Littlestuff Weekender-2-12-2011

From Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States continued:

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

We’re still in D.C. today and will be returning late tonight and arrive home early tomorrow.

When we finally recoup our energy after traveling to the energy-sapping capitol of the nation, we’ll begin our starter seeds.

So many people are filled with hope and encouragement following the GOP’s November slam dunk for the House of Representatives. So far, we’ve seen a promised $100 billion cut reduced to $32 billion, a procedural screw-up on the Patriot Act, and Boehner’s proposal for a 5 per cent cut next year which will allow the debt to grow larger. This year is only six weeks old. More to come. Go to www.LP.org  and www.LPO.org  and find a group near you. Minimum government, maximum freedom…the Libertarian mantra.

A friend whom I haven’t seen in several years was found dead in his home. Bruce was 10 years younger than I am, but was an effective and enthusiastic teacher when I took his classes in grad school. It’s a sad time, and I wish the best for his family and loved ones in Georgia and Ohio. RIP, Bruce, and may your golf game improve on the heavenly links.

The weather forecast is quite promising for the next several days. It appears as if we might get some serious melting of our mounds of snow.

Ohio Speaker of the House, Bill Batchelder, seems to have his caucus headed in the right direction. I do hope that Bill and the gang keep “the pedal to the metal” and dismantle the Nanny State bolt by bolt, piece by piece.

If those of you who are Tea Party, Patriot, Liberty Group or 912 Project activists are serious about getting our government back under control, then you will begin NOW to run candidates in EVERY Congressional and State Legislative primary in 2012. The current dancing by the Republican Congress has illustrated that you cannot expect a leopard or a career politician to change his/her spots. Each one of them must be challenged in order to hold them accountable.

Despite all the moaning about the Chinese being the source of so much of the country’s borrowing, they only represent somewhere between 11% and 16% of the total. The largest group that holds U.S. debt is the bondholders who live in the United States. A default or a hyper-inflationary move by the government to escape or devalue the debt would hammer those bondholders two ways. They would be hurt as debt holders and as taxpayers. No good deed goes unpunished.

Here’s a scenario that many of you may recognize. When I return from D.C., Frosty will go crazy because he will be so thrilled to see me, then he’ll pout for several hours to punish me for leaving him. We’ll be back Monday with a new week of Littlestuff-minoosha.

Comment:  cearlwriting@hotmail.com   or   www.littlestuff-minoosha.blogspot.com

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Freedom Fighting

In mid-December I wrote four columns about the citizens’ reactions to an overzealous repressive government. They were: “Willful Submission”…a discussion of a nation’s meek submission to its autocratic government; “A Salvation Message” which explored the role of nullification as a remedy; “Secession as a Strategy” developed the thesis for leaving the Union if the nullification efforts were inadequate; and “Sedition Sentiment” examined the justification for active resistance when a government has clearly exceeded its mandate. While I didn’t receive a lot of feedback on those columns, I am aware that they were written before many of you began reading “Littlestuff-minoosha.” I have, however, been thinking about sedition as the final chapter. It is not,….and it cannot be the end result. Seditious activity will incur the wrath of the state apparatus, and thus, must either escalate or be extinguished.

It seems somewhat ironic to me that as this piece is being distributed, I am in Washington, D.C., among the marble and granite monuments and buildings that reflect the power of this once glorious and free nation. Even here surrounded by cherished evidences of our wonderful history, I am attempting to cope with a suffocating sense of decay. Power is palpable here, but it doesn’t feel as if it is necessarily benign. People scatter about like mice in a granary when the door is opened, and one wonders if they know what they’re doing….or is it merely a charade? They seek to justify their roles by sucking the blood of liberty from the rest of us. Political and regulatory vampires on power trips. Oh my!

One of the great strengths of the United States of America is that we have attracted freedom-loving people from every nation and culture on the planet. They have brought their traditions and their ingenuity with them as they sought liberty and opportunity. Yet the nameless faces who are toiling behind these marble walls are seeking to squeeze us into a molded “sameness.” Equal opportunity was promised at the Founding, but the government class yearns for equal outcomes. They expect us to endorse their goals, but we must resist them if we are to be free. Seeking a solution to this problem, I sought the counsel of some learned, wise men:

hen in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security

From the Declaration of Independence of the United States.

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Please State

Has the United States become a police state? It seems rather ironic to me that as we have the continual assaults on our Second Amendment rights, an increasing number of agencies, bureaus and task forces at all levels of government are armed and wield police powers. Pick any three-letter agency within the federal bureaucracy, and you will find a division or department that holds an investigative portfolio and is armed. If you watch any of the cop shows on television, you’ll note that a common theme is the jurisdictional tension between various police agencies when they encounter a crime. Perhaps, that little tidbit may be suggesting that there are too many police agencies stumbling over one another in their aggressive attempts to hold the American people in line.

Tuesday the Patriot Act came to the House of Representative’s floor for a short-term renewal and failed. It didn’t fall because Members of the Congress had a change of heart about the invasive nature of some of the more onerous portions of that legislation. No, it failed because the Republican Whip team cannot count. The historic tension between security and liberty, safety and freedom, is starkly represented in the Patriot Act. The powers in the Act are considered above and beyond necessary tools for traditional police work during “normal” times. The difficulty arises when defining or identifying extraordinary conditions that demand excessive power for all the enforcement agencies. As long as government has the power to declare emergencies and define when additional police action is necessary, the people’s liberty will be at risk.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act authorizes the government to secure “any tangible thing” that may be relevant to an investigation of terrorism. They are allowed to do so even if there is no link between the “tangible” object and potential terrorists or terrorist actions. Do you own a firearm? Are you contemplating an act of terrorism? Doesn’t matter. Theoretically they can seize your weapon under the pretense that you may consider becoming a terrorist at some point in the future. This section is ripe for abuse.

There are several other provisions of the Act that can be interpreted as threats to citizens’ rights. The fact that there is not an overwhelming collection of data that suggests those provisions have been corrupted does not prevent the potential for abuse. Power does not respect a vacuum, and people who hold power will be tempted to use it…for good purposes, they believe. Perhaps you share my concern about the political class and the bureaucracy that they have created: I may like them, I may even admire them, but no way in hell do I trust them to do what is right for my family and me. I do not trust their motives, their instincts or their judgments. We all know someone who when placed in a position of power, feels compelled to “lord” it over everyone in his sphere of operation. Multiply that attitude by the thousands and you have the bureaucrats and politicians running throughout the nation trying to protect us from ourselves. Who, pray tell, will protect us from them?

Republican inefficiency has given us an opportunity to preserve some small element of freedom. If they continue to insist that the Patriot Act is necessary for protecting the nation from terrorism, then we have been given a second bite of the apple to minimize its most odious abuses. No government agency at any level should be given carte blanche to harass the citizens of our country. No agency should be awarded unlimited powers to arbitrarily redefine what constitutes a threat. No agency should have the unconstitutional authority to confiscate my “tangible thing.”

This column was titled “Please State” because at the present time our law enforcement agencies sometimes get a warrant before their actions. In some cases the agents will knock on your door before crashing through it. The issues become more problematic when you’re driving, however, because the rules that allow for you to be stopped are less concrete. Just hang on to your “tangible thing.”

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Minus Seventeen

Repeal the 17th Amendment.

 From The Campaign to Restore Federalism

www.restorefederalism.org

One of the fundamental presumptions of the U.S. Constitution is this: when governmental power is consolidated and unlimited it is unresponsive to the needs of the governed. The framers originally sought to prevent the overreach of government by creating an elegant framework to distribute power as widely as possible through a structured competition of natural self-interests. It is for this reason that the framers preserved the integrity of the states, these independent but united “laboratories of democracy”, and it is this federal system that the 17th Amendment (which provides for the direct, popular election of U.S. Senators) destroyed. This amendment has resulted in, as the framers predicted, a national government with influence, power and control unchecked by any political mechanism. This unlimited structure threatens the uniquely American way of life and the solvency of the national government.

The original design of the U.S. Constitution acknowledged that the several state governments were equipped better than the national government to address the vast majority of citizens’ needs. The democratically elected officials of those state governments live among the people they represent. They shop at their constituents’ stores and socialize at their homes. Unlike a national politician in Washington with millions of citizens he “represents”, state officials each have constituents that number in the tens of thousands. They are far more likely to know the people, their strengths, their problems and their sensibilities, and are therefore the appropriate representatives of the people’s most critical political desires. Assembled in the state house, these governments have collective interests and characters of their own that legitimately compete with those of the national government.

The original U.S. Constitution gave state governments a strong voice in the national government by requiring them to select U.S. Senators - to serve much like ambassadors today at the United Nations - and thus created the U.S. Congress to be a political (not judicial) venue for the competition between state government interests and national government interests. The Senate provided the state governments the necessary ability to restrict the natural inclination of the national government to expand its power. It is no coincidence that the national government began its exponential growth following the passage of the 17th Amendment, just as soon as there was no longer a competing interest that could stop it. The framers concluded that the judiciary was not the appropriate arbiter (as the courts currently imagine themselves) of the line between state and national interests, in part because the courts have a self-interest favoring a strong national government (the courts being created by Congress), and in part because the framers understood that different generations may draw that separation in different ways.

The framers understood that the people of the several states were also citizens of the nation, and as such, gave them responsive representation in the form of the U.S. House of Representatives. The Progressives that pushed for the 17th Amendment in the belief that the cure for democracy’s shortcomings is more democracy, did not address the fundamental purpose for the Senate: to protect the sovereignty of the states against the encroachment of national government into the states’ meaningful interest in addressing their people’s needs. It did not take long for the state governments, which ratified the 17th in record time, to understand the full, detrimental impact of what they had done. Consider that those in state government claim a responsibility to address questions in the areas of taxation, education, employment, disaster relief, public safety, transportation, health care, marriage, and property rights, to name but a few. Yet all of those issues, and far more, are now primarily mandated, regulated, or directed out of Washington, DC, far away from the people being impacted by those policies. While the state governments bear much of the responsibility for their citizens, they have only secondary authority to do anything about the issues they face. When federal courts decline, as they frequently do, to interpret the 10th Amendment as protecting the sovereignty of states, without a voice in the U.S. Senate the states have no recourse. Repealing the 17th would address this deficiency.

The “winner take all” mentality and the resulting bitterness that grips partisan Washington today is one direct result of the 17th Amendment. Interest groups understand that to impose one’s will on 300,000,000 Americans, one must influence one president, the selection of 5 supreme court justices, 51 (or 60) senators, and 218 representatives, a total of 275 individuals who live primarily in physical isolation, far away from those they govern. This makes the stakes extremely high. A tremendous amount of money is raised and spent on influencing 275 individuals in Washington. Repealing the 17th Amendment would devolve power away from the national government and drastically reduce the influence of interest groups. Under the original design, change at the national level required that the majorities of all the state legislatures – made up of thousands of representatives – be taken into account. The framers understood that moderate, temperate government is brought about by a multitude of competing interests. Repealing the 17th takes a major step toward restoring this balance.

At the same time, the individual’s self-interest is currently working against a repeal of the 17th. Consider recent studies showing that 52% of the U.S. population receives a significant portion of their personal income from government programs. At present, it is in the majority of citizens’ own short-term self-interest to see this flow of money grow larger and faster. Without checks on our own self-interest, we the citizens of the United States will continue to vote ourselves payments from the U.S. Treasury until our national government is financially and philosophically bankrupt. This is perhaps the most classic, and most widely understood pitfall of democracy, and strong safeguards must be restored to correct for it.

There is a mechanism in the original constitutional design that could prevent our own self-destruction, and may keep us from spending our way into total ruin. A repeal of the 17th Amendment and the resulting rise of strong, sovereign state governments is our best hope.

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Church and State

Henry VIII was disturbed that the Pope wouldn’t allow him to divorce the Queen. He wanted a natural heir to the throne and believed that as the supreme monarch of England, he had the right, indeed the duty, to produce a successor. So, Henry did want any crazed ruler would do. He pulled the English church from under the Papal umbrella and created the Church of England, the Anglican Church. With generous crown subsidies, the Church of England became an extension of the British crown, and church and state were intertwined in the affairs of the people. Blasphemy became a crime against the state as well as a violation of church canon. The admonition of Jesus to “render unto Caesar” had become blurred because of the indistinguishable differences between church and state concerns.

Fast forward to the early Nineteenth Century when the Danbury Baptist Association from Connecticut wrote to President Thomas Jefferson and inquired about the nature of their relationship with the federal and state governments as outlined in the Constitution. Although Jefferson had not been an instrumental player in the drafting and ratification of the governing document, he replied to the Baptists that, in his view, the Constitution expressly forbade the government’s interference in the affairs of the church because of a “wall of separation.” In essence, Jefferson appeared to believe that the reason for the “freedom of religion and expression” clause in the Constitution was to prevent the formation of a state-sanctioned church similar to the Church of England. The Baptists were fearful that “unapproved” doctrines or churches might be thwarted, but Jefferson sought to assure them that anticipated role of government was to be one of tolerant indifference rather that one of endorsement or hostility.

As we have noted, the role of the federal government as designed by the Founders has been distorted in many different ways. One of the most egregious perversions of original intent has been the relationship between the government (state) and the believing community (church). The role of the federal government has been transformed from a “hands-off” detachment to one of active hostility. At the same time that the federal government’s anti-religious posture has expanded, the power and self-determining rights of localities have been severely undermined too. The power of federal pronouncements and court decisions has been extended to the states and local jurisdictions. The hostility has been ramped up to the point that a local county is forbidden to display the Ten Commandments in or on its courthouse. According to religious tradition, the Ten Commandments were given by God to Moses and were to be the personal and societal foundation for the people of God. Three of the largest bodies of faith in the world (Judaism, Islam and Christianity) honor Moses and his relationship with God as integral elements of their traditions of faith.

The federal interference in matters of faith and issues of local control are symbolic of the overreaching and oppressive facets of the Too Big Unconstitutional Government. The First Amendment, the Ninth Amendment and the Tenth Amendment are blatantly disregarded as the Nanny State enforces its will. The federal government does not have the constitutional authority, the moral imperative or the popular support to willy-nilly discard critical portions of the Constitution that it does not like. The Feds do not have the authority to implement the desires of the ACLU and other discontented fringe groups by trashing the Constitution. In matters of faith and local control it seems obvious that citizens must become “dumpster divers” in order to retrieve, restore and re-implement the principles of Constitutional government as designed some two and a quarter centuries ago. The biggest obstacle is that the government has the guns…the big ones.

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