Constitution Day – 2 February 2015
When I ran for Congress, some decades ago, I overheard one of the other candidates grousing about “Constitution thumpers”. I had never heard the term, but I knew who he was talking about.
Here we were, six candidates running for an office that is established by the Constitution by a document which specifically says, “this document shall be the Supreme Law of the Land,” and the winner of race would soon be going to Washington, D.C., where he would raise his right hand and swear an oath to “faithfully support and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic, so help me God.”
Trying to follow the logic of someone who would say such a thing, I can only conclude that he was a man without regard for the truth – a liar before the fact, with every intent to defraud the voters by supporting legislation HE liked, without regard to the Constitution. (Man, I wish I could go back and make some very different speeches, just for the fun of embarrassing the winner in advance! Maybe I’ll run for Congress again, with that as my only goal.)
So…whom do we blame? Willfully dishonest politicians? Or voters who stupidly re-elect these miscreants to office? Voting has been made so easy to do that it has gone to the lowest common denominator. (And that’s not counting the fact that cheating has also become proportionately easier, with computer assisted counting.)
Candidates pander to the greed of the voters, who vote their own interests instead of the interests of the nation. “Human nature,” you argue? Absolutely. And the great weakness of this experiment they call “democracy”. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his famous Democracy in America, “Democracy will thrive until the people learn that they can vote money from the public treasury into their own pockets, and then it will fail.” Spot on.
If we’re not going to return to the Constitution, then we are never again going to see a constitutional republic. If the Constitution is a “living document” which means what each successive administration wants it to mean, then it is a meaningless document. And if that is the case, then my support for a government determined to lead us away from the very document to which they swear allegiance, is something on which they can no longer depend. I hope you get my drift.
The policy of tyrannical government – “I have a phone and a pen,” – is the fuel to anarchists, to nullification, and to secessionists.
The Road to Recovery lies in all of the following:
- Quit electing candidates who have no intention of adhering to the document they swear an oath to support and defend. (That means replacing the majority of them!)
- Require proof of citizenship and residency in the case of every voter;
- Repeal the 17th Amendment – direct election of senators did precisely what it was intended to do – it deprived the States (which create this government) from their very important partnership in said government.
- Balance the budget and pay of the debt, one way or another.
There are other needed reforms, and amendments that need to go, but this is a minimal beginning. If it were up to me I would raise the voting age to 35, require a poll tax of $100 a year, a literacy test, and proof of ownership of property. And, if my wife would let me, I would restrict the vote to men only. But, alas, those days are gone. They are no more achievable than the minimal list above.
What does that bode for our country? It means that our Ship of State will continue to “draw water”, get more and more sluggish, and harder to steer, until a crisis will occur that will cause us to suddenly slip below the surface and we will join all those other civilizations which have suffered a similar fate. The barbarians are not “at the gates”, they are inside the gates, they are on welfare, and they are voting. The future of freedom in America is bleak, indeed.
Happy Constitution Day – 2015
© Daniel D. New, Permission to copy, with credits, is hereby granted.-
