(Fox News Latino) A senior member of the Obama administration said Thursday that the administration plans to change a rule to reduce the time the spouses and children of undocumented immigrants are separated from citizen relatives while they try to win legal status in the United States

Currently, undocumented immigrants must leave the country before they can ask the government to waive a three- to 10-year ban on legally coming back to the U.S. The length of the ban depends on how long they have lived in the U.S. without permission.

The official said the new rule would let children and spouses of citizens ask the government to decide on the waiver request before the undocumented immigrant heads to his or her home country to apply for a visa. The undocumented immigrants still must go home to finish the visa process to come back to the U.S., but getting the waiver ahead of time could reduce the time an undocumented immigrant is out of the country.

The waiver shift is the latest move by President Barack Obama to make changes to immigration policy without congressional action. Congressional Republicans repeatedly have criticized the administration for policy changes they describe as providing “backdoor amnesty” to undocumented immigrants.

It’s not so much Obama showing a clear lack of respect for the People’s House, ie, Congress, as it is 1) Obama attempting to create political issues with which to fight the GOP, and 2), and more importantly, the fact that Obama has never been a real leader, has no skills as a leader, and becomes petulant and therefore unwilling to do the hard work necessary to reach across the aisle and make accommodations with the opposition Party, who represent specific parts of the United States as laid out by the Constitution. Every other president has had to do this, and has worked, or at least attempted to work, with the opposition party. That’s too difficult for Emperor Obama. Funny how he keeps calling himself a “Constitutional Professor”: who’s constitution, Venezuela’s? Iran’s?

That said, if the GOP plays their cards right (sometimes a big “if”), they can use Obama’s unilateral extension of unchecked power grabs against him during the General Election, and perhaps tie it in to the Congressional Democrats. Perhaps some videos of Democrats complaining about Bush unilaterally taking on new powers juxtaposed with Obama actually doing just that.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

One of the reasons that our economic recovery has been so slow is that the Obama administration has opened a continuous avalanche of regulations affecting jobs, hampering businesses, and costing all of us billions in lost revenue, taxation, and waste. But there is a bill in the House called the REINS Act that could help tamp down this avalanche, save us all money, help bring back the creation of jobs that aren’t being created now.

The full name of the act is the Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny Act and that is a pretty straight forward name for the legislation as its premise is that regulatory agencies are so out of control and the costs they impose on the people have become so onerous that Congress has to step in and place limits on this untrammeled power. (H.R. 10 and the Senate’s similar bill S. 299)

The bill was introduced two years ago by Kentucky Representative Geoff Davis (R) who got the idea from a constituent who confronted the Representative on the costs of regulation. Davis’ bill would require an up or down vote by Congress and the President’s signature on all regulations that will cost Americans $100 million or more to implement.

As Davis’ REINS Act website explains:

For too long, Congress has delegated much of its constitutional authority to Executive Agencies. This has allowed Executive Branch agencies to implement rules that are sometimes ineffective, redundant, time consuming, costly, and even counterproductive. In addition, it has allowed previous Congresses to limit their accountability for such rules by front-loading the benefits of legislation and back-loading the costs.

The REINS Act would restore congressional responsibility and accountability in the regulatory process so that the elected representatives of the people can be held accountable. This will ensure that new major rules serve their intended purpose and do not place unnecessary burdens on the job-creating businesses that our economy needs to grow.

This is actually a sort of cause for me, that Congress has given away its powers to everyone but other Congressmen! Congress has allowed its powers to be slowly chipped away by allowing the the courts to take power and the president to take power away from it. It’s time Congress reasserted its rights.

This is a good start for Congress to reassert its authority. Call your congressman and tell him to support the REINS Act now.

For more information, the Heritage Foundation has a webpage on the REINS Act.

“Officials in this city where Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson are buried are considering limits on downtown flag-flying, including the Confederate flag, angering defenders of the divisive Southern symbol.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans organized a rally ahead of a scheduled public hearing Thursday night and an expected vote.

Officials in this college town of 7,000 insist the flag limits are not aimed at the Confederate flag. The proposal would limit the use of downtown poles to the flying of the U.S., Virginia and Lexington flags. It would not restrict the display of the Confederate flag elsewhere in the city.

“They can carry their flags anywhere they want,” City Manager T. Jon Ellestad. The city received hundreds of complaints the last time Confederate flags were planted in holders on lights poles, in January to mark Lee-Jackson Day, a state holiday.

The NAACP launched an economic boycott of South Carolina in 1999 about the Confederate flag that flew atop the Statehouse dome and in the chambers of the House and Senate. A compromise in 2000 moved the flag to a monument outside the Statehouse.

This is not the first time Lexington, is at the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley, has clashed with the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The city attempted nearly 20 years ago to ban the display of the Confederate flag during a parade honoring Jackson. The American Civil Liberties Union, which successfully defended the group’s bid to carry the flag, is closely watching this dispute from afar.

“City council could live to regret this ordinance, as it imposes unusually restrictive limits on the use of the light poles,” said Kent Willis, the ACLU’s executive director in Virginia. “Sometime in the future when city officials want to use those light poles to promote a special event they may find themselves handcuffed by their own lawmaking.”

Source

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

In an effort to ensure their citizens are treated fairly in Alabama, 16 nations, including Mexico, filed briefs against the state’s controversial new immigration law that has already drawn fire from the U.S. Department of Justice.

So, Mexico and the other 16 nations are admitting that their citizens are present in Alabama in violation of Unites States law? Which means that we should listen to Mexico and find all their citizens and send them on back.

Edward Still, a Birmingham attorney who filed the brief, told The Montgomery Advertiser that the nations “want to have one immigration law and not 50.”

“Mexico has an interest in protecting its citizens and ensuring that their ethnicity is not used as basis for state-sanctioned acts of bias and discrimination,” the brief said, according to the paper.

And Alabama has an interest in protecting its citizens and ensuring that illegals are not around, taking Alabama citizens’ jobs, stealing their identities, stealing their property, assaulting them, raping them, killing them.

The Justice Department argues that the states are overstepping their authority by wading into something that is a strictly federal responsibility: immigration enforcement.

Which, in an of itself, is an idiotic argument: should state, local, and county police ignore lawbreakers if they are only breaking federal laws? But, then, the Politicized Obama DoJ doesn’t want to argue that they hate the law because these could be future Democrat voters if they could just ram through some amnesty programs.

America is fast coming to a crossroads from which there will be no return if we take the wrong path. Do we take the road that leads away from America and toward a Euro-esque way of governing? Do we cast aside our American character and bury our great nation in a grave of socialist-styled authority? Do we damn our progeny to a failed superstate that violate every tenet of our original ideals?

I say we do not. I say we reject the Democrat’s Euro-esque ideas and refocus ourselves on American exceptionalism. Our federal system has strayed far from our founding ideals and we may soon find that its time for a new Declaration of Independence from a tyrannical government that has usurped power from proper authority.

Since it was just Independence Day over the weekend (and I waited until it was over on purpose so as not to obviate from that celebration), I offer this new Declaration as a rallying cry to all those willing to return to our true American character…

A New Declaration of Independence

When in the Course of human events it again becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with a failed authority and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God as well as our original, properly constituted laws entitle us, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that we should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of we the people; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to repair to their former Systems of Government. The history of the present President, his Congress, and our recalcitrant federal government is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

It has abused its role over the law and instituted fiat rules that are detrimental to the common good — welfare, cap and trade, oppressive taxes, onerous regulation on business are recent examples.

It has forbidden governors of states to pass laws useful to local needs and has interfered in state business.

It has refused the right of local government to govern at home and has as a matter of course caused local legislators to carelessly assume they have no power.

It has defacto dissolved the authority of state governments so that the representatives of the people constantly defer to rule from Washington.

It has refused to secure the borders so that all manner of foreigners of the lowest station might flood these shores without hesitation while refusing to allow those foreigners with useful skills and education to enter and apply for citizenship.

It has allowed capricious courts to usurp proper legislative duties and to rule from the bench.

It has seated judges with no opposition or investigation and has not required judicial candidates to express an interest in the true meaning of the law of the land.

It has erected a multitude of new regulatory offices few of which have any basis in the Constitution and has as a form of graft filled them with friends, lobbyists, and placemen.

It has refused to properly fund our armies in times of peace without including graft and monies unconnected to the needs of our armed forces.

It has therefore interfered with the military stopping it from operating at peak efficiency.

It has conspired with powers outside our duly constituted authority to take away our constitutional rights, to subvert our national laws, and has given assent to forces such as the UN to rule us from afar without accountability. These outside forces are hateful of our system and desire it’s end. Therefore we accuse our government of attacking us from inside.

For positing that UN forces are superior in authority to our own:

For signing treaties inimical to our national interests:

For cutting off free trade with worthy countries such as Colombia, yet opening trade with evil countries such as China:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us of our constitutional rights of property, life, and self-protection at every opportunity:

For creating rules that encroach on freedom of religion:

For increasing the size of government to never before seen size and power in a manner against our founding principles and for purposefully creating chaos in business, banking, and every other area of the private sector with never ending regulations that strangle, confuse, and stifle American growth:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

And for corrupting our legislatures with federal largess and assuming unto the federal government all powers to rule from Washington D.C.

It has abdicated its Constitutional role and essentially come to see the people as an enemy and waged philosophical war against us.

It has plundered our businesses with overweening regulations, capriciously outlawed entire fields of business, and burdened the lives of the people with oppressive taxes.

It has created an army of police, taxmen and regulators to fan out across the land to assault and imprison our citizens, to confiscate lands to federal ownership and to lay waste the economy and bring our people into a form of dependency akin to slavery.

It has often sent our armed forces to foreign nations without a proper mission, held back necessary funding, and burdened it with untenable “rules of engagement” which has limited our troop’s ability to fight to win, and has allowed barbarous enemies to gain the upper hand on the battle field.

It has attempted to separate the citizenry into warring factions yet has allowed our enemy to easily enter the country and perpetrate a merciless Muslim warfare which is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, religions and American institutions and intends enslavement of us all.

In every stage of these violations millions of citizens have gathered in the streets to protest these government outrages yet no heed has been paid to the agony of the people in its hallowed halls.

Nor have we been heard by our Democrat brethren. We have warned them of the destruction of the American rule of law, yet they are uninterested in this plight. We have appealed to their love of country and we have reminded them of the glorious history of our great nation to no avail. They have turned a deaf ear to Constitutionality, a cold shoulder to our American character, and our law and we find their sympathies lie with Europeans instead of their fellow Americans. We must, therefore, consider them enemies of our national interests, safety, health, and welfare.

We, therefore, the representatives of the American tradition and character assemble as citizens proud of our history and institutions, and in the tradition of our national power being held in the hands of the people, assert our loyalty to our true American system. We hold this government to be illegitimate by its usurpation of power and its obviation of our laws. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence that has been rejected by our enemies, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

We’ve already had the tea party. Now, let the new revolution begin!

My Friend Maggie Thurber has a great piece chronicling the hate that unions in Ohio display for those voters that stand against the absurd riches that government employees have wrung out of the taxpayers in the Buckeye State.

Pointing out that union supporters are “dripping with ‘hate’ and derision toward people who see a problem and are trying to fix it,” Thurber does a great job of identifying the flawed logic in this union member’s argument on why the focus on the “opulent” benefits and pay scales of government workers is wrong on their opinion.

One point that Thurber makes is spot on. While it is true that many people are sick and tire of these union thugs ripping off the taxpayers, the unions are not the only entities at fault here.

“I don’t blame unions solely for this,” Thurber writes. “I also blame elected officials who, with their symbiotic relationship to the public sector unions, fail to properly represent the taxpayer when it comes to negotiations and voting on contracts.”

Thurber goes on to layout clearly the mess that both pliant politicians and greedy union spendthrifts have created for the state of Ohio’s budget. But, we must understand that this rancid situation isn’t isolated to Ohio. The fact is every single state in the union has this problem.

Government unions across the country have caused state budgets to be sunk in a mire of red ink, over spending, unearned promises, and overly generous pay scales, benefits, and pension obligations. Politicians have acted the union’s agents in the halls of our legislature, too. To top it off, the activist courts have continually sided with the unions against the public weal.

This is precisely why government unions are detrimental to our nation. Government unions are antithetical to good government. The voters are entirely cut out from affecting the constant undeserved increases in union benefits as the unions ply politicians with campaign cash while those pols bend to the union’s will in order to get that cash. It is a never ending cycle that goes strictly against fiscal responsibility and the will of the people.

Government unions should be made illegal like they were only 50 years ago. It’s just that simple.

One of the Things Wrong With Our Legislative System Appears in Tennessee

One of the things wrong with our system of creating legislation and passing it into law in America today has appeared in Tennessee. The Volunteer State is not the only place things like this happen, either.

Recently the Tennessee legislature passed a bill to remove state funding from the abortion mill operator Planned Parenthood. The bill was a hard fought victory for the Tennessee GOP and finds favor with the voters as well. As it happens, while the budget was winding its way through the Tennessee legislature a thus far unnamed state senator slipped in an amendment that no one saw, no one voted on, and no one knew anything about. This surreptitious amendment completely upends the defunding of Planned Parenthood quite despite the open legislative process that eliminated the funding in the first place.

In other words, despite the political wrangling, the public debate, and the will of the voters having been heard, some abortion-loving pol took it upon himself to throw out all that democracy business and put his own will right into the budget.

This isn’t the only instance of an anti-democratic abuse of the legislative process. It happens all the time in nearly every state as well as Washington D.C. After weeks, months, even years of debate and crafting legislation we see these sort of things slipped into bills all the time, things that materially alter the original intent of the law.

What’s the point of having transformative elections, publicly debating proposed legislation, and passing same if it can all be undermined by secretive amendments that no one has a chance to even discuss before the voters?

As to this particular incident, some Tennessee legislators, advocates, and analysts are claiming that this last second budget amendment was added to keep PP from suing the state. One can only ask why anyone should care if PP tries to sue? These nuisance lawsuits are, any more, the result of nearly every bit of legislation passed these days.

Worse, the amendment in question was put in the budget one other time, too. It was removed that time, but was slipped in yet again this time in the state senate.

It is a corruption of the system, an abuse that reveals the arrogance of our elected officials. They don’t have any regard for either the public debate or the will of the voter.

Most Americans are under the mistaken assumption that we as voters can elect someone to make changes in our government. Whether the government of our city, county, state or that in Washington DC we voters have this romantic idea that we can affect change by electing people to office that will make those changes. The New Jersey Supreme Court, however, has disabused us all of those absurd notions.

Governor Chris Christie was elected to office for one reason, to solve New Jersey’s budget mess. He’s not Mr. Nice guy. He’s not the prettiest face in New Jersey politics. He wasn’t even the state’s most beloved public figure. He ran on fixing the budget and the people hired him to do just that.

But now, even though he was able to get certain budget changes through both houses of his state legislature, even though he has kept his shoulder to the grindstone doing the very job that the people hired him to do, even as he was on the verge of succeeding, the courts have stepped in and torpedoed the effort.

In a 3-2 decision, the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered the governor to restore $500 million in funding to the state’s “poorest schools” by July 1. So, the wasteful spending perpetrated against the taxpayers by New Jersey’s schools can continue apace regardless of what the voters of New Jersey wanted.

Now some New Jersey commentators are claiming that this is not judicial activism. The decision, they claim, only restored the funding promised by former Gov. John Corzine and his legislature so this is not the courts making new law, they say.

But what else could it be but judicial activism to reach back to prior elections to find old budget schemes all the while ignoring the current administration’s — and therefore the voter’s — wishes. This is an activist court deciding that it did not like the recent election and reaching back to a previous, more favorable — and more left-wing — administration, one that satisfies the court’s desire toward big spending government waste.

Naturally, it doesn’t surprise that this level of wasteful spending makes unions happy, too.

This decision could possibly open the door for every school system in New Jersey to cry poor and run to the courts to stop Governor Christie from altering the obscenely generous funding that former administrations promised them. This ruling will prevent these profligate school administrators from doing what they should be doing: finding ways to cut budgets. Instead of facing reality, they will now have a tendency to pin their hopes on activist court interventions instead of making the hard decisions they must make.

It isn’t just New Jersey we see this sort of left-wing judicial activism happening. Unions in every state are running, to the courts bawling their eyes out about budget cuts and pointing to union contracts “negotiated” with spendthrift legislators that unions had for decades bought and paid for. Unions are desperately trying to save their overly generous pay scales, outrageous pensions, and cushy benefits given by politicians they paid to give them free stuff courtesy of the taxpayer. They are crying “breach of contract.”

Just today another union bought and paid for judge went into action. In Wisconsin, another left-wing, anti-democracy judge struck down the hard-fought policy of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker who has been trying to solve his state’s budget troubles. Once again the voters are overruled by an activist judge.

Is a contract gotten by graft one worth honoring? The voters are increasingly saying “no” by voting in officials that will cut back the undeserved riches showered on government union members by past pliant, sold-out pols.

Yet, despite that the people are speaking by voting in those interested in finally getting a grip on the waste seen in every last government all up and down the line, the unions are running to the courts to step in to thwart the voter’s will.

For decades the court system has been acting against the will of the majority of the people. This has not changed in our current debt crisis. It’s time we did something about these activist judges.

One of the main forces behind the Tea Party movement and the disgust that many Americans have with the federal government is its supreme arrogance and its constant unwanted and unwarranted power grabs. This is one of the things that the American people really need to put their attention toward reversing.

Perhaps it is just beginning?

Alaska, for instance, has just thrown its weight behind the opposition to the federal government’s obscene persecution of an Alaskan citizen who was arrested for violating rules that the federal government has imposed on those Alaskan waterways flowing through national parks.

The state is claiming that regardless of what the man did on the waterways, the federal government has no authority to arrest and prosecute the man because the waterways are in Alaska’s purview and the feds are over stepping.

Another recent example is in the millions of dollars that the federal government is forcing local city and state governments to spend on new street signs. The feds have changed its regulations on the typography on street signs and is requiring all street signs in the country to conform to the new regulations. From whence does this arrogance come? Well if states get federal highway money the feds feel they have the right to demand that the states spend that money the way the feds say they must spend it. If that means wasting millions on new street signs then that’s just what they will expect to be done.

Then there’s the multiple states joining the lawsuit over Obamacare. At least 20 states attorney generals have joined together to fight off President Obama’s attempt to take over the country’s healthcare system.

The federal government’s grasping for unconstitutional power is everywhere these days from the EPA, to the president, to Congress making rules without really bothering to justify them under our governing document.

All might not be lost, though. There is a growing movement among the various states to begin to reapply their 10th Amendment rights.

The 10th Amendment states: “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.” States are beginning to find a renewed interest in this clause.

Certainly it should come as no surprise that this is occurring when one reviews the many, many ways that the powergrabbers in Washington have exceeded their authority and encroached on the sovereignty of the states.

Another effort is the “Repeal Amendment” effort as seen at www.repealamendment.org. The site tells us of its goal…

Our Founding Fathers gave enumerated powers to the Federal Government and reserved most of the power for the States. Today, the federal government has usurped the power that the Founders originally intended for the States.

The Repeal Amendment is dedicated to restoring our nations economic liberty by advocating for an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that restores the balance of power between the States and Federal Government.

The Amendment these folks would like to see passed is this:

Any provision of law or regulation of the United States may be repealed by the several states, and such repeal shall be effective when the legislatures of two-thirds of the several states approve resolutions for this purpose that particularly describe the same provision or provisions of law or regulation to be repealed.”

“This doesn’t undo some of those bad Supreme Court cases and doesn’t resolve some of the problems of the Seventeenth Amendment, but it does restore some of the balance of power that was originally intended — and the mechanism by which we can control some of the out of control spending and get our debt under control,” said Marianne Moran, executive director of RepealAmendment.org.

It is hoped that this renewed interest in state’s rights will lead to knocking down the federal government’s power a few pegs and eliminating some of the undue and illicit power that the federal government has stolen from us.

Our fourth president, James Madison, has been called the father of the Constitution for not inconsiderable reasons. Madison was highly educated, widely read, and well thought of. He was also a prescient man. Madison was so prescient that in February of 1788 he was able to describe the precise reasons why his beloved Republic would be faring so badly 222 years later in 2010.

Madison’s far-reaching delineation of our current troubles appears in the Federalist Papers, a document that Thomas Jefferson proclaimed “the best commentary on the principles of government ever written.” There in Federalist 62 — his explanation of the senate — we find an amazingly clear prediction of how badly we’ve gone off track in Washington D.C., not to mention our state and local governments.

Student of history that he was, Madison understood that democratic governments often suffer from the malady of unfaithful elected officials. “It is a misfortune incident to republican government,” Madison wrote, “that those who administer it may forget their obligations to their constituents, and prove unfaithful to their important trust.”

The founders and writers of the Constitution intended that the Senate help keep the federal government on track serving as a “salutary check on the government.” The Senate, they proposed, would serve as a check on the passions of the House of Representatives and possibly an overzealous president. They intended that the senate would slow the wheels of government and help keep the interests of the states alive in the halls of Congress. It would become known as the “most deliberative body in the world” exactly for this reason.

Originally Senators were appointed by the state legislatures in order to represent the interests of the states. Since the members of the House were elected by state voters to represent their interests, electing senators seemed duplicative. After all with the whole of the people electing the president and the individual voters of each district electing their member of the House of Representatives it seemed that the voters were getting plenty of representation. The states needed their interests protected and so senators were appointed by the states for that purpose.

That delicate balance would end in 1913 when the Seventeenth Amendment altered the original plan and made provisions for voters to directly elect members of the Senate just as they do their House members. No more would the states be represented in Washington and as each decade passed into the future our politicians began more and more to take on that “misfortune” that Madison so lamented.

Noting that any person that is “inconstant to his plans, or perhaps to carry on his affairs without any plan at all” is immediately “marked” as a “victim to his own unsteadiness and folly,” Madison insisted that governments that act similarly forfeit “the respect and confidence” of everyone.

Every nation, consequently, whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability, may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of their wiser neighbors.

Madison is right that nobody likes or trusts a flighty fool. But Madison was not talking in merely general philosophical terms. He saw his own fledgling nation already acting is such a self-defeating manner under the feckless Articles of Confederation that he hoped the new Constitution would correct.

But the best instruction on this subject is unhappily conveyed to America by the example of her own situation. She finds that she is held in no respect by her friends; that she is the derision of her enemies; and that she is a prey to every nation which has an interest in speculating on her fluctuating councils and embarrassed affairs.

The country was already floundering due to its ineffective form of national government. Madison saw the Articles of Confederation as a complete failure offering no stability for his nascent nation. But as he went on to explain why the Constitution would be better than what they had in the Articles, Madison seems to be describing exactly the situation we are confronted with today.

Today we are faced with a government that no one can count on. It is capricious, constantly changing, and grabbing new power unto itself nearly every month. Businesses cannot make plans for the future for fear that those plans will be ruined by the next government power grab. Greedy politicians that are more interested in power for themselves and their party than they are about governing beset us. They exhibit a supreme arrogance that only comes from those that feel they are unaccountable to anyone but themselves. Additionally, as these oppressive government tendrils reach further into our lives we find that those lobbyists who understand and/or can guide the next set of rules constantly emanating from government are the only ones that benefit. Sadly the people are either the last to benefit or don’t benefit at all.

Read, then, Madison’s description of a failed state and you’ll find it a perfect description of our predicament.

The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessing of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood… Law is defined to be a rule of action but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

Madison noted other consequences of these calamitous failures.

Another effect of public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uniformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any way affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few, not for the many.

Sound familiar? Remember that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi insisted that we had to pass Obama’s budget bloating Obamacare bill so that “we could know what’s in it”? We’ve had senators and members of the house insisting that they can’t be expected to actually read the bills they are voting on? We have dozens of bills floating from one unaccountable committee to another until no one is sure what is at what stage of consideration? We have government convening in the dead of night to slip things past the people and thousands of documents dumped on Friday evenings so that no one sees them? We’ve also had federal agencies issuing reams of new regulatory changes every month with no real accountability at all. Madison’s description of a calamitous government poisoning the blessing of liberty is no exercise in philosophy. It is a precise description of our current governing climate.

Were it not for its elegance, one would think that Madison’s words were ripped from today’s news.

Madison continued:

The want of confidence in the public councils damps every useful undertaking, the success and profit of which may depend on a continuance of existing arrangements. What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not but that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed? … In a word, no great improvement or laudable enterprise can go forward which requires the auspices of a steady system of national policy.

The end result is that the people themselves no longer have a bond of affection to their government.

But the most deplorable effect of all is that diminution of attachment and reverence which steals into the hearts of the people… No government… will long be respected without being truly respectable… without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.

With approval ratings of congress and presidents at all time lows and voter turnout at a trickle of what it should be, who can’t see that the people have lost reverence and attachment to their government? Madison was exactly right with his warnings.

After all this, what is the solution to our ills? Is Madison’s Constitution itself at fault? Of course we have not had Madison’s Constitution for well over a hundred years. We’ve allowed his blueprint to become bastardized, warped, and made a shadow of its former self. Have some things gotten better? Sure they have. But on the whole we’ve strayed far from our founding principles and of what was prescribed in the Federalist Papers.

The only solution is to begin a systematic trimming of government. Scores of federal employees and their departments need to be summarily eliminated. Pensions canceled. Programs ended. Departments snuffed out. We need to force our politicians to adhere to the Constitution by insisting that they justify their policies by pointing to which clause tells them that their actions are Constitutional. We need to begin impeaching judges far more than we do. In short, we need to start taking government out of our lives, not involving it more.

But above all, today our politicians think we are their servants. We need to remind them of who controls whom.