—by Odysseus
Today, the second to last line of defense for the Republic collapsed. This regiment has never had the strongest reputation for bravery nor has it enjoyed a storied history of holding the line against the growth of absolutist, omnipotent government. In fact, its history is speckled with tales of where it broke and fled, abandoning the cause of limited government it was created to defend. However, this morning, the yellow stripe down the back of the United States Supreme Court shines like neon.
It is beyond the scope of this article to detail the myriad ways in which “Obamacare” infinitely expands the powers of unlimited governance and how it opens the door for absolutist control over the most minute aspects of our daily lives. However, all of the arguments can be summed up as follows. Imagine if your health insurance company commanded the police and could utilize them to punish any behavior you engaged in that might cost them money. Every aspect of our lives will be dictated by some Washington bureaucrat. It is no mistake that I use the word bureaucrat because it will not be elected representatives who detail each aspect or decision of the rules to implement upon us, to bring us into line with what is deemed “best” for us. They have delegated that absolutist power to technocrats buried in agencies. The rules of your life will be written and monitored by a bureaucrat with eyes that are a toxic blend of those of an insurance adjuster and an IRS investigator whose objective is to keep your life from costing the government money and whose dictate holds the weight of the inflexible rule of law. Your happiness or comfort are not a consideration.
The Founding Fathers, having just fled a continent steeped in ideas of “the divine right of kings” and “noblesse oblige” and knowing how, in practice, this inevitably became governance of avarice and arrogance and ruling for the benefit of themselves, set out to try and create something different. They saw that the only way to protect each man’s best interest was to allow him to do that for himself. Governments made up of men could not be trusted to look after the best interests of the individuals, but at least a strictly limited government couldn’t hamper men’s abilities to take care of themselves. Throughout history, when the tax-man, sheriff, herald, or social worker shows up at the working man’s door, their words are full of niceties about society’s benefit, but they end up doing what benefits the rulers and hampers the life of the homesteader. With recent knowledge of the absolutist king and self-serving nobility, they followed the opposing philosophy being developed in their age of liberty as the best and most just antidote to the human condition. Acknowledging that all governments lust for absolute power and an remorseless quest to turn “citizens” into “subjects”, they set up layers of defenses to keep government in check. They forged chains to restrain the monster, ranks of infantry to defend the principle of liberty. Over the last 200+ years, those chains have been systematically broken and each rank of infantry has fallen until one thin line is left.
The founders limited the power of the government in Washington by strictly defining and limiting its powers in the written contract we call “The Constitution”. They established the United States Supreme Court which could resolve issues with the Washington government, and, even in their time, took on the task of enforcing the terms of that contract. They divided the power of government between Washington and leaving independent governments in charge of each of the colonies making them states in a federal system. The founders divided the new parliament which they called “Congress” into two bodies, and they further empowered the states by giving them a say in the conduct of the elites in the Washington DC parliament and by giving those state governments sole power to appoint their representatives in the upper house of that parliament, the “Senate”. This was so that legislation could not be passed without approval of those state governments. They made all the new elites subject to election at regular, frequent, intervals so that the citizens could remove them from office and replace them if they were failing to live within the confines of their designated powers.
However, those layers of defense of liberty have not proven strong enough. Some have fallen because they were used in defense of ideas that were indefensible. Some have been merely allowed to expire for mere expediency because the citizenry has failed to bear in mind the absolutism they were built to protect against. The protections of Federalism fell at Appomattox when the states fought the civil war on the principle that the government in Washington did not have the constitutional power to make unilateral, fundamental changes in the property laws and economy of the states without their consent. They chose to use their constitutional rights to defend the immoral institution of slavery and lost their constitutional protection in the process. Federal supremacy was firmly established at the bayonet point. Seldom in U.S. history has the coercive power of Washington been made so blatantly. The power of the States was further destroyed and the power of the government in Washington was further consolidated when the Senators were changed to have their mandate come from direct election, rather than being dependent upon the goodwill of the state governments. The States had already been de-clawed, but now they were muzzled as well. During times of economic woe or warfare, the citizens easily surrendered much of their sovereignty and self-reliance, vastly empowering government for the sake of convenience or false security, and the defensive line for the Constitution, the United States Supreme Court was AWOL, interpreting the Constitution to mean things that were perpendicular to both its language and historically well known intent. The Court has long been the most desultory of the guardians of the social contract that is the U.S. Constitution, as it has proven an adept verbal and mental contortionist to justify expansions of government action far beyond anything imaginable to the founders, so compromise and cowardice from that source is no shock.
Of all the safeguards the founders placed to limit government to being a servant of the citizens, not an absolutist master of its trembling subjects (for their own good of course), only one still stands. It is the thin line that is the regularly scheduled popular election. The United States will hold such an election this November, 2012, and it is the only remaining safeguard of liberty and limited government. All others have fallen or fled the field. This will not be the fair, open election our soldiers fought and bled for in Iraq and Afghanistan, where actual living citizens with proof of identity showed up to actual voting places on the scheduled day and time to cast a secret ballot only once with a finger dipped in iodine to prove participation and that the vote was cast with no coercive power looking over their shoulder. This last line (last gasp) of liberty will be cast by unsecured “mail in” ballots, filled out by no one knows whom, under utterly unknown conditions, and merely accepted with signature. It will be cast at voting stations where the United States Justice Department is suing the various states to prevent them from checking the identity or even proof of eligibility of the “voter”. It is taking place where the votes will be only electronically counted on “hack able” computers, and tallied by a private company operating out of a foreign country (Spain), protected from effective oversight. It will be covered by a news media, open in its support for the party and candidate presently holding power, seeking to award unlimited, absolute, unchallenged power over the citizenry who don’t even realize themselves to be mere “subjects”.
Sorry, Mr. Franklin, the Republic was good, but we hadn’t the wisdom or bravery to keep it. The serfs will be back at the plow on their lord’s land.
