Tag Archives: usconstitution

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Daily Broadside | We’re Going to See If Texas Stands Tall

This statement has a feel similar to the Declaration of Independence ennumerating the “long train of abuses and usurpations” endured by the American people.

GOVERNOR GREG ABBOTT
January 24, 2024

The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States. The Executive Branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting States, including immigration laws on the books right now. President Biden has refused to enforce those laws and has even violated them. The result is that he has smashed records for illegal immigration.

Despite having been put on notice in a series of letters–one of which I delivered to him by hand–President Biden has ignored Texas’s demand that he perform his constitutional duties.

* President Biden has violated his oath to faithfully execute immigration laws enacted by Congress. Instead of prosecuting immigrants for the federal crime of illegal entry, President Biden has sent his lawyers into federal courts to sue Texas for taking action to secure the border.

* President Biden has instructed his agencies to ignore federal statutes that mandate the detention of illegal immigrants. The effect is to illegally allow their en masse parole into the United States.

* By wasting taxpayer dollars to tear open Texas’s border security infrastructure, President Biden has enticed illegal immigrants away from the 28 legal entry points along this State’s southern border– bridges where nobody drowns–and into the dangerous waters of the Rio Grande.

Under President Biden’s lawless border policies, more than 6 million illegal immigrants have crossed our southern border in just 3 years. That is more than the population of 33 different States in this country. This illegal refusal to protect the States has inflicted unprecedented harm on the People all across the United States.

James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other visionaries who wrote the U.S. Constitution foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats like cartels smuggling millions of illegal immigrants across the border. That is why the Framers included both Article IV, sec. 4, which promises that the federal government “shall protect each [State] against invasion,” and Article I, sec 10, Clause 3, which acknowledges “the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders.” Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387, 419 (2012) (Scalia, J., dissenting).

The failure of the Biden Administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article IV, sec. 4 has triggered Article I, sec. 10, Clause 3, which reserves to this State the right of self-defense. For these reasons, I have already declared an invasion under Article I, sec. 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself. That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary. The Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.

Greg Abbott
Governor of Texas

This is a showdown, the SCOTUS decision the other day notwithstanding.

Oh, but they are doing something.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday said he will add more razor wire at the U.S.-Mexico border to prevent more illegal immigrants from entering the United States, coming after the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration and allowed federal agents to cut the wire.

“We are adding more razor wire as we speak right now to make sure that we are doing even more to secure the border,” the Texas Republican said in an interview Thursday with Bloomberg TV.

The governor said his state has the authority to defy the U.S. government under the U.S. Constitution because its authors—the Founding Fathers—believed that “there would be times when the federal government does not do its job and states have a right of self-defense.”

In fact, Abbott taking charge and leading the way has inspired 25 other states to support his effort. With Texas, that makes it a MAJORITY of states opposing Brandon’s open border. How’s that for “muh’ democracy”?

It’s a confrontation between two power centers — the state v. the federal government. This is how our first civil war started. A second may be churning under the surface as the two sides square off.

Have a good weekend.

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Daily Broadside | Did You Commemorate Constitution Day Yesterday?

I can hardly believe in three-and-half years of blogging about faith, culture and politics, I’ve never written about Constitution Day, which was yesterday.

Also known as Citizenship Day, Constitution Day is an American observance begun in 2005, honoring the day 39 delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the United States Constitution. This historic date was September 17, 1787, 236 years ago.

Another important figure in the creation of Constitution Day is Louise Leigh. Leigh, after taking a course in Constitutional History with the National Center for Constitutional Studies, was inspired to spread her newfound love of the Constitution throughout the country. In 1997, she founded a nonprofit organization called Constitution Day, Inc. to help encourage recognition of the importance of this national holiday.

Through her efforts, Constitution Day became an official holiday alongside Citizenship Day in 2004 when, with the help of support from Senator Robert Byrd, the “Constitution Day” amendment to the Omnibus Spending Bill passed. In May 2005, the United States Department of Education backed the law when it announced that it would apply to any school receiving federal funds of any kind.

What is unique about the U.S. Constitution is that it is the only law passed by the People, and legislatures are therefore under the oversight of the People. In other words, the governments of this land, whether federal or state, are answerable to the People through the Constitution. We, the People, have the right and responsibility to demand that our “rulers” honor its authority and do not transgress it, as they are more and more inclined to do.

But to do that we need to know what it says. Here are some facts about the Constitution to get you interested in learning more.

  • James Madison, America’s fourth President (1809-1817), made a major contribution to the ratification of the Constitution by writing The Federalist Papers, along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. In later years, he was referred to as the “Father of the Constitution.”
  • The U.S. Constitution has 4,400 words. It is the oldest—and shortest—written Constitution of any major government in the world. (To be technically accurate, the Constitution contains 4,543 words, including the signatures, has four sheets, each 28-3/4 inches by 23-5/8 inches. It contains 7,591 words when including the 27 amendments.)
  • Delaware was the first state to ratify the Constitution.
  • There are 27 Amendments to the Constitution. The first ten are called The Bill of Rights and were ratified in 1791.
  • 39 men signed the Constitution. The oldest was Ben Franklin, who was 81, physically frail, and entered the convention hall in a sedan chair borne by four prisoners from the Walnut Street jail in Philadelphia.
  • The youngest signer was Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey who was 26 years old.
  • George Washington and James Madison were the only presidents who signed the Constitution.
  • As Benjamin Franklin left the Pennsylvania State House after the final meeting of the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787, he was approached by the wife of the mayor of Philadelphia. She was curious as to what the new government would be. Franklin replied, “A republic, madam. If you can keep it.”
  • The word “democracy” does not appear in the Constitution.

If you’ve never commemorated Constitution Day, think about making an effort to understand the Constitution and then observing the day every September 17 by reading it.

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Daily Broadside | Do We Have the Heart to Resist Unconstitutional Rule?

Happy Wednesday and I hope you enjoyed your time off yesterday for Independence Day. One of the foundational truths that has been lost over our years as a nation is the notion that “we the people” are in fact the locus of self-government.

The question to ponder on Independence Day is, simply: Where do our rights come from?

In any system of government ultimate authority, or sovereignty, must be located somewhere in the system for it to function. For most of history, in most places, sovereignty has been located in the ruler: the king or queen, warlord, military commander, party chairman, or the like.

Where sovereignty is located in the ruler, the personal embodiment of legitimate state power, the rights of individuals have been understood to be little more than the malleable artifacts of the ruler, with their scope and substance and tenure entirely dependent upon the ruler’s determinations and dispensations. The economic and social status of persons, their property, their liberty, their very lives are understood to be contingent upon their relationship with the ruler.

In 1776, our Founders turned this traditional concept of state sovereignty, and the relation of the ruler to the people, upside down. For the first time in history, a nation was founded on the proposition that the people themselves were sovereign, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights that the government was bound to recognize, respect, and protect.

With their property and person protected by a Constitution enacted to secure the natural rights affirmed in the Declaration of Independence, the creative genius of a free American people produced unparalleled progress and prosperity.

Our rights, correctly understood, are given to us by God. They are not conferred on us on the whims of the president, congress, or by an elite “ruling class.” We are endowed by God “with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

If rights come from God, the ultimate Authority, then no man has the authority to take away or otherwise impede my enjoyment of those rights. Nevertheless, we are experiencing the diminishment of our enjoyment of these rights under the oppressive rule of the “managerial class.”

Americans should understand the meaning of their own founding documents and history.  The type of government contemplated by the founders prioritized “self-government,” one that obtains the “consent of the governed” by its nature.  The current regime is a progressive-era holdover, an undemocratic managerial state ruled by putative technocrats and experts.

Progressive era managerialism claims legitimacy because it imagines the discovery of verifiably correct public policy.  Having discovered technocratically correct policies, these policies may be advanced without regard to public opinion.  After all, if the policies are correct, any expression of opposition is mere “misinformation” serving no purpose.  Thus, the administrative state’s managerial heads will ignore, deceive, and manage public opinion to pursue policies that they have determined are the fruit of authentic political and managerial science.

There is more than one type of threat to liberty.  Just as foreign occupation is incompatible with independence, rule by homegrown aliens, with whom one does not share the same interests, values, and pieties, can threaten independence as well.  Arguably, the distance between ordinary people and the Washington D.C. government sector is more profound today than that of the American colonists from the English in 1776.

And, like those colonists, we live under a kind of occupation, complete with a new flag.

My question is, “Do we have the heart to overthrow the oppressors?” should it come to that? I’m not confident we do. But I’m inspired by an interview conducted with a man who fought at the Battle of Concord on April 19, 1775.

Captain Levi Preston, a minuteman who fought at the Battle of Concord, demonstrated the power of sentiment to spur one to action. Many decades after the battle, historian Mellen Chamberlain asked him, “Why did you go to the Concord fight?” Why did this Massachusetts farmer decide to leave his plow, pick up his musket, and join the fight against the British? Chamberlain suggested possible motivations, each of which Preston denies. Was it “intolerable oppressions”?

“Oppressions?” asked Preston. “I didn’t feel them.”

The Stamp Act? “I never saw one of those stamps.”

The tea tax? “I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.” Chamberlain then mentioned the great seventeenth-century philosophers. “I suppose you had been reading Harrington or Sidney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty.”

Preston’s reply: “Never heard of ‘em. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watts’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanack.”

Perplexed, Chamberlain then asks, “what was the matter? And what did you mean in going to the fight?”

Preston’s answer: “Young man, what we meant in going for those red-coats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”

Preston’s instinctual attachment to self-government drove him to fight to defend it. Chamberlain considers Preston’s statement “the ultimate philosophy of the American Revolution,” writing that, “the attitude of the colonists was not that of slaves seeking liberty, but of freemen—free men for five generations—resisting political servitude.” Preston had no knowledge of the American Revolution’s legal and philosophical underpinnings and had not suffered from the “long train of abuses and usurpations” that Jefferson describes in the Declaration. He chose to fight out of loyalty to his community’s self-government and was willing to die to preserve it.

We think we have an attachment to self-government, but the truth, as I see it, is that we merely think that if we elect someone, then they have the power to do whatever they think best, even if it means boxing us in and diminishing our God-given rights to self-determination. Our “self-rule” consists of voting for people who may or may not be interested in preserving your God-given rights.

As we think about July Fourth, we should remember that America was first in human history to establish a free and independent constitutional republic based on two political and moral principles. First, the government was required to protect its citizens’ inalienable God-given freedom and rights, which would later be formalized in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Second, it was the first country to establish that the legitimacy of government resides exclusively in the people, who elect their leaders.

Modern Americans need to remember that prior nations around the world for thousands of years were undemocratic and hierarchical, with rulers and their inner circles at the top having the power and privileges while people at the bottom had few rights. Before America was established, freedom and rights as we understand and experience them simply did not exist. We must never forget the courage, determination, and godly principles that were necessary to establish the United States.

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Daily Broadside | The Weaponization of the Federal Government Continues Apace

Daily Verse | Proverbs 14:34
Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people.

Thursday’s Reading: Proverbs 18-21

Thursday and, if you’ve been paying attention (and even if you weren’t), the Supreme Court sent Roe v. Wade to the dustbin of history last month with a 6-3 majority (although Roberts only concurred with the case in question, Dobbs, not with overturning Roe). Of course, there was the much anticipated reaction from the Left, which had been hyperventilating with murderous threats since the draft opinion was leaked in May, with one near-assassination attempt on Justice Kavanaugh. As the Left likes to spout about every issue it supports, “people are gonna die!” And they almost delivered.

Roe was overturned on solid constitutional grounds because it was originally established on faulty reasoning and unconstitutional grounds. In other words, Roe was judicial malpractice, with the court overstepping its authority and usurping the role of the State legislatures. Even the notorious RGB agreed that Roe was bad law. Remember, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In other words, the federal government has only the powers delegated to it in the U.S. Constitution. If a power isn’t listed, that “power” belongs to the states or to the people.

The legality of abortion — killing an unwanted child all the way up to the moment of birth in some cases — was rightly returned to the States for adjudication.

A number of States have banned (or will shortly ban) abortion, while many others have codified abortion. Some, like New York and Vermont, want to make abortion access a constitutional right so that it can’t be rescinded with new legislatures. While I am adamantly opposed to abortion, this is how it should be: each State working out through their legislatures how they will handle baby-killing.

So, with all being right in the world, why does this press release give me the chills?

The Justice Department announced today the establishment of the Reproductive Rights Task Force. The Task Force formalizes an existing working group and efforts by the Department over the last several months to identify ways to protect access to reproductive health care in anticipation of the possibility of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. 

Oh.

Let me get this straight. SCOTUS corrects an egregious (not to say illegal) wrong and the United States Department of Justice — justice which is supposed to act only according to the law without respect to education, rank, wealth, sex, skin color or opinion — is not only choosing sides, but aligning itself against SCOTUS?

“As Attorney General Garland has said, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is a devastating blow to reproductive freedom in the United States,” said Associate Attorney General Gupta. “The Court abandoned 50 years of precedent and took away the constitutional right to abortion, preventing women all over the country from being able to make critical decisions about our bodies, our health, and our futures. The Justice Department is committed to protecting access to reproductive services.”

As is usual with Leftists, they constantly lie, and especially so in our ruling class. SCOTUS did not “take away a constitutional right to abortion” because there never was a constitutional right to abortion to begin with. That so-called “right” was made up by unelected men in black who “concocted an elaborate set of rules, with different restrictions for each trimester of pregnancy, but [they] did not explain how this veritable code could be teased out of anything in the Constitution, the history of abortion laws, prior precedent, or any other cited source.”

Also note the euphemism, “reproductive services.” If you’re fighting for abortion, you’re not fighting for “reproduction.” You’re fighting to keep from reproducing which, let’s face it, is pretty simple: keep your zippers zipped.

But that won’t stop the DOJ and former SCOTUS nominee Merrick Garland from bringing the weight of the federal government to bear on the States and, in effect, on We the People.

Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta will chair the Task Force, which will consist of representatives from the Department’s Civil Division, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Attorney community, Office of the Solicitor General, Office for Access to Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, Office of Legal Policy, Office of Legislative Affairs, Office of the Associate Attorney General, Office of the Deputy Attorney General and Office of the Attorney General and will be supported by dedicated staff.

Hey, Fat, what’s with all the “offices”?

Those many “offices” who are banding together to intimidate those who oppose abortion are being paid for by your taxes. This is a perfect example of the federal leviathan that, once created, keeps growing and consuming more resources, more office space, more overhead and, most of all, more tax dollars. Like Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors.

Guess who else the DOJ is “partnering” with.

The Justice Department is working with external stakeholders such as reproductive services providers, advocates and state attorneys general. The Task Force will continue this important effort. It will also work with the Office of Counsel to the President to convene a meeting of private pro bono attorneys, bar associations and public interest organizations in order to encourage lawyers to represent and assist patients, providers and third parties lawfully seeking reproductive health services throughout the country.

Can you imagine the DOJ, or any agency of the United States government for that matter, advocating on behalf of crisis pregnancy centers if the situation had somehow been reversed and it was pro-life advocates who had lost a “right”?

Yeh, me neither.

The DOJ is pulling together a juggernaut of baby-killer advocates to fight for an imaginary “right” to murder your offspring instead of upholding the law of the land which is now being determined by the States. In Garland’s own statement, he says that, “The Justice Department will use every tool at our disposal to protect reproductive freedom.”

It sounds like he’s serious.

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Daily Broadside | It’s Not Liberty if You Fear Your Rulers

Daily Verse | Genesis 29:18
Jacob was in love with Rachel and said, “I’ll work for you seven years in return for your younger daughter Rachel.”

Thursday’s Reading: Genesis 30-31

Happy Thursday, Broadsiders. Thanks for sharing your time with me.

There’s something very wrong with our government. As I wrote yesterday, the conflict we’re seeing in our country is ultimately between those who support the Judeo-Christian values upon which our government was founded (whether or not they are truly Christ followers) and those who deny God and want to supplant him with themselves as ruler. It’s the age-old dilemma of Man v. God and I can tell you right now that, in that engagement, it will not end well for man.

That’s at the core of the dilemma we face, but when I say something’s wrong with our government, I mean that it’s been inverted. Our Constitution starts with the words, “We the People” for a very good reason: we determined to govern ourselves. It was we, the people, who set up our system of government by writing and ratifying a law—the U.S. Constitution—to which all other governance in the U.S. must submit. It is the highest law of the land.

The people passed that law establishing a stronger central government over these United States. It’s the only law passed by we the people. Because it was written by us, that means that, technically and legally, all other forms of governance and governors under that Constitution are subject to our oversight. We did not pass that law to establish such government and then say to it, “Feel free to do what you want, we’re your subjects.”

But that’s not how it feels in today’s society, does it? Do you get the sense that the federal government is concerned at all about whether they’re following the will of the people as expressed in the Constitution? Do you get the sense that all of our state legislatures and governors are following the will of the people as expressed in the Constitution? Do you think that the judicial system we established has carefully ensured that they have faithfully applied the Constitution to their decisions free from their political biases?

If we’re honest, we have to admit that in today’s United States the inverse is true: we the people have become subject to the political agendas of those elected to high office. Our “representatives” aren’t concerned about whether they’re governance is Constitutional. One only has to look at all the federal “alphabet” agencies and the rules and regulations they create to know that Congress outsourced the legislative responsibilities the Constitution gave only to them.

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. — Article I, Section I: Congress

Congresscritter A: Hey, I’ve got an idea! What if we make a law that gives someone else the job of making laws?

Congresscritter B: Wait, why would you do that if the Constitution only gives us that role?

Congresscritter A: If we delegate our law-making role to a bunch of unelected bureaucrats then the people can’t blame us for bad laws. If they can’t blame us for bad laws, we get re-elected!

Congresscritter B: Oh, I see. Then we can sit on committees to “oversee” the bureaucrats and call them in to testify when things go wrong and pretend that we’re representing the people! What a country!

No, to the extent that they are concerned at all about the Constitution, it’s about being elected “by the people” then taking that as a vote of confidence to shove their political agenda through the system and finding ways to either evade the Constitution or weaponize it—such as twice impeaching a president to tarnish his standing and legacy.

The government that we the people authorized to “insure domestic tranquility” has intentionally dissolved our southern border and allowed hundreds of thousands of foreigners to flood our nation unchecked, essentially becoming wards of the state because they’re dependent on government handouts funded by the money they take from us.

The government that we the people formed is now calling parents “domestic terrorists” for objecting to the sexual perversion and Marxist indoctrination being foisted upon their children by government-run (public) schools.

The government that we the people created serially undermined, hampered, harassed and lied about an elected president’s relationship with Russia and spent millions of our hard-earned dollars “investigating” what they knew was a bogus case—and those responsible have not been punished according to law.

The government that we the people established to “promote the general welfare” has instead taken to promoting the welfare of only certain groups identified by the color of their skin, their sexual preferences, their political bias and any other category by which they can divide us.

The government that we the people oversee now passes trillion-dollar “budgets” that are thousands of pages long without giving legislators time to read and understand what is in them, robbing us of our wealth in the present and our children in the future to pay for it all.

You get the idea.

I’m not saying that there aren’t, can’t or won’t be differences of opinion or that our leaders can achieve complete neutrality or that they will get every decision right. But it’s clear that the government we forged has become an elitist cabal of grifters detached from the law they are supposed to preserve, protect and defend, who have in mind only their own interests—money, power, notoriety—or those of “special interest groups,” which means they are more concerned with pleasing their base than the whole of we the people.

Often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, it was John Basil Barnhill who said, “Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty.”

What is very wrong with our government is that it does not respect or fear the people, who are its rightful masters.