Posted on 11/24/2011 6:59:04 AM PST by Kaslin
What if the whole purpose of the Constitution was to limit the government? What if Congress' enumerated powers in the Constitution no longer limited Congress, but were actually used as justification to extend Congress' authority over every realm of human life? What if the president, meant to be an equal to Congress, has become a democratically elected, term-limited monarch? What if the president assumed everything he did was legal, just because he's the president? What if he could interrupt your regularly scheduled radio and TV programming for a special message from him? What if he could declare war on his own? What if he could read your emails and texts without a search warrant? What if he could kill you without warning?
What if the rights and principles guaranteed in the Constitution have been so distorted in the past 200 years as to be unrecognizable by the Founders? What if the states were mere provinces of a totally nationalized and fully centralized government? What if the Constitution was amended stealthily, not by constitutional amendments duly passed by the states, but by the constant and persistent expansion of the federal government's role in our lives? What if the federal government decided whether its own powers were proper and constitutional?
What if you needed a license from the government to speak, to assemble or to protest the government? What if the right to keep and bear arms only applied to the government? What if posse comitatus -- the law that prohibits our military from our streets -- were no longer in effect? What if the government considered the military an adequate dispenser of domestic law enforcement? What if cops looked and acted like troops and you couldn't distinguish the military from the police? What if federal agents could write their own search warrants in defiance of the Constitution? What if the government could decide when you weren't entitled to a jury trial?
What if the government could take your property whenever it wanted it? What if the government could continue prosecuting you until it got the verdict it wanted? What if the government could force you to testify against yourself simply by labeling you a domestic terrorist? What if the government could torture you until you said what the government wanted to hear? What if people running for president actually supported torture? What if the government tortured your children to get to you? What if the government could send you to your death and your innocence meant nothing so long as the government's procedures were followed? What if America's prison population, the largest in the world, was the result of a cruel and unusual way for a country to be free? What if half the prison population never harmed anyone but themselves?
What if the people had no rights except those the government chose to let them have? What if the states had no rights except to do as the federal government commanded? What if our elected officials didn't really live among us, but all instead had their hearts and their homes in Washington, D.C.? What if the government could strip you of your rights because of where your mother was when you were born? What if the income tax was unconstitutional? What if the states were convinced to give up their representation in Congress? What if the government tried to ban you from using a substance older than the government itself? What if voting didn't mean anything anymore because both political parties stand for Big Government?
What if the government could write any law, regulate any behavior and tax any event, the Constitution be damned? What if the government was the reason we don't have a Constitution anymore? What if you could love your country but hate what the government has done to it? What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government? What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs least? What if I'm right? What if the government is wrong? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
What Good Can a Handgun Do Against An Army?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/2312894/posts
We’re living it right now.
The Fed is doind VERY few of the powers enumerated TO IT, and sticking its nose into everything else.
One of its duties is to enforce our borders (illegals).
Another is to protect us against enemies foreign and domestic (Islam comes to mind).
Yet we spend billions on the TSA and Homeland Security to have elederly ladies’ diapers felt up and to get warnings about frying a frozen turkey.
You mean, like right now?
The judge is coming dangerously close to acknowledging the inevitable solution here.
Freedom’s greatest danger is now and it is the milquetoast Republicans who care more about what the Washington Post thinks of them then the people that elected them are to blame.
It Is the NE media elite who care more about Georgetown cocktail parties then actually reporting the truth who are to blame.
It is honest congressmen who have been corrupted by the political machine that are to blame.
And it is the people who allow this to happen because congress lets them keep an extra 15 bucks a month that are to blame.
My daddy always told me, the only way someone can take something from you is if let them. We are letting them take control over our lives and we aren’t fighting back.
Until the rest of you finally "get it", ain't nothing going to change.
We would be royaly screwed, that’s what.
What if we nominated Judge Napolitano for President?
If it no longer applies to them, then it no longer applies to the States and People, and we're under no obligation to recognize them as anything other than a criminal organzation engaged in extortion and bribery.
...ping.
“What if?”
I know trick questions when I see ‘em.
Ya’ can’t fool me.
Have a safe and Happy Thanksgiving.
5.56mm
You mean a REAL Constitutional scholar ?!
+1
I’ll come out and say it...we need a revolution, a Constitutional Revolution via the very fail-safe tool the Framers left us; Article V.
Anything short of that dramatic event will run us right onto the trash-heap of other collapsed governments.
IMO with the mindset prevalent in the country right now I think a constitutional convention right now would be a disaster.
The Constitution has stopped being applied for a long time, my FRiend except when applying it suits or helps advance the Socialists agenda.
Thank goodness we’re all still allowed to have opinions! :)
What would happen if the Constitution were not observed?
According to one of the Founders, “horrid mischief would ensue”.
Note that “Horrid” resides in the White House along with its as yet unindicted co-conspirator “Mischief”.
Great post! I’ve always hated the Demonrats but lately that has extended to the Republicans. I don’t trust any of them to do what we elected them to do or do what’s right for the country. Very few politicians in WDC that I trust. The whole damned place needs a political enema, imho! I don’t know how or when it came to be that these politicians started thinking themselves to be something special......they aren’t. They’re HIRED help! All the perks they have rewarded themselves with could go a long way in reducing spending but NO, medicare and SS (which every taxpayer contributed) and now pensions (even my Hubs to which he contributed for 30 years and STILL pays for his own insurance out of his pension check) need overhauling according to the “Gods” on Crapitol Hell! I don’t want to get started on Thanksgiving Day but I’m gettin’ close. :)......have a wonderful Thanksgiving my fellow freepers.
"Until the people have, by some solemn and authoritative act, annulled or changed the established form, it is binding upon them collectively, as well as individually; and no presumption or even knowledge of their sentiments, can warrant their representatives [the executive, judiciary, or legislature]; in a departure from it prior to such an act." - Alexander Hamilton
And, John Marshall, in his Marbury Opinion, wrote:
"That the people have an original right to establish, for their future government, such principles as, in their opinion, shall most conduce to their own happiness, is the basis on which the whole American fabric has been erected. The exercise of this original right is a very great exertion; nor can it, nor ought it, to be frequently repeated. The principles, therefore, so established, are deemed fundamental: and as the authority from which they proceed is supreme, and can seldom act, they are designed to be permanent."
America's wise Founders framed a We-the-People's written Constitution to protect Creator-endowed rights and liberties of individuals.
We are the inheritors of that Constitution, for which we are thankful on this Thanksgiving Day, 2011.
The Miracle of America
from
axes and hoes to high technology;
log cabins to air-conditioned condos;
horsedrawn wagons to autos, planes, and rockets;
scarcity to abundance; &
from tyrannical government rule to individual liberty
HOW DID IT ALL BEGIN?
Most of our history books don’t tell us that, in the beginning, the pilgrims established a communal economic system. Each was to produce according to his ability and contribute his production to a common storehouse from which each was to draw according to his need.
The assurance that they would be fed from the common store, regardless of their contribution to it, had a peculiarly disabling effect on the colonists. Taking property away from some and giving it to others bred discontent and retarded employment. Human nature was the same then as now, and before long, there were more consumers than there were producers, and the pilgrims were near starvation. Governor Bradford, his advisors, and the colonists agreed that in order to increase their crops, each family would be allowed to do as it pleased with whatever it produced. In other words, a free market system was established. In Governor Bradford’s own words:
“This had very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corne was planted than other waise would have bene by any means ye Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deall of trouble, and gave farr better contente. The women now wente willingly into ye field, and tooke their little-ons with them to set corne, which before would aledg weaknes, and inabilitie; whom to have compelled would have bene though great tiranie and oppression. . . . By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed. . . . and some of ye abler sort and more industrious had to spare, and sell to others, so as any generall wante or famine hath not been amongst them since this day . . . .” (Wm. Bradford, “Of Plimoth Plantation,” original manuscript, Wright & Potter, Boston, 1901)
Those who, today, favor central government planning, common ownership and redistribution of the earnings of others are advocating a system that Americans tried and rejected over 350 years ago. Their wisdom gave birth to the great American miracle!
Are we as wise today?
You Can Do Something About This
(This message originally published in the mid-1980’s by Stedman Corporation’s Government Affairs & Free Enterprise Education Program – a former NC textile firm. For more essays in this series, visit www.ouragelessconstitution.com )
I don't think we could have one right now. There would be political division into no less than 2 countries, one dominated by left/liberal philosophy, and one dominated by right/conservative philosophy.
Not long after that, war between the two would break out when the liberal nation discovers they can't feed themselves and decide they're entitled to take whatever they need from the conservative nation.
IMHO
“The judge is coming dangerously close to acknowledging the inevitable solution here.”
Indeed. And though we’re not really permitted to advocate what that solution is (or must be) openly here, we can still “talk around it”.
However, I don’t see that “solution” as absolutely “inevitable” — IF in the future the USA comes to a “Soviet revelation/solution”.
That is to say, if you go back to around 1980, who could have dreamed that the “Soviet Union” — as it existed at the time as an “evil empire” — would no longer “exist” only about ten years later? Who could have foreseen that? And what was said about anyone who might suggest it?
Yet by 1991 the Soviet Union had fallen onto “the ash heap of history” (didn’t I hear that from someone named Reagan?), and the remnants the breakup became “The Commonwealth of Independent States”.
Here in North America, the internal forces are ever-building that would break apart our own nation. This would not have become “inevitable” except for the fact that somewhere back in the early 1960’s we abandoned many of our core cultural beliefs and principles (or refused to fight for them as they were stolen from us). Sometimes I wonder if it’s really worth debating about that any more, because the “America” of the 1950’s was “then”, and what America has _become_ is “now”, and the two are worlds apart. It’s my opinion only, but I sense that America as as “divided” a nation in 2011 as it was back around 1854. What did Mr. Lincoln have to say about houses such as that?
Again, your solution only becomes inevitable IF we cannot realize that it would be better for us to walk the same pathway as did the Soviets before us. They were able to cross that line without the violence of a civil war. Will we be as wise to do the same?
I believe “the traditional core” of Americans (essentially conservatives) do have that wisdom. All they wish is for a peaceful separation and to be left alone to go their own way.
It’s the _left_ that will never permit this. They will use the full force of government (the military, the police, the intelligence services) to try to stop a “Commonwealth of North American States” from occurring.
Whether or not the left will ultimately realize (as did the Soviet elites) that the price of resisting will be far higher than simply “letting go”, will become the factor that determines what kind of “solution” we’re going to get....
A certain quote by Jefferson about some sort of tree comes to mind.
Ding! The Constitution is an agreement amongst the states. The Federal govt is a derivative not a primary entity. Should it suspend the Constitution it simply ceases to exist, and the individual states are no longer bound to recognize it.
The Federal govt can go through all the legal sophistry it wants but it cannot create anything that surpasses the Constitution other than an outright declaration of dictatorship. Problem is that the states have national guards and the ability to raise militias, and despite the delusions of some our military simply cannot defeat dozens of states defending themselves.
Imagine....
“No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government” - Thomas Jefferson
You default back to the previous Founding Document:
>>>Ding! The Constitution is an agreement amongst the states. The Federal govt is a derivative not a primary entity. Should it suspend the Constitution it simply ceases to exist, and the individual states are no longer bound to recognize it.
The Federal govt can go through all the legal sophistry it wants but it cannot create anything that surpasses the Constitution other than an outright declaration of dictatorship. Problem is that the states have national guards and the ability to raise militias, and despite the delusions of some our military simply cannot defeat dozens of states defending themselves.<<<
Indeed. I’ve thought the same thing. Unlike the Civil War, though, this battle will see the states gathering to defend the concept of a republican federal government with limited and enumerated powers. Eventually the states will be forced to cede all their power to the federal government or forced to act, and some will act. At that point, I would imagine that there would be some conflict, and some parts of the United States would fall away, but the end result would be a reconstituted country without the leftist enclaves. Maybe. I hope it isn’t a replay of the Russian Civil War. God help us.
The Judge sounds like a FReeper. Wonder what his moniker is....
And those of us who have been watching this slow motion car wreck for decades, even before Free Republic existed, you have my sympathy too.
.../sarc!!!
Dear Judge N.
IT IS ALWAYS better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave. The question is will we have the chance? When all of us "Freedom" lovers are rounded up standing in the pouring rain surrounded by barbed wire incarcerated in "Re-education camp No. 57-B" waiting for a bowl of fish eye soup, is that when we should begin to discuss what shall never be discussed? I prefer to act while there is still time.
What good can a faggotized army numbering 1.5 million do against long-guns in the hands of 20-million pissed-off "American" veterans plus handguns in the hands of an additional 50-million "American" citizens?
Probably first depends on how many break away, and how many others side with the Feds, and how many are neutral.
The feds have some issues to overcome if they want to take over. The national guards right now do a great deal of heavy logistical lifting for the military. And for example, just north of me is the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant who makes all sorts of military ordinance. If Iowa secedes the state will take them over in a heartbeat. Logistics and supply will be a challenge for the federal military to say the least.
Then there is the tax revenue issue. If a third or half the states pull away, our parasitic federal govt is going to have a tough time just having enough money to keep order for what it has. What I can say is if enough states thumb their nose at the feds it’s not going to be a cakewalk for them to put that kind of uprising down.
The only thing I can predict if a large number of states secede is a very uncertain roadmap.
I like him also, but like ron paul, he’s a pure libertarian. And not a conservative.
“”What Good Can a Handgun Do Against An Army? “
What good can a faggotized army numbering 1.5 million do against long-guns in the hands of 20-million pissed-off “American” veterans plus handguns in the hands of an additional 50-million “American” citizens?”
There is a lot to be said for modern military hardware & amortization.
We have no hope of victory without raising our own army nearly as organize and equip as the Federal army.
Thou our State militia we have the beginnings of such a system if we can manipulate them to assert their right.
Yes they can. And did. In fact The Civil War, IMHO and that of many others, changed a basic fact best expressed by grammar.
in the era before the Civil War, one said The United States ARE etc. etc. Now we say The United States IS.
IOW, the erosion of States' Rights between 1860 and 1898 fundamentally changed the nation. For efficiently fighting fighting big wars of any kind and building empires overseas, you need a strong federal government with subservient, taxable provinces supporting the military and the government itself. Had we followed England's lead and abolished slavery in 1819, perhaps there would not be a constitutional crisis today, because it is the moral issue of slavery (one way or another) that led to the civil war and the eventual death of states' rights under the Constitution.
150 years ago yes under those dynamics which are quite different today. What you had then was two nations with two central governments, one of which had a large industrial advantage over the other. You also had a ‘third-party’ reason for the war - slavery - that gave them the ability to muster troops.
Much different scenario today. Now you would have a federal govt essentially trying to create a dictatorship. Much of our military is now supplemented by the national guard, something no longer available to them. I can’t see the states under the Federal govt being able to muster large numbers of troops or have the tax base to pay for them. Logistics are much more difficult.
They are going to have a difficult enough time keeping order in their own cities, as the liberal states have the largest ones for the most part. Logistics and funding will be difficult, it’s much easier and cheaper to defend than to project. For them to get it done would be a task that I don’t think they are up to.
The standing army of the USA right now is around 500K. I think the state of Virginia alone could raise a militia of a million men in a very short time. Also probably half of the current standing army would change allegiance.
And that’s the real issue - attrition. In my small rural county there’s 35,000 people. There are 99 counties in Iowa alone. Our fighting troops are the best there is, but as we learned in Mogadishu even the best can be overwhelmed just by sheer numbers.
There will be numerous active, inactive, reserve, and discharged vets in any of these states that secede. It won’t be like fighting a bunch of ragtag goat-humping ragheads wanting to go to allah.
What's this "Constitution" you speak of?
What if such usurpations, far from being treated as just cause for the punishment of the usurpers, was actually relied upon as binding legal precedent to show that future usurpations unforeseen by the founders were in fact Constitutional? That legal doctrines would be invented decreeing that discussion of the propriety of those earlier decisions was out-of-bounds even for those ostensibly charged with keeping the government within it's granted area of authority? Even when the older decision was in fact in place for far fewer years than the policy IT overturned?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
