ZGram - 11/23/2004 - "Sobran: How Tyranny Came to America" - Part II

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Mon Nov 22 06:46:09 EST 2004





Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

November 23, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:


[START]

How Tyranny Came to America - Part II

The Declaration of Independence, which underlies the Constitution, 
holds that the rights of the people come from God, and that the 
powers of the government come from the people. Let me repeat that: 
According to the Declaration of Independence, the rights of the 
people come from God, and the powers of the government come from the 
people. Unless you grasp this basic order of things, you'll have a 
hard time understanding the Constitution.

The Constitution was the instrument by which the American people 
granted, or delegated, certain specific powers to the federal 
government. Any power not delegated was withheld, or "reserved." As 
we'll see later, these principles are expressed particularly in the 
Ninth and Tenth Amendments, two crucial but neglected provisions of 
the Constitution.

Let me say it yet again: The rights of the people come from God. The 
powers of government come from the people. The American people 
delegated the specific powers they wanted the federal government to 
have through the Constitution. And any additional powers they wanted 
to grant were supposed to be added by amendment.

It's largely because we've forgotten these simple principles that the 
country is in so much trouble. The powers of the federal government 
have multiplied madly, with only the vaguest justifications and on 
the most slippery pretexts. Its chief business now is not defending 
our rights but taking and redistributing our wealth. It has even 
created its own economy, the tax economy, which is parasitical on the 
basic and productive voluntary economy. Even much of what passes for 
"national defense" is a kind of hidden entitlement program, as was 
illustrated when President George Bush warned some states during the 
1992 campaign that Bill Clinton would destroy jobs by closing down 
military bases. Well, if those bases aren't necessary for our 
defense, they should be closed down.

Now of course nobody in American politics, not even the most 
fanatical liberal, will admit openly that he doesn't care what the 
Constitution says and isn't going to let it interfere with his 
agenda. Everyone professes to respect it -- even the Supreme Court. 
That's the problem. The U.S. Constitution serves the same function as 
the British royal family: it offers a comforting symbol of tradition 
and continuity, thereby masking a radical change in the actual system 
of power.

So the people who mean to do without the Constitution have come up 
with a slogan to keep up appearances: they say the Constitution is a 
"living document," which sounds like a compliment. They say it has 
"evolved" in response to "changing circumstances," etc. They sneer at 
the idea that such a mystic document could still have the same 
meanings it had two centuries ago, or even, I guess, sixty years ago, 
just before the evolutionary process started accelerating with 
fantastic velocity. These people, who tend with suspicious 
consistency to be liberals, have discovered that the Constitution, 
whatever it may have meant in the past, now means -- again, with 
suspicious consistency -- whatever suits their present convenience.

Do liberals want big federal entitlement programs? Lo, the Interstate 
Commerce Clause turns out to mean that the big federal programs are 
constitutional! Do liberals oppose capital punishment? Lo, the ban on 
"cruel and unusual punishment" turns out to mean that capital 
punishment is unconstitutional! Do liberals want abortion on demand? 
Lo, the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments, plus their emanations and 
penumbras, turn out to mean that abortion is nothing less than a 
woman's constitutional right!

Can all this be blind evolution? If liberals were more religious, 
they might suspect the hand of Providence behind it! This marvelous 
"living document" never seems to impede the liberal agenda in any 
way. On the contrary: it always seems to demand, by a wonderful 
coincidence, just what liberals are prescribing on other grounds.

Take abortion. Set aside your own views and feelings about it. Is it 
really possible that, as the Supreme Court in effect said, all the 
abortion laws of all 50 states -- no matter how restrictive, no 
matter how permissive -- had always been unconstitutional? Not only 
that, but no previous Court, no justice on any Court in all our 
history -- not Marshall, not Story, not Taney, not Holmes, not 
Hughes, not Frankfurter, not even Warren -- had ever been recorded as 
doubting the constitutionality of those laws. Everyone had always 
taken it for granted that the states had every right to enact them.

Are we supposed to believe, in all seriousness, that the Court's 
ruling in Roe v. Wade was a response to the text of the Constitution, 
the discernment of a meaning that had eluded all its predecessors, 
rather than an enactment of the current liberal agenda? Come now.

And notice that the parts of this "living document" don't develop 
equally or consistently. The Court has expanded the meaning of some 
of liberalism's pet rights, such as freedom of speech, to absurd 
lengths; but it has neglected or even contracted other rights, such 
as property rights, which liberalism is hostile to.

In order to appreciate what has happened, you have to stand back from 
all the details and look at the outline. What follows is a thumbnail 
history of the Constitution.

In the beginning the states were independent and sovereign. That is 
why they were called "states": a state was not yet thought of as a 
mere subdivision of a larger unit, as is the case now. The universal 
understanding was that in ratifying the Constitution, the 13 states 
yielded a very little of their sovereignty, but kept most of it.

Those who were reluctant to ratify generally didn't object to the 
powers the Constitution delegated to the federal government. But they 
were suspicious: they wanted assurance that if those few powers were 
granted, other powers, never granted, wouldn't be seized too. In The 
Federalist, Hamilton and Madison argued at some length that under the 
proposed distribution of power the federal government would never be 
able to "usurp," as they put it, those other powers. Madison wrote 
soothingly in Federalist No. 45 that the powers of the federal 
government would be "few and defined," relating mostly to war and 
foreign policy, while those remaining with the states would be 
"numerous and indefinite," and would have to do with the everyday 
domestic life of the country. The word usurpation occurs numberless 
times in the ratification debates, reflecting the chief anxiety the 
champions of the Constitution had to allay. And as a final assurance, 
the Tenth Amendment stipulated that the powers not "delegated" to the 
federal government were "reserved" to the separate states and to the 
people.

But this wasn't enough to satisfy everyone. Well-grounded fears 
persisted. And during the first half of the nineteenth century, 
nearly every president, in his inaugural message, felt it appropriate 
to renew the promise that the powers of the federal government would 
not be exceeded, nor the reserved powers of the states transgressed. 
The federal government was to remain truly federal, with only a few 
specified powers, rather than "consolidated," with unlimited powers.

[END]

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