The View From 1776

A Rose by Any Other Name
(A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Totalitarianism)

By Rattlesnake Central - Melanie Wooten

“United States corporation” and the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871 - more anti-”banker” misinfo (disinfo?)

I have always been fascinated by the fact that we wandered off the reservation of CONSTITUTION FOR the united STATES of AMERICA and went to Constitution of the United States of America.  I knew that the language of the original broadsides was critical to our very existence as a Nation, but I had no idea when or how or why the change was effected.  The argument stated in the above link not only provides the key to my contentions but it also sets out the basis of District of Columbia v Heller (No. 07-290). 

Basically, if the Constitution of the United States (Civil Rights Act of 1871) can trump the Constitution for the united States (I do that deliberately!), we are done for because we have admitted that the federal law passed to establish, define and govern federal property, i.e., the Civil Rights Act of 1871, called Constitution of the United States, which applies ONLY to the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, et al., can govern us, the citizens of the individual states, i.e., CONSTITUTION FOR the united STATES of AMERICA, in areas outside federal jurisdiction.

The fact that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has decided to hear arguments on the right of a citizen of a federal territory (Heller) to own a gun in a federal territory (District of Columbia) should wave a bright flag of warning to those of us who still believe in the CONSTITUTION for the united STATES of AMERICA.  The truth of the matter is that unless the individual states decide and legislate individually that it is illegal for a citizen in THAT state to possess a gun in THAT state, the decision will be in actuality no more than a fart in a tornado.  We have been conditioned to believe that laws passed governing federal territories apply to the states.  NOT TRUE!  We have GIVEN UP our rights; they did not take them!  The truth is that under the CONSTITUTION for the united STATES of AMERICA, I do have the right to keep and bear arms, but taking a gun to a national park (a federal territory governed by the Constitution of the United States) is a no-no (or was until recently).  Case decided; no problem!!

Throughout our history, we have had decisions made that drew the bright line of where federal jurisdiction ended and the states’ jurisdictions began.  The best-known example is the Dred Scot decision, where SCOTUS ruled that the law in the state where Dred Scot originally lived required that Mr. Scot be turned back to his owner because under extant law, he was the property of the owner.  Case closed.

During WWII, there was a Hawaiian case, Duncan v. Kahanamoku, 327 U.S. 304 (1946), where a defense worker waiting to enter his work area (federal land) got into an altercation with another worker and was arrested by the Marines guarding the premises.  The case arose when he was moved around the island of Oahu and his rights under habeas corpus were denied him, but because his attorneys could prove that Hawaii was not in imminent danger of invasion, a pre-requisite for suspension of habeas corpus, the military governorship was null and void, so Mr. Duncan had to be released.  The decision of the state courts was subsequently overturned on the basis of evidence that the offenses complained of had occurred on federal property.  Case closed.  Bottom line:  if we don’t like a law, change the law; don’t ask the courts to do the legislature’s job! 

Like it or not, the post-Roosevelt SCOTUS turned modern America upside down when it said that the federal government could tell the states what they can and cannot do based on something other than the Constitution, which is the only arena over which SCOTUS has jurisdiction.  In other words, SCOTUS was permitted to legislate morality, distinctly outside its purview!  Since the Constitution had irrevocably and subtlety changed in 1871, and before that in 1867, by the 14th Amendment, precedents were established under which we are still reeling. 

If SCOTUS rules that DC law under which the Heller case was brought trumps the Constitution; specifically, the 2nd Amendment, we have willingly laid bare our necks to the yoke of the federal government and yet another right of the individual states will have been handed over, not taken.  The last time I looked, only the 3rd Amendment remains untouched by presidential fiat or federal decisions, and then only because we have not been ordered to feed and quarter federal troops at federal command under our own roofs!

All of these individual skermishes (gold-fringed flag, gun control on federal lands, establishment of jurisdiction over schools, churches, etc.) are strangely reminiscent of those situations giving rise to the War Between the States.  Anyone who has studied our history understands that this war was fought because the States believed that THEY controlled the federal government.  The War of Northern Aggression (look at the map before you screech!) came as a direct result of an individual state (South Carolina) refusing to turn over collected taxes to President Lincoln, who sent gunboats to obtain said taxes.  We all know what happened after that.

I do not pretend to know where this will end.  I do know that we have fifty states who each came into the union individually under broadly different circumstances, such as Texas and California who were republics before joining/being annexed to the united States; Virginia, Massachusetts, Kentucky and Virginia who were commonwealths; others whose government forms I have forgotten (I are old; cut me some slack!) I also know that “E Pluribus Unum” ("From many, one") stands in grave danger of being totally irrelevant.  The State of Montana has refused to comply with federal edict(s) and is threatening to secede; Texas is making similar noises.  All states are straining under the burden of non-funded mandates, which are no more than attempts by a federal government to bring the states involved back into line.  The dialogue is almost word-for-word that of the Confederate states prior to the bombing of Ft. Sumter, so if other states decide to confront the federal government over what it can and cannot control, I tremble for my Country.  My only consolation is that at age 68 I probably will not see the total disintegration of my America.

When we were taught our history, we learned of the “Immortal Trio”:  John C. Calhoun of South Carolina; Henry Clay of Kentucky; Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, who guided the American ship of state in the turbulent years before the War Between the States.  Daniel Webster was a staunch defender of the Constitution, stating:  We may be tossed upon an ocean where we can see no land—nor, perhaps, the sun or stars. But there is a chart and a compass for us to study, to consult, and to obey. That chart is the Constitution.

Our Constitution was hijacked over 150 years ago and for that length of time, we have been re-arranging the deck chairs on our sinking ship of state while our federal government steers America ever closer to the shoals that would cause her to founder.  What is at stake now is will we raise our eyes, and arms, in time to save her?

Read George Shadroui’s Crossing Swords: Dwight Macdonald and Journalism as Style over Substance, posted on the Intellectual Conservative website.

It’s lengthy, but the scope of the article more than justifies it. 

When William F. Buckley, Jr. graduated from Yale in 1950, liberal-progressives were supremely confident that socialism was mankind’s sole hope for peace, justice, and harmony.  So much so that they turned blind eyes toward Stalin’s mass murders in the Soviet Union.

Although Judeo-Christianity was the foundation of Western civilization, of conservatism, and of the United States itself, celebrated New York liberal icon and literary critic Lionel Trilling could write correctly that, “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.  For it is a plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” ( The Liberal Imagination, 1949).

We’ve had a barrage of encomia to the late William F. Buckley, Jr., but none that I have read covers so well as Mr. Shadroui’s essay the nature of Mr. Buckley’s early struggles to give voice to Judeo-Christian traditions, which had long since fallen out of favor in literary and higher-education circles.

A quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1833 Democracy in America emphasizes one of Mr. Lukens’s point made below:

On my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things.  In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions.  But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country…

In the United States religion exercises but little influence upon the laws and upon the details of public opinion; but it directs the customs of the community, and, by regulating domestic life, it regulates the state…. Thus, while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash and unjust.  Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it.

When [people in France] attack religious opinions, they obey the dictates of their passions and not of their interests.  Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.

Church and State are Mutually Supportive
By Jeff Lukens

The Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People. General Prologue to the Wycliffe Bible in 1384.

Our country and its laws were established on the fundamental belief that our morality emanates from God. While the Constitution begins with the line, “We the people,” it does not contain any religious words. Some people cite this as evidence that America is a secular country. Not so. America has always combined secular government with a society based on religious values.

Many settlers in the 1600s came to what they considered this new promised land seeking religious freedom. They identified with the biblical Jewish Exodus from Egypt because they had left Europe and its values as well. Ours is the only country to identify with many Jewish beliefs, and is why our culture calls itself “Judeo-Christian.” These values include the importance of laws, fighting for justice, and a belief in judgment by loving and forgiving God.

The Founders understood there is a divine order that rises above the human order. By the 1770s, they sought our freedom from the British Crown with reliance upon, what the Declaration of Independence calls, “Nature’s God,” the “Creator,” and “the Supreme Judge of the World.”

The First Amendment was never intended to exclude all references to God from government institutions and public debate. It simply says, “Congress shall not establish a religion or prohibit the free exercise thereof.” The word “establish” meant the creation of a state church, as in the Church of England. It is nonsense to say the founders intended the First Amendment to exclude all religious expression in public places.

They knew that if we, as a people, ever lost our biblical foundation, no amount of Constitutional protection would preserve the republic. They recognized that without a Divine influence, their struggle for freedom would be in vain.

John Adams wrote: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people.”

The Founders also knew the government they were establishing could last only if it was set in a moral framework that only the church provides. They knew that without God there could be no prompting of the conscience. Only those humble enough to admit they are imperfect before God could bring to democracy the tolerance it requires to endure.

In the 1850s, abolitionist minister Theodore Parker frequently used the phrase “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” His sermons and writings inspired many people, including Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address used the phrase as well while affirming the values of human equality espoused in the Bible and in the Declaration of Independence. We now regard that speech as one of the greatest in American history. 

There are countless other examples throughout our history of politicians evoking God’s will or God’s blessings in their speeches. Every president has spoken of them. “The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the Hand of God,” President Kennedy said in his inaugural address. Kennedy’s remarks offended no one then, why should anyone be offended by such remarks now?

As this election year unfolds, the role of religion in society is sure to be discussed. Candidates’ beliefs and endorsements by religious leaders will be scrutinized, as John McCain and Barack Obama have discovered. Religious beliefs may differ, but voters should keep in mind that church and state, though separate, should be mutually supportive. 

The rigidity of the law alone cannot bring order and unity to society. Its foundation rests on the voluntary consent of its citizens. God’s authority and eternal laws are the prerequisites for human rights and democracy. While our justice system often allows us to do as we please, the conscience of believing citizens keeps them from committing what is rash or unjust.

Of course, such talk is enough to make the secularists shudder. But their attempts to suppress all reference of God in public are contrary to what the Founders had in mind. While the Founders did not intend that we have a religious government, it is an exaggeration to declare they wanted all mention of God removed from public speeches, buildings, currency, pledges—or even from high school commencements and football games—as some today would have you believe.

We mandate no belief in this country. We are free to believe or not believe whatever they want. The ACLU and other secularist organizations, however, do not have the right to destroy the norms that have characterized our nation from the beginning. Any mention of God annoys them, but the Constitution does not deny free speech simply because someone is annoyed.

Longer term, the issue is whether our country continues in its founding traditions as “one nation under God,” or becomes a secular one like those in Europe and Asia. If the public at large has anything to say about it, our traditions of freedom of religion and freedom of speech will remain a compatible part of the public debate.

Jeff Lukens is a Featured Writer for The New Media Journal and a Staff Writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc., a non-profit (501c3) coalition of writers and grass-roots media outlets. He can be contacted at HYPERLINK “http://www.jefflukens.com” http://www.jefflukens.com

Posse Comitatus in America
By Melanie K. Wooten

The phrase “posse comitatus” is Latin and translates as “posse of the county”.  In the common law it was defined as:

The power or force of the county.  The entire population of a county above the age of fifteen, which a sheriff may summon to his assistance in certain cases, as to aid him in keeping the peace, in pursuing and arresting felons, etc.— BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY 1162 (6th ed.  1990).

The British historically used their military to assist the civil authorities in times of riot or other large or unusual circumstances when additional manpower was needed.  When the American colonists began to openly disobey tax and customs laws, the British authorities sought assistance from their military forces to enforce law.  Naval vessels were used to catch smugglers at sea, and the army to conduct operations on shore.

A number of the colonists’ complaints are reflected in the Declaration of Independence, and corrected by provisions in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

Constitution, Article I, Section 8 [Congress has power to declare war, raise armies, etc.]

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

Constitution, Articles I and II [Congressional power to raise, govern and pay for an army and navy; President as Commander in Chief; Writ of Habeas Corpus may only be suspended in times of rebellion or invasion (i.e.  Courts can free people held by the military)]

Amendment V [Grand Jury indictment in criminal cases except when serving in the armed forces --- effectively limits citizens being subject to martial law or a military courts-martial].

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

Constitution, Amendment III.  [No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.]

Although Americans did not like the idea of soldiers enforcing the law, it is not prohibited by the Constitution.  The militia has always been a source of manpower for the states to use in times of trouble.  The regular army was used a number of times to enforce the civil law:

1787 Shays Rebellion Massachusetts

1794 Whiskey Rebellion Pennsylvania.

1807 Congress declares the army the enforcer of federal law.

1846 Anti-Catholic Riots in Philadelphia.

1850s "Bloody Kansas” Battles between Free-Staters and pro-slavery forces.

1854 U.S.  Attorney General Caleb Cushing issues an opinion stating that all citizens, including soldiers, are subject to the call of federal authorities as a posse comitatus.  The Army and Navy were then used to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, and return escaped slaves to their owners.

1859 U.S. Marines under Army Colonel Robert E.  Lee capture John Brown at the Harpers Ferry Arsenal.  Brown was turned over to Virginia authorities, tried, and hanged.

1861 1863 - Draft Riots in New York City were put down by troops fresh from the Battle of Gettysburg.

1865 to 1877 - Reconstruction and occupation of the defeated South.

It was the election of 1876 that led to passage of the Posse Comitatus Act.  Rutherford Hayes won the Presidency by only one electoral vote.  Hayes got the electoral college votes in highly disputed elections in three southern states.  President Ulysses S.  Grant had sent federal troops to assist officials in those states as a posse comitatus to supervise the election.

Posse Comitatus Act of 1878

“Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” 18 U.S.C.1385.

Obviously, the original 1878 Act did not mention the Air Force.  Note that the Act does not apply to the Navy, the Marine Corps, or the Coast Guard.  Department of Defense policy and regulations subject the Navy and the Marine Corps to the same posse comitatus restrictions imposed on the Army and Air Force.  The Coast Guard is authorized by law to enforce various federal laws, and can and does routinely make arrests and otherwise enforce the civil law.

Current Posse Comitatus Act Issues

One thing to keep in mind is the difference between the National Guard, the Reserves, and Regular forces.  The National Guard is a state entity, albeit federally funded in large part.  The Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) does not apply to the National Guard when acting as a state organization.  A governor can use the National Guard to control riots.  However, if the National Guard is “federalized” - called into federal service - the PCA would apply.  The Reserve and Regular components of the armed forces are always federal and are always subject to the PCA and implementing regulations.

The PCA has a number of exceptions created by subsequent legislation.  The first allows passive assistance to civilian law enforcement authorities - equipment, supplies, training, information, and technical assistance.  The Congress has also passed a number of laws specifically authorizing the military to enforce certain laws.

The majority of these exceptions will not impact the ordinary citizen.  However, the military is authorized to serve warrants in civil rights cases where state officials refuse to act.

The official U.S. position is that the Constitution specifically authorizes use of military forces:

• "to prevent loss of life or wanton destruction of property and to restore governmental functioning and public order when sudden and unexpected civil disturbances, disaster, or calamities seriously endanger life and property and disrupt normal governmental functions to such an extent that duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation.”

• "to protect Federal property and Federal Government functions when the need for protection exists and duly constituted local authorities are unable or decline to provide adequate protection.” DOD Directive 5525.

The Congress has also expanded the military role in the war on drugs by placing the Department of Defense in charge of the detection and monitoring of aerial and maritime transit of illegal drugs into the United States, including its possessions, territories and commonwealths.  DoD is further tasked with integrating the command, control, communications and technical intelligence assets of the United States that are dedicated to the interdiction of illegal drugs into an effective communications network.

The First Things website carries a provocative essay by Richard John Neuhaus.  The essay explores the contention that, as Anti-Federalists feared in the 1787-89 Constitutional ratification debate, the judiciary has come to be the dominant power in the Federal government.

Without exaggeration, it can be said that most of the activist, anti-traditional measures of government have been judicially imposed.  Those have been predominantly aimed at outlawing Judeo-Christian morality, notably Roe v Wade and measures to banish spiritual religion from education and politics, while encouraging an accelerating descent into the cesspool of sensual gratification.

Such measures were judicially imposed precisely because there never has been sufficient public support for them to gain passage in Congress.  Federal judges have simply legislated what, in their person opinions, the law ought to be.

The effect of judicial activism since the late 1950s has been an unconstitutional establishment of atheistic socialism as the official religion of the United States.

Beginning with Chief Justice John Marshal’s Marbury v Madison decision, the courts have increasingly exercised legislative power, overriding Congress.  In the regard, see also Judicial Activism - Summary of Prior Postings.

The following are key excerpts from the First Things essay:

Budziszewski suggests we should pay more attention to the anti-Federalist writer who styled himself as Brutus and was probably New York’s Judge Robert Yates. Brutus claimed that the Federalists, and Madison in particular, were vastly overestimating the way in which their famous “checks and balances” would keep the judiciary from becoming the controlling power in the new political order.

In “Civilizing Authority,” Budziszewski quotes Henry de Bracton, the thirteenth-century English jurist who declared, Lex facit Regem—the law makes the king, not the king the law. The king is supreme within the system but not over the system. Budziszewski then notes the ways in which the anti-Federalist Brutus was prescient in seeing how, far from the courts being checked by the legislative and executive branches, the two latter branches would acquiesce and even collude in the protection and expansion of government power by letting the judiciary have the last word in saying what the Constitution means.

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Kartik Ariyur takes a careful look at Lee Harris’s criticisms.

Reassessing Rep. Ron Paul’s Policy Positions
By Kartik B. Ariyur

I went through Lee Harris’ article. I don’t think that he has fully comprehended Rep. Paul’s arguments (he probably hasn’t read much beyond the libertarian label). Instead of countering 19th century historian Thomas Buckle, he should try to counter Rep. Paul.
 
I know that the active expression of virtue gives rise to the keenest intelligence—and therefore, when I heard Rep. Paul debating Mayor Giuliani, I studied his positions carefully. Given that he is the only Presidential candidate who has made a serious effort to uphold his Constitutional oath over the years, I believe every reasonable individual should study his positions seriously. On the other hand, when individuals openly violate an oath they take with their hands on Scripture, there is no reason why their positions should be given the benefit of doubt in initial study.

 
Rep. Paul’s position is not of the government not interfering in domestic affairs or for that matter of not conducting any foreign policy. His position rather, is that of upholding his Constitutional oath of office. He would have the Federal government interfere only to ensure equal justice under the law, the protection of free markets and private contracts, and secure the borders (and this is certainly no advocacy of zero government). He said he would go to war only with a Congressional declaration of war (never obtained since World War II), or if there is a clear and present danger.
 
What constitutes a clear and present danger differs from individual to individual. Those with greater faith prefer liberty to material comfort and security—for they recognize that there is never any gain of security through sacrificing liberty (Rep. Paul regularly quotes Benjamin Franklin on this topic). Those with lesser faith want to spend more of their income purchasing insulation rather than insurance (healthcare is a good example of this). Of course, those without very much faith prefer the job security of slavery to the uncertainty that liberty entails, and the pursuit of virtue and excellence that it enforces. For in a free society, one’s rewards are proportional to the value of service rendered to others in that society. Rep. Paul is willing to live with a small probability of a terrorist group acquiring or making a nuclear bomb and detonating it. And besides, he is the only Presidential candidate that believes in national sovereignty (no UN, WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA…), and the protection of borders, and has practical plans to secure the border.
 
If you try in business to get the probability of an unfavorable event to zero, you end up paying a lot, and then expose yourself to several unfavorable events, because you haven’t mitigated all of the other risks and have spent all of your resources mitigating just one possibility. Rep. Paul is weighing the chances of different events—and he believes dependence upon Saudi Arabia (who are building fundamentalist mosques around the world and in the USA with the dollars they earn) and China for the day to day expenses of the Federal government constitutes a greater risk to national security at this time than Iran making a bomb and giving it to terrorist groups. Besides, he wants to let the Israelis destroy Iranian nuclear facilities if they want to—indeed, he was the only Representative in Congress to defend Israel’s destruction of the Osirak reactor in Iraq while Congress and the Reagan administration condemned Israeli self defense. He is clear that the danger posed by Al Qaeda or Iran is not in anyway of the same relative magnitude as that posed by Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. He sees possible economic warfare by China and a monetary crisis as greater threats to security (and I happen to agree). The other more pressing dangers he sees are: the government controlling what ministers can say in the churches with their new legal tools; the institution of a police state which will prevent quick recovery from economic downturns. A police state can be economically efficient and provide a semblance of safety in the short term, but it would also destroy a culture of individuals speaking their minds, leading to a significant slowdown of innovation.
 
As for blowback, any violation of the natural rights of individuals, or offenses to their religious sensitivities, perceived or real, can result in violent retribution by those who take offense. And here, Rep. Paul is merely stating that US foreign policy has contributed to it and is stating that US citizens are better off without the US government using force to protect private commercial interests abroad. Moreover, he said that 9-11 would never have happened if the Unites States had respected the 2nd amendment and private property rights (without the FAA subsidizing the airlines and providing security, the airplanes may well have had cockpit doors and perhaps a gun or taser among the pilots/flight attendants; besides all the airlines would have had different security systems and would have been continuously evolving under competition—making it almost impossible for anyone to hijack). So this is rather consistent—the government violating natural rights at home and giving a perception of violating them abroad causes the problems. Blowback in this sense is the result of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ : whenever natural rights are violated, there are reactions.
 
Of course, this brings up the question of other nations getting cheaper oil because the Unites States does not intervene there. Does protection of oil interests abroad constitute a part of the General Welfare as intended in the Constitution? What if the Soviet Union had taken over the Persian Gulf? Would they have been able to hold on to it? Given that they needed food from the US and Western Europe, would they have tried imposing an oil embargo on the US? Even if they did hold on to it for a few years, wouldn’t the US have gotten along through more local drilling—ANWR and offshore drilling and Canadian oil. Besides, without spending a Trillion dollars abroad each year (2006—if you add up the money given to the World Bank, IMF, EXIM bank, UN, the 700 bases in 130 countries, foreign aid to the likes of Mr. Mugabe…--why do Americans or Europeans think that politicians in developing countries will actually use that money for the welfare of their citizens?), the US would not need the income tax; there would be a lot more prosperity, and an explosion of individual creativity. Clean coal would have long ago become a reality (because of free market competition induced by temporarily high oil prices), and that combined with widespread use of nuclear power would very likely have completely eliminated oil dependence.
 
But then, most aren’t willing to take risks, and freedom is risky, and it takes courage to take risks with your own life or property (unlike the banks or many corporate executives, who are not capitalists because they do not risk their own money—they are politicians). And one cannot have courage without faith in God or a Just Providence.
 
Most of the problems of society whether in the United States or elsewhere arise from a lack of faith—most want insulation, whether from oil supply shocks, or from healthcare costs, or for the cost of education—all of which result in enormous expenditures, whether in foreign military bases or in domestic bureaucracies, which results in the erosion of natural rights. If there were enough individuals with faith in a society, these problems would not arise. And if the number of those with faith becomes large enough again in the United States, there is no doubt that the Constitutional Republic would be restored.
 
To sum up, an individual such as Rep. Paul will be elected President of the United States only when the number of those with faith is significant. In fact, he was skeptical whether there were enough citizens who desired a return to the Rule of Law and limited Constitutional government. While the debate on war brought attention to his candidacy, it is the monetary issue that has energized and propelled support.
 

Gail Collins, editorial page editor of the New York Times, in a December 8 edition op-ed article, reflects liberals’ embrace of mobocracy at the expense of Constitutional government.

She writes:

Romney’s message, which boiled down to let’s-all-be-religious-together, was certainly different from the John Kennedy version, which argued that a candidate’s religion is irrelevant. But then Kennedy was speaking to the country, while Romney had his attention fixed on the approximately 35,000 Iowa religious conservatives who will tip the balance in the first-in-the-nation Republican caucus.

Can I pause here briefly to point out that in New York there are approximately 35,000 people living on some blocks? If my block got to decide the first presidential caucus, I guarantee you we would be as serious about our special role as the folks in Iowa are. And right now Mitt Romney would be evoking the large number of founding fathers who were agnostics.

First, there was no “large number of founding fathers who were agnostics.”

Apart from Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Cornelius Harnett, who were Deists, all 204 founders declared themselves to be Christians (see Religious Affiliation of the Founding Fathers).

Deists, by the way, are not agnostics.  They view all of nature as God’s handiwork.

Second, Ms. Collins’ comment highlights the frightening potential for political tyranny implicit in the move to eliminate the electoral college and to substitute election of the President by popular vote alone.

No presidential candidate would find it profitable to campaign in Iowa or any other state without a million-plus population city.  Presidential campaigns, both primaries and general elections, would concentrate upon the sinks of corruption that are the East and Left Coast urban centers.

Those precincts are dominated by atheistic, materialistic liberal-progressive-socialists, who revere, not the Constitution, but the French Revolution’s destruction of the whole of the social structure, from monarchy and hereditary privilege, to the Catholic Church and private property rights. 

The invariable tendency of liberal-progressive-socialism is political tyranny, as exemplified by the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, in which more than 70,000 French citizens were murdered.  This French innovation in public education was followed by the ascendancy of Napoleon to supreme power and his military subjugation of most of Western Europe to form the French Empire.

In America’s liberal-progressive-socialism, the structure of government is to be shaped by the Marxian class struggle.  The working class must overcome the capitalists and, in the fiery furnace of revolution, transform human nature, enabling the earthly salvation of humanity through the agency of atheistic, materialistic government.  The mild version is Hillary Clinton’s Village.

While Ms. Collins and her New York City confreres, one assumes, advocate the less violent creeping socialism of the English Fabians, the aim is the same: social justice, which means to make everyone equally poor and totally subordinate to Rousseau’s conception of the General Will, as interpreted by intellectual councils.  No doubt Ms. Collins presumes that the Times editorial board will play a leading role in those councils.

The late Irving Howe, one of New York City’s leading socialist theoreticians of the 1950s - 1980s, called this social democracy, the process by which the majority, with the connivance of an activist judiciary, eradicate the protections afforded by the Bill of Rights for individuals against the encroachments of arbitrary, collectivized government.

James Madison, in Federalist No. 10, warned against this sort of social democracy, contrasting it with the form of government to be created by the Constitution:

...it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction [i.e., special interest groups]. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

It must be confessed that in this, as in most other cases, there is a mean, on both sides of which inconveniences will be found to lie. By enlarging too much the number of electors, you render the representatives too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests; as by reducing it too much, you render him unduly attached to these, and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects. The federal Constitution forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures.

Election of the President by the electoral college is based exactly upon this conception, the antithesis of mob rule by ill-formed public opinion.

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