Judge Andrew Napolitano announced on the Glenn Beck Show this week that he is planning to do a Constitutional Law seminar on Fox News. I see this as the next avenue of Tea Parties: We begin to talk about the U.S. Constitution, and what liberty really consists of, in detail, and we keep talking about it.

Thomas Jefferson said:

“… God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed.

The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.

If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty…. And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.

The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334 (C.J. Boyd, Ed., 1950)

That is an awesome quotation – an awesome thought.

Napolitano is the author of a wonderfully informative book, Constitutional Chaos. I’m looking forward to the lecture or lectures as a way to get the conversation started.

Not everyone is anxious to hear the Judge’s ideas, however. It would be naive to think Liberals would be interested in the U.S. Constitution. I found one Liberal site admitting they are “more than a little queasy” at some of the issues Napolitano addressed yesterday:

Freedom of choice and control over your own body will be lost.

More of your hard earned dollars will be at the disposal and tender mercies of federal bureaucrats. It was not intended to be this way.

We can vote the bums out of their cushy federal office

…we can persuade the state governments to defy the Feds in areas like health care where the Constitution gives the federal government zero authority.

We can ask our state legislatures to threaten to amend the Constitution to abolish the income tax, to return the selection of US senators to state legislatures and to nullify, to nullify! all the laws that Congress has written that are not based on the Constitution.

But there is one thing we can’t do. Just sit back and take it.”

Napolitano has been laying out our politically incorrect abuse of the US Constitution for a very long time. Here’s a snippet from the introduction to his book Constitutional Chaos:

What’s at Stake in America Today

I, myself, am a strong and fervent believer in Natural Law. The only valid laws are those grounded in a pursuit of goodness. Anything else – like taking property from Person A and giving it to Person B, like silencing an unpopular minority, like interfering with freedom of worship – is an unjust law, and, theoretically, need not be obeyed. St. Thomas Aquinas said only just laws impose an obligation of obedience, because unjust laws are not within the power of the government to enact; and only laws that seek goodness are just. This is the essence of Natural Law. No government may enact laws interfering with our freedoms no matter how popular the enactment.

The positivist would say since the government gives freedom, the government can take it away. The Natural Law says only God gives freedom and the government can only take it away as a punishment for violating the Natural Law, and then only through due process.

To a positivist, the government’s goal is to bring about the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. Under the Natural Law, the only legitimate goal of government is to secure liberty, which is the freedom to obey one’s own free will and conscience, rather than the free wills or consciences of others.

The problem today in America – the greatest and gravest threat to personal freedom in this country – is that the positivists are carrying the day. Under their sway, the government violates the law while busily passing more legislation to abridge our liberties.

If we wish to survive the near future with our rights intact, we need to understand the size and scope of the threat. We must also understand its true identity: a government that breaks its own laws. ~  Constitutional Chaos, Judge Andrew Napolitan

About Natural Law, new President George Washington said:

The foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality; …the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained…”

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Today, President Obama signed into law a bill that will dramatically expand the federal hate crimes law, enabling prosecutors to bring federal charges against people who were previously found innocent of hate crimes in state court. The hate-crimes provisions were added to a defense appropriations bill, which the President signed in a White House signing ceremony this afternoon at around 2:30 p.m.

The new law dramatically expands the reach of the existing federal hate-crimes law that was already on the books, by getting rid of the requirement that a hate crime affect federally-protected activities to be prosecuted in federal court. It also adds sexual orientation, gender, disability, and transgender characteristics to a law that was originally designed to protect racial minorities.

The hate-crimes bill was opposed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for allowing the reprosecution in federal court of people found innocent in state court. The Commission called the new law a “menace to civil liberties” because it is an end-run around constitutional guarantees against double-jeopardy.

As explained earlier, the bill’s sponsors seek to use it to reprosecute people in federal court who have already been found innocent of hate crimes in state court, taking advantage of the “dual sovereignty” loophole in constitutional protections against double jeopardy. Civil libertarians like Nat Hentoff and Wendy Kaminer thus object to the bill on double-jeopardy grounds. Backers of the bill, like the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Commissioner Michael Yaki, supported the bill partly as a way of prosecuting all over again people who were either found not guilty, or who were convicted only of ordinary crimes, while being acquitted of hate-crimes (like the teenagers acquitted of hate crimes in the Shenandoah incident, and the California case of Joseph Silva and George Silva).

Such re-prosecutions can be an enormous waste of money, and grossly unfair to the people who are reprosecuted, driving them into bankruptcy to pay lawyers to represent them all over again when they have already been found innocent in state court after an expensive trial. When the government re-prosecutes someone, it gains an enormous tactical advantage over the defendant from using the prior prosecution as a test-run, even if the defendant is innocent — making a guilty verdict possible even if the defendant is in fact innocent.

The bill also raises serious constitutional federalism issues under the Supreme Court’s Morrison decision.

Passage of the bill was aided by lousy reporting, in which some journalists, like Reuters, depicted the bill as simply a harmless measure to add sexual orientation to the list of protected characteristics covered by the federal hate-crimes law, ignoring its many other, far more important (and dangerous) changes to federal hate-crimes law.

Many supporters of the hate crimes bill want to allow those found innocent to be reprosecuted in federal court. As one supporter put it, “the federal hate crimes bill serves as a vital safety valve in case a state hate-crimes prosecution fails.” The claim that the justice system has “failed” when a jury returns a not-guilty verdict is truly scary and contrary to the constitutional presumption of innocence and the right to trial by jury.
But it is a view widely shared among supporters of the hate-crimes bill. Syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum pointed out in 1998 that Janet Reno, Clinton’s Attorney General, backed the bill as a way of providing a federal “forum” for prosecution if prosecutors fail to obtain a conviction “in the state court.”

Supporters of the hate crimes bill also see it as a way to prosecute people even in cases where the evidence is so weak that state prosecutors have decided not to prosecute. Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed for the hate crimes bill as a way to prosecute people whom state prosecutors refuse to prosecute because of a lack of evidence. To justify broadening federal hate-crimes law, he cited three examples where state prosecutors refused to prosecute, citing a lack of evidence. In each, a federal jury acquitted the accused, finding them not guilty.

As law professor Gail Heriot notes, “Some have even called for federal prosecution of the Duke University lacrosse team members–despite strong evidence of their innocence.” Advocates of a broader federal hate-crimes law have pointed to the Duke lacrosse case as an example of where federal prosecutors should have stepped in and prosecuted the accused players — even though the state prosecution in that case was dropped because the defendants were actually innocent, as North Carolina’s attorney general conceded (and DNA evidence showed), and were falsely accused of rape by a woman with a history of violence (including trying to run over someone with her car) and making false accusations.

The Obama administration has long supported the hate-crimes bill, which it used as a wedge issue in the 2008 election.

As law professors like Jonathan Turley and Eugene Volokh have noted, the Obama administration recently urged restrictions on hate speech at the United Nations, joining in calls to treat such speech, protected by the First Amendment under Supreme Court rulings, as a human-rights violation in violation of international human-rights treaties. In the U.S., college hate-speech codes have been used to discipline students for criticizing affirmative action, discussing the racial implications of the death penalty, and calling homosexuality immoral. In Canada and Britain, hate speech laws have been used to punish religious criticism of Scientology and homosexuality.

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In an interesting take on what is or isn’t legal, a union is threatening a critical blog for using the union’s name in its blog title. The American Federation of Teachers had its lawyers send a cease and desist letter to the operators of a blog called AFTexposed.com.

Now right off the top, this is an idiotic attempt to use legal threats on a blog. Imagine if this proscription became a legal precedent! Imagine a movie reviewer not being able to use a movie title in an article critical of the movie. Imagine a TV news station not being able to use the name of an organization it is investigating. Obviously this is more union thuggery on display, attempting to use the threat of law to stop people from criticizing them.

So, what happened? Here is Kyle Olson’s post on the matter at BigGovernment.com:

On Friday, October 9, we received a threatening letter from the AFT’s general counsel (which was carbon copied to AFT President Randi Weingarten), demanding we immediately stop using the acronym ‘AFT’ anywhere on the site, effectively neutering it, and turn over the domain registration to the union. [See the letter here.] How can we have a website completely dedicated to analyzing the AFT and its agenda if we aren’t allowed to use the acronym ‘AFT?’

What got these union thugs so upset? Well, for one thing AFTExposed.com used the union’s financial reports (called LM-2 filings) to report that the teachers union had donated $1.3 million dollars to ACORN.

Why would a teacher’s union be donating such a huge amount of money to the criminal ACORN organization? Why do teachers need to affiliate with a group known primarily for government shakedowns and voter fraud? Good question, so good that the AFT is a bit miffed that anyone would dare to report on their generous donation.

So, it’s off to the lawyers to try and bully someone into shutting up and violating their free political speech.

No wonder our schools are in such a mess.

(Cross posted at TheUnionLabelBlog.com.)

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A 17-year-old Eagle Scout in upstate New York has been barred from stepping foot on school grounds for 20 days — for keeping a 2-inch pocketknife locked in a survival kit in his car.

Matthew Whalen, a senior at Lansingburgh Senior High School, says he follows the Boy Scout motto and is always prepared, stocking his car with a sleeping bag, water, a ready-to-eat meal — and the knife, which was given to him by his grandfather, a police chief in a nearby town.

But Lansingburgh High has a zero-tolerance policy, and when school officials discovered that Whalen kept his knife locked in his car, he says, they suspended him for five days — and then tacked on an additional 15 after a hearing.

Nothing sums up the mind frame of the totalitarian moonbats that run our schools like the phrase “zero tolerance.”

This pointless exercise in petty tyranny could jeopardize Whalen’s dream of attending West Point.

On a tip from Frank W. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Comrade Obama revealed that he shares a conception of rights that would have horrified the Founding Fathers when he stated during a debate that healthcare is a human right, implying that you have a right for the government to force other people to pay for the goods and services you consume. Seen from the other side, this means you have the right for the government to expropriate the product of your labor and give it to someone else. You have the right to be a slave.

Now Spokane, a city that normally represents the sane side of Washington State, has climbed aboard the slaves rights campaign with a “Community Bill of Rights” that entails sacrificing basic freedoms to attain liberal utopia. It will be on the ballot next month, calling for the following:

1. Residents have the right to a locally-based economy

2. Residents have the right to affordable preventative health care

3. Residents have the right to affordable and safe housing

4. Residents have the right to affordable and renewable energy

5. The natural environment has the right to exist and flourish

6. Residents have the right to determine the future of their neighborhoods

7. Workers have the right to be paid the prevailing wage, and the right to work as apprentices, on certain construction projects

8. Workers have the right to employer neutrality when unionizing, and the right to constitutional protections within the workplace

No doubt all of this sounds wonderful to moonbats. But a moment’s reflection reveals that only a totalitarian government could guarantee these “rights,” and only by trampling the real rights enshrined in our constitution.

A “right” to a “locally-based economy”? This is a right for the government to impose draconian restrictions on trade. A “right” to affordable and renewable energy? This means the government has a right to spend your money on subsidies for windmills and pixie dust.

There’s a reason the Founding Fathers didn’t grant us the right to a chicken in every pot. Rights guarantee freedom. Entitlements, handouts, and moonbattery guarantee slavery.

On a tip from gibbswtr. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Here is the bottom line for me. Islam preaches mercy killings for Christian converts. Rifqa has converted to Christianity and is expressing a legitimate fear her parents would do Allah’s will if the government gave her back. Perhaps her fear is wrong, but is that possibility worth the chance? The bottom line for me is she is seventeen and would know her parent’s capability and devotion to Islam better than anyone. In a few months she has the legal right to live on her own anyway. Is giving her back to her parents really worth the risk? I don’t think so.

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It will astonish many conservatives, no doubt, to learn that a co-blogger at STACLU has vigorously defended in court one of the parents of Rifqa Bary and believes his former client’s cause is just. And there is little doubt that many on the left will be astonished to learn that a former attorney for one of Rifqa Bary’s parents blogs at STACLU. Yes, I was Aysha Risana Bary’s (Rifqa’s mother) attorney from August 10, 2009 until September 3, 2009. I hope it doesn’t come across as anything but a simple fact when I say to you, STACLU reader, that I know more about what is really going on in this case than you do — and we as Christians and conservatives ought to be interested in knowing what is really going on about controversial stories.

Let me give you a quick tour of my Christian, non-muslim-apologist bona fides before I continue. I found the Lord and became born again at the age of five and was raised in an evangelical tradition and environment. In other than my live appearance on FNC’s Fox and Friends August 27th, I have made my faith as a Christian clear to every journalist who has interviewed me about this case. I have served in uniform as an Army Reservist post-9/11. I am in civilian life an attorney who has been involved with probably close to a thousand cases involving child abuse and neglect, both on the side of the State, (a little aside: I almost lost my job way back for trying to save Terri Schiavo while I was a Florida DCF attorney — I was critical of Attorney General Charlie Crist in that case then and am critical of Governor Charlie Crist in this case now) and on the side of parents who have had the State dismantle their families. I have used this very blog to do what I can to encourage and defend Christian expression in our culture. I could go on, but hope I don’t have to. Bottom line, believe me or not, I am a Christian attorney who believes in working to advance the cause of Christ while I’m here in this fallen world.

And I also believe that many Christian conservatives have allowed themselves to adopt a narrative and thus reach conclusions about the Rifqa Bary case prematurely just as we rightly accuse the left-leaning MSM/drive-by/state-run media of sticking to their preferred narratives instead of squaring their passions with reality. Early on I all but plead with Christians to hit the pause button and wait for more investigation and facts. The implications of getting this wrong has pained me greatly.

Now to the facts. On the morning of August 10th, I was at the juvenile courthouse in Orange County, Florida, working, and observing people loudly making threats to bring in the media and the governor about some matter to be heard that day. Something seemed “off” about some of the personalities in this case immediately (and by that I do not mean the child herself). I was appointed to the case to defend Rifqa’s mom later that day. This did not happen purely by chance. As the person in my county who is routinely appointed to serve as an attorney ad litem to speak for children in foster care, I was asked to stick around because it was expected that I might very well become Rifqa’s attorney. When the attorney who had at first entered an appearance on behalf of Pastor Blake Lorenz later changed her position and declared that she in fact represented the child Rifqa, however, I was given the task of representing one of the parents in the case. It’s kind of inside baseball for most readers, but I was immediately struck by the strangeness of the Lorenz’ attorney spontaneously declaring an attorney-client relationship with the child in open court that hadn’t existed the moment before. That sense of strangeness remains relevant given a recent motion to clarify the roles of Rifaq’s four attorneys filed by DCF. In any event, I took the case on behalf of Rifqa’s mom and started digging, knowing from the beginning that the case had implications for people of my Christian faith and being determined to get it right.

By August 12th, I already had solid documentation that at least one thing circulating in the media and on blogs was flat wrong: that the parents had not reported the child missing for ten days. Not long after, I was able to nail down another misreported “fact”, that the child’s note left to her parents had not been given to police. Neither of those things are true. Why are those relatively mundane facts important? They are important because the person reporting them couldn’t possibly know those things, yet so-called adults surrounding Rifqa eagerly passed those things on to media without analysis, one imagines, because they served to paint the child’s parents in a bad light. Knowing that the key facts first presented here in Orlando were just plain wrong, and almost inexplicably wrong given that neither claim could possibly be known to anyone in Florida, I continued with my sense that something was “off” here, and kept digging.

I was annoyed as a Christian, as an officer of the court, and as a litigator, (in that order) that many with whom I agree on many issues were so willing to disregard the notion that a parent has the right in this country to raise and influence a child without governmental interference, unless there is evidence of abuse or neglect that is credible and not based on stereotypes or based on the beliefs or actions of what people who are not the parents might think, feel, or do. Consider this: a minor goes missing; an Amber Alert is issued; law enforcement officials develop information; that information leads police to a lead; that lead actually has knowledge of where the child is; despite the fact that the lead initially denies his knowledge of where the child is, police are able to put that together with a call to the National Center for Missing and Endangered Children, and then they find the missing child….. Yet the response of certain people involved with this case is to be outraged that the police did their jobs. Something is “off”.

Then came the FDLE report executive summary. It’s out there now. It confirms things I already knew. When Mohamed Bary personally showed me photographs of his daughter in a cheerleader outfit when we met for the second time on August 21st (he had driven from Ohio to Florida twice now to attend court hearings) I knew that claims that he had no idea that his child was a westernized and normal high school student were nonsense. Reading the FDLE report, I now have confirmation of several things I’d developed information about. I am no longer involved with this case as an attorney. It would be improper by this blog post to interfere with the Barys’ new attorneys and how they want to proceed. Let me just say this: if you can find a copy of the FDLE report on the web (the one distributed to the media has been redacted to remove names), you will know that every claim in this case so far that can be objectively and independently looked into, that isn’t a he-said, she-said about a conversation that you and I were not part of, is embellished or false. I don’t intend to litigate on a blog or go point-by-point about the FDLE report. I could, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that a growing list of otherwise uninterested people would have to be lying in order for what you think is true about this case to be true.

To my Christian readers I say that most of you likely had a heartfelt desire to protect a new convert to our faith. I can’t fault you there. Quite frankly I am happy that the child knows Jesus, but that is a personal feeling and not relevant to my previous job of defending these parents from the power of the State to take their family apart. Please recognize that the Lord is not so powerless as to need pastors and others to hide information, to embellish facts, or to give false witness in order to advance Christ’s Kingdom. You homeschoolers in particular ought to pause and weigh the power of the State to take your child into foster care against your feelings on this case and whether or not you would wish to be afforded a competent defense should religious biases be used against you some day.

To any readers who may be of the People for the American Way variety who blog about the hypocrisy of Christians, I simply present myself, an Evangelical Christian who believes in facts and law and has extended himself far out on a limb before his peers on behalf of Rifqa’s mother.

To any readers who may be Muslim, I invite you to explore the New Testament and I pray that you find the Way, the Truth, and the Life. See the paragraph above. Do not allow your reading of certain blogs to taint your feelings toward your Christian neighbors.

And to Rifqa, one year younger than my older child, I say that as a father and as a Christian, and as your mother’s former attorney, I care about you and have since August 10th. God bless you, and I believe that all things will work together for good.

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A principal and an athletic director are facing criminal charges for a lunch-time prayer.

Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against Pace High School in Santa Rosa County, Florida. The ACLU claimed some teachers and administrators were endorsing religion, but the school chose to give in to the ACLU’s demands rather than fight them in court.

According to the settlement, all school employees are banned from engaging in prayer or religious activities before, during, or after school hours. Now two school officials are facing criminal charges for offering meal-time prayers at an appreciation dinner for adults who had helped with a school field house project. Principal Frank Lay and athletic director Robert Freeman are scheduled to go on trial next month on criminal contempt charges. If convicted, both are subject to fines and imprisonment.

Schools give in on this politically correct crap all the time because they don’t have the money to defend themselves against the well funded bullies in the ACLU. Guess who funds the ACLU? We do. Our tax money pays for their wins. Half the time, they use this as leverage and set precedents never even going to court, just through pure threats. It’s a sad state our Country has allowed itself to get into. Soon the Constitution will be thought of by the general public to mean exactly opposite of what it was intended. Sad and scary!

Big Hat tip to Doug Powers!

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The Constitution is the people’s permission for the federal government to operate. As originally written, any issue not directly given as a responsibility of the federal government was to be left to the states. As specified in the 10th Amendment.

“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.”

The supreme authority in the United States is actually granted to us, the people, by our Creator as stated in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was much more than our asserting our emancipation from an oppressive dictator, it was our establishment as a people. This establishment went on without direction until after the American Revolutionary War when the Articles of Confederation were established. This loose agreement among the newly freed former colonies of the British crown established them as independent states with no way to settle disputes among them. This facilitated the Constitutional Convention which was empowered by the states to refine the existing Articles of Confederation.

When it was convened a decision was quickly made that the current Articles of Confederation were so flawed that they needed to be abandoned and a new agreement of the states needed to be made.

The intent of those who drafted our Constitution need not be interpreted as those who believe that it is a living breathing and evolving document would have you believe. For the love of Pete it is written in English. The intent is just as clear today as it was in 1787 when it was signed. The United States was and is to be a Constitutional Federal Republic in that the political power of the nation is to be centered in the various states NOT as some would have you believe the federal government.

Upon its signing, the US Constitution was nothing more than 7 Articles establishing the responsibilities of the Congress, President, Supreme Court and subordinate courts, interstate relations, a method of amendment, an establishment of authorization for the payment of debts, supremacy, and oaths of office, and the mode of ratification. It was to be understood, that if the Constitution did not address an issue specifically, it was for the states themselves to deal with or the people.

The USA Began to Unravel Before the Ink Was Dry

Since it’s ratification in 1789, the United States Constitution has been modified for better or for worse according to Article V.

The first fracture in this limited government was made with the adoption of the Bill of Rights. Jefferson, the Democrat that he was, believed that by establishing a bill of rights it would open the Constitution up to assumptions. If the government can assume one right over the people, where would it end. We now know. It doesn’t end.

How Abortion Has Led to the Downfall of a Nation

The next crack was with the adoption of the 14th Amendment. As necessary as the 14th was at its time in history, the amendment was written so broadly that those who cannot understand that a document written in English needs no interpretation will find meaning in its lack of wording to define rights or responsibilities that were never intended. This is how a Constitutional right to terminate life can be found in an amendment adopted to establish citizenship for all persons living in the United States at a specific moment in time regardless of previous state of servitude; and that those persons could not be denied due process under the law. I’m sorry people but slavery has been illegal in the United States since 1862. NO ONE living in 1972 – or since – had ever been a slave. Subsequently they could not be denied due process of law based upon a previous status of servitude. The basis for the legalization of abortion in the United States as legislated by the Supreme Court – a clear violation of Articles I and III of the Constitution – could not and should not have been made by the Warren court. The Amendment cited does not apply.

In contrast to the Warren Court’s establishment of the superiority of the 14th Amendment over all other provisions of the US Constitution, the 10th Amendment shines brightly above it. Or at least with any free thinking individualist with skills to comprehend a sentence written in plain English.

“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.”

Abortion is in the most liberal of terms a medical procedure. There is no Constitutional authority for the federal government to regulate, over-see, fund, or otherwise interfere with medical procedures in this country in spite of the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid. Simply put, there is no existing authorization in the Constitution allowing the federal government to do so. However, under the 10th Amendment the states have such a right.

The Warren court decided to supercede the right of the State of Texas to deny a woman an abortion because the state had established the procedure as being not lawful within its jurisdiction. The Warren court’s decision to hear the case much less find some twisted “Constitutional right” was a clear violation of states’ right as defined under the 10th Amendment. Their justification for even hearing the case in the first place – interstate commerce. A medical procedure – legal or illegal – has suddenly become a matter of interstate commerce. This will be the justification for Obamacare next. But I digress.

With this decision, the Warren court made it possible to argue that since every product and/or service performed in this country – legal or illegal – has an intrinsic value and might be a cause for an individual to cross a state line in order to seek said product or service, it is automatically a matter of interstate commerce and thus the jurisdiction of the federal government. And if a product or service is denied to a citizen of a state by the state, it can be argued that the citizen’s rights of due process have been violated even though, that person had no previous condition of servitude.

Using that argument, in Nevada, anyone can walk into any public building and play a slot machine. Here in Ohio we cannot. Therefore my right to feed a potential gambling addiction (which I don’t have) cannot be satisfied. Because companies in Nevada supply these type of machines, it can be argued that Ohio’s anti-gambling laws constitute a violation of my 14th amendment rights under interstate commerce. I don’t have readily available access to those machines. (note: this is actually a better argument for interstate commerce due process interference than the Roe decision was.)

In a sense, the Roe decision opened the 14th amendment up for bastardization by any liberal crazy with a wild hair to do anything that is currently forbidden by a state government.

The Income Tax and the Beginning of Class Warfare

The next modification to our Constitution that contributed to our demise as a country is the 16th Amendment. A very simple amendment the establishment of an income tax.

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

This removed the requirement established in Article I requiring an enumeration of the people before the levying of any taxes in Article I Section 2 Paragraph 3. I know the reason for doing so however, that does not justify the levying taxes without an enumeration of the people as required by our founders. Removing the racial make-up and devaluation of the human-being implied by Article 1 Section 2, it still should be required that if any new tax is to be imposed on the people, an enumeration of the populous should be conducted in order to know how much revenue would be generated by said tax. This only makes common sense and thus why it was originally written into article I.

This income tax has been a vehicle by which a particular political party has created a separation of the people based solely on one’s ability to earn. Hard work, effort, and the taking of risks in this country is what makes it great. Those who wish to impose some twisted sense of social equality based solely on existence have created in a sense a war among the classes that takes place every 4 years at the ballot box. Those who ‘have’ continue to be vilified in this nation rather than rewarded for creating wealth and providing opportunities for others to establish themselves and provide for their families. A progressive and overly burdensome tax system has been implemented in order to spread the wealth in a quest to redistribute the wealth of the nation according to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

The worst kept political secret in this nation is that the Democrat party has been working towards full implementation of social Communism by way of income redistribution. And the vehicle used most often is the 16th Amendment.

The Popular Election of Senators – The States Are Removed from the Equation

With the passage and ratification of the 17th Amendment, the people would in a sense have two Houses of Representatives. Originally, the state legislatures had the responsibility of appointing 2 Senators in different term classes to the United States Senate for terms of 6 years. This is outlined in Article 1 Section 3 of the Constitution.

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.

Being appointed by the state legislature made a Senator accountable to the state from which he/she was appointed. This gave the state more power. With the passage of the 17th Amendment, the people of this nation removed this accountability to the states and in a sense made the states subservient to the federal government. And the end of our Republic was begun.

Clause 1. The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.

Clause 2. When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of each State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.

Clause 3. This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.

As of the ratification of the 17th Amendment, we are no longer a collection of 50 separate and independent nations, we are nothing more than 50 provinces or districts within the out of control monster known as the United States.

Conclusion

Many cite the Constitution as the ultimate authority in the United States. This idea is nothing more than fiction. It is the will of the people as expressed by the people. We will it or it cannot be so. This authority is granted to us by GOD and declared to the world as such by the Declaration of Independence.

With the growing emergence of the sovereignty movement among the states, I can see a day when the United States as we know it could – and I emphasize the word COULD – be obsolete. If every one of the 50 states declared themselves independent again – like the Constitution originally intended – then perhaps a new agreement among the states could replace the now totally flawed and bastardized Constitution like it replaced the Articles of Confederation. One could only hope.

Gribbit Reporting for Stop the ACLU – Ohio

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The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because [on] their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

….We conclude that race-based action like the City’s in this case is impermissible under Title VII unless the employer can demonstrate a strong basis in evidence that, had it not taken the action, it would have been liable under the disparate-impact statute. The respondents, we further determine, cannot meet that threshold standard. As a result, the City’s action in discarding the tests was a violation of Title VII. In light of our ruling under the statutes, we need not reach the question whether [respondents’] actions may have violated the Equal Protection Clause. …

In other words, there is no evidence —let alone the required strong basis in evidence—that the tests were flawed because they were not job-related or because other, equally valid and less discriminatory tests were available to the City. Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer’s reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions. The City’s discarding the test results was impermissible under Title VII, and summary judgment is appropriate for petitioners on their disparate-treatment claim.

Ed Morrissey:

This creates a big problem for Obama and the Democrats in Congress. They certainly have the votes to confirm Sotomayor, but their big sell — that she was one of the appellate court’s most brilliant minds — just took a body blow on this decision. Most people want to move past the old arguments on race and hiring, feeling that forty years of affirmative-action policies have run their course. Having to defend a jurist who attempted to impose them in a court case will not make Sotomayor seem moderate or reasonable at all, but extreme and perhaps less than competent.

LawShawn Barber:

A developing meme is that the Supreme Court reversed Sotomayor. Will it make a difference during confirmation hearings? I’m not hopeful Sotomayor-reversed will generate much steam. I doubt Republicans have the heart to grill Sotomayor the way they should. They’re not of stout heart.

McQ:

I’d say that’s a fairly significant ruling and certainly the opposite of what Sotomayor held. Of course, if Sotomayor was on the court right now (and hadn’t had to recuse herself for hearing the case in a lower court) she wouldn’t have made any difference since David Souter, the justice she’s slated to replace, voted in the minority.

American Power rounds up the reactions of the left!

Also see: Michelle Malkin

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