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The Administration's over-reach for power, based on its apparent reliance on the constitutional illiteracy of a majority of citizens, may now have awakened that citizenry to a renewed interest in their Constitution's limits and bounds on government power.

Readers: if you have read the following on another thread today, please ignore. If not, then perhaps, as Barone indicates, for the first time in seven decades, the Constitution's limits are the subject of intense political discussion and study. That is a good thing for the future of liberty.

"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court even can do much to help it." - Judge Learned Hand

Now is the time for "the People" to stand for the foundational principles of liberty enshrined in the 1787 Constitution.

Despite last week's ruling, the "Trojan horse" called "health care reform" simply was a vehicle in the goal of "transforming America" from its foundations in individual liberty to one of coercive rule by political elites--imperfect persons in positions of power in government.

America's Founders understood the latter concept well, and they soundly rejected it in favor of a written "People's" Constitution to forever limit, separate, check and balance, and "bind down" their elected and appointed representatives in government. In Article V, they provided the only valid means of amending that written Constitution. The results were astounding!

Then, along came the so-called "progressives" who, in their arrogance and lust for power and control, several decades ago began to erode those "foundations" of individual liberty. Now, led by the current Administration, "health care reform" was to lay a different and opposite foundation.

By the Founders' formula, "the People's" written Constitution was the anchor of our liberties, binding government to the "People's" limitations on its power.

The "progressives" (who are, in fact, regressive in their counterfeit ideas), in effect, would undo all the monumental work accomplished by the Founders on behalf of liberty and leave the law afloat and without anchor, relying, as of old, on mere men and women.

From Page xv of "Our Ageless Constitution," allow me to include here excerpted words from President Andrew Jackson's Proclamation of December 10, 1832:

"We have received it [the Constitution] as the work of the assembled wisdom of the nation. We have trusted to it as to the sheet anchor of our safety in the stormy times of conflict with a foreign or domestic foe. We have looked to it with sacred awe as the palladium of our liberties, and with all the solemnities of religion have pledged to each other our lives and fortunes here and our hopes of happiness hereafter in its defense and support. Were we mistaken, my countrymen, in attaching this importance to the Constitution . . .? No. We were not mistaken. The letter of this great instrument is free from this radical fault. . . . No, we did not err! . . . The sages . . . have given us a practical and, as they hoped, a permanent* Constitutional compact. . . . The Constitution is still the object of our reverence, the bond of our Union, our defense in danger, the source of our prosperity in peace: it shall descend, as we have received it, uncorrupted by sophistical construction, to our posterity. . . ."

*Underlining added for emphasis

And, it was Thomas Jefferson who used another metaphor with reference to the Constitution when he indicated that "the People" must "bind them (government) by the chains of the Constitution." In another instance, he declared: "It was intended to lace them up straitly within the enumerated powers. . . ."

With that in mind, we also might remember these words from President Washington's "Farewell Address":

". . . Towards the preservation of your Government and the permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite, not only that you steadily discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts. --One method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the Constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown. . . ."

Rather than railing against the ruling, whatever energy lovers of liberty can muster should be directed toward enlightening the minds of fellow citizens in the urgent need to study and understand what Washington, Jefferson, Jackson and the other Founders understood--that imperfect people who assume power over the lives of their fellow citizens are to be "bound down by the chains of the Constitution," according to the Author of our Declaration of Independence.