House Democrats in Direct Violation of the Constitution

by

       M. Richard Maxson

      The Democrats in the House of Representatives are in direct violation of the Constitution with their abnormal attempt at impeachment. I say the Democrats because not one member of the other party voted for it. They have disgusting framed their charges as an attack on democracy and wrapped their narrative in red, white, and blue to try to convince the country that THEY are right and Constitutional originalists are wrong. We will get to the direct violation in a moment. First a few wrds from these originalists.

           

                           "The impeachment of President Trump is Un-Constitutional.”

                                           - Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz (D)

      Professor Dershowitz rubuking the House Democrats hand-picked “experts” stated, that a president could be impeached for gross abuse of office. “That’s just not in the Constitution. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s only four criteria for impeachment: treason, bribery, high crimes and misdemeanors. Abuse of office is not one of them. It would be unconstitutional to impeach the president on these grounds. And the message has to be, Congress is not above the law. They keep saying the president's not above the law. That's right. Congress is not above the law. They can't make it up as they go along. They can't make up crimes. We've had people saying, “Oh, disclosing the name of the whistleblower would be a crime" — no, it's not. Obstruction of justice — that's not a crime. Collusion — that's not a crime. The phone call — that's not a crime. You can't just make it up. To have a crime, you have to find something in the statute book that existed before the actions took place, and that was clear and unequivocal. It's just not there.”

       “This is a dark chapter in American history, an ugly chapter. The fact is that THIS impeachment is perhaps not un-Constitutional, but it is anti-Constitutional. It is a terrible mistake for our country”

          - Ken Starr, Former federal Judge, Solicitor General, and Independent              

                                                Council of the Clinton impeachment.

      If there was ever a person who knows about impeachment, it’s Starr. He weighed in on what has been discussed and has his verdict. His assessment is that, “No crime was proven. Nothing he did even comes close to a crime. In fact, Trump was doing the right thing when he spoke with Ukraine’s president. The foreign relations of the United States are, above all, entrusted to the person who we elect," Starr continued. "This is a terrible interference, what is unfolding. It's a terrible interference with what the president does at the most sensitive level -- which is a person-to-person conversation with another leader. And I think it's an erosion of presidential power, which is unfortunate." Starr claimed it was within the scope of Trump's authority to ask for a favor and said affairs of state and foreign relations are one of the chief functions of the office of the president. There you have it. The man who led the country’s last impeachment investigation announced that no crime was proven. He also stated that this could be considered as an “attempted coup.”

      As to the Constitutional violation.Article I, Section 9, Clause 3 states that“No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.” A Bill of Attainder is when the legislature declares the guilt of a person or group of persons, and punishes them without due process (the benefit of a trial).

      In Britain, bills of attainder were used as a convenient way for the King to convict subjects of crimes and confiscate their property without the bother of a trial, and without the need for a conviction or indeed any evidence at all. Such actions were seen as tyrannical, and the Founding Fathers did not wish to give the new federal government those same kinds of powers. Some states, prior to the Constitution, did use attainders against British loyalists, but the practice all but disappeared after the Constitution so specifically forbid the use of attainders by the U.S. Congress.

      Prohibiting the use of bills of attainder serves a number of purposes. One purpose is that by disallowing the bills of attainder the separation of powers is reinforced. By disallowing bills of attainder, it literally forbids the legislature from performing judicial functions. Another purpose is in regard to the protection of the concept of due process, which was later reinforced by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

      A clear violation regarding bills of attainder arose regarding President Obama’s treatment of British Petroleum. The President considered BP guilty of the crime of spilling oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and demanded they pay retribution without the benefit of due process. However, the argument was that the President did not legislate a bill of attainder, and therefore was innocent of acting in an unconstitutional manner.

      In reality, that made him even more guilty of violating the Constitution (again), for it was evidence that President Obama was acting in lieu of the Judiciary and Legislature. In other words, he took on their authorities without even the consideration that what he was doing was a usurpation of the powers of the other branches of government.

       The true danger of a bill of attainder is that such a legislative act inflicts punishment without a judicial trial, and takes away the life, liberty or property of the target.

                                       - Constitution Instructor Douglas V. Gibbs

      This is a disgusting attempt at a power grab by the minority party that has lost touch with the majority of Americans. Democrats have been relying on the news media to hype up the whistleblower’s complaint but it has not worked. Recent polls show that the President did nothing wrong 72%-28% and when asked if they thought the impeachment was “rigged” they agreed 75%-25%.

The Deja-Vu of Political Impeachment

by

       M. Richard Maxson

      The Constitution grants Supreme Court justices a lifetime appointment if they choose to stay by not specifying a time or age limit of service. The purpose of a lifetime appointment was to give them freedom to make decisions without interference from the executive or legislative branches of government. But the Constitution leaves open the possibility of impeachment and removal by Congress. In U.S. history, one justice was impeached, but not convicted, and one justice resigned under the threat of impeachment. The single justice impeached but subsequently not forced out was Samuel Chase, a longtime Maryland legislator and a signer of the Declaration of Independence who was appointed to the court as an associate justice by President George Washington. A Federalist, Chase irked Thomas Jefferson and his Republican allies in Congress, and was impeached on politically motivated charges of acting in a partisan manner during several trials.

      The Constitution does allow elected or civil officials to be impeached on grounds of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” But the barriers to actually bringing impeachment charges forward, much less securing a conviction are high. And those barriers came into play in the case of Chase.

      Chase was appointed to the court in 1796 and during his early years as an associate justice developed reputation for open partisanship in favor of the Federalist Party, and specifically the policies of President John Adams. This put Chase in direct opposition to the executive branch after Thomas Jefferson, whose Democratic-Republican party bitterly opposed the Federalists, was elected president in 1800.

      Jefferson already disliked Chase for openly political statements he often made while presiding over lower court cases. (Until the late 1800s, Supreme Court justices also served as lower court judges.) But things worsened after Chase went so far as to open a grand jury charge in a U.S. circuit court that ardently criticized a law passed by the Democratic-Republican-controlled congress. Jefferson seized on those statements as evidence of Chase’s inappropriate political bias and his allies in the House of Representatives agreed. Chase was eventually served with eight articles of impeachment, one related to his grand jury charge and the other seven focused on alleged improper behavior when he resided over in lower court cases.

      In 1804, eight articles of impeachment accused him of allowing his political views to interfere with his decisions. This description of events comes from the U.S. Senate's website: Samuel Chase  had served on the Supreme Court since 1796. A staunch Federalist with a volcanic personality, Chase showed no willingness to tone down his bitter partisan rhetoric after Jeffersonian Republicans gained control of Congress in 1801. Representative John Randolph of Virginia, at the urging of President Thomas Jefferson, orchestrated impeachment proceedings against Chase, declaring he would wipe the floor with the obnoxious justice. The House voted to impeach Chase on March 12, 1804, accusing Chase of refusing to dismiss biased jurors and of excluding or limiting defense witnesses in two politically sensitive cases. The trial managers (members of the House of Representatives) hoped to prove that Chase had “behaved in an arbitrary, oppressive, and unjust way by announcing his legal interpretation on the law of treason before defense counsel had been heard.” Highlighting the political nature of this case, the final article of impeachment accused the justice of continually promoting his political agenda on the bench, thereby “tending to prostitute the high judicial character with which he was invested, to the low purpose of an electioneering partizan.” On March 12, 1804, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach Chase by a 73 to 32 margin, naming John Randolph, a cousin of Jefferson and a mercurial politician in his own right, to head the House Managers responsible for the prosecution.

      On November 30, 1804, the Senate appointed a committee to “prepare and report proper rules of proceedings” for the impeachment trial. When they took up the case against the Federalist justice in January 1805, the Senate consisted of 25 Jeffersonian Republicans and nine Federalists. Chase appeared before the members on January 4, 1805, to answer the charges. He declared that he was being tried for his political convictions rather than for any real crime or misdemeanor and requested a one-month postponement to prepare a defense. The Senate agreed and the trial began in earnest on February 4.

      Chase’s defense team, which included several of the nation’s most eminent attorneys, convinced several wavering senators that Chase’s conduct did not warrant his removal from office. Chase was tried in the Senate for 22 days. With at least six Jeffersonian Republicans joining the nine Federalists who voted not guilty on each article, the Senate on March 1, 1805, acquitted Samuel Chase on all counts. A majority voted guilty on three of the eight articles, but on each article the vote fell far short of the two-thirds required for conviction. The Senate thereby effectively insulated the judiciary from further congressional attacks based on disapproval of judges’ opinions. Chase resumed his duties at the bench. He would serve on the Supreme Court for the rest of his life, dying in 1811 after 25 years on the bench.

      President Donald Trump was impeached on December 18th, 2019 for accused crimes of soliciting the aid of a foreign government to gain information on Joe Biden, a political candidate challenging President Trump, and for obstruction of Congress. This impeachment was described by some as the first in which the President was not accused of any specific crime. As with the impeachment of 1805 this action is purely political. The facts will show that the information that the President was seeking was NOT to help him win an election but rather to expose the massive election interference by the Democratic party with the assistance of now removed Ukrainian officials and other foreign governments in the 2016 US election. An ongoing criminal investigation into this matter is being conducted by the Justice Department. Patriotic Americans eagerly await it’s findings.

The Presidents Rebuttal to the Political Use of the Constitution

by

       George Sontag

       President Trump’s letter to Speaker Pelosi is one of the most important documents written by a president in our nation’s history. It is the most honest and open interpretation of this three-year impeachment process on record. When history looks back on this time of partisan strife and a nation transitioning towards a post-truth status quo, this letter will be seen as either a last-ditch effort to stop the onrushing blight of cultural Marxism or it will be seen as the rallying cry to make America not only support its duly elected president, but also to embrace the sanity that seems to be slipping away from our society. It’s a document that will be referenced by historians of the future, and how it’s viewed will depend on how America moves forward from here.

       The root cause of all of this also happens to be the true enemy spreading like an epidemic across this great nation, the Democrats push towards Cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism is driving this impeachment and the illogical responses to the prosperity before our eyes. He wrote this letter to detail what has been happening to him and our country since he was elected. The corrupt methodology of the Democrats’ systematic attack on the 2016 election has truly been a long-term coup attempt.

       These are excerpts from the letter. The full version can be accessed by the link below. He begins;

"Dear Madam Speaker:"

      

     "I write to express my strongest and most powerful protest against the partisan impeachment crusade being pursued by the Democrats in the House of Representatives. This impeachment represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers, unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history."

 

      "The Articles of Impeachment introduced by the House Judiciary Committee are not recognizable under any standard of Constitutional theory, interpretation, or jurisprudence. They include no crimes, no misdemeanors, and no offenses whatsoever. You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!"

 

      "By proceeding with your invalid impeachment, you are violating your oaths of office, you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution, and you are declaring open war on American Democracy. You dare to invoke the Founding Fathers in pursuit of this election-nullification scheme—yet your spiteful actions display unfettered contempt for America’s founding and your egregious conduct threatens to destroy that which our Founders pledged their very lives to build. Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying “I pray for the President,” when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense. It is a terrible thing you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I."

      "You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offense—it is no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for the lawful exercise of legislative power.”

      "The claim, so-called “Obstruction of Congress,” is preposterous and dangerous. House Democrats are trying to impeach the duly elected President of the United States for asserting Constitutionally based privileges that have been asserted on a bipartisan basis by administrations of both political parties throughout our Nation’s history. Under that standard, every American president would have been impeached many times over.  As liberal law professor Jonathan Turley warned when addressing Congressional Democrats: “I can’t emphasize this enough…if you impeach a president, if you make a high crime and misdemeanor out of going to the courts, it is an abuse of power. It’s your abuse of power. You’re doing precisely what you’re criticizing the President for doing."

      "Everyone, you included, knows what is really happening. Your chosen candidate lost the election in 2016, in an Electoral College landslide (306-227), and you and your party have never recovered from this defeat. You have developed a full-fledged case of what many in the media call Trump Derangement Syndrome... You are unwilling and unable to accept the verdict issued at the ballot box during the great Election of 2016. So you have spent three straight years attempting to overturn the will of the American people and nullify their votes. You view democracy as your enemy!"

      "Speaker Pelosi, you admitted just last week at a public forum that your party’s impeachment effort has been going on for “two and a half years,” long before you ever heard about a phone call with Ukraine. Nineteen minutes after I took the oath of office, the Washington Post published a story headlined, “The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun."

      "You and your party are desperate to distract from America’s extraordinary economy, incredible jobs boom, record stock market, soaring confidence, and flourishing citizens. Your party simply cannot compete with our record: 7 million new jobs, the lowest-ever unemployment for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans, and a rebuilt military..."

      "After three years of unfair and unwarranted investigations, 45 million dollars spent, 18 angry Democrat prosecutors, the entire force of the FBI, headed by leadership now proven to be totally incompetent and corrupt, you have found NOTHING! Few people in high position could have endured or passed this test. You do not know, nor do you care, the great damage and hurt you have inflicted upon wonderful and loving members of my family. You conducted a fake investigation upon the democratically elected President of the United States."

      "You are the ones interfering in America’s elections. You are the ones subverting America’s Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice. You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain...Your legacy will be that of turning the House of Representatives from a revered legislative body into a Star Chamber of partisan persecution."

      "I have no doubt the American people will hold you and the Democrats fully responsible in the upcoming 2020 election. They will not soon forgive your perversion of justice and abuse of power. One hundred years from now, when people look back at this affair, I want them to understand it, and learn from it, so that it can never happen to another President again."

      Forty years ago, our editor, predicted that a form of Socialist Communism would take control of the United States by the year 2025. Was he right? In that article he stated that the U.S. would become a Socialist nation wrapped in red, white, and blue and many of of it’s citizens would not even realize what happened. Was he right? In 1960 Nikita Khrushchev the head of the communist Soviet Union stated, “You Americans are so gullible. No, you won't accept communism outright, but we'll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you'll finally wake up and find you already have communism….” Was he right?

Read the full letter here:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Letter-from-President-Trump-final.pdf 

Congress Has Perverted It's Constitutional Duty

by

       M. Richard Maxson

      The very first clause of the very first section of the very first article of the Constitution says: All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives - all legislative powers. Today, most of our laws are now made by men and women not of our own choosing. They are done by bureaucracies known as the Deep State. The term Deep State refers to “a state within a state,” a group of people who have so much control inside of a state that they don’t actually have to abide by the same laws, largely because they’re the ones creating them.

      The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. The men and women who work in our bureaucracies and who write these regulations that impose new rules, new burdens on the American people are mostly well educated Leftists still in place from the Clinton and Obama administrations. They are hard working and well intentioned to their cause but there is one critical feature they do not possess which members of Congress do. That is they're not elected by the people and they don't have the responsibility or the authority under the text of the Constitution to make law. Then why, as a violation of the Constitution, are they allowed to do it?

       The Constitution ought to be applied as it was written -- it wasn't poetry, to be interpreted by the self-proclaimed moral superiors, but a legal document requiring specific legal interpretation. The Constitution cannot protect our rights if we do not protect the Constitution. The Constitution is just some words on paper if we do not do anything to those who violate it.

      The power to legislate means the power to make law. The power to make law means the power to make rules that are binding on the public and carrying the force of government behind them. This power is not supposed to be just delegated to the bureaucracy as it so often is. Congress, especially the House of Representatives, is actually the perpetrator of this. Congress does this voluntarily of its own accord in order to acquire power while escaping blame for the failures. Members of Congress like to be able to take all the credit and receive none of the blame for laws that they put in place thus assuring their massive re-election rate.

“Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.” - Abraham Lincoln

      The Democratic controlled Congress of the day relinquished the majority it’s rightful authority right after the Watergate scandal. They abrogated their constitutional duties to become an investigative body, which they are not. We have a Department of Justice and an Attorney General for investigations. It is not Congresses duty but it is a way for one political party to continue to harass the other and create sensational headlines in the process of demonizing their opposition. The only proof needed is their attempt to impeach every Republican president since then in order to gain absolute power and create their utopia of a one-party system. In his farewell presidential speech, Washington said: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”

 

      It is very important to have conversations with your children, with your family members, your friends, your neighbors, about the Constitution as it was written, as it was intended, especially with your children, to talk to them about what protects our liberty. Talk to them about the stories underlying our Constitution and how it came about, how it has worked well over the years, and how it has benefited us to the degree that we've followed it, and how provisions of it have been lost and need to be restored. The Constitution of the United States says that the federal government has only those powers specifically granted to it by the Constitution -- and that all other powers belong either to the states or to the people themselves, not to faceless bureaucrats.

A Disgusting Warping of the Constitution for Political Gain

by

       M. Richard Maxson

      The American Constitutionalist has refrained from commenting on the impeachment investigation until now as this IS an assault on the Constitution. In our system of government, power resides with the American people, who delegate executive power to the President through an election once every four years. Unelected officials and career bureaucrats assist in the execution of the laws. The unelected bureaucracy exists to serve the elected representatives of the American people.

      The Democrats’ impeachment inquiry is not the outgrowth of serious misconduct; it is an orchestrated campaign to upend our political system. The Democrats are trying to impeach a duly elected President based on the accusations and assumptions of unelected bureaucrats who disagreed with President Trump’s policy initiatives and processes. The evidence presented does not prove any of these Democrat allegations, and none of the Democrats’ witnesses testified to having evidence of bribery, extortion, or any high crime or misdemeanor.

      The Democrats’ impeachment narrative flips our system on its head in service of their political ambitions. They have violated every conceivable due process right….counsel, confrontation, cross-examination, compulsory process. They have conducted secret hearings leaking selectively and deceptively. This Democrat Congress will be remembered for wholesale trashing of the U.S. Constitution to satisfy the politically-driven irrational hatred of a president who challenges the Lefist idea that they are intellectually and morally superior to the rest of us.

      The parade of witnesses(?) is a whose-who of Deep State characters and Leftist jurists with a long history of published anti-American and Socialist viewpoints. The three liberal professors with knowledge of the Constitution whom Democrats dragged in to advance their case weren't witnesses to anything -- they are merely Democratic donors and/or partisans with an axe to grind against the president. The only recent voice of reason comes from George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley, who himself admitted that he did not vote for the president but as a true American and constitutionalist, could not remain silent.

      In his testimony at the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Turley warned Congress that it was abusing its power suggesting that Congressional Democrats would be committing the high crimes and misdemeanors — not President Donald Trump — with the way that they are conducting their impeachment efforts. “If you impeach a president, if you make a ‘high crime and misdemeanor’ out of going to the courts, it is an abuse of power. It’s your abuse of power. You’re doing precisely what you’re criticizing the president for doing,” he stated.

      “If this Committee elects to seek impeachment on the failure to yield to congressional demands in an oversight or impeachment investigation, it will have to distinguish a long line of cases where prior presidents sought the very same review while withholding witnesses and documents,” Turley said. “Basing impeachment on this obstruction theory would itself be an abuse of power … by Congress. It would be an extremely dangerous precedent to set for future presidents and Congresses in making an appeal to the Judiciary into ‘high crime and misdemeanor.'”

      Professor Turley also stated, “In the current case, the record is facially insufficient. The problem is not simply that the record does not contain direct evidence of the President stating a quid pro quo, as Chairman Schiff has suggested,” Turley continued. “The problem is that the House has not bothered to subpoena the key witnesses who would have such direct knowledge. This alone sets a dangerous precedent. A House in the future could avoid countervailing evidence by simply relying on tailored records with testimony from people who offer damning presumptions or speculation.”

      Their impeachment inquiry lacks any substance and they know it so they play dirtier than anything ever done in the history of the United States. The Democrats release the private phone numbers of their opponents. The last few years of Democrats encouraging their radical bases to attack and assault their political opponents is disgusting. This time they put it in overdrive as Republican Congressmen and Senators now require extensive security.

      House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has done almost exactly what he and fellow Democrats accuse President Donald Trump (falsely) of doing: he abused his power to ask an outside entity to investigate political opponents. Schiff subpoenaed phone records from AT&T that he then used to claim his Republican counterpart, Ranking Member Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), was part of a plot to smear a U.S. ambassador.

      What Schiff did is arguably worse than what he claims Trump did in his telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. AT&T is an American company, not a foreign government. Schiff didn’t simply ask AT&T for dirt on his opponents. He forced it to hand over the records. And he did so without giving Nunes any warning, or any opportunity to respond to the claims he would later sneak into his 300-page impeachment report.

      Kimberly Strassel at theWall Street Journal notes: “Mr. Schiff claims the ignominious distinction of being the first congressman to use his official powers to spy on a fellow member and publish the details.” She adds, quoting former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, that Schiff’s subpoena may have broken the law. Phone carriers cannot divulge call records without an individual’s consent, except for a legitimate law enforcement purpose: this was not. Schiff ordered the phone records on Sep. 30, but the House impeachment inquiry was not properly authorized until Oct. 31, so he cannot claim the subpoena was justified. Strassel adds, citing constitutional law expert David Rivkin, that anyone swept up in Schiff’s phone snooping might have the right to sue. Shockingly, she adds, “The media is treating this [the phone records] as a victory, when it is a disgraceful breach of ethical and legal propriety.”

      The Wall Street Journal editorial board blasted not only the attempt to smear/suggest the involvement of the included people by the records without, of course, any evidence, but also the unprecedented abuse of power. Now we have elected members of Congress using secret subpoenas to obtain, and then release to the public, the call records of political opponents. “Apparently Mr. Schiff now wants to impeach Members of Congress too.”

       Americans see how unfair and corrupt the entire impeachment process has been from the start but this act was brazen and shameful. While it may not have been illegal (because Congress writes its own rules on investigations) it certainly was wrong. It certainly tramples on rights normally held dear by the left. But most of all what it did was expose that Schiff, for all of his pompous bluster, is doing exactly what he has accused President Trump of doing: using his power to investigate his political opponents.

      Schiff has destroyed the ability of the Intelligence Committee to work in a bipartisan fashion, which is crucial to its oversight function. But what is even worse is that he has private information about the conversations of an unknown number of Americans, including journalists and elected officials. His “inquiry” is no longer just about the president. It has become an Inquisition, encroaching on the rights of ordinary citizens who have nothing to do with Trump.

      This is all bad political theater on the backs of taxpayers footing the multimillion-dollar tab. Meanwhile, Democrats aren't doing the work of the American people -- work they were elected to do.

• They refuse to pass the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a trilateral deal that will strengthen crucial trade alliances with neighboring Canada and Mexico, create an estimated 176,000 new jobs, increase wages and add $68.2 billion to the U.S. economy.

• They're turning a blind eye to other needs such as failing infrastructure; funds for our military and the government; lowering prescription drug prices; and fixing the broken immigration system jeopardizing national security.

• They're also ignoring one the biggest issues voters across the aisle care about, health care, evidence that liberal lawmakers care more about power and all its self-serving manifestations than doing what's best for our country and the American people.

      The hypocrisy is mind-blogging. Just go back to Barack Obama. The same president who ignored Congress and created laws by fiat. The man who ignored laws when they were inconvenient, and then ignored courts that told him to stop doing it. The man who ignored congressional subpoenas after his administration put 2,000 weapons into the hands of narco-traffickers (and an Islamic terrorist), leading to the murder of at least one American. More than once, Obama spied on the press. He ordered law enforcement to back off a terrorist organization that was engaged in criminal behavior in the United States, so that he could make a deal with Iran and bolster his political agenda. More than any modern president, Obama was rebuked by the Supreme Court, often 9–0. To watch a supporter of the previous president — a president who abused his executive power in unprecedented ways — playacting as a constitutional purist is intolerable.

Is Propaganda Now Legal in the US?

by

       George Sontag

      Throughout the country, many of us have rightly been long concerned about the danger of the government using taxpayer funds to covertly influence public opinion. Since 1948 a law has been in effect prohibiting the government from using propaganda on it’s own citizens. It was passed by the fear that the large amount of propaganda that we were using overseas would be used in this country. For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the US. government's mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. That fact, even though it is law, is debatable.

      The US. foreign propaganda machine is massive. There is one US. government program that brought over about a thousand journalists from overseas to come train in the US; this is one of the State Department projects. And just one bureau of the State Department has by their account 86 media programs overseas. Even the $700 million figure… is just a tip of the iceberg on how much the US spends to influence the media overseas.

      Fast forward to 2012. The rise of the internet allowed citizens to access all of the world’s information including propaganda and that became a problem. News reports with different meanings of the same stories were becoming obvious. To keep the facade, something had to change.

      On 12/29/12, President Obama signed HR 4310, the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act. Section 1078 of the bill authorizes the use of propaganda inside the US which had previously been banned since 1948 when the Smith-Mundt Act was passed.. The NDAA to allow the government to use propaganda to openly LIE to the people. It also legalized covert infiltration of media organizations by government agents and even the creation of media outlets that legally operate entirely as government fronts. What most people refer to as “propaganda material”, the amendment refers to as “public diplomacy information.” This bill appears to not only open the door to legalization of the dissemination of propaganda in America, but to legalize the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird.

      For the first time since 1948, propaganda is now legal in the US. It is being said the legislation allows the material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon to strike the ban that had been in place on domestic dissemination of propaganda. The result is an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic US. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for US. domestic propaganda efforts. Many people feel it legalized the use of propaganda on American audiences. Examples of this can be seen today with such television shows like Madam Secretary, which was a blatant attempt to ensure Hillary Clinton’s ascension to the White House. Another is Seal Team, one of five such programs in the last few seasons that makes this country’s violation of international law seem righteous and normal.

      It is clear the legislation had nothing to do with repealing a law relating to the news media publishing false information. Propaganda or Fake News need not be blatant lies — they can be, and most often are, the subtle deformations of reality in which a sapling of truth is grafted onto an agenda driven interpretation to produce a bramble of pseudo-reality. Congress cannot pass a law that limits the media's ability to publish truth or falsity, although citizens can sue a publisher for damages caused by libel or defamation. The First Amendment to the US. constitution, however, does not apply to the congressional power to limit the distribution of content (propaganda) created by a federal agency.

      From a First Amendment perspective, however, the ban is both highly paternalistic and a nightmare for government transparency. As noted, State- and BBG-produced material (The Broadcasting Board of Governors is now the United States Agency for Global Media.) are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. And there are less restrictive means available than an outright ban to ensure that the State Department and BBG are not turned into organs of a domestic government propaganda machine.

       We should trust that the American public will be able to take government public diplomacy communications with a sufficient grain of salt to prevent undue influence but most people believe what they’re told. It’s the reason advertising is so scarily effective. It’s why fake news is so pervasive in our society. When one is told something, especially young people, it’s likely to be believed. In layman’s terms the news media/government can broadcast propaganda to the American people as they please. It has been signed into place, and there is nothing that can be done about it at this time.

       The greatest worry is that the Bill essentially neutralized two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect US. audiences from their own government’s misinformation campaigns. As we have stated before, critical and analytical thinking using the most sources available is the only way to find the truth in a world of propaganda and agenda driven falsehoods.