Those men who wrote our Constitution made it perfectly intelligible to anyone who cared to read it. They also left some flexibility in its articles to ensure that as time passed and circumstances changed the document would remain viable as the indispensable protector of the republic they created and of the liberty of citizens who delegated a limited amount of their sovereign power to the national government through its provisions. And after a long and often angry ratification debate, the first congress added a bill of rights to the Constitution as that document’s first ten amendments. These amendments were fully as clear as the text — perhaps more so — but less flexible than the body of the document because they dealt with the tenets of republican liberty which, if regularly and deliberately violated by the national government, would require that Americans, to paraphrase Jefferson, demolish the existing government and erect a new one that would better safeguard their liberties and their republic’s security.
In recent decades, however, Americans have been treated to an endless stream of politicians, academics, lawyers, and pundits who describe the opaqueness of the Founder’s Constitution and the need for “experts” to decipher or infer what the document means. As a result, we now have presidents who take the country to war on their whim; politicians who are legally bribed by “campaign contributions” from rich individuals, corporations, labor unions, and foreign lobbies and governments based on an absurd reading of the Constitution; a public that is increasingly endangered by flamboyant blasphemers who seek violence and war under the protection of the First Amendment; and the routine criminality of executive branch officials who refuse to obey their oath of office to execute the laws. We also have the overwhelming majority of both political parties willing to destroy the Fourth Amendment in the name of providing for national security against an enemy they have resolutely refused to either stop motivating or militarily annihilate. Together these realities amount to a more-than-full justification for Americans to recall that, as Jefferson wrote, “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
In the midst of America’s third consecutive despotic presidency — each more despotic than its predecessor, and all more than Nixon — the citizenry now sees two singularly courageous individuals standing up and saying the destruction of the Fourth Amendment must stop. The junior senator from Kentucky, Mr. Paul, and FOX’s senior judicial analyst, Judge Andrew Napolitano, have been and are saying that it is unconstitutional for any congress and/or president to order NSA to collect the electronic communications of all Americans. (NB: Note to Congressman Gowdy: Can’t you get Hillary Clinton’s e-mail from NSA? Or is the unconstitutional collection system rigged so the corrupt elite are exempt?) If the U.S. educational system was not run by people who yearn and work for despotism, and if that system taught civics and history instead of political indoctrination, the senator and the judge would not be so alone in their opposition to tyranny. (NB: Perhaps the sheep-like silence and passivity of much of the public toward this deliberate and cynical violation of their constitutionally protected rights is the best reason for destroying the federal Department of Education at the first opportunity.)
Those who support the destruction of the 4th Amendment, of course, do so because they have knowingly failed to provide for the security of the United States since Osama bin Laden declared war on the nation in August, 1996. The threat from al-Qaeda, and now from its progeny, the Islamic State, exists and is still growing because we have had three presidents who refused to either stop motivating the Islamists to attack us or to annihilate them, their supporters, and their infrastructure with U.S. military power. Instead, they have made Americans pay with the currency of their soldier-children’s lives and limbs and their liberty for the government’s deliberate failure to protect the republic against enemies foreign and domestic. Indeed, the last three presidents and their lieutenants have provided the bulk of America’s domestic enemies, and their transparently unconstitutional and enemy-protecting behavior is ample, accumulated justification for Americans to begin to look for ways to devise “Guards for their future security.”
Last Thursday evening (21 May 2015) on Bret Baier’s excellent “Special Report,” Judge Napolitano concisely and clearly explained the intention of the White House and Congress to continue their illegal evisceration — it began with the Mr. Bush’s Patriot Act — of the Constitution’s 4th Amendment. Napolitano convincingly made his point and then another panelist — the Neoconservative Charles Krauthammer — replied that he was “dead wrong.” Krauthammer and his Neocon brothers, who labored mightily for the 2003 invasion of Iraq (lost war 1), the 2014 re-intervention (lost war 2), and now for the return ground troops to Iraq to lose again — pray God, three strikes and they are exiled to Israel — have been accurately described by the erudite political scientist Claes G. Ryn as the “New Jacobins.”
The new Jacobin does not want competition in prescribing the right model [of government]. … The new Jacobin is convinced that he knows what is best for all mankind, and if much of mankind shows reluctance to follow his lead, it is to him a sign that injustice, superstition, and general backwardness or a misconceived modernistic radicalism is standing in the way of progress. The new Jacobin is not content with voicing his own ideas and letting the peoples of the world make their own decisions. They must recognize the superiority of his principles. Governments that do not do so appear to him perverse. … The world must be rid of unenlightened, undemocratic societies. If persuasion and diplomatic pressure fail, the forces of democracy should be willing to resort to military means, especially against powers that have the temerity of openly defying the United States. The new Jacobin desires strong, activist government that can enact what he considers virtuous purposes.*
Intolerably, individuals fitting Professor Ryn’s description dominate both American political parties and for decades have made foreign policy for the United States. Since the early 1990s they have brought America constant war and its reliable companion, the steadily broadening erosion of constitutional liberty. The names of these people are well known. Beyond Krauthammer, the following are, to name just a few, members of the Jacobin/Neocon fold: Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, Madeline Albright, Lindsey Graham, Jeb Bush, Joseph Lieberman, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama John Boehner, Joe Biden, Bill Kristol, John Bolton, and the 90-plus Senators who did not join Kentucky’s junior senator in defending the 4th Amendment. All of them, to judge by their words, believe it is the absolute right of the United States to intervene politically and militarily abroad wherever and whenever it chooses, and to impose by force what they define as “universal values.”
But their words are lies, there are no such things as universal values. There is only one value common to all men in all times and that is the universal lust for gaining and exercising arbitrary power, and that power is exactly what the Jacobin/Neocon crowd is after. They want power abroad and they want power over the American citizenry at home. They have proven they cannot attain power abroad — having lost every war they started — and they cannot get power at home unless Americans permit them to continue to systematically hollow out the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
On that score, however, they are incrementally succeeding, and this success is the reason that Americans must begin thinking about what “new Guards for their future security” might be appropriate. And to ensure U.S. citizens can realistically discuss all options for preventing or destroying tyrannical government at home, the Founders left them the Second Amendment. After all, as Jefferson asked in 1787, “And what country can preserve its liberties, if the rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.”
