“No law abiding citizen in the United States of America has any fear that their Constitutional rights will be infringed in any way. None! Zero!” (Joe Biden). See it here.
Seriously, Joe? Has Mr. Obama been holding back info from Joe about the IRS scandal and the White House spying on the media?
Allow me to list from the First Ten Amendments to the Constitution, otherwise known as the Bill of Rights, just the negative phrases that the framers felt the need to use with regard to their concerns over the federal government riding roughshod over the people.
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1st – “shall make no law…prohibiting…abridging”
2nd – “shall not be infringed”
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3rd – “No soldier…without the consent”
4th – “shall not be violated”
5th – “No person shall be held…nor shall be compelled…nor be deprived…nor shall”
6th – Uses all positive language to establish the rights of the people in regards to a speedy trial.
7th – “no fact”
8th – “shall not be required, nor excessive…nor cruel and unusual”
9th – “shall not be construed to deny or disparage”
10th – “not delegated…nor prohibited”
Not only is the Constitution replete with language that evidences the distrust the framers had in centralized government and the need, therefore, to be explicit in the establishment of limits on government, but enough representatives refused to sign on to the new Constitution unless further safeguards for the rights of the people were established so that the convention was forced to draw up a Bill of Rights.
Walter E. Williams, Ph.D. economist and “John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics” at George Mason University, helps us understand the concerns that the framers had regarding the ever vigilant need to limit the scope of centralized government. “The Bill of Rights is explicit in that distrust, using language such as Congress shall not abridge, shall not infringe and shall not deny and other shall-nots, such as disparage, violate and deny. If the framers did not believe that Congress would abuse our God-given, or natural, rights, they would not have provided those protections” (Walter E. Williams – Distrusting Government).
Further evidence of the intent of the framers to limit the growth, power, and scope of the federal government can be seen in the Constitution and its establishment of the separation of powers, checks and balances, and several other anti-majoritarian provisions.
As stated in an earlier blog, the United States is not a democracy; democracy is another term for mob rule. Our Constitutional Republic could be classified as a representative democracy. There are provisions in place to protect the minority view from being stamped out by a simple majority. One evidence of this is the fact that we are not ruled by a unicameral (single) body of government via a group of legislators that are representative only of numbers. While the House of Representatives considers the number of people in each state and so doles out representatives to states based on population (California has 53 House representatives whereas Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming each have only one member in the House of Representatives), the Senate, the stronger of the two houses, gives equal representation to each state apportioning two members per state regardless of size and/or population. This guarantees that smaller states will not be overrun by a simple majority of the larger states. Further anti-majoritarian provisions include the Electoral College which guarantees a president will be elected by a majority of states rather than a simple majority of people, the two-thirds vote rather than a simple majority vote required to override a presidential veto, the two-thirds requirement to call for a constitutional convention, and the three-quarter state requirement to ratify any Constitutional changes.
In fact, the original colonies banded together to form one nation not as a collection of people but as a group of states each concerned with its own sovereignty with none willing to yield to the rule of the masses.
Thus we come now to recent issues and the manner in which the states have reacted to some of the more egregious oversteps of the federal government. Mr. Williams goes on to inform us in his article about these reactions; “According to an Associated Press story, about four-fifths of the states now have local laws that reject or ignore federal laws on marijuana use, gun control, health insurance requirements and identification standards for driver's licenses.”
In fact, the Supreme Court and/or the Congress can and do perpetrate acts that are unconstitutional. Remember, the Supreme Court gave us Dred Scott and, more recently, Roe v. Wade. The justices are not gods descended from Mount Olympus when they don their black robes; they are men and women like you and me and are prone to error. In fact, the greater the responsibility invested in an individual, the greater that error can manifest itself in such a person. Thomas Jefferson said it thus, “To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions (is) a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”
Consider the untold suffering that was passed onto our African brothers and sisters via the Dred Scott decision. Likewise, do you know how many innocents have never seen the light of day thanks to the Roe v. Wade decision?
I can only repeat what Ronald Reagan said as I realize more and more each day the truth that it tells, "In our present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
On this Independence Day it is wise to consider that our liberty was hard fought for and when given up is won back with only the most extreme effort or, more likely, not at all.
