WE MUST REMEMBER..... LEST WE FORGET!

On this recent 237^th anniversary of our Independence, it is good for us all to give pause and consider our legacy.  Most have no idea how quickly our legacy and freedoms are being usurped and squandered by a bloated, “Big Brother” Government that is totally out of control, a Government that holds our Constitution in utter disdain.

John Adams, Founding Father and second President of the United States gave us a few thought-provoking words to reflect upon this Independence Day: “You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.”

Far too many Americans don’t seem to realize that violations of our Constitution with its Bill of Rights, under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, have now made substantial inroads to destroy of our rights and liberties.  There is blame enough to go around very wide and deep, from the actions of both political parties, and from all branches of Government.  Actually, we no longer have three branches of one government providing the checks and balances that our Framers in their wisdom bequeathed to us.  We are, sadly, being controlled by three separate governments all acting beyond and without powers granted to it by the Constitution.  Without the Constitution there can be no government; it is the font of all power, which power, in turn, is granted to the Government by the People.

I urge you to read Paragraph 2 of The Declaration of Independence but this except will do:   “. . . that to secure these Rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it . . .”  The Government works for us, the People.  Yet the People, the governed, are today being totally ignored and kept in the dark under the pretense of “National Security” as their Constitutional heritage and rights are fast disappearing into a cosmic black hole, a force so powerful that not even light that otherwise races unimpeded across the 13.8 billion light years of our universe can escape from its grip.

Our President constantly ignores and changes laws passed by Congress, the only body given legislative power in Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution; just as tragic, the President blithely bypasses Congress to “write laws” by using non-elected bureaucratic Czars in his federal agencies like the EPA. This is in total violation of Article I, Section I that states: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.”  This is simple declarative sentence with a single, unambiguous meaning.  Period.

For two years in a row during his first term, Mr. Obama addressed large Hispanic groups and told them, in effect, that he wished he could change the law but that we have a Constitution that prevents him from doing so.  But just a few months before the 2012 elections, Mr. Obama unilaterally changed the law by exempting almost one million people from being deported.  The Chief Executive has no power to either create laws or to alter them.  Period . . . again! This was a bold-faced, shameless act of usurpation of power designed to alter the outcome of the elections.  Furious ICE agents have been granted standing and are now suing Obama for yet another gross violation of the Constitution.  In his own words, the President admitted for two years he lacked the Constitutional power to do anything without Congress, yet before the elections he somehow miraculously “found the power.” And for you historians reading this, I would ask if this mystery of new-found power could have any parallel to the “mysterious” power that Hitler found to burn the Reichstag in February of 1933 with elections scheduled for March 5, 1933?  As Lord Acton said in 1906, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Yet the Congress obligingly ignores the President’s Constitutional trespasses.  Congress then passes laws that they have not even read, and even laws that clearly violate the Constitution like the NDAA.

Finally, the Supreme Court “creates laws” from the Bench by distorting the clear meaning of the Constitution. SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) is not infallible, not even consistent. It has reversed its own decisions approximately once every 13 months since it began operation on February 2, 1790.  Something cannot be Constitutional and  unconstitutional at the same time!  Where is the constancy in applying the Constitution? When convenient, the Constitution becomes just a dusty, inconvenient Truth that needs to be rationalized into oblivion in order to make social judgments so that SCOTUS can “pass” socially desirable laws to its liking, a power reserved exclusively to the Congress.

When our liberties are gone it will be too late.  Those who prefer not to care and to leave the future of their liberty, and that of their children, in the hands of self-serving politicians will have no one to blame but themselves when the country finally awakens one day from its Rumplestiltskin lethargy.  Unfortunately it will be too late, as it was for those millions and millions beguiled by the Nazi party and at least 60 million sent to die in the gulags under Josef Stalin.

We have just witnessed the most massive demonstrations in the recorded history of the world that took place in Egypt this week to remove a “democratically elected” President and the Muslim Brotherhood.  Why?  Because this “democratically elected” Government betrayed the People who constitute the source of that government’s legitimacy.  People died throughout Egypt to take back their government and their freedoms, just as our forefathers fought and died to reclaim their liberties and freedom from a tyrannical George III. Egypt’s now “former” new President and his ideologue colleagues betrayed the Nation by trying to impose on 82 million people a vision for Egypt totally at odds with the wishes of the People, the “governed,” the source of any legitimate government’s power.

If cavalier citizens of the United States were to send a similar message to its ideologue-driven, self-serving government of both parties there might be hope for the Republic.  But when the average citizen is oblivious to what its Government is doing there is slim chance of that happening.  It seems that what liberties we lose in stealth and small steps seem somehow to go unnoticed and unchallenged.  Today it is our “private” phone calls and e-mails being collected and stored by an all-seeing, all-powerful central government. Tomorrow it will be our guns and right to self-defense against an imperious government. What will we eventually find at the end of the proverbial “slippery slope we travel?”  Every American should have the opportunity to speak with those who were trapped in Communist Russia for 70 years and with those deprived of their inalienable rights in the conquered nations subjugated behind the Iron Curtain after World War II.  They still seek a new life in a new America, but what will happen to their dreams of liberty and opportunity in a “fundamentally changed,” future America not so far off?

Why has the Department of Homeland Security, NOAA, Social Security and other “benign” agencies of the Federal Government purchased over 1.8 billion (billion with a “B”) rounds of hollow-point ammunition, enough to put 5 rounds in every man, woman and child in the USA?  The Geneva Convention bans the use of hollow-point ammunition in conflict by all signatory nations; it cannot be used by the armed forces; it has but one purpose—to kill.  To kill whom we should ask?  Despite questions by many retired military generals about these 1.8 billion rounds, we are yet to receive an answer other than “for target practice.”  At five times the cost of target practice ammunition does anyone really believe that?  This stockpile of bullets is enough to fight a war like Iraq for decades yet we still have no answer from our Government.  During this time when we commemorate our Independence, won for all of us at incredible sacrifice, we should ponder many questions and issues like this that never make it to Main Street America because of the impenetrable barrier of the Main Street Media:

Far too many Americans don’t seem to realize that violations of our Constitution with its Bill of Rights, under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, have now made substantial inroads in the destruction of our rights and liberties; our official government policies have usurped powers never contemplated, and certainly never granted, by our Framers in our Constitution:

• Because of the actions of one Edward Snowden (despite what many think of his actions at stealing ill-guarded “State Secrets), we now know that the U.S. government has spied on each and every one of us for seven years—watching and collecting our phone calls, emails and other communications, amassing all this personal information in secret databases.  The last two U.S. presidents have committed unprecedented violations of the right to privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment, with warrantless wiretapping and government mining of electronic communications.  Where was Congress or the Supreme Court to say “No?”  The new National Security Agency’s National Data Center in the Utah desert is so capable of storing and knowing virtually everything about everyone that alarmed spokesmen have said that it is “a turnkey operation, that literally with the turn of a key could turn America into a totalitarian state.”  National Security is one thing but the survival of the Republic is quite another.

The Forth Amendment makes it very clear: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”  Some in the NSA have resigned over what they believe is an unconstitutional hijacking of the Republic whose only purpose is to turn it into George Orwell’s 1984.  Every digital record from bank records to private phone calls and e-mails are at risk of “unreasonable search and seizure.”  With the blatant disdain for the Constitution we already are experiencing, can we even think about surrendering our basic freedoms to a voracious, power-hungry government that the Constitution had limited to be only a small, general government with 17 enumerated powers granted in Article I, Section 8?  To recall the words of Thomas Jefferson, the author of The Declaration of Independence and our third President:     “In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”  Thomas Jefferson 

• The current president has admitted that he has ordered American citizens to be assassinated without charges or trial and claims he has the right to continue this executive murder.  (I would like to see the Constitutional justification for this absurd claim!)
• In violation of the First Amendment's guarantee of Freedom of the Press, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has secretly ordered the collection of extensive records of phone calls and other information of reporters for the Associated Press and Fox News, even falsely alleging, in order to obtain a warrant, that one reporter was engaged in a criminal conspiracy because he was seeking information.  Holder swore before Congress that he had no knowledge of this yet only he could sign the application for the warrant and the record shows he did so!  Holder now claims that he had no intention of prosecuting, which means he lied twice, this time to a judge in order to obtain the warrant.  How is this different from “show trials” we have witnessed in dictatorships over the years?  The first thing dictatorships do is to seize control of the free press so that when a totalitarian government manipulates the truth there is no one to shine a light into the darkness.  Unfortunately in Obama’s America there is no need to seize the press.  The “press” has gladly abandoned its time-honored obligation to investigate and report, and accepted instead a place of shame at the head of the sacred, virtual procession to enshrine the “Anointed One.”
• This same attorney general supports the president’s “right” to order the murder of U.S. citizens without trial or due process, claiming: “Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”  Oh? My copy of the Constitution must be outdated!
• The U.S. Congress enacted a law in 2012 (See The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA, paragraph #1021.)  It gives power to the U.S. president to have the right to order the U.S. military to arrest and hold U.S citizens indefinitely, without evidence, without charges or trial — a patent violation of the right to freedom of expression, the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty and the right to a speedy trial, all of which are enshrined in the Bill of Rights. The Executive AND Legislative branches have absolutely NO Constitutional authority to do this.  Just because Congress passes legislation and the Chief Executive signs it, does NOT make it Constitutional.  Yet the average, distracted American has not a clue what is happening.  I find it less than reassuring that President Obama has promised not to use that power.
• Why do we have a dead Ambassador and staff in Benghazi, Libya?  Why were those who could have protected them told, “to stand down?”  Where was the Commander-in-Chief that evening?  We do know that he left on Air Force One the next morning to go campaigning and fund raising.  After nine months of Congressional investigations, we have no answers and nothing but stonewalling from the purported president of this great Republic.  Yet the “free press” has elected to stay “free” and far from this story because it might put their demi-god hero in an awkward situation where he might be forced to face the truth, never mind to tell the truth.  If our “free press” were no longer free I submit that they would be the first to rebel, claiming the right to a free press.  Yet this same MSM somehow sees no contradiction in cooperating in the ultimate, self-inflicted demise of the free press they are supposed to represent and protect.
• Financial privacy is dead in America, killed by the PATRIOT Act that forces bankers to act as government spies.
• Unreasonable restrictions impede Americans’ rights to conduct business offshore, to the point that foreign banks and businesses now reject U.S. clients simply because they are Americans.
• The Director of the FBI admits that his agents use aerial drones to spy on U.S. citizens, and Congress has authorized the use of thousands of surveillance drones to be used by police, the Defense Department and the Dept. of Homeland Security.  Yet if a citizen tries to fight this infringement of the Fourth Amendment in the courts he is told that he has “no standing” to bring this case.  So where is Congress, the elected representatives of the People?  Do not all these individuals take a solemn oath to uphold, support and defend the Constitution?
• The FBI is now charged to investigate the criminal behavior targeting conservative groups at the IRS that has recently come to light.  Obama feigned outrage and an investigation.  Yet when Congress asked FBI Director Muller what agent was directing the investigation he had no idea.  It is now six-weeks after this so-called investigation started and not ONE SINGLE VICTIM has been contacted.  The FBI Director works for Attorney General Eric Holder who, in turn, works for Barrack Obama.  Can the fox guard the henhouse? Will we ever learn the truth about the IRS? Yet it is this same IRS that needs to hire at least an additional 16,000 agents to police ObamaCare, another law that was concocted and passed in secret when we had been promised total transparency.  All discussions were to be on C-Span!

Even Democrat Senator Max Baucus, often called the Father of ObamaCare, and who voted for it is dismayed.  In an open discussion with HHS Secretary Sebelius he said: "A lot of people have no idea about all of this," he said. "People just don't know a lot about it, and the Kaiser poll pointed that out. I understand you've hired a contractor. I'm just worried that that's gonna be money down the drain because contractors like to make money ... I just tell ya, I just see a huge train wreck coming down. "

And who could not be cynical when 58% of the American people oppose the legislation while most of the remaining 42% have no idea what it mandates.  Finally, after Kathleen Sebelius recently told the world that all was going smoothly for on-time implementation, the Administration announced without warning in a bombshell release on Twitter just before Independence Day (no press conference or opportunity to ask questions) that the employer mandate would be postponed for a year but that the individual mandate (read: tax and penalty) would not be waived. The result?  The real impact of this draconian change to our healthcare will not be felt until after the 2014 elections. How can one not be cynical about the manipulation of our election process unless drinking the Government’s free gifts of its special “Kool-Aid?”

Our government is systematically destroying our liberties, acting in secret, claiming that we the people have no right to know what is being done because of “national security.”

Americans fought, and we won independence from Great Britain against enormous odds. But now, politicians from both parties are destroying more of our liberties than King George III and the British ever did. Maybe the Egyptians know something we don’t know.

Salva nos et Republicam nobis.

Publius

**Flag photo from Drudge Report