa 21 http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rqLyyIsKyCU
“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
- Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, December 10, 1939 (Smith College, Sanger Collection)
- Abortion & Race, In Their Own Words http://with-friends-like-these-who-needs-enemies.org/in_their_own_words.html
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