The Constitution Protects the Nation Against Democracy

By

       M. Richard Maxson

      What a treasure our Constitution has been and how easy it is to take for granted. In a world facing accelerating change and division, it’s a gift to have an anchor that keeps our freedoms secure. Unfortunately, our government today is not the constitutionally restrained protector of personal freedoms the Framers left us. It has morphed into a quasi-Socialist entity that the majority of the elite uses to forward democracy, something the Founding Fathers never wanted. Our Founders saw democracy as a variant of tyranny.

      The Framers believed in the presumption of liberty, which declares that we are free to make personal choices, and the government cannot interfere with our liberties unless we violate the rights of others. The ideal way to organize human conduct is to create a system that maximizes personal liberty for all. They did this in a number of ways, including establishing a system of federalism, which divided powers between the federal and state governments. They also specifically enumerated powers granted to the federal Congress and added the Bill of Rights, which expressly restricted Congress' encroachment on a panoply of individual liberties and also included the ninth and 10th amendments, which reserve powers to the states and the people.

      Yes, America’s Founders abhorred the idea of democracy, which is why they fashioned a constitutional republic with separation of powers between the states and the central government and within the national government. Plus, national borders and meaningful citizenship. In Federalist 10, James Madison warned of the dangers of a pure democracy without republican safeguards: “[S]uch democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.”

      Other Framers were just as adamant. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph said, "...that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy." John Adams said, "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." Alexander Hamilton said, "We are now forming a Republican form of government. Real Liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of dictatorship." It is not a co-incidence that the word democracy appears in none of our founding documents.

      The Founders recognized that we need some form of government, but because the essence of government is force, and force is evil, government should be as small as possible. The Founders intended for us to have a limited republican form of government where human rights precede government and there is rule of law. Citizens, as well as government officials, are accountable to the same laws. Government intervenes in civil society only to protect its citizens against force and fraud, but does not intervene in the cases of peaceable, voluntary exchange. By contrast, in a democracy, the majority rules either directly or through its elected representatives. The law is whatever the government deems it to be at this time. Rights may be granted or taken away.

      In the 21^st century the Founders could have never envisioned Americans warping the meaning of the document in order to promote Democratic Socialism as the country’s future. The continuous twisting of the constitution to justify their Leftist agenda is nothing short of disgusting to true Patriots. As the nation continues the drift towards Democratic Socialism all Patriots must ask themselves – Are we too late?

The Attempted Coup D’etat?

by

       George Sontag

      The most egregious anti- constitutional actions ever taken by members of what we now call the Deep State are confirmed with the publication of fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s new book detailing how the FBI and Justice Department plotted what is basically a coup d’etat’ to remove President Trump from office for firing FBI Director James Comey.

      Instead of waiting for the proper appointment of a new FBI head and allowing him/her to set the tone of any investigation, they decided that they were the ones that should take action and discussed wiretapping and using the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove President Trump. They acted to create an independent counsel over obstruction that never happened as a retaliatory move for Comey’s firing.

      The discussions about invoking the 25th Amendment was serious, it was also ridiculous because McCabe and Rosenstein had no authority to invoke the 25^th Amendment. The 25th Amendment does not permit the deputy attorney general to trigger the process for removing an incapacitated president. By its own terms, it can only be invoked by the president himself, or by the vice president in conjunction with a majority of the Cabinet (or a congressionally authorized committee).

      On the other hand, while talk about invoking the 25th Amendment was serious, it is also ridiculous. The 25th Amendment was adopted in the years shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination to address the potential problem of a president who is rendered physically or mentally unable to perform his duties – as, for example, President Woodrow Wilson was by a stroke. The amendment is not a substitute for the Constitution’s impeachment process: If you believe a president is guilty of criminal, abusive, or incompetent behavior – the remedy is for Congress to impeach him, not to declare him physically or psychologically unfit.

      The fact is that the amendment has nothing to do with the situation McCabe and Rosenstein believed they were confronting - a president who is either potentially obstructing an investigation or not up to the obligations of the office. In addition, neither McCabe nor Rosenstein was a Cabinet officer. All they could do was speculate about which Cabinet officials might be amenable to considering a 25th Amendment ploy; and they quickly dismissed the idea because they realized they were nowhere close to a Cabinet majority, let alone to a green light from the vice president.

      But these elitist Justice Department and FBI officials who believe that the end justifies using any means were joined by Lisa Page and Peter Strzok of the FBI – knew how to get around the intent of the law and the Constitution. They were on a mission to remove Trump from office for daring to fire Comey and other perceived atrocities to the status quo. They even thought they were part of the 25th Amendment, which empowers only the Cabinet and Congress to remove the president from office in extraordinary circumstances.

      There has been a good deal of commentary this week about whether McCabe and Rosenstein were seriously brainstorming about a coup attempt. McCabe, himself, and others say Rosenstein was deadly serious when he discussed invoking the 25th Amendment and wiretapping against President Trump in an effort to remove the president from office. Rosenstein says he was just joking around. No one was in a joking mood when these discussions took place. McCabe was in the midst of formally opening a criminal investigation of the president, and Rosenstein was handwringing over the possible appointment of a special counsel.

      No, they were not joking. They wanted more believable accusations so they decided that if you’re going to convince people that the president is unfit, you need evidence of his unfitness. McCabe and Rosenstein discussed considering whether they could secretly come into the White House, the Oval Office, wearing a wire to capture Trump saying things that were incriminating or crazy. They could then use such recordings to try to convince top administration officials that the president needed to go. 

 

      Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz said any justice official who discussed the 25th Amendment in the context of ousting the president "has committed a grievous offense against the Constitution," adding that using the 25th Amendment to circumvent the impeachment process or an election, "is a despicable act of unconstitutional power grabbing."

       Evoking the 25th Amendment, Dershowitz added, would be a fundamental misuse of its original purpose. He said it was originally "about Woodrow Wilson having a stroke. It’s about a president being shot and not being able to perform his office." He emphatically stated that the Department of Justice’s discussions to employ the 25th Amendment to oust President Trump-- if true-- is ‘clearly an attempt at a coup d’etat’

      Every Democrat, Republican and Independent American should stop angling for partisan advantage and agree, regardless of who is helped or hurt, that these officials acted without proper authority in discussing the possibility of removing a duly elected President and are responsible for unprecedented damage to our democracy and our political system.

      As they dress up their resistance in high-minded rhetoric about protecting the Constitution. But in reality, it is the ruling elite that is undermining democratic norms, by subverting the core of our democratic process. The American idea is that “we the people” should be in charge, through the representatives we elect. The Deep State has a different idea: not “We the People” but “You the People, ruled by We the Elite.” We are still not out of the woods.

History Repeats Itself

By

        Zeno Potas

       Overall news coverage of the president in the news media has been negative since he took office in January 2017. The Media Research Center has reported that from last June 1 to Sept. 30 it monitored the TV network evening news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC and found that 92 percent of news coverage of President Trump during this period was negative. The center called this “the most hostile coverage of a President in TV history.” A former executive editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, says the paper’s news pages, the home of its straight-news coverage, have become “unmistakably anti-Trump.”

The Times and the media has long faced accusations of liberal bias, even before Trump got into politics and became its harshest critic. But Abramson’s words carry special weight because she is also a former Times Washington bureau chief and Wall Street Journal correspondent specializing in investigative reporting. No president since Abraham Lincoln has faced the kind of unending bias and hostility from the media that he is living through.

Here are some comments about our president printed in the news media;

• “Within 90 days from inauguration, the Republican Party will be utterly ruined and destroyed. His path is environed with so many difficulties, that even if he had the ability of Jefferson and the energy of Jackson, he would fail, but he is a weak and inexperienced man, and his administration will be doomed from the commencement.”

• “If he takes that radical section of the Republican Party, the conservative wing of it will cut loose and repudiate him. If, on the other hand, he courts the conservatives and pursues a moderate conciliatory policy, the radicals will make open war upon his administration.”

• “….is universally an admitted failure, has no will, no courage, no executive capacity… and his spirit necessarily infuses itself downwards through all departments.”

• ….“his election was a rash experiment, his administration is a deplorable failure.”

• “As President of the United States he must have enough sense to see and acknowledge he has been an egregious failure. One thing must be self-evident to him, and that is that under no circumstances can he hope to be the next President of the United States … (he should) retire from the position to which, in an evil hour, he was exalted.”

• The President was “evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis."

• Even one general dismissed the President as a... “hack and an idiot...”

       Does any of this sound familiar? Then you a quite the historian as these comments were made over 150 years ago about President Abraham Lincoln. Many news organizations opposed Lincoln from the beginning – much as they have President Trump in our time and the hostility toward Lincoln within the Washington establishment and the political elite was just as ferocious.

       This relentless hostility parallels what President Lincoln had to endure in the media of his day – newspapers and magazines. Just as President Trump rails against “fake news,” President Lincoln felt that a significant front in his war to preserve the Union was against the news media. This made Lincoln highly critical and skeptical of the media.

       According to Noah Brooks, a reporter who had regular access to the president, Lincoln often said "the worst feature about newspapers was that they were so sure to be 'ahead of the hounds,' outrunning events, and exciting expectations which were sure to be disappointed." Sound familiar?

       Today’s never-ending Russia investigation is a perfect example that things have not changed, in fact, when in comes to mainstream media distorting information and telling lies. They have gotten much worse in recent years, It is highly encouraging that more people are starting to see through these lies. It’s time to turn off your television, “Big Brother’s fantasy box,” and do your own research. Read news accounts from all sources especially outside the US propaganda sphere. Use the tools of critical analytical logical reasoning to come to your own conclusions, not the opinions of the talking heads that represent the elite who want nothing more than profit and power. If you are curious about what is happening on our planet. It’s time to wake up

Society of Fear

By

       Zeno Potas

       We are becoming a “society of fear”. Individual citizens live under the constant threat of government surveillance. It is an society where individuals reasonably believe their actions are being tracked, recorded and monitored by government agents at all times. They fear having their computers hacked by government bureaucrats. Privacy International spokesman Mike Rispoli said: What is frightening about the NSA's capabilities are that they collect massive amounts of information on everyone, including your political beliefs, contacts, relationships, and internet histories.
 

      We are becoming a “society of fear.” Individual citizens live under the constant threat of social scrutiny. American Patriots are becoming afraid to speak, act and think freely. George Orwell’s 1984 is a classic book depicting a populace ruled by a political regime that persecutes individualism and independent critical thinking as “thoughtcrimes” that must be enforced by the “thought police.” This party seeks power above all, and, through the propagandist Ministry of Truth, presents the people with their version of truth. Sound familiar?

      In 1949, when he wrote “1984,” Orwell predicted all this, including the secret torture, the perpetual warfare, the continuous spying and the fear of the government. His predictions were right on the mark -- he was only mistaken by 30 years.

      Today, it is still held that Communist Socialism and Fascism are considered opposite extremes of the political spectrum. This has not been true for almost 100 years. The Left/Right convention used to describe the two is an archaic and meaningless originally referenced to French parliamentary practice. It has zero application in American politics, where extreme far-right views would be Anarcho-Capitalist or Libertarian, and extreme far Left views would be both Communist Socialism AND Fascism.

      A truly free society exists only when citizens have a reasonable expectation they are free to live their lives without the fear of unwarranted interference from the authorities. Unfortunately, in today’s society, there is a growing expectation that is quite the opposite -- that we are, or soon will be, the victims of government targeting, for either personal or political motives.

Author Richard Dolan puts it quite well:

      "If you are concerned about Fascism coming to America, don’t look for a single fist pounding demagogue. Look instead at a government that can read every email you have ever written, GPS you at any time, know your internet habits better than you do, surveil you literally wherever you go in any major city, and use your information against you if they decide, however loosely, that you are an enemy of the state. That is Fascism, and the U.S. has been living that bipartisan nightmare for years."