Constitution @ MindSay 
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I just saw here on a blog a video with the soundtrack of Let The Sunshine In from HAIR. I began to weep from a sense of hope. However, the following blog is a result of my contemplation over and about the current sorry State of the Union of AUSPONA. This effort following began as a reply to blog posting just mentioned.
I am nauseated and my stomach aches with a possible ulcer developing over thoughts of returning to such a cesspool of ignorance and intolerance.
Still, return I will! I will return to work on the presidential campaign for The Brave Barack Obama. I have no illusion that a President Barack Obama will be a leader in a politically progressive movement. I do not have such an Illusion. He and others of the Democrat and supposed "liberal" persuasion will have to be pushed to the front of the movement, to the front of a, I hope, clamorous parade toward enlightened progressivism and out of the shadows of fraud and deceit and away from Dick Cheney's and Karl Rove's "dark side" of evil, sinister politics.
After Obama is inaugurated my mission, my work and my INTENT to see the land of the free and the home of the brave a place where one's pursuit of happiness will not be considered a crime or immoral due to the power and dictates of fudkers [Foppish Uneducated Demented Knee-jerk Egregious Religious Sons-of bitches] will continue. Such, my work in earnest must and will continue! I won't back off or back down.
I will not cease in my INTENT and earnest work toward the time to come when there is a comprehensive enabling, freeing and unrestricted PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS AMENDENT added to The Constitution of AUSPONA.
Yes, the video, Let The Sunshine In brought on hope in me and therefore weeping from me. Thank you for the posting left for me and others to find and see.
Sincerely in pursuit of happiness and freedom from fascist tyranny in AUSPONA,
Mr. David Tecumseh Schmidt, MSW '82 University of Michigan Tecumseh High School '59
AND NOW THE APOCALYPSE!
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[PLEASE TAKE NOTICE: All entries are in descending order by the date(s) they were posted, and in some cases in ascending order by the date(s) written.]
The American flag, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights have now been torn to shreads. "Rest In Peace (RIP)", Freedom and Liberty. RIP, "the experiment in democracy".
We have watched in dumb amazement (those of us who have realized what is really going on, that is) as for the past five years the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution, liberty, and freedom have been step by step, systematically eviscerated, first with the so-called "USA P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act (those who criticize it supposedly aren't patriots)", and then with the latest afront on domestic freedom and liberty, the "Military Commissions Act of 2006," also known among other names as the "Detainee Bill", passed by an almost completely cowed Senate in the dead of night on Friday, the 29th day of September, 2006.
Now NONE OF US is safe. Not civil libertarians, not dissenters, not protesters of even the mildest variety (as virtually everything is now considered "terrorism"), and not even those blind worshippers of the U.S. government or its agents; because, if someone decides they don't like you, or gets jealous or resentful of you, all they need do is CLAIM you criticized the government, defended "rights", felt that certain force used against someone was excessive, or committed some other equally innocent "perceived threatening conduct" (some of the federal government's favorite wording that they now use for those who exercise their inalienable, immutable, inviolable First Amendment rights of Freedom of Speech, Belief and Dissent to disagree with their government), and you will very likely be "disappeared" into custody, stripped of U.S. citizenship, and be interro(r)gated, intimidated, humiliated, terrorized, tortured, and/or very possibly murdered, all without "Due Process of Law" under the Fifth and Fourteen Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, or a fair, unbiased hearing, access to an impartial lawyer, court, judge, or jury; and, if you live through this process, you could be kept secretly imprisoned forever without access to ANYONE important to you. This is NO exageration WHATSOVER; and, if "We, The People" don't repeal this horrific law, or the U.S. Supreme court doesn't overturn it, this is the END of our Republic, of Democracy, and of ALL Liberty and Freedom in "the land of the free, and the home of the brave", and THE END OF ALL protection(s) from a capricious, out of control, dictatorial government.
So, you see, the inviolable freedoms and liberties that we have so taken for granted, and that most Americans now have so little understanding of the supreme importance of, much to our grave detriment, were not overturned by "Islamo-Fascist terrorists", nor by protesting, dissenting U.S. citizens, nor journalists critical of the government, nor any other equally illusory, contrived, manufactured, engineered, and/or U.S.-government-created, state-sponsored "enemy(ies)", agents, assets, patsies, bogeymen, infiltra(i)tors, disinfo-agents, detractors, distractors, naysayers, actors, shills, trolls, hackers, informers, spies, entrappers, and/or agents provocateur, etc., but this act of true terrorism was carried out by the very people in our own government who are literally sworn to uphold and protect the U.S. Constitution "from all enemies, foreign AND DOMESTIC", including from THEMSELVES and other tyrannical, 'absolutely despotic' (to loosely quote the Declaration of Independence) forces in that very government; and the vast majority of them have COMPLETELY failed us and thrown EVERY SINGLE PERSON in this great country OF OURS into limitless danger and threat(s) by that government to the very safety of EACH AND EVERY ONE OF OUR LIVES.
The following is very likely the best article on this subject that has thus far been written, at least as far as I am aware; and, therefore, I share it with you at this time to further clarify just how truly catastrophic, life-threatening and consequential the situation we are now in actually is for every single man, woman, child, and little baby in this entire country, and ultimately in this entire world. The world-renowned True Journalist who wrote this great article, Chris Floyd, is also a True Hero and an exceedingly courageous human being for writing such an accurate article of warning to world-citizens planet-wide, and such an accurate portrayal of the extremely dire situation the U.S. and the world are in as a direct result of the subject matter it covers, as follows:
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FATAL VISION: THE DEEPER EVIL
BEHIND THE DETAINEE BILL
("Big Brother" Government
Is Now Here In The U.S.)
By Chris Floyd, T.O. UK Reporter
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday, 3 October 2006
[Copyright (c) 2006 in the
U.S.A. and Internationally
by t r u t h o u t (.org),
Empire Burlesque (Chris' blog)
and/or Chris Floyd.
All rights reserved.]
(This is a slightly revised version of a piece that first appeared on the Oct. 2nd edition of Truthout.org .)
There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country -- if the people lose their confidence in themselves -- and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.
--- Walt Whitman
I.
It was a dark hour indeed (on Friday, September 29th, 2006) when the United States Senate voted to end the constitutional republic and transform the country into a "Leader-State," giving the president and his agents the power to capture, torture and imprison forever anyone -- American citizens included -- whom they arbitrarily decide is an "enemy combatant." This also includes those who merely give "terrorism" some kind of "support," defined so vaguely that many experts say it could encompass legal advice, innocent gifts to charities or even political opposition to US government policy within its draconian strictures.
All of this is bad enough -- a sickening and cowardly surrender of liberty not seen in a major Western democracy since the Enabling Act passed by the German Reichstag in March 1933. But it is by no means the full extent of our degradation. In reality, the darkness is deeper, and more foul, than most people imagine. For in addition to the dictatorial powers of seizure and torment given by Congress on Thursday to George W. Bush -- powers he had already seized and exercised for five years anyway, even without this fig leaf of sham legality -- there is a far more sinister imperial right that Bush has claimed -- and used -- openly, without any demur or debate from Congress at all: ordering the "extrajudicial killing" of anyone on earth that he and his deputies decide -- arbitrarily, without charges, court hearing, formal evidence, or appeal -- is an "enemy combatant."
That's right; from the earliest days of the Terror War -- September 17, 2001, to be exact -- Bush has claimed the peremptory power of life and death over the entire world. If he says you're an enemy of America, you are. If he wants to imprison you and torture you, he can. And if he decides you should die, he'll kill you. This is not hyperbole, liberal paranoia, or "conspiracy theory": it's simply a fact, reported by the mainstream media, attested by senior administration figures, recorded in official government documents -- and boasted about by the president himself, in front of Congress and a national television audience.
And although the Republic-snuffing act just passed by Congress does not directly address Bush's royal prerogative of murder, it nonetheless strengthens it and enshrines it in law. For the measure sets forth clearly that the designation of an "enemy combatant" is left solely to the executive branch; neither Congress nor the courts have any say in the matter. When this new law is coupled with the existing "Executive Orders" authorizing "lethal force" against arbitrarily designated "enemy combatants," it becomes, quite literally, a license to kill -- with the seal of Congressional approval.
How arbitrary is this process by which all our lives and liberties are now governed? Dave Niewert at Orcinus has unearthed a remarkable admission of its totally capricious nature. In an December 2002 story in the Washington Post, then-Solicitor General Ted Olson described the anarchy at the heart of the process with admirable frankness:
"[There is no] requirement that the executive branch spell out its criteria for determining who qualifies as an enemy combatant," Olson argues.
"'There won't be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this,' Olson said in the interview. 'There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances.'"
In other words, what is safe to do or say today might imperil your freedom or your life tomorrow. You can never know if you are on the right side of the law, because the "law" is merely the whim of the Leader and his minions: their "instincts" determine your guilt or innocence, and these flutterings in the gut can change from day to day. This radical uncertainty is the very essence of despotism -- and it is now, formally and officially, the guiding principle of the United States government.
And underlying this edifice of tyranny is the prerogative of presidential murder. Perhaps the enormity of this monstrous perversion of law and morality has kept it from being fully comprehended. It sounds unbelievable to most people: a president ordering hits like a Mafia don? But that is our reality, and has been for five years. To overcome what seems to be a widespread cognitive dissonance over this concept, we need only examine the record -- a record, by the way, taken entirely from publicly available sources in the mass media. There's nothing secret or contentious about it, nothing that any ordinary citizen could not know -- if they choose to know it.
II.
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush signed a "presidential finding" authorizing the CIA to kill those individuals whom he had marked for death as terrorists. This in itself was not an entirely radical innovation; Bill Clinton's White House legal team had drawn up memos asserting the president's right to issue "an order to kill an individual enemy of the United States in self-defense," despite the legal prohibitions against assassination, the Washington Post reported in October 2001. The Clinton team based this ruling on the "inherent powers" of the "Commander in Chief" -- that mythical, ever-elastic construct that Bush has evoked over and over to defend his own unconstitutional usurpations.
The practice of "targeted killing" was apparently never used by Clinton, however; despite the pro-assassination memos, Clinton followed the traditional presidential practice of bombing the hell out of a bunch of civilians whenever he wanted to lash out at some recalcitrant leader or international outlaw -- as in his bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in 1998, or the two massive strikes he launched against Iraq in 1993 and 1998, or indeed the death and ruin that was deliberately inflicted on civilian infrastructure in Serbia during that nation's collective punishment for the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic. Here, was following the example set by George H.W. Bush, who killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Panamanian civilians in his illegal arrest of Manuel Noriega in 1988, and Ronald Reagan, who killed Moamar Gadafy's adopted 2-year-old daughter and 100 other civilians in a punitive strike on Libya in 1986.
Junior Bush, of course, was about to outdo all those blunderbuss strokes with his massive air attacks on Afghanistan, which killed thousands of civilians, and the later orgy of death and destruction in Iraq. But he also wanted the power to kill individuals at will. At first, the assassination program was restricted to direct orders from the president aimed at specific targets, as suggested by the Clinton memos. But soon the arbitrary power of life and death was delegated to agents in the field, after Bush signed orders allowing CIA assassins to kill targets without seeking presidential approval for each attack, the Washington Post reported in December 2002. Nor was it necessary any longer for the president to approve each new name added to the target list; the "security organs" could designate "enemy combatants" and kill them as they saw fit. However, Bush was always keen to get the details about the agency's wetwork, administration officials assured the Post.
The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of an American citizen, along with several foreign nationals, by a CIA drone missile in Yemen on November 3, 2002. A similar strike occurred on December 4, 2005, when a CIA missile destroyed a house and purportedly killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a suspected al-Qaeda figure. But the only bodies found at the site were those of two children, the houseowner's son and nephew, Reuters reports. The grieving father denied any connection to terrorism. An earlier CIA strike on another house missed Rabia but killed his wife and children, Pakistani officials reported.
However, there is simply no way of knowing at this point how many people have been killed by American agents operating outside all judicial process. Most of the assassinations are carried out in secret: quietly, professionally. As a Pentagon document uncovered by the New Yorker in December 2002 revealed, the death squads must be "small and agile," and "able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to ... enter countries surreptitiously."
What's more, there are strong indications that the Bush administration has outsourced some of the contracts to outside operators. In the original Post story about the assassinations -- in those first heady weeks after 9/11, when administration officials were much more open about "going to the dark side," as Cheney boasted on national television -- Bush insiders told the paper that "it is also possible that the instrument of targeted killings will be foreign agents, the CIA's term for nonemployees who act on its behalf.
Here we find a deadly echo of the "rendition" program that has sent so many captives to torture pits in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere -- including many whose innocence has been officially established, such as the Canadian businessman Maher Arar, German national Khalid El-Masri, UK native Mozzam Begg and many others. They had been subjected to imprisonment and torture despite their innocence, because of intelligence "mistakes." How many have fallen victim to Bush's hit squads on similar shaky grounds?
So here we are. Congress has just entrenched the principle of Bush's "unitary executive" dictatorship into law; and it is this principle that undergirds the assassination program. As I wrote in December, it's hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an "enemy." It's hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is exactly what the great and good in America have done.
But this should come as no surprise. They have known about it all along, and have not only countenanced Bush's death squad, but even celebrated it. I'll end with one more passage from that December article, which sadly is even more apt for our degraded reality today. It was a depiction of the one of the most revolting scenes in recent American history: Bush's state of the Union address in January 2003, delivered live to the nation during the final warmongering frenzy before the rape of Iraq:
Trumpeting his successes in the Terror War, Bush claimed that "more than 3,000 suspected terrorists" had been arrested worldwide -- "and many others have met a different fate." His face then took on the characteristic leer, the strange, sickly half-smile it acquires whenever he speaks of killing people: "Let's put it this way. They are no longer a problem."
In other words, the suspects -- and even Bush acknowledged they were only suspects -- had been murdered. Lynched. Killed by agents operating unsupervised in that shadow world where intelligence, terrorism, politics, finance and organized crime meld together in one amorphous, impenetrable mass. Killed on the word of a dubious informer, perhaps: a tortured captive willing to say anything to end his torment, a business rival, a personal foe, a bureaucrat looking to impress his superiors, a paid snitch in need of cash, a zealous crank pursuing ethnic, tribal or religious hatreds -- or any other purveyor of the garbage data that is coin of the realm in the shadow world.
Bush proudly held up this hideous system as an example of what he called "the meaning of American justice." And the assembled legislators ... applauded. Oh, how they applauded! They roared with glee at the leering little man's bloodthirsty, B-movie machismo. They shared his sneering contempt for law -- our only shield, however imperfect, against the blind, brute, ignorant, ape-like force of raw power. Not a single voice among them was raised in protest against this tyrannical machtpolitik: not that night, not the next day, not ever.
And now, in September 2006, we know they will never raise that protest. Oh, a few Democrats stood up at the last minute on Thursday to posture nobly about the dangers of the detainee bill -- but only when they knew that it was certain to pass, when they had already given up their one weapon against it, the filibuster, in exchange for permission from their Republican masters to offer amendments that they also knew would fail. Had they been offering such speeches since October 2001, when the lineaments of Bush's presidential tyranny were already clear -- or at any other point during the systematic dismantling of America's liberties over the past five years -- these fine words might have had some effect.
Now the killing will go on. The tyranny that has entered upon the country will grow stronger, more brazen; the darkness will deepen. Whitman, thou should'st be living at this hour; America has need of thee. (Subtitle and/or emphasis added by Wolf Britain.)
Chris Floyd is an American journalist residing in the UK. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times, and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium
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Every election year, the only two people the media ever wants to talk about are the two major party candidates. The Democrats push out yet another rich martini-swilling progressive while the Republicans yell "next" and present the next rich scary-looking old man in line. During the primaries, each candidate becomes a champion of their party's values. The Democrats are all super-liberal and super-progressive, promising vast sweeping social reforms and government programs galore. The Republicans are all real conservatives, ready to bring this country back to a smaller government and more open market. Then, the primaries end, the candidates are chosen, and both start sounding a lot more like each other. We have John McCain being an environmentalist, and Barack Obama citing "safety of the American people" when he votes to give the government more warrant-less wiretapping powers. Before you know it, Obama will be an Iraq War supporter.
It's clear that the worst time to determine a politician's loyalties is an election year. Pandering to every voter interest possible inevitably leads to contradiction and policy "flip-flopping." What's also clear is that when no one is trying to garner votes, the party lines are substantially blurred. The Republicans and Democrats work essentially as one party in the "off season." As a result, nothing ever changes.
People do recognize this. Many do not get involved in politics, citing "they're all the same" as the reason. So why is it, election after election, these same people pick the person they hate over the person they really hate? Why don't they vote for a third-party candidate?
The reason is because people love to be right, and too often, voters will vote for who they think will win rather than who they like. Voting for a third party candidate is seen as throwing a vote away, or worse yet, giving it to the enemy. Many cite Ralph Nader's 2000 campaign as an example. Nader is blamed for Gore's defeat because those making the claim assume that if Nader wasn't running, all of his votes would have gone to Gore. Many of them probably would have, but there is also one other important fact: Gore won the popular vote in Florida and thus the 2000 election. It was the supreme court that made the determination that Bush won. Nader's votes wouldn't have tipped the scales because they were already tipped in Gore's favor.
But even if that sentiment was true, it was the sentiment itself that made it so. It's not impossible for a third party candidate to win an election. Ross Perot, and independent candidate, actually polled as the winner in the 1992 presidential elections for a short time. Perhaps if he hadn't dropped out of the race, we would have had 8 years of President Perot in the 90's.
Many are fed up with the one political party that masquerades as two come election time, but are still drawn to vote for it when the crucial moment comes. Some may be genuinely fooled (yet again) by campaign rhetoric, but the vast majority I feel continue voting for the same corrupt system because they get caught up in the black-and-white, us-vs-them mentality. To them, they may not like the candidate they're voting for, but they really hate the other candidate. They feel the risk is too great to vote third party. The problem is, once again, that voting for a major party because you don't believe a third party candidate can win is precisely why third party candidates don't win.
I was a victim of the same reasoning. As an Obama supporter, I began to excuse more and more minor shifts in direction he exhibited. When the controversy over FISA started, I adopted a "wait and see" attitude. Obama promised us he was different. He wasn't just another politician, and he was true to his ideals. I trusted his words against FISA (including those against telecom immunity) meant that when given the opportunity to act against it, he would do so.
When Obama had the chance to seize that opportunity, he changed his mind, and instead supported the FISA bill in the end. That's when I realized that he is, in fact, just another Republi-crat. Now that he's not courting the left wing, his politics are diving strictly to the center, where he believes he will get more votes. Now he's starting to talk about safety, and how great of a reason it is to give the government unprecedented spying abilities and let large corporations off the hook for violating the law.
On the conservative side, McCain has long been a disappointment to conservatives. His record as a conservative is paltry at best, and often throws in with Democrats in order to propose very liberal (to the conservatives anyway) legislation.
As I thought about these things, I realized that there is a battle between two political wills in this country, but not between the two that most people think. No, the battle is between the Republi-crat establishment and the minor party rebellion. These parties, whether it be the Libertarian, Green, or Constitution Party are the only ones that are advocating real, sweeping change. You want an interesting debate? I would much rather see Ralph Nader go up against Bob Barr than watch Barack Obama and John McCain pretend to disagree with each other. I know where Nader and Barr stand. They actually have sharply different ideas on how to run this country. There are more issues at stake than just pro-war vs. anti-war.
To anyone reading this who is reading this, who is fed up with Obama and disappointed by McCain, I beg you to seriously consider your political alternatives. Really think about what the purpose of an election is, and above all, remember that in order for a third party candidate to really win this time, it takes your, yes your vote. Ignore the polls, ignore the media. They're bought and paid for by the political institution. They'll ignore Barr, Nader, McKinney, or Baldwin no matter what the polls show. Sure, they throw the rebels a bone once in a while, but the vast majority of their time is on the candidates who are part of the system. I'm proud that I'll be voting this November for Ralph Nader, because I know I'll be voting for real hope and real change from someone that has actually changed things for the better. I hope you can feel the same way when you pull the lever this November, regardless of who your candidate is.
Today is the official release date for Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush (Random House/Crown Forum), the book I wrote with Kevin Gutzman, the New York Times bestselling author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution.
In a sense, our book states the obvious: the United States government today is restrained not by the Constitution but simply by a sense of what it can get away with.
But ours is not the standard right-wing lament about the emasculation of the Constitution at the hands of liberal judges, though such judges receive in our pages none of the superstitious reverence Americans are taught to have for the judiciary. (Mencken once described a judge as merely a law student who graded his own examination papers.) To the contrary, we suggest that all three branches of the federal government, either separately or in collusion, have been responsible for turning the Constitution into just a museum piece, and that conservatives and liberals alike have much to answer for as well.
To hear the Left tell it, the Bush administration is a strange aberration in our history. But bad as the Bush administration is, it is not an aberration, and most of its deformations of the Constitution enjoy bipartisan support. The Democrats have made and will doubtless continue to make equally bold claims for presidential war powers, and Bill Clinton sought measures similar to the Patriot Act in the 1990s.
As I wrote in last year’s 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask, "The philosophy of an activist, vigorous executive possessing inherent powers that override congressional prerogative is not a recent development at all, but has been an integral part of the thinking of most of the presidents our historians teach us to admire. Demonizing only one president, as the left is by and large still doing in 2008, is far too timid. So many others merit the same treatment."
We show that Harry Truman’s seizure of the steel mills in 1952, for which the Supreme Court rebuked him (though not as sweepingly as the standard account suggests), was based on the same philosophy of the presidency that nearly all twentieth-century presidents held, and was likewise no aberration at all.
Woodrow Wilson is another good example, for more reasons than we can chronicle in this book. As Bill Kauffman puts it, Wilson makes George W. Bush look like a pro bono lawyer for the ACLU. In tandem with draconian penalties for the most harmless statements about the Great War, voluntary enforcement agencies with names like the Sedition Slammers, the Terrible Threateners, and the Boy Spies of America sprang up across the country. Eugene V. Debs made the best of his situation, collecting a million votes for president in the 1920 election while in prison for giving a speech. (A popular campaign button read, "For President: Convict No. 9653.") All three branches of government heartily approved.
Now people who draw the conclusions that our book does in the cases relating to race can be assured of smears and character assassination. The intentions of anyone advancing them are assumed to be bad, so their reasoning is ignored. That’s how our society works, and media and education establishments populated by cowards and ignoramuses keep it that way. Likewise, writers critical of President Bush and the constitutional theories of those under him will be accused of "aiding the terrorists." Rational discussion of what the Constitution actually says, regardless of whom it offends, almost never occurs in such an environment. Every significant appeal to the Constitution, supposedly the fundamental law of the land, is a thought crime of one kind or another. That seems to be just the way the political and media establishments like it.
We also cover the issue of presidential signing statements, by which President Bush has pledged to interpret various laws in ways that are at odds with congressional intent, or not to enforce them at all. Such statements often go overlooked, buried in collections of official documents. But Bush has used the signing statement to challenge twice as many legislative provisions as all previous presidents combined. (And no, he’s not challenging them because they’re unconstitutional and he’s such a constitutional stickler.)
We show the alleged constitutional power to draft people into the armed forces to be without foundation; one of the arguments the Court used to uphold it was that all the cool countries were doing it – Russian, Austrian, German, Japanese, and Chinese emperors drafted their citizens, after all. Surely the U.S. can’t be "one of them loser countries," to borrow a phrase from Moe Szyslak.
We likewise cover forced busing, medical marijuana (the federal government’s arguments against it have to be read to be believed), the confiscation of Americans’ gold in 1933, and the federal government’s dishonest treatment of church-state relations. We even tread upon the third rail of American jurisprudence: Brown v. Board of Education. And lots more.
It’s interesting and revealing to consider the two figures whose blurbs we feature on the back cover. One is Judge Andrew Napolitano, an avid reader of this site who is also senior judicial analyst for Fox News. The other is Kirkpatrick Sale, who is resolutely a man of the Left but who still favors the kinds of values the Left once believed in, including Jeffersonian decentralism and a distrust of bureaucratic solutions to human problems. Both men are equally aghast at what our one-party system has done to the Constitution, and to American freedom along with it.
Publishers Weekly almost seems to like the book, which briefly made us think there might be something wrong with it, but we finally decided just to accept its respectful review gracefully. Lysander Spooner once said that he believed "that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize." At the same time, he could not exonerate the Constitution, for it "has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist."
Harsh words, yes. But there is a contradiction at the heart of the very idea of constitutional government, that makes a constitution’s perversion all but inevitable. How can an institution be restrained by a document that it has a monopoly on interpreting? The problem becomes all the worse when that institution also (practically speaking) monopolizes the education of children, who are taught that "flexible" interpretation of the Constitution by their betters is perfectly normal and just what the American people signed on for.
That, in a nutshell, is what Who Killed the Constitution? is all about. A better question, in light of all this, might involve who killed the Articles of Confederation.
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