We Can’t Sit Back and Allow the Loss of Our Freedoms
by Andrew Napolitano
hat tip: FOXNews.com
We elect the government. It works for us. As we watch the Democrats’ plans for health care take shape, we can only ask how did our government get so removed, so unbridled, so arrogant that it can tell us how to live our personal lives?
Last Saturday, at 11 o’clock in the evening, the House of Representatives voted by a five vote margin to have the federal government manage the health care of every American at a cost of $1 trillion dollars over the next ten years.
For the first time in American history, if this bill becomes law, the Feds will force you to buy insurance you might not want, or may not need, or cannot afford. If you don’t purchase what the government tells you to buy, if you don’t do so when they tell you to do it, and if you don’t buy just what they say is right for you, the government may fine you, prosecute you, and even put you in jail. Freedom of choice and control over your own body will be lost. The privacy of your communications and medical decision making with your physician will be gone. More of your hard earned dollars will be at the disposal of federal bureaucrats.
It was not supposed to be this way. We elect the government. It works for us. How did it get so removed, so unbridled, so arrogant that it can tell us how to live our personal lives? Evil rarely comes upon us all at once, and liberty is rarely lost in one stroke. It happens gradually, over the years and decades and even centuries. A little stretch here, a cave in there, powers are slowly taken from the states and the people and before you know it, we have one big monster government that recognizes no restraint on its ability to tell us how to live. It claims the power to regulate any activity, tax any behavior, and demand conformity to any standard it chooses.
Future Prospects for Economic Liberty
by Walter Williams
The following is adapted from a lecture delivered on August 2, 2009, during a Hillsdale College cruise from Venice to Athens aboard the Crystal Serenity.
One of the justifications for the massive growth of government in the 20th and now the 21st centuries, far beyond the narrow limits envisioned by the founders of our nation, is the need to promote what the government defines as fair and just. But this begs the prior and more fundamental question: What is the legitimate role of government in a free society? To understand how America’s Founders answered this question, we have only to look at the rule book they gave us—the Constitution.
Most of what they understood as legitimate powers of the federal government are enumerated in Article 1, Section 8. Congress is authorized there to do 21 things, and as much as three-quarters of what Congress taxes us and spends our money for today is nowhere to be found on that list. To cite just a few examples, there is no constitutional authority for Congress to subsidize farms, bail out banks, or manage car companies. In this sense, I think we can safely say that America has departed from the constitutional principle of limited government that made us great and prosperous.
On the other side of the coin from limited government is individual liberty. The Founders understood private property as the bulwark of freedom for all Americans, rich and poor alike. But following a series of successful attacks on private property and free enterprise — beginning in the early 20th century and picking up steam during the New Deal, the Great Society, and then again recently — the government designed by our Founders and outlined in the Constitution has all but disappeared. Thomas Jefferson anticipated this when he said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”
Who’s Afraid of The New World Order?
The Liberty Voice Transcript Service
Transcript of a speech given by Lord Christopher Monckton, former policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher, in which a dire warning is given to all Americans regarding the United Nations Climate Change Treaty.
At Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it — because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regimes around the world like the European Union will rubber-stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it. I have read that treaty, and what it says is this: That a world government is going to be created.
The word government actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from countries of the west to third world countries in satisfaction of what is called coyly a climate debt, because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t and we’ve been screwing up the climate. We haven’t been screwing up the climate, but that’s the line. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement. How many of you think that the word election, or democracy, or vote, or ballot occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists piled out of the Berlin wall and into the environmental movement and took over Green Peace so that my friends who founded it, left within a year because they’d captured it. Now the apotheosis is at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Noble Peace Laureate; of course he’ll sign it.
The trouble is this. If that treaty is signed, your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution, and you can’t resile from that treaty unless you get the agreement of all the other states participating, because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out.
How to Take Back Your Constitution
Regaining Limited Federal Government By Holding Local Politicians Accountable
by John R. McAlister
City Councilman, Gahanna, OH
http://gahanna.gov
Introduction
Would you like to see a limited federal government bound by the chains of the Constitution? Would you like to see politicians upholding their oath to the Constitution? It is possible to see these two principles of good government instituted. It all starts at the local level by confronting the politicians who live in your neighborhood. This essay points the way but it is up to “We the People”, i.e., you to make it happen.
Holding local politicians accountable to their oath to the Constitution
We all know that Congress and the President consistently violate their oath to “uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.” But did you know that every local politician, mayor, city or village council representative, township trustee, county commissioner, etc., also takes an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the constitution of their state?
As a City Councilman in the Columbus suburb of Gahanna, OH, (http://gahanna.gov) I decided that I would uphold that oath by voting NO on certain city ordinances funded by unconstitutional federal money. Before a city can spend money Council has to vote on a city ordinance authorizing the expenditure.
In order to uphold my oath I have had to vote NO on buying three police cruisers with “drug money” taken in a drug raid. Why? Because the “war on drugs” is a totally unconstitutional policy.
I had to vote NO on a “safe sidewalks to schools” grant. Why? Because there is no authority in the Constitution’s Article I, sec 8, the enumerated powers of Congress, which grants the federal government the right to give money to cities. All one has to do is look each month at how many money spending ordinances are being voted on by local politicians and see which ordinances violate Article I, section 8.
Why are these local politicians violating their oath? It’s because the average citizen is not calling them on it. What if two, then ten, then 20, then 40, etc, people started showing up at their local government meetings and started monitoring the unconstitutional votes of their local politicians? What if these citizens started voicing their opposition to these votes during the council’s “hearing of visitors” part of the meeting? What if these people started becoming as outraged over their local politicians dishonoring their oath to the constitution as NIMBY’s become outraged over a zoning issue?
If “we the people” are ever going to have a Constitution that has any teeth in it, then “we the people” will have to give it meaning by acting at the local level and confronting local politicians who violate their oath. When the next local election comes up, the Constitution can be made the issue by making it known how many times an incumbent violated his or her oath.
Jury Nullification: The Right of Free Americans
by sherry clark
I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. What I can do, I should do and, with the help of God, I will do!
Everet Hale
The last refuge of freedom — our great experiment– has turned its back on the very thing that made this country great–our Constitution. Where the “rule of law” was once king, we see everywhere its desecration. What then can the people actually do about it? One word: Nullify.
“I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”
Thomas Jefferson, 1789 letter to Thomas Paine
Jury nullification is an act by a jury through its verdict to make an official rule, especially a statute, void in the context of a particular case. In other words, it is the process whereby a jury in a criminal case effectively nullifies a law by acquitting a defendant regardless of the weight of evidence against him or her. This is done when the individuals serving on a jury, either by reason of their conscious or moral grounding believe that a law is immoral or that a sentence is unjust. As the 12th Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Harlan F. Stone put it, “The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided.” Jury nullification is thus a means for the people to express opposition to an unconstitutional, immoral or unjust legislative enactment.
Ohio Now Among Growing list of State Sovereignty Seekers
This is the text of House Concurrent Resolution No. 11 text as introduced by Sponsors Jerrod Martin (R-70) and Assistant Minority Whip, Kris Jordan (R-2) along with 19 more co-sponsors into the 128th General Assembly, on March 18, 2009, “[t]o claim sovereignty over certain powers pursuant to the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, to serve notice to the federal government to cease and desist certain mandates, and to insist that certain federal legislation be prohibited or repealed.
WHEREAS, The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads as follows: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”; and
WHEREAS, The Tenth Amendment defines the total scope of federal power as being that specifically granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States and no more; and
WHEREAS, The scope of power defined by the Tenth Amend-ment signifies that the federal government was created by the states specifically to be an agent of the states; and
WHEREAS, Today, in 2009, the states are demonstrably treated as agents of the federal government; and
WHEREAS, Many federal laws directly violate the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States; and
WHEREAS, The Tenth Amendment assures that we, the people of the United States and each sovereign state in the Union of States, now have, and have always had, rights the federal government may not usurp; and
A Vote Is an Endorsement
Statistically, we each have 435 times greater likelihood of influencing our Congressman than our President. Here in the 12th Congressional district, we must put someone in the people’s House who will speak for the people. The House of Representatives was structured in the Constitution to be the people’s bridge to Washington. But with Tiberi as “our Congressman” we have a bridge to nowhere.
