"A Republic...If We could Keep it"

 

Back when our country was founded, there was an undercurrent of values, despite of clawing a civilization out of the wilderness, there was a underpinning of shared values, of shared honor, where a man's word was his bond, a handshake was a binding contract amongst men. and if one broke such a contract, he was ostracized by others to such an extent that banishment was usually the result.  There was a shared Judeo-Christian values, a faith in God, and a "Manafest Destiny" played a part.  THere was a belief that with  honest hard work and ingenuity  that anything was possible.  So different from today, where we have a huge underclass that is proud to not work and grift from the government.   There is a phrase that was Alec de Tocceville(This is from memory mind you), " When a populace can vote themselves largess from the public treasury, tyranny will follow".. This was written in the 18th century about the fall of the "Athenian Republic" 2500 years prior.

  I clipped this from Farcebook

Before being fully caffeinated this morning an idea began to form. It then percolated while packing boxes and moving heavy objects throughout the day, I thought about Ben Franklin’s response to a very specific question. As the story goes, when exiting the last meeting of the body drafting America’s constitution, Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government the new nation would have. He replied:

“A Republic, if you can keep it.”

If you have been paying attention to the fraud numbers coming out of Minnesota, California, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, it seems clear that one of – and perhaps THE – most grave dangers we face as a constitutional Republic is the inability of our government to police itself.

If there is one lesson to take from the past 50 years, this is it.

America seems deeply in the bog described by Thomas Jefferson’s prophetic warning:

“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.”

Unfortunately, the broken chains of the Constitution have failed to contain the federal government.

I know that repeating my favorite quote of John Adams is getting tedious, but when most read it, they think Adams was talking about religion in government – but that was only part of it:

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

I’m suddenly reminded of my second favorite John Adams quote, that, when taken in context with the preceding Adams wisdom leads me to my point:

“Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.”

Adams believed deeply in constitutional government, representation, and liberty. What he feared was pure democracy untethered from restraints, virtue, law, or institutional balance.

In the founders’ vocabulary, “democracy” often meant direct mass rule driven by passion rather than deliberation. Adams, like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, believed that human nature included ambition, envy, passion, tribalism, and susceptibility to demagogues. Their answer was a constitutional republic with separation of powers, federalism, checks and balances, and protections for property and minority rights.

He was saying that absent men and women of honor and character who swear and exhibit total and absolute fealty to the Constitution of the United States, there is no force on earth capable of policing, adjudicating and controlling the whims of a fickle, feckless and faithless government.

None.

There is simply no way for the fraud schemes that we now know existed (continue to exist?) could have happened without the knowledge of government officials at some level.

And the put come based interpretations of the Constitution­, where the ends justify the means, and a desire to stretch it to “make” law and create “rights” out of whole cloth—leads inexorably to arbitrary and selective application of those laws. When capriciousness becomes the order of the day, instead of a government rooted in a respect for just law, the illegitimacy of government is the natural progression.

When a regime has control of Congress and inhabits an executive that sees the Constitution as an archaic hindrance incapable of comprehending “modern” issues, tyranny is only one vote away.

A Republic is the only defense we have against such rapine majoritarian tyranny.

Politicians should be measured using the Constitution as a yardstick and not their legislative “effectiveness” in bringing home the pork or how much money they spend with Madison Avenue to get elected.

Using this scale, most in DC today would fare none too well.