Authority over every issue not enumerated, or assigned to Congress, is reserved for the individual states.
By: Mike Maharrey
I’ve often joked that George Orwell’s novel 1984 was meant to be a warning, not an instruction manual. And yet every day the U.S. marches closer and closer to making Orwell’s dystopian nightmare a reality.
Nobody wants this. So, why is it happening? Because way too many people do want the intermediate steps that necessarily lead to Orwell’s vision.
Not a day goes by without reports of police officers overstepping the bounds of the Constitution and brutalizing, terrorizing and killing the citizenry. Indeed, the list of incidents in which unaccountable police abuse their power, betray their oath of office and leave taxpayers bruised, broken and/or killed grows longer and more tragic by the day. Indeed, as John W. Whitehead reports in this episode of On Target, it is increasingly evident that militarized police—who are armed with weapons of war and who are allowed to operate above the law—have not made America any safer or freer.
By: Mike Maharrey
On Sept. 18, 1850 President Millard Fillmore signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 into law, setting the stage for wildly successful nullification efforts by northern states.
The Fugitive Slave Act set up a legal structure to facilitate the capture of runaway slaves and their return to their “owners.” Abolitionists dubbed it “Bloodhound Law.” It significantly expanded the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and was extremely unpopular in northern states.
The law erased any semblance of due process for an accused runaway slave. A white man could basically drag a black man or woman into slavery on the power of his word. Accused runaways weren’t even allowed to testify in their own defense.
Continue reading “Today in History: Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 Signed into Law”
By: Dave Benner
On September 17, 1787 representatives in Philadelphia signed the finalized United States Constitution. This occurred after a summer filled with contrasting proposals and rigorous debate.
The convention decided upon a league of states rather than a national government, settling on “a more perfect union.” Throwing monarchy to the wayside, the body embraced the separation of powers doctrine, ensuring one center of power could not become too dominant over the others. The document incorporated federalist maxims, and recognized that all powers not enumerated would be reserved to the states and the people.
Continue reading “Final Draft of the Constitution Signed in Philadelphia”
By: Rob Natelson
Judging by the promises of presidential candidates, you might think the federal government is designed to fix whatever ails us: health care, education, crime, infrastructure, the common cold.
But the Constitution doesn’t grant the federal government such unlimited authority. And neither Congress nor the presidency nor the courts were created to exercise it.
The Constitution fashioned the federal government to address a limited number of activities, contained in the document’s “enumerated powers.” The remainder were exclusively the domain of state and local government and the private sector. This system of divided authority is called “federalism.”
Continue reading “How our Constitution was supposed to work: new evidence comes to light”
By Mike MaHarrey
One of my biggest frustrations right now is all the people I knew back in the Tea Party days who support President Trump with no reservations. These are the same people who were talking about how important it was to limit federal power, shrink the federal government, cut federal spending and deal with the national debt when Barack Obama was president.
The pro-gunners want Congress to do this. The anti-gunners what Congress to do that. Same for religious issues. Well, there are 102 major legislative bodies in the United States. Most of them have the authority to write laws about guns and religion. Can you name the two that don’t have that authority?
The First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, …” The Second Amendment says, “… the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” The Tenth Amendment clarifies that the states have these authorities. We forget that the Bill of Rights restricts the federal government but not our entire governmental system.
The Constitution left these two topics to the sovereign states. The First and Second Amendments to the U.S. Constitution (and hence also the first two of the Bill of Rights) say that the federal Congress has no legislative jurisdiction to write such laws.
We forget that this is not a democracy but a democratic republic. It is a kind of “united nations” with each nation retaining a great deal of sovereignty. However, we the people, have been prone to look to the federal government for legislation to fix any difficulty. These first two amendments were designed, along with the Tenth Amendment to assure that these issues, always delicate, would be handled by governments closer to the people than the federal government could ever be.
The States are Sovereign Nations
The United States is exactly that – united states or united nations. It is a cooperative designed to address issues which would otherwise breed conflict between those nation-states and to present a unified face to the world. That was the intent when the thirteen, independent nations came together to replace the Confederacy. There was so much concern that the new over-all government might get too powerful, that the Bill of Rights was needed in order to get the new constitution approved by those nation-states. The last statement in the Bill of Rights clarifies that all authority not granted by the new constitution was reserved to the states and the citizens.
It’s Our Own Fault
“Congress shall make no law …” seems clear enough. And so does “shall not be infringed”. So what’s the problem? We humans have a tendency to grab the biggest stick we can lay our hands on when we want something taken care of. That’s the feds, of course. In the process, we have put the legislative authority in the hands of people who live thousands of miles away. We also forget that laws don’t administer themselves, they are enforced by individual people, not by agencies or organizations. Like the patrolman in your rear-view mirror, when enforcement time arrives, it is one-on-one.
We are wise if we keep power as small and weak and as close to us as possible. Instead, we have reached for the big stick that we are all tired of dodging.
And if that weren’t enough, we have elected representatives who promise to “do something” about this or that without thinking about which governmental body would best handle the problem. It is high time to demand these people tell us what they will not do, and how they will help put our government back in the cage where it was first confined. We need to change the dialog and we can if we ask the right questions and demand the right behavior.
Want to Feel Like Your Opinion Matters?
Then you want to keep political power as close to home as possible. You want a renewal of the republic mindset. You want to vote for representatives who promise and know how to do that. This is not a foreign idea at all. The founders knew that land, water, freedom of conscience and self-defense were all necessary to the pursuit of happiness and they did their best to keep the federal government out of those matters. Property and water laws are all administered by the states. Think about who you deal with in matters of real estate, vehicles, roads, guns and water rights. Except for some federal laws, these are all administered by the states. That was on purpose. And those federal laws are probably unconstitutional when looked at closely.
by Ron Paul
Former Federal Reserve official Bill Dudley’s recent op-ed calling for the Federal Reserve to implement policies that will damage President Trump’s reelection campaign states that such action would be unprecedented. Dudley claims the Federal Reserve bases its policies solely on an objective evaluation of economic conditions.
This is an example of a so-called noble lie — a fiction told by elites to the masses supposedly for the people’s own good, but really designed to maintain popular support for policies that benefit the elites. Dudley’s noble lie is designed to bolster a rapidly (and deservedly) eroding trust in the Federal Reserve. The truth is the Federal Reserve has always been influenced by, and has always tried to influence, politics.
President George H.W. Bush and other members of his administration blamed his 1992 defeat on then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s refusal to reduce interest rates. Greenspan was more cooperative with Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton. Lloyd Bentsen, Clinton’s first Treasury secretary, wrote in his autobiography that the Clinton administration and the Federal Reserve had a “gentleman’s agreement” regarding support for each other’s policies. Greenspan also boosted President George W. Bush’s “ownership society” agenda by lowering interest rates after 9-11 and the collapse of the tech bubble, thus creating a housing bubble.
Ben Bernanke, Greenspan’s successor, facilitated both Bush W. Bush and Barack Obama’s bailouts, “stimulus” spending, and massive welfare-warfare spending with record-low interest rates and quantitative easing. Speculation that the Fed was keeping interest rates low during the 2016 presidential campaign in order to help Hillary Clinton was fueled by the revelation that a Federal Reserve governor donated to Clinton’s campaign.
Presidents have always tried to influence the Fed — usually pushing for lower rates to (temporally) boost the economy. President Richard Nixon was recorded joking with then-Fed Chair Arthur Burns about Fed independence. President Lyndon Johnson shoved Fed Chair William Martin against a wall after an interest rate increase. Johnson’s frustration may have been because he realized that the success or failure of his guns and butter policies was largely out of Johnson’s control. The success or failure of presidents’ agendas is often determined by a secretive central bank’s manipulations of the money supply. No wonder presidents spend so much time trying to influence the Fed.
The Fed’s history of influencing, and being influenced by, presidents is one more reason why Congress should pass the Audit the Fed bill. Auditing the Fed is supported by almost 75 percent of Americans across the political spectrum, including such leading progressives as Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard.
My Campaign for Liberty is leading a major push to get a majority of Congress members to cosponsor Audit the Fed in order to pressure House and Senate leadership to hold a vote on the bill. The American people have had enough of noble lies about the Federal Reserve. It is time for truth; it is time to audit the Fed.
Copyright © 2019 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
By John W. Whitehead
“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
It’s been 230 years since James Madison drafted the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, and what do we have to show for it?
Nothing good.
In America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.
We can pretend that the Constitution, which was written to hold the government accountable, is still our governing document, but the reality of life in the American police state tells a different story.
“We the people” have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.
The bogeyman’s names and faces have changed over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, etc.), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called named of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago.
Most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.
A recitation of the Bill of Rights—set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches (all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, the courts and the like)—would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.
Here is what it means to live under the Constitution today.
The First Amendment is supposed to protect the freedom to speak your mind, assemble and protest nonviolently without being bridled by the government. It also protects the freedom of the media, as well as the right to worship and pray without interference. In other words, Americans should not be silenced by the government. To the founders, all of America was a free speech zone.
Despite the clear protections found in the First Amendment, the freedoms described therein are under constant assault. Increasingly, Americans are being arrested and charged with bogus “contempt of cop” charges such as “disrupting the peace” or “resisting arrest” for daring to film police officers engaged in harassment or abusive practices. Journalists are being prosecuted for reporting on whistleblowers. States are passing legislation to muzzle reporting on cruel and abusive corporate practices. Religious ministries are being fined for attempting to feed and house the homeless. Protesters are being tear-gassed, beaten, arrested and forced into “free speech zones.” And under the guise of “government speech,” the courts have reasoned that the government can discriminate freely against any First Amendment activity that takes place within a government forum.
The Second Amendment was intended to guarantee “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Essentially, this amendment was intended to give the citizenry the means to resist tyrannical government. Yet while gun ownership has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as an individual citizen right, Americans remain powerless to defend themselves against SWAT team raids and government agents armed to the teeth with military weapons better suited for the battlefield. As such, this amendment has been rendered null and void.
The Third Amendment reinforces the principle that civilian-elected officials are superior to the military by prohibiting the military from entering any citizen’s home without “the consent of the owner.” With the police increasingly training like the military, acting like the military, and posing as military forces—complete with heavily armed SWAT teams, military weapons, assault vehicles, etc.—it is clear that we now have what the founders feared most—a standing army on American soil.
The Fourth Amendment prohibits government agents from conducting surveillance on you or touching you or invading you, unless they have some evidence that you’re up to something criminal. In other words, the Fourth Amendment ensures privacy and bodily integrity. Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment has suffered the greatest damage in recent years and has been all but eviscerated by an unwarranted expansion of police powers that include strip searches and even anal and vaginal searches of citizens, surveillance (corporate and otherwise) and intrusions justified in the name of fighting terrorism, as well as the outsourcing of otherwise illegal activities to private contractors.
The Fifth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment work in tandem. These amendments supposedly ensure that you are innocent until proven guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you of your life, your liberty or your property without the right to an attorney and a fair trial before a civilian judge. However, in the new suspect society in which we live, where surveillance is the norm, these fundamental principles have been upended. Certainly, if the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.
The Seventh Amendment guarantees citizens the right to a jury trial. Yet when the populace has no idea of what’s in the Constitution—civic education has virtually disappeared from most school curriculums—that inevitably translates to an ignorant jury incapable of distinguishing justice and the law from their own preconceived notions and fears. However, as a growing number of citizens are coming to realize, the power of the jury to nullify the government’s actions—and thereby help balance the scales of justice—is not to be underestimated. Jury nullification reminds the government that “we the people” retain the power to ultimately determine what laws are just.
The Eighth Amendment is similar to the Sixth in that it is supposed to protect the rights of the accused and forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the Supreme Court’s determination that what constitutes “cruel and unusual” should be dependent on the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” leaves us with little protection in the face of a society lacking in morals altogether.
The Ninth Amendment provides that other rights not enumerated in the Constitution are nonetheless retained by the people. Popular sovereignty—the belief that the power to govern flows upward from the people rather than downward from the rulers—is clearly evident in this amendment. However, it has since been turned on its head by a centralized federal government that sees itself as supreme and which continues to pass more and more laws that restrict our freedoms under the pretext that it has an “important government interest” in doing so.
As for the Tenth Amendment’s reminder that the people and the states retain every authority that is not otherwise mentioned in the Constitution, that assurance of a system of government in which power is divided among local, state and national entities has long since been rendered moot by the centralized Washington, DC, power elite—the president, Congress and the courts. Indeed, the federal governmental bureaucracy has grown so large that it has made local and state legislatures relatively irrelevant. Through its many agencies and regulations, the federal government has stripped states of the right to regulate countless issues that were originally governed at the local level.
If there is any sense to be made from this recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual freedoms have been eviscerated so that the government’s powers could be expanded.
Yet those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.
It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.” As the Preamble proclaims:
We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.
In other words, we have the power to make and break the government. We are the masters and they are the servants. We the American people—the citizenry—are the arbiters and ultimate guardians of America’s welfare, defense, liberty, laws and prosperity.
Still, it’s hard to be a good citizen if you don’t know anything about your rights or how the government is supposed to operate.
As the National Review rightly asks, “How can Americans possibly make intelligent and informed political choices if they don’t understand the fundamental structure of their government? American citizens have the right to self-government, but it seems that we increasingly lack the capacity for it.”
Americans are constitutionally illiterate.
Most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their basic rights. And our educational system does a poor job of teaching the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For instance, when Newsweek asked 1,000 adult U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 44% were unable to define the Bill of Rights.
A survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a little more than one-third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, while another one-third (35 percent) could not name a single one. Only a quarter of Americans (27 percent) know it takes a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate to override a presidential veto. One in five Americans (21 percent) incorrectly thinks that a 5-4 Supreme Court decision is sent back to Congress for reconsideration. And more than half of Americans do not know which party controls the House and Senate.
A survey by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that only one out of a thousand adults could identify the five rights protected by the First Amendment. On the other hand, more than half (52%) of the respondents could name at least two of the characters in the animated Simpsons television family, and 20% could name all five. And although half could name none of the freedoms in the First Amendment, a majority (54%) could name at least one of the three judges on the TV program American Idol, 41% could name two and one-fourth could name all three.
It gets worse.
Many who responded to the survey had a strange conception of what was in the First Amendment. For example, 21% said the “right to own a pet” was listed someplace between “Congress shall make no law” and “redress of grievances.” Some 17% said that the First Amendment contained the “right to drive a car,” and 38% believed that “taking the Fifth” was part of the First Amendment.
Teachers and school administrators do not fare much better. A study conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis found that one educator in five was unable to name any of the freedoms in the First Amendment.
In fact, while some educators want students to learn about freedom, they do not necessarily want them to exercise their freedoms in school. As the researchers conclude, “Most educators think that students already have enough freedom, and that restrictions on freedom in the school are necessary. Many support filtering the Internet, censoring T-shirts, disallowing student distribution of political or religious material, and conducting prior review of school newspapers.”
Government leaders and politicians are also ill-informed. Although they take an oath to uphold, support and defend the Constitution against “enemies foreign and domestic,” their lack of education about our fundamental rights often causes them to be enemies of the Bill of Rights.
So what’s the solution?
Thomas Jefferson recognized that a citizenry educated on “their rights, interests, and duties” is the only real assurance that freedom will survive.
As Jefferson wrote in 1820: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of our society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”
From the President on down, anyone taking public office should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. One way to ensure this would be to require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution and pass a thorough examination thereof before being allowed to take office.
Some critics are advocating that students pass the United States citizenship exam in order to graduate from high school. Others recommend that it must be a prerequisite for attending college. I’d go so far as to argue that students should have to pass the citizenship exam before graduating from grade school.
Here’s an idea to get educated and take a stand for freedom: anyone who signs up to become a member of The Rutherford Institute gets a wallet-sized Bill of Rights card and a Know Your Rights card. Use this card to teach your children the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.
If this constitutional illiteracy is not remedied and soon, freedom in America will be doomed.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have managed to keep the wolf at bay so far. Barely.
Our national priorities need to be re-prioritized. For instance, some argue that we need to make America great again. I, for one, would prefer to make America free again.
As actor-turned-activist Richard Dreyfuss warned:
“Unless we teach the ideas that make America a miracle of government, it will go away in your kids’ lifetimes, and we will be a fable. You have to find the time and creativity to teach it in schools, and if you don’t, you will lose it. You will lose it to the darkness, and what this country represents is a tiny twinkle of light in a history of oppression and darkness and cruelty. If it lasts for more than our lifetime, for more than our kids’ lifetime, it is only because we put some effort into teaching what it is, the ideas of America: the idea of opportunity, mobility, freedom of thought, freedom of assembly.”
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
by Ron Paul
The US Constitution never granted the federal government authority to create a central bank.
The Founders, having lived through hyperinflation themselves, understood that government should never have a printing press at its disposal. But from the very beginning of America’s founding, the desire for a crony central bank was strong.
In fact, two attempts were made at creating a permanent central bank in America prior to the creation of the Fed. Fortunately, the charter for The First Bank was allowed to expire in 1811, and President Andrew Jackson closed down the Second Bank in 1833.
But, unfortunately, a third attempt was successful and the Federal Reserve was unconstitutionally created by Congress in 1913. Americans have been living under a corrupt and immoral monetary system ever since. The Federal Reserve is the printing press that has financed the creation of the largest government to ever exist. Endless welfare and endless military spending are both made possible by the Federal Reserve. The Fed can just print the money for whatever the US establishment wants, so those of us who long for a Constitutional and limited government have few tools at our disposal.
Despite all the propaganda claiming “independence,” the Fed has always been a deeply political institution. Because the Fed is a government-created monopoly with key government-appointed employees, its so-called “independence” is a mere fiction. However, the US Congress created the Fed with legislation; it can also abolish the Fed with legislation.
Last week, the facade of Federal Reserve “independence” was dealt a severe blow. Ironically, the person who broadcast to the world that the Fed is anything but “independent” was ex-New York Fed President Bill Dudley. Dudley wrote that, “Trump’s re-election arguably presents a threat to the United States’ and global economy, and if the goal of monetary policy is to achieve the best long-term economic outcome, the Fed’s officials should consider how their decisions would affect the political outcome of 2020.”
The timing of Dudley’s threats to use Fed monetary policy to affect the outcome of a US election couldn’t come at a more striking time. After all, for more than two solid years Americans have been bombarded with fabricated stories about Russians rigging our elections. And yet here is a Federal Reserve official threatening to do the same exact thing – but this time for real!
Whether it’s the mainstream media, the CIA, the FBI, or now the Federal Reserve, more and more Americans are waking up to the fact that there is a Deep State in America and its interests have nothing to do with American liberty. In fact, our liberty is what the Deep State wants to abolish.
When it comes to the Federal Reserve, I stand firmly by my conviction that it needs to be audited and then ended as soon as possible.
America’s Founders were not perfect. They were human beings just as capable of error as we are. But they had a remarkable understanding of the ideas of liberty. They understood that liberty cannot exist with a government that has access to a printing press. Sound money and liberty go hand-in-hand. If we want to enjoy the blessings of Liberty, we must audit and then end the Federal Reserve!
Copyright © 2019 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
Visit Alabama’s only no-compromise gun rights group, BamaCarry!