How We Got Here: The Left's Assault on the Constitution: Heartland Diary USA, #5

The Heartland

Diaries

By FRANK MIELE

columnist, Real Clear Politics &

www.HeartlandDiaryUSA.com

Previous

Volume 1: Why We Needed Trump, Part 1:

Bush’s Global Failure: Half Right

Volume 2: Why We Needed Trump, Part 2:

Obama’s Fundamental Transformation: Far Left

Volume 3: Why We Needed Trump, Part 3:

Trump’s American Vision: Just Right

Volume 4: The Media Matrix:

What If Everything You Know Is Fake

Volume 5: How We Got Here:

The Left’s Assault on the Constitution

Forthcoming

Volume 6: What Matters Most:

God, Country, Family and Friends

Volume 7: A Culture in Crisis:

Reviews and Reminders from the War Upstream

Collected from the author’s 18 years as managing editor

of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana.

HEARTLAND DIARY VOLUME 5

How We Got Here

The Left’s Assault on the Constitution

BY FRANK MIELE

Heartland Press

Kalispell Montana 2020

How We Got Here:

The Left’s Assault on the Constitution

Copyright © 2020 by Frank Miele

All rights reserved

By agreement with

Hagadone Montana Publishing

Back cover photo: Meredith Miele

ISBN: 978-1-7329633-4-4

First Edition

Library of Congress Control Number: Pending

Heartland Press

Kalispell, Montana

Dedicated to

my son Huzhao,

who shares my passion

for Making America Great Again

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my readers at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com for your continued support. It has been my honor to work with all of you to make America great again.

I also have to acknowledge my debt to the publishers of the Daily Inter Lake for giving me the opportunity to write the collected columns in the Heartland Diaries over the course of 14 years and to Hagadone Montana Publishing Company for giving me permission to reprint them in this form.

Of course, as any author will understand, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my wife, Yuzhao, for her continued patience with what surely seems like self-absorption to anyone who has not lived with a writer. She rightly qualifies for sainthood, and I would be remiss if I did not mention so.

—FDM, May 2020

Introduction

how Dewey, FDR, Ayers, Alinsky

and Obama tried to subvert

the Constitution,

and why they must never succeed

By Frank Daniel Miele

The book you are about to read represents the very best work I have ever done, or expect to do, in defense of liberty. As I assembled the enclosed essays, many of which I have not read since they were written, I was struck by the recurring themes that had occupied my writing since 2004 — the Constitution, American exceptionalism, the importance of a shared history and identity, and the continuing assault on the Constitution waged by the left for more than 100 years.

You will read some of the my own story in here, how I grew up in the 1960s at the end of an era of patriotism and the beginning of an era of radicalism, but much more important is the story of a nation at war with itself. How had the vision of the Founding Fathers of a self-righting republic been turned on its head? How had so many of our citizens failed to embrace the gift they had been given through birth or grace? How had the truths we used to hold to be self-evident become so cryptic that we could no longer even agree on the right to life? Time after time, I came up with the same explanation — that too few Americans were consulting the operating instructions — the Constitution — and that we were therefore on the verge of running off the rails.

What became clear to me in my research was that the devaluation of the Constitution was not accidental — it was a strategy adopted by a group of people who went by many names — progressives, socialists, communists, Democrats — but who had one single solitary purpose — to acquire power for the purpose of meting out what they called social justice.

Social justice, it turned out, was roughly the equivalent of what Satan was after when he advised Eve that God was holding out on her and Adam. It was the promise of a better life inevitably followed by the exile from paradise, except no one ever tells you about the down side of trying to live on other people’s money. There’s the loss of self-esteem, the lack of incentive, the inevitable realization that someone else still has more than you do, and the absolute certainty that you can never get back the inheritance you sold for a mess of potage.

I’ve arranged the essays in this book in chronological order as they were written so that you can follow along with me as the nation went down the rabbit hole of socialism with President Obama, and then fought its way back to an attempt to restore normalcy under President Trump. You will also be able to follow along with me as I learned about the methods and manipulations of the far left to subvert our culture and our Constitution. The oldest essay in the book dates to 2004, just two months after I started writing my Editor’s 2 Cents column for the Daily Inter Lake. More and more, I wrote, courts and the government as a whole seem intent on using the documents of liberty to dismantle liberty from within. I didn’t yet have any idea how to counter the leftist agenda, but I saw the problem pretty clearly, and I had set in my own mind a challenge — how to save the country from itself?

By the end of the next year, I had settled on restoring the plain language of the Constitution as the key. In November 2005, I wrote, Our Constitution is no longer the law of the land; it is instead a magic mirror that tells its owner whatever it wants to hear. The next week I concluded that the right of self-government, is primary, and it is this which we have lost by allowing the Constitution to be hijacked by the judiciary. I had thus begun my quest to educate the public about natural law and natural rights and to restore the Constitution to its original purpose. By 2013, I had even developed what I called The Restoration Amendment to provide a clear path to taking pack the Constitution as originally written:

For a long time, I have thought that the only hope for our country to continue as a bastion of freedom is to return to the original principles of the Constitution. But how exactly could you do so? An amendment demanding that the Constitution be interpreted according to the plain language in which it was written seemed too vague, just another lost cause like the 10th Amendment. An amendment throwing out case law as it applied to the Constitution and declaring a clean slate seemed hopelessly academic.

What was needed was an amendment which both stated plainly its intended goal — to strip the federal government of the power it has grabbed without authority over more than 200 years — and at the same time provided a clear mechanism for restoring America to the principles envisioned by the founders.

Article I of my proposed amendment established that If a power is not expressly granted to the combined federal government of these United States by this Constitution, then that power cannot be exercised, acquired, or enumerated without specific amendment to this document. Therefore, all laws and interpretations of laws which have resulted in the federal government imposing its will on the states or the people without specific authorization from this Constitution or its amendments shall be declared null and void.

A grand vision, if an unrealistic one!

The reason it is unrealistic, of course, is that the power of the people as the sovereign authority has been under constant attack for more than 150 years. That assault is the second theme that runs as a constant through these pages.

Starting with two essays in April 2006 about the threat of nationalized health care, I had gone to great lengths to explain the dangers of socialism. I never believed when I wrote Will Karl Marx have the last laugh? that we were just four years away from Obamacare. How could that happen when we had fought against socialism for more than 80 years? I answered that question in December 2013 in an essay called Progressives & patience, where I looked at the decades-long campaign for socialized medicine that had been waged alongside our Cold War against communism. The quote attributed to socialist Norman Thomas says it all: The American people would never vote for socialism, but under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.

It was around 2010 that my research into the roots of our national crisis reached fever pitch. The Nov. 14 column that serves as the prologue to this volume asked the question, How did we get here? and I spent much of the next two years looking for answers. Taken together, these essays are a mini-course in American history. In the six essays starting with the one dated Dec. 10, 2010, for instance, I explore Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and noted wryly that Many did dare call it socialism. Staring on April 10, 2011, I explored how the Greek goddess Athena was a perfect symbol for the Tea Party, and then wrote about women warriors who have fought to better our country such as Ayn Rand, Sarah Palin, Dorothy Thompson and Jean Walterskirchen, 1958 candidate for Congress from Montana.

Starting in June of 2011, I switched gears and took a look at how the education system had been used by radicals to corrupt American youth and indoctrinate them in anti-American leftist ideology. Here, I took an in-depth look at pedagogical philosopher John Dewey — the godfather of generations of self-absorbed students who were taught that their half-formed thoughts were of equal value with the foundational principles of Western civilization. The moral relativism of Dewey made a perfect foil to the natural law cherished by our Founders and provided the underpinnings for the social revolution that infected America from the 1950s forward. As I described it in one of those essays, Progressive education was a necessary predecessor for America’s plunge into willing acquiescence to progressive economics — also known as socialism. Thus, we are close to a solution to our initial question: ‘How did we get here?’ We have exposed the lever of progressive education as the mechanism by which Americans were primed to surrender the blessings of liberty in exchange for the bonds of socialism. It remained to discover the fulcrum that had provided the wedge that broke American society in half. I found that fulcrum in the counterculture revolution of the 1960s, which had mistakenly been written off as a failure, but in fact was a masterpiece of social engineering.

Bill Ayers, who generally has been dismissed as a two-bit terrorist, was in fact the architect of a grand strategy to overthrow the American order. Remarkably, it looks like he is close to achieving that goal. In a series of essays starting on July 24, 2011, you will read about how Ayers relatively quickly realized that violent revolution was unlikely to persuade Americans to give up the benefits of their capitalistic decadence, and that revolution instead should be waged through education rather than bomb-throwing. Yes, Ayers and the Weather Underground took advantage of the unpopular Vietnam War to spread their revolutionary message on the streets, but after spending a decade in hiding, Ayers emerged with a new strategy learned from comunity organizer Saul Alinsky. In 1971, Alinsky had written his seminal book Rules for Radicals in which he tutored radicals that in order to achieve their revolutionary goals they needed to work inside the system and act more like neighbors than activists. This was the turning point. It took Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn another decade to recognize that Alinsky was right and they were wrong, but eventually, in 1980, they emerged from the underground ready to resume the revolution.

With Dewey as his inspiration, Ayers empowered youth as his ambassadors of change, and worked with others to co-opt systems of social welfare, criminal justice and education to work within the system to topple the system. A couple of sociologists named Cloward & Piven provided a blueprint for overwhelming the U.S. treasury by creating a demand for welfare and other benefit programs that could not possible be afforded by society. That — combined with growing distrust of government, disdain for religion and disrespect for our traditions — gave Ayers the formula he needed to weaken our 200-year-old republic. It was an apt coincidence that just as I finished writing about Ayers’ revolution, his political acolytes were trying to crash the economy with their Occupy Wall Street campaign in 2011.

The fact that many of these essays were written in the shadow of the Obama presidency is no coincidence at all. President Obama was the spiritual godchild of Bill Ayers and Saul Alinsky, and with his disarming manner he was a perfect Trojan horse to introduce socialism into mainstream America. For the past four years, Donald Trump has worked to restore the original vision of America as a place of endless opportunity, but with the courts, Democrats and the Deep State against him, his plan to Make America Great Again may be doomed. As we enter the election of 2020, we stand at the crossroads. After you read this book, you will know how we got here, but if Trump loses his re-election bid, it is unlikely anyone will ever again be able to get us out of here.

And remember, if you enjoy the essays in this collection, please visit me at www.HeartlandDiaryUSA.com or follow me on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA, or on Twitter or Parler @HeartlandDiary.

Kalispell, Montana

June 2020

frank@HeartlandDiaryUSA.com

PROLOGUE

How did we get here?

A starting point

November 14, 2010

How did we get here?

That is a question I have asked myself a thousand times. When I look at the America we live in today and compare it to the America I grew up in 50 years ago, I am heartsick. And I am not alone.

Were there problems 50 years ago? Yes, of course. In particular, there were issues of racism that continued to plague the nation as a result of the scourge of slavery even though it had been abolished 100 years before. Other forms of discrimination also existed and were the subject of continuing reform efforts.

But in almost every other major aspect of life, we were better off then than we are today. Our economy was better. Our families were stronger. Our morals were firm. Our military was respected both at home and abroad. Our education was the best in the world.

Today, everything has been turned on its head — and what’s worse, plenty of people are glad of that. Our weaker economy has been a boon to the Third World and those who promote social justice at the expense of the American worker. Our weakened families have been a boon to government control of our personal decisions. Our weakened morals have allowed liberty to be mistaken for license, resulting in an ever more narcissistic culture that panders to appetites instead of aspiring to greatness. Our weakened military gives strength to those who would leave us at the mercy of their misguided conception of the goodness of human nature. Our weakened education system has compounded all of this by failing to teach our citizens the truth, leaving them untethered from their own heritage and adrift in a sea of moral relativism.

So — How did we get here?

That question can never be answered definitively, but it does seem to have its roots sometime in the last century when the globe was divided into the free world and the totalitarian world. Leading the former was the United States with assistance from Great Britain, France, Canada, Australia and other Western democracies. Leading the latter were the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Communist China, in alignment with numerous small dictatorships throughout Africa, South America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Such a division of nations cannot be doubted by anyone who has studied history. The global geopolitics of the 20th century was a chess game in which many nations were pawns that moved back and forth between the two camps. But the 20th century itself can be divided in two as well, and the strategic position of the United States shifted dramatically sometime in the middle of the century from a defensive posture against anti-American ideologies to a position of smug assurance that America had nothing to fear from its enemies.

Exactly when or how that happened would take a book-length exposition to make clear, but let’s draw an imaginary dividing line sometime around 1950 and see what we find.

Before World War II, the United States was plainly opposed to tyranny and considered it a threat not just to the world, but to its own republic. Thus, we had committees in Congress whose sole purpose was to root out enemies of the American way of life. The famous House Committee on Un-American Activities, which in one form or another dated back to 1934, was dedicated to exposing subversives in our homeland whose intent was to attack the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution.

Now, of course, the idea of a Committee on Un-American Activities would itself be considered by many to be un-American, not to mention unconstitutional. That in and of itself should be evidence that some kind of a sea change happened in the mid-20th century. Whether this change was a result of intention or simply inertia is again a topic too large to be settled in a short weekly column; however, it is possible to establish the world view that made the change acceptable.

Prior to 1945, the safety of the West from foreign enemies was in doubt. Thus, despite the isolationist forces that remained strong in our country, the United States went to war both in World War I and World War II to oppose empire building that could eventually affect our own position in the world.

Between those two wars, as Marxism developed into Bolshevism and finally Stalinism, it became apparent to many American leaders that the communist ideology was not only dangerous when espoused by our enemies abroad, but was also contrary to our constitutional republic’s ideals and thus a potential danger from within as well. The emergence of Hitler’s National Socialism (aka Nazism) created a new threat that also had its domestic component intent on subverting the Constitution.

Americans who cherished their system of government — and the liberties and rights which it protected — took seriously the oath of office which they had sworn — to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same [emphasis added].

This oath explicitly acknowledged that the Constitution — and the government which it established — could have enemies who lived AMONG US, and who presumably could well be citizens. The Constitution therefore assumes that federal officials are empowered IN FACT to take action to DEFEND the Constitution against its enemies, even if they are citizens and regardless of their race, religion or any other defining characteristic. 

Yet today we are confronted with a federal bureaucracy and Congress that are not only sluggish to defend the Constitution against its enemies, but go so far as to offer them protections so that they may enjoy virtual immunity as they seek to destroy our way of life. Thus, freedom of speech has been perverted into a shield for sedition, and protections intended only for citizens have even been granted to enemy combatants.

Indeed, today it is part of mainstream thought to believe that anyone should be welcomed in America whether they are enemies of the Constitution or not. This is presumed to show just how marvelously open-minded we are, as opposed to those countries and cultures which zealously protect themselves against destruction.

Perhaps that point is instructive. No sentient being could possibly prefer open-mindedness over self-destruction. Therefore we have to assume that Americans, as a whole, at some point lost the ability to conceive of their country’s destruction. Without that consequence to consider, open-mindedness is of course preferable to narrow-mindedness. But with destruction in the mix, open-mindedness loses its allure quite rapidly.

So why is it that in the midst of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and with the memory of World War II still fresh in the national consciousness, that Americans no longer feared any threat to their way of life or their Constitution. Why did the American public presume that our country, our system and our way of life were inviolate — that they could not be corrupted by the influence of socialists, communists or other totalitarian ideologies?

My best guess is that the American military primacy established by World War II, and confirmed by our devastating nuclear arsenal, resulted in just such a feeling of invulnerability. Sure we had real problems in a land war in Southeast Asia, but our homeland never came under attack, and we knew that if worse came to worst, we could always drop The Bomb and be done with it. That lulled most of us into a false sense of security that allowed the nation to drift into a Rip Van Winkle slumber that lasted for half a century or more.

So, to answer my own question — How did we get here? — I guess the honest answer is that we sleep-walked into the 21st century. Now the question is, When will we wake up?

How We Got Here

Enough is enough

December 5, 2004

At some point when the snake begins to swallow its own tail, it should get indigestion.

That, at least, is the effect one hopes for if one loves the snake and wants to see it survive its suicidal mischief.

But it seems like today's America is almost to the point of swallowing its founding principles, and hardly a burp has been uttered about it.

More and more, courts and the government as a whole seem intent on using the documents of liberty to dismantle liberty from within. The latest example comes from California, where a school teacher has been forbidden by his principal from handing out the Declaration of Independence to his students because it contains references to God.

Whoa! Hold on there!

Isn't that why our forebears left England and those other merry states of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries in the first place? To rid themselves of the tyranny that would not let them acknowledge a God who was greater than the tyrant?

Could anyone truly make the case that the Declaration of Independence is inappropriate for fifth graders? The same fifth-graders who are assaulted with (or is that insulted with?) Brittany Spears, gangsta rap, Grand Theft Auto and, of course, Janet Jackson's breast?

These words from the Declaration should never be inappropriate:

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.

The principles embedded in the Declaration go far beyond the list of complaints against King George III that provoked them to be enunciated in this form. Nor are these principles a mere matter of religiosity. They are the foundation stone of our republic.

So how do we get to a place in history where Steven Williams, that fifth-grade teacher in Cupertino, Calif., has to sue his principal in order to bring those sacred principles to the attention of his students?

What makes the snake start to swallow its own tail?

I don't have any brilliant ideas on the topic, but I do remember saying prayers in school before the Supreme Court said I couldn't do so anymore, I do remember pledging allegiance to the republic that we knew was one nation under God, and I do remember a time when we cherished our heritage enough to teach about it proudly.

I do know the difference between not allowing an establishment of religion and prohibiting the free exercise thereof, two of the pillars of the First Amendment. Sometimes, it seems the first pillar has been distorted out of recognition, and the second all but forgotten.

And if push comes to shove, then I have to align myself with those Founding Fathers who took up their pens at great risk to themselves and signed on to the great American experiment by saying:

...for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Without that firm reliance, perhaps there is nothing to stop us from giving up on not just the Declaration, but also the Constitution and even those self-evident truths they embody.

To paraphrase a patriot, Give me Divine Providence or give me death.

Time to rethink abortion politics

July 24, 2005

How about a new idea about abortion?

Maybe it’s time we tried one, after a half century of bitter fighting about the issue.

Everyone seems to think that President Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court ought to be judged not on his intelligence, temperament and experience, but on whether he will support or vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the case law that established a woman’s constitutional right to have an abortion.

Indeed, both sides are so emotionally invested in this issue that many are afraid to talk about it at all. It’s almost as though abortion rights and pro-life have become so important as fund-raising slogans that any kind of middle ground is considered a kind of no man’s land where you will be shot by both sides.

There are a couple of things that everyone should remember if we are going to have a serious discussion about abortion and the law. First of all, people must understand that if Roe vs. Wade were overturned, it would not automatically make abortion illegal. It would simply return the right to regulate this medical procedure to the states, where it had always been handled before 1973.

The second thing to remember is that before 1973 there was no constitutional right to have an abortion. That right was discovered by the Supreme Court in 1973 as part of a penumbra of privacy that had been divined in the Constitution a few years earlier, even though it had evaded discovery for the previous 175 years.

The third thing to remember is that a vast majority of Americans, in every nationwide poll, supports the right of a woman to have an abortion. This, of course, is not based on a love of abortion, but on a recognition that the alternative may be even worse in individual cases. Those of us who are old enough to remember when abortion was illegal in most states can attest to the fact that many women died horrible deaths at the hands of back-alley butchers in an effort to rid themselves of a pregnancy that was either shameful, painful or maybe just one too many.

So it’s a complicated issue, with well-intentioned people on both sides.

But isn’t it just possible that Roe vs. Wade is not of fundamental importance to the future of our Union? Are we even allowed to take time to think what would happen if the precedent were overturned? Or are we just supposed to move along in lockstep to marching orders from one side or the other?

The world we live in resembles 1973 to about the extent that the iPod resembles the Hi-Fi. (Younger readers may want to Google Hi-Fi in order to see what we are talking about.) The fact of the matter is that in 1973 we were still living in a society that bore some similarity to the world of 1788, when our Constitution was ratified. Today, everything is different. Families, values, technology — it’s all flipped on its head.

So — if Roe vs. Wade were overturned, does anyone really think that the clock would automatically roll back 32 years? Does anyone think those polls in favor of abortion rights would suddenly switch 180 degrees? Does anyone think women are going to quietly step aside and let men once again tell them what is best for them?

Not at all. What would happen is that many states, perhaps representing a majority of the population of the country, would quickly pass abortion rights legislation of their own. It goes without saying that New York, New Jersey, California and Massachusetts would be among those states.

It also is likely that much of the Deep South, along with Utah, would automatically pass laws making abortion a crime of some sort.

The rest of the states would split the difference. Some would join one side or the other. Some others would pass carefully crafted compromises to ensure abortions were available in certain circumstances but not in others.

Most women who come from families that support abortion would be able to have one — either in their own state or by traveling to another state by car, bus or plane. In 1973, air travel was still something of a novelty. Probably more than half the population had never taken a flight anywhere. Today, air travel is taken for granted.

If people can afford air travel to visit Disney World or Aunt Nancy in Indiana, then they could probably find the money to travel to complete what they considered a crucial medical procedure that would change their lives forever.

It is unlikely we would ever return to an era of back-alley butchers. Too much has changed.

But we would also live in a new America where we would no longer need to have a tug-of-war for the Constitution.

That would make me feel better.

I’d like to think that the Constitution will survive and thrive for another 215 years, but I wonder if that could happen if we continue to use the Constitution like a Ouija board to talk to the ghosts of the founders and get messages about the secret meaning of words like secure, due process and liberty.

The Constitution is the bedrock of our republic. It is written in plain language. If we can’t agree about what it says in some fundamental way, then we are doomed to be the losers of Ben Franklin’s sardonic challenge when asked what kind of government the constitutional convention had given to the new nation: A republic, madam — If you can keep it.

My thinking is that we had better be more committed to keeping the republic than to keeping Roe vs. Wade if we expect our nation to last into the unforeseeable future. Face it, Roe — along with numerous other decisions of the court in the past few decades — has led to increasing conflict, skepticism, selfishness and cynicism about our government and our way of life.

That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a constitutional protection for abortion rights either. We have a way to change the Constitution that doesn’t involve judges using a microscope to discern previously unnoticed rights. It’s called the amendment process.

Since abortion rights advocates say they represent the vast majority of Americans, why don’t they just put before the American people a constitutional amendment that would explicitly guarantee the right to have an abortion?

If passed and ratified, it would put an end, once and for all, to the uncertainty inherent in basing our rights on reversible Supreme Court rulings. Fundamental rights should be fundamentally clear; they should not be discovered in penumbras, formed by emanations, as Justice Douglas laughably wrote when he located the right to privacy in the Bill of Rights.

For the good of all, let’s change the debate and stick with the Constitution.

Th-th-that’s all, folks

November 20, 2005

In the Sixties, they had a saying: If it feels good, do it.

If you think that makes sense, then you don’t have to spend any more time thinking why the previous president of the United States got caught with his pants down a few years ago. It’s because of you, and people who think like you.

In fact, you can pretty much attribute all the problems in our society today to that slogan and its corollary — If it doesn’t feel good, why bother?

We have become — for lack of a better word — a hedonistic society, one that bases its success or failure on how happy it is — or more accurately how happy its individual members are. This has led us by and large to abandon the traditional set of Judeo-Christian ethics which made Western civilization possible by encouraging a certain amount of self-sacrifice in order to promote the greater good.

Now, what is interesting is that our country is based in part on the very principle that may eventually become our undoing. It is no accident surely that a society that values individual freedom as much as ours would have among its founding truisms that all men are endowed by their Creator with a right to the pursuit of happiness.

What exactly that means, and why it could contain the seed of our ultimate destruction, should be worthy of consideration in an era when the pursuit of happiness has been expanded far beyond anything imagined by our forebears. It might be instructive therefore to list a few of the things now considered normal and appropriate that would have been considered evil and abhorrent in 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was penned by Mr. Jefferson and company.

Let’s start with abortion. It is the most obvious starting point in any discussion of the changing moral landscape in our country, and though it is typically argued from a constitutional perspective, it can also be looked at from the point of view of the Declaration’s guarantees of the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Women today say they can’t be free (enjoy the fruits of liberty) without the ability to control their own bodies and determine how their bodies are used. Thus, in pursuit of their individual happiness, women have successfully argued that they are free to engage in any sexual activity of their choosing without needing to worry about any consequences that might impede the enjoyment of their way of life. Society’s interests in protecting its progeny must thus give way to the individual’s pursuit of happiness.

The same, of course, has now been determined to be true regarding sexual behavior. Take pornography, for instance. Yes, pornography, in one form or another, has probably always been around, and it will always have its fans, but does that mean society needs to accede to it? And yes, it will always be a subjective determination whether one piece of art or writing is pornographic or not, but does that mean society should not have the right to make that determination?

There is no doubt that when our country was founded, and right through the 1950s, pornography was considered an inappropriate endeavor that did enough harm to the general welfare that it could be banned by states or municipalities. Today, on the other hand, the general welfare has subsided to the point where it is almost invisible, and the individual right to pursue happiness by looking at dirty pictures or selling them or taking them (except when children are involved) has become pretty much a constitutional right.

Which brings us to the U.S. Constitution, where these matters must rightly be settled in any case.

We have heard a lot about the Constitution in recent months as we have gone through three different Supreme Court nominations, and listened to various arguments about how these nominees might threaten or protect constitutional rights, especially the so-called right to abortion.

What would be instructive at this point would be if everyone could take out their copy of the Constitution of the United States and read it. One thing you will not find is any reference to abortion whatsoever. Plain and simple, the constitutional right to abortion does not exist; what does exist in this country is a right granted by the judiciary to have an abortion as a result of the right to privacy, which was also granted or invented by the judiciary.

These shadow rights are based in large measure on the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment, where it says ... nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. Yes, that’s right, the whole wrangle over abortion is based on a constitutional provision that protects us from being thrown into jail or having our property seized without a fair trial or other administrative action known as due process.

It seems that in the Supreme Court’s collective mind, due process is not accomplished when a state Legislature does what it is legally constituted to do — make law. According to this theory, the greater right to liberty can only be denied by the state upon show of some extraordinary cause rather than because the state Legislature has expressed the will of its people. But if that is the case, then no law that restricts or narrows the liberty of an individual can hold sway any longer either. Laws that control such matters as public drunkenness, public nudity, and drug use must also come under the same fig-leaf of privacy that the Supreme Court uses to cover its naked re-write of the Constitution.

Folks, there is no right of privacy in the Constitution. To say that there is would be to stretch logic and language with Clintonian perversity to the point that we would have to say it depends what the meaning of ‘in’ is.

The trouble is not with the Constitution; the trouble is with ourselves. Thanks to our hedonistic tendencies, we have now come to the point where we unwittingly accept as true the following precept:

If it feels good, it must be constitutional.

This — in plain language — is the root of the problem. Our Constitution is no longer the law of the land; it is instead a magic mirror that tells its owner whatever it wants to hear.

But the problem is, not all good ideas are constitutional. It may indeed be a good idea to allow abortion under certain circumstances; that does not mean it is a constitutional right. It may be a good idea to allow gay marriage; that does not mean it is a constitutional right. It may be a good idea to instruct all children in the importance of religion, but that does not mean it is a constitutional right.

Unfortunately, it is probably too late to make such distinctions.

Otherwise we would not only have to jettison decades worth of legal precedent, we would also have to throw out most of the laws passed by Congress, since they plainly don’t emanate from the powers granted to Congress in the Constitution under Article 1, Section 8, or anywhere else.

We are living in a constitutional republic to the same degree that Porky Pig is living in the real world. Uh, bibba-dibba-dibba, uh, th-th-th-that’s all folks!

The naked emperor and the naked truth

November 27, 2005

I wrote about the Constitution last week, and a few readers took offense at my suggestion that the Constitution might not actually contain some of the rights and guarantees in it which they cherish.

The argument of these people seems to be that we are better off living in a country that has such rights and guarantees, so keep quiet about it, you fool.

I suspect the little boy who told the emperor he was butt naked got the same reaction from the imperial guard.

What no one who wrote to me bothered to do was take up my implicit challenge of demonstrating where the Constitution guarantees a right to privacy and, by extension, a right to have an abortion. That’s because there is no such guarantee in the document itself.

If there were, I can assure you it would not have taken 200 years to have found it (or 100 years if you think the right can be found in the 14th Amendment.)

What was discovered after that long period of time was that society had changed, not that the Constitution had changed. It had become a consensus opinion that people generally did not want the government in the bedroom, regulating sexual behavior, and therefore courts — swayed by the ethos of their time — cobbled together tortuous constructs (based not on the simple language of the Constitution, but on the torturous language of judges and lawyers) in order to provide what right thinking had determined to be appropriate anyway.

As I said last week, if it feels good, it must be constitutional, right?

But what exactly is the point of having a written constitution if the words contained in it are treated as if they were handed over to the country with a wink and a nod.

Lawyers may think that words can be stretched in any direction at any time, but I for one don’t like the idea of the Constitution as a magician’s balloon that can be twisted into the shape of a dog one day and a fish the next. There is a way to change the shape of the Constitution — it is called the amendment process. But that apparently takes too long, and requires participation of the people, so we have instead gotten this new thing called the Supreme Court shortcut, which allows judges to make laws for the good of us all.

Well, maybe these learned judges really do know what is best for us. But that is not the point. What matters is not whether we agree with the result of the judges’ decisions, but whether they have any business making law in the first place.

And this is not a personal complaint; it is a philosophical one, and a practical one. I have no personal interest in the legality of abortion one way or the other. If the state of Montana permitted legal abortion either through legislative action or because of our explicit constitutional guarantee of the right to privacy, I would not have any problem with that. My concern is entirely with whether the American public has been able to keep the republic whose birth Ben Franklin pronounced as he walked out of the constitutional convention in 1787.

It would seem that turning our sovereignty over to judges and courts which find rights because it is convenient to do is one good sign that the republic is in peril of being lost.

Again, show me the plain language in the Constitution that gives the federal government any jurisdiction in the matter of abortion, and I will shut up about it. Or tell me what right guaranteed under the Constitution is being violated when a state Legislature makes a law restricting abortion?

The general answer is the right to privacy, but such a right is not found in either the original Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or any other amendment. And if such a right to privacy did exist, would it not by necessity and fairness have to apply to any number of other activities and behaviors which the state chooses to regulate?

Would it not, for instance, permit unlimited drug use? Perhaps so — and maybe it will next week. Court is in session after all.

There are those who find sanctuary for inventing new rights in the vagueness of the Ninth Amendment, which holds that The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

But, in fact, the Ninth Amendment is no friend of Roe vs. Wade, which was an imposition of a federal decree upon the states and their people. By judicial fiat, the people have been denied the right of self-determination.

The Ninth Amendment should actually protect the right of the people, in the form of their state legislatures, to regulate their own lives in ways they find appropriate. This right, the right of self-government, is primary, and it is this which we have lost by allowing the Constitution to be hijacked by the judiciary.

Will Karl Marx have the last laugh?

April 9, 2006

Karl Marx lost the battle, but he may be winning the war.

We all thought back in the late 1980s when communist governments were collapsing under the weight of their own excesses in Eastern Europe, that the discredited ideas of communism’s founder would disappear, too.

But old Karl Marx may have the last laugh.

From each according to their ability; to each according to their need.

That is the simplest statement of Marxist philosophy that exists, and if it doesn’t set off alarm bells when you hear it, then you haven’t been paying attention to the political debate in our country recently. More and more, it looks like our country and our people are supposed to feel guilty for being successful, and we are supposed to make up for it by throwing money at people who haven’t earned it. In the old days, they called that begging; now they call it entitlement.

The United States has jobs, and Mexicans need them, so therefore Mexicans are entitled to those jobs.

Hospitals have health services, and poor people need them, so therefore poor people are entitled to those health services.

Bill Gates has billions of dollars, and the government needs billions, so therefore he should fork over as much as the government wants — no questions asked.

(Oh yes, and because he has so much money, the government is going to want more of his than yours. Heck, they’re entitled to it, right? From each according to their ability; to each according to their need.)

While we’re on the topic, the government has billions of dollars it already got from Bill Gates and other taxpayers, and people with less initiative, intelligence and good fortune than Bill Gates need it, so therefore they are entitled to it in the form of tax credits. It doesn’t matter if they paid taxes or not. They need the money — so they get it. You can call it an earned-income tax credit or you can call it communism. Either way, it’s the same story:

From each according to their ability; to each according to their need.

If you are a hard worker, it ought to make you mad. There you are, putting in extra time and effort to accomplish the best for yourself and your family, but the next guy over is less driven (I like to enjoy the good things of life!) so he ends up taking it easy. You provide health insurance for your family; he provides nothing. When your family gets sick, you bring them to the hospital, pay the deductible, follow the rules, borrow if necessary, set up a payment plan, but you do the right thing. When his family gets sick, he brings them to the hospital, demands the best care, then complains when he gets the bill. Why is my family not entitled to the best health care, he whines. Are we not people?" So instead of trying to pay the bill, he lets the rest of us pay in the form of higher bills, higher insurance payments and higher taxes.

From each according to their ability; to each according to their need.

Now, before anyone accuses me of locking the hospital doors and letting people die on the street, let me explain myself. I do believe in charity. I do not believe in entitlements. Charity helps to bring us closer together; entitlements drive us further apart.

It is a good thing for the government or a church or an individual to help someone in need, but it is a bad thing to let people expect that every time they get in trouble, there is going to be someone there to bail them out. That is not called charity; it is called enabling.

When you enable an alcoholic to continue drinking by helping him to avoid the consequences of his disease, you are not doing him any favors — you are just speeding him on the way to his death — and you will encourage resentment at the same time.

Likewise, when you enable the chronically unsuccessful to avoid the consequences of their lack of education, resourcefulness or toil, you are just speeding them on the way to a life of dependency and despair, and if you don’t think people on welfare resent the hand that feeds them, visit the inner city in a major urban area for a day. You will not discover an attitude of gratitude.

Maybe Karl Marx should have said it this way: From everyone else because they’ve got it; to me, because I damn well want it.

Health care over easy,

with fries on the side

April 16, 2006

People sure are funny.

Take the response to last week’s column on how Karl Marx’s philosophy is slowly but surely taking over the United States. A number of readers wrote to let me know they appreciated my willingness to challenge the entitlement mentality that has pervaded our country, but a few others wrote to call me names.

I enjoy nothing more than a well-reasoned argument, but being called an egotistical, arrogant jerk has its charms, too.

Almost everyone who wrote to complain about my column focused on the paragraph that talked about health care. I compared the example of two hypothetical families, one which tries to pay its own way and one which feels that health care is a right and thus should be available to everyone, with or without the ability to pay.

Put aside the notable lack of reference to health care in the Constitution of the United States. Forget about the fact that the Declaration of Independence does not mention the right of the people to commandeer medical services whenever necessary. The Declaration does say that people have an unalienable right to life, and apparently some people think that includes the extended service warranty with full checkups until death and unlimited repairs at no cost.

Except, of course, there is a cost.

When someone gets free medical service, it means someone else paid for it — the doctor, the hospital, the insuror, the taxpayer. Someone, somewhere is shelling out the dollars. You can take that to the bank.

In the old days, before the New Deal, most of the largesse that helped the less fortunate pay their medical bills came in the form of what is now quaintly called charity. It was the idea of individuals helping each other, or in a grander sense, the idea of institutions such as the Catholic Church helping those in need. Thus, it was common in many communities to have a Charity Hospital, where the poor and indigent could count on service thanks to the kindness of their fellow man.

Somewhere along the way charity got twisted into welfare — the difference being extreme. Charity is an act of giving. Welfare is an act of taking — namely the forced taking of money from one set of citizens for the betterment of another.

This is not to condemn people on welfare. They have no choice in the matter. This is the only option society has given them, and that should be the point which you take away from a study of entitlements. Once you create them, it is inevitable that people will take advantage of them. Poor people are no different than rich people when it comes to opportunism. If you create a loophole in the tax code, then rich people are going to take advantage of it. Why shouldn’t they?

By the same token, poor people are going to take advantage of anything given to them for free. Why shouldn’t they?

So we should not be surprised by the fact that as soon as private charity became institutionalized as public welfare, it also inevitably mutated into an entitlement. Instead of receiving help with gratitude, people with an entitlement mentality receive it with certainty that they deserved it all along. And to be honest, once an entitlement is granted in a democracy, it is virtually indestructible. That’s because entitlements eventually translate into voting blocs — also known as special interests — and politicians for obvious reasons are beholden to the voters who vote for the politicians who granted the voters the entitlement in the first place. It’s called a vicious cycle.

Of course, the issue of public health care is a complicated one, which cannot be reduced simply to a discussion of entitlements. One underlying cause of almost any problem in our society today is the lack of an extended family such as existed for millennia before technology allowed us all to become mobile. When you lived in a small town with your mother and father and five to 10 brothers and sisters and your rich Uncle Allan and your great-grandmother Rose and you all knew each other and got together for holidays, then if you got sick, it wasn’t going to be the problem of Uncle Sam; it was going to be the problem of Uncle Allan and whoever else in the family had some money to help.

Today, it is much more likely that you live in a town where you have no relatives other than the immediate nuclear family. That means there is no private support structure — which is why more and more people turn to the government for more and more help.

Then, of course, you have to factor in the wonderful achievements of modern medicine. The average life expectancy increased by 50 percent during the 20th century. Over the course of about 160 years, life expectancy has increased by as much as 40 years. That is quite remarkable, and it means that health care costs for society as a whole have increased exponentially. You also have to kick in the value of all those high-tech gadgets and gizmos