I wrote this, and then sat on it, wondering whether – no matter how passionate I am on this matter, or how right I might be (naturally I do think I’m right in what I’m saying) – I ought to either post it or spike it.  Finally I decided to go ahead and post it, both because it reflects my position, and because it may lead to some serious discussion of one of the major issues we conservatives face as we come up to elections next year and in 2012.

 

Just so you’ll know where I’m coming from, let me say that when I became old enough to vote, in 1978, I registered Republican.  My very first presidential vote was for Ronald Reagan in 1980 – a fact that I remain very proud of.  I voted mostly Republican for 12 years after that, taking the view that I would vote for the best candidate regardless of his party affiliation – and finding that in the vast majority of cases the Republican candidate was superior.  In 1992, with the Democratic nomination of Bill Clinton, a proven prevaricator and adulterer, who had lied and then fled to England to avoid the draft, and then had gone to Moscow to participate in anti-American protests, I changed my policy.  I became a “yellow dog Republican,” choosing to vote for the Republican candidate every time, even if it was just a yellow dog.

 

Then came the 2008 election, when the Republican Party nominated John McCain, whom I had voted against in 2000 (I was not enamored of George W. Bush, but he was not as liberal as McCain).  I have no use for McCain’s political views.  The last useful thing he’d done prior to 2008 was his service in the Navy; the only useful things he did in the campaign were first, choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate, and second, unhesitatingly declaring that a child gains human rights “at the moment of conception.”  After the election, which McCain seemed to hardly care whether he won, I agonized for a long time – and finally, on Valentine’s Day of 2009, I sent in a form to the county clerk changing my voter registration from Republican to the Constitution Party.

 

With that in mind, I want us to consider whether we, as conservatives, can trust the Republican Party anymore.  Think of this fact: The last conservative presidential candidate the Republican Party fielded was Ronald Reagan, in 1984.  It has, therefore, been 24 years since the party saw fit to choose a conservative to run for president.  It’s as though, having secured landslides in two presidential elections, national prosperity, and the defeat of the Soviet Union through the courage and integrity of Ronald Reagan, the party became ashamed of its outstanding success, and decided to slink around thenceforth.

 

Congressional Republicans are little if any better than its presidential candidates.  Indeed, we have seen Republicans in Congress falling all over themselves to be bipartisan (meaning doing whatever the Democrats want), to “reach across the aisle” (meaning to be Democrats in everything but name), to be “mavericks” (meaning to side with the Democrats almost every time), to in short act completely contrary to cherished Republican principles.  And now the party’s leadership is openly – if not avowedly – liberal; the 2008 platform explicitly opens the party to liberals while containing little conservatism, and the new RNC chairman has attacked Rush Limbaugh while urging Republicans to take it easy on Barack Obama.

 

With all this in mind, can we conservatives trust the Republican Party?  Does it truly represent us?  Or is it, rather, a party of liberals who don’t want to call themselves such, of Democrats in everything but name, of enemies who hate the principles we hold dear?  Many conservatives have not left the Republican Party – but hasn’t the party most thoroughly left them?

 

I’ve been saying for months, in the Conservative Principles and Action mailing list (you can find it at www.groups.yahoo.com – just search for that title), that though I think they’re wrong, I hope those who think they can return the Republican Party to conservatism succeed.  But as time goes on, not only do I think that the effort is futile, but I begin to think that the belief it can succeed is naïve.  The Republican Party has gone RINO, and the conservatives who remain have no power at any level (there are conservatives in the party – as there are, believe it or not, a few conservatives left in the Democratic Party – and they even run for office here and there, but beyond that their influence is nil).

 

I have come to believe that the party of Reagan has turned into another party of Obama.  It has shocked me to see a few Republicans in Congress standing up and voting against Barack Obama’s programs, for I’ve come to expect congressional Republicans to act just like Democrats.  I’ve seen them doing it for years, hoping and praying that for once they’ll stand up on their hind legs and act like Republicans.  When Republicans voting against liberal bills is a surprise, something is extremely rotten in the state of Denmark – or in the Republican Party.

 

Today, I firmly believe that if you’re a conservative, the Republican Party doesn’t want you, doesn’t want your money, and certainly doesn’t want your input.  Indeed, I think that the Republican Party would just as soon silence Rush Limbaugh as the Democratic Party would; I believe that congressional Republicans would vote for the "fairness doctrine” (under whatever name) just as quickly as the Democrats would.  They don’t want to hear it.  They don’t want to hear about reducing taxes, about the right to keep and bear arms, about reduction in the size of government, about ending such unconstitutional and ultimately unworkable programs as Social Security, about getting the United States out of the hatefully anti-American United Nations, about anything that is truly conservative.

 

The day is coming, I believe, when the Republican Party will go on a witch hunt a la the Democratic Party.  For the conflict now isn’t between the two major parties – they’re far more alike, in 2009, than they’re different.  The conflict is between ideologies.  The battle is not between the Republican Party on the one hand and the Democratic Party on the other, but between conservatism and liberalism – with liberalism controlling both the major parties.

 

So what do we conservatives do?  Well, if you truly believe that there’s a chance of success, you can continue to fight against the Republican Party, seeking to return it to conservative principles.  But I predict that you’re going to get weary of fighting a party which hates your views, and which wants nothing more than to be Democrats without the donkey.  I think you’re going to wind up defeated in that fight, and that the energy you put into it will be a complete waste.

 

Or we can abandon the Republican Party to its liberal decay, and go elsewhere.  The question is where.  I don’t profess to be an expert on all the political parties out there, but I know for a fact that no conservative has a place in the Democratic Party, or the Green Party, or any other liberal party.  Not only would we feel very uncomfortable there, but they wouldn’t have us.

 

Nor would conservatives truly fit into the Libertarian Party.  That party seems conservative at first glance, but on some key issues it’s as liberal as anything you’ll find in the Democratic Party.  It is, perhaps, conservatism minus its moral compass – and that is not really conservatism at all, since we recognize that all ethical positions, and all legitimate laws, have a moral basis (e.g. we support laws against murder because murder is wrong – a moral judgement).

 

The American Conservative Party is attractive, and I gave it serious consideration when I was wondering where – if anywhere – I ought to go.  But it seems to be a rather amateurish operation, if its Web site is any indication, and it has no finalized platform.

 

What I recommend to conservatives is the Constitution Party.  I’ve read the platform, and find more to agree with there than in any other platform I’ve read or have any knowledge of.  The Constitution Party explicitly recognizes and supports the contributions of Christians to the United States.  It stands firmly on the principle that if a program or expenditure has no clear basis in the Constitution, then the federal government has no right to run that program or spend that money.  It favors smaller government, which by definition means more money our pockets, and more power in our hands to shape our lives as we see fit.  It is – according to its literature, which I have no reason to doubt but no independent evidence to confirm – that it is the third-largest political party in the country.  And I think that if conservatives will acknowledge that the Republican Party has become Republican In Name Only – that it is, in fact, the RINO Party; that instead of the Grand Old Party it is now the Tired Old Party – and flock to the Constitution Party’s standard, we can make this conservative party the next major political party in the United States.

 

And if that happens, the Democrats and Republicans both will be in for a fight.  They will, in fact, have suddenly to contend with conservatives voting as a bloc, something that hasn’t happened in decades.  The liberals will be, finally, in a position to lose the White House and Congress and state legislatures and governors’ mansions and county boards of supervisors and city councils and mayors’ offices.  If conservatives will come together as one under the banner of the Constitution Party – or at least vote for Constitution Party candidates – that party can come roaring into prominence like the Third Army stormed across Europe, sweeping all before it.  And if that happens, we can then began working to not only halt the expansion of our current Big Brother federal government – we can begin to actually reverse the damage that decades of liberalism have wrought.

 

I’ve come a bit afield from my original point, and I’ve been more prolix than I usually am in these posts.  So let me summarize:

 

     1. I don’t think we can trust the Republican Party to represent us

     2. I think that we can trust the Constitution Party to do so

     3. Therefore, I urge all genuine conservatives to reregister with their county clerk not as Republicans, but as members of the Constitution Party, to support the Constitution Party with time or money or moral support, and to vote for Constitution Party candidates at every opportunity

 

I know that it sure feels a lot better knowing that my new party hasn’t gone liberal, the way my old party did.

In a certain sense, the political debate which this country has been going through for decades, and which is now at white heat, is almost religious in nature.  I am not the first, nor the only, observer to note that the devotion of Barack Obama’s followers is not significantly different from the adoration that members of any religion give to their God.  And that is merely one manifestation of the way liberals approach things.

 

I am not saying that either conservatism or liberalism is a de facto religion.  There are and have been atheists on the conservative side (I was one until my conversion in 1983, and Ayn Rand was vicious in her atheism), and there is rampant atheism among liberals, both avowed and de facto (when you’ve redefined God to the point where He’s no more real or powerful than a puff of smoke, you’ve essentially denied His existence).  So neither of these ideologies is, strictly speaking, a religion.  But liberalism comes close to it, while conservatism makes it a point not to be a religion.

 

I’m not a philosopher, nor the son of one, but I’ve learned a philosophical term from Ayn Rand – epistemology.  That’s the study of how we learn things, of how we come to our positions, or so I understand it.  And it is in the realm of epistemology that conservatism and liberalism differ most fundamentally.

 

Liberalism is, above all, an emotional position.  Rush Limbaugh says that the most gutless choice you can make is to be a liberal, because you don’t have to deal with the consequences of your actions, you don’t have to apply any sort of skull sweat – all you have to do is make sure that your words and actions make you and others feel good.  How many times have we heard some liberal, promoting whatever cause, making the point not that this will do a good thing, or that it will be inherently virtuous, but that it will make you feel good?

 

Liberalism is all about emotion.  We see that openly and flagrantly in the worship of Barack Obama.  His speeches are short on content (and those who serve him seemingly pay no attention to what little content there is), but they’re long on high-sounding language that if you swallow it uncritically makes you feel good.  At the infamous rally in Florida, both Henrietta Hughes and the punk (I disremember his name) who couldn’t manage to work himself up to shift manager at McDonald’s after four years, approached Obama in a highly emotional manner.  Instead of standing up like free people describing their situations with dignity and honor, Hughes wept and begged like any bum on the street, and the McDonald’s punk acted like Obama was his god incarnate in the flesh (in fact, he reminded me of North Koreans openly weeping at the feet of statues of Kim Il-sung when the “Great Leader” died).

 

Conservatism isn’t so.  I don’t say that conservatives are without emotion – far from it.  If you want to see an emotional conservative, get me started on Ronald Reagan.  I never met the man, and so this may be using purple prose, but I think it’s safe to say that in a sense I loved him.  After living through Nixon, Ford, and Carter (I lived through Kennedy and Johnson too, but I was only eight when Johnson left the White House), the advent of Ronald Reagan was like spring suddenly replacing an interminable ice age.  The full effects of his reforms took a little time to take hold, but I was in the Air Force when he took office and the difference was almost immediate.  Not only did I now have a commander-in-chief who was proud of the military and of whom I could be proud, but my financial situation improved dramatically.  I got out of the Air Force in 1982, and during the rest of Reagan’s administration I was a civilian – and I can honestly say that at no subsequent time have I and my family had it as good, overall, as we did during Reagan’s eight years in office.  So yeah, I’m real emotional about Ronald Reagan.

 

But my emotions are a reaction, not a cause.  They don’t form my views, but rather are a side effect of reality.  I don’t wish we had Reagan back because he inspired good feelings in me, but for solid, objective, rational reasons (to put it bluntly, he’d be a better president as an embalmed corpse than the clueless socialist we’ve got now).

 

And that’s conservatism.  To be a conservative is to apply reason to things.  It is to use one’s mind in evaluating data and reaching decisions.  It is to think about things, rather than merely feeling.

 

I have often faced the question, “What is your feeling about this?”  And my standard reply is, “What I feel is irrelevant.  But here’s what I think about it.”  If I guided my life by my feelings, I would conclude God is great on even days, and that He’s dead on odd days.  If my emotions formed my opinions, I’d decide about once a month that my wife hates me and I ought to leave her (she loves me, and if I left I’d be a natural born fool).  If I based my political convictions on my feelings, I might be conservative today, liberal tomorrow, and anarchist the day after.

 

Emotions are the most fickle, fallible, and unreliable guide we can have.  God created us with emotions, but they – like every other part of us – have suffered from the fall, and respond to the wrong things, or wrongly to the right things.  We can’t depend on emotions to guide us – emotions led Germany into the nightmare of the Third Reich, they led Cambodia into the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge regime, they led the People’s Temple into mass suicide in Guyana, and they led a mob below Pilate’s balcony to demand the crucifixion of the Messiah they’d been seeking for centuries.  You can’t depend on emotions, and conservatives don’t.

 

But liberals do.  And that is the most fundamental difference between us.  Liberals are liberals because their emotions lead them that way.  Conservatives are conservatives because our minds lead us that way.  A liberal could function, politically, if he possessed no reasoning power whatsoever, for reason doesn’t form his political views.  But a conservative who lost the power of ratiocination would be lost politically; his entire ideology comes from thought, rather than from feelings.

 

And so the choice is clear.  You can go through life believing what feels right, and be a liberal.  Or you can think, and be a conservative.

 The liberals want us to think that the only immigration debate these days is whether we’ll allow it, or prevent it.  That’s complete hogwash (it’s what the liberals are saying, so of course it’s hogwash, right?).  We conservatives would say that the question of whether the United States will accept immigrants isn’t a question at all.  We don’t, after all, want to tear down the Statue of Liberty nor even remove the plaque on the base containing Emma Lazarus’ poem.

 

What we do want is for the federal government to enforce immigration laws.  Those laws already exist.  That’s why there’s such a thing as illegal immigrants – if there were no laws on the subject, one couldn’t immigrate illegally.  And by definition, an illegal immigrant is one who, by the manner of his immigration to this country, has broken the law.  He is a law-breaker – a criminal.  Now I’ll grant that simply coming across the border illegally isn’t as heinous an act as rape or murder…on the other hand neither is the theft of ten dollars, yet we still want the police to prevent someone from taking a sawbuck out of our pocket, and to arrest him if he does.

 

And that’s all we’re asking for – the enforcement of immigration laws.  We want the Border Patrol to find, arrest, and deport those who break the law in entering the United States.  That’s all.  We’re not saying that no one should come here.  We’re not saying that immigration is bad.  We’re saying that illegal immigration is bad.  It’s that one little adjective that makes all the difference.

 

Because conservatism is rational, it would be impossible for conservatives as a group to oppose immigration (there may be some fringe types out there who do, but in that they don’t represent conservatism any more than a tenement rat represents good hygiene).  You see, everyone in this country either is an immigrant himself, or descends from immigrants.  Even we Indians (I’m a quarter Indian) came from elsewhere – it’s not an accident that people have mistaken my Korean wife for an Indian, or that a picture of her when she was 18 looks like a portrait of a young Pueblo Indian lady.  The Indians are related to Orientals, for that’s where we came from, thousands of years ago.

 

And so are the rest of us.  My last name is Scottish – it’s an Americanized form of Mackay, which in turn is the Anglicized version of Macaoidh.  Clann Macaoidh – Clan Mackay in English – held the far northern reaches of the Scottish mainland, in Sutherland.  Some of my ancestors, then, were Highlanders, and immigrated to this country.

 

I’ve also got German in me, on my mother’s side.  Obviously those German ancestors immigrated to this country.

 

As I mentioned above, my wife is Korean.  I was a witness to her immigration; indeed, she came here only because she married me (that wasn’t the purpose of her doing so; for whatever reason, she loves me).  She got her green card and her passport and her visa, and came here, and earned her American citizenship – and boy, did she earn it; if the rest of us had to put in that kind of effort in order to be American citizens, most of us wouldn’t be.

 

My experience may be unique in the details – most people don’t marry Korean women, after all, and don’t wind up the only one in the family who’s not a minority (my wife is Korean, my children are half Korean and 1/8 Indian, and my granddaughter is half Palestinian, ? Korean, and 1/16 Indian) – but it is typical in the general shape of it.  If your name’s Smith, you probably came from England.  If it’s Stein, you probably have German ancestors.  If you’re a Gutierrez, you’ve got ancestors who came from Spain – either directly, or via one of the Spanish-American countries (of which Mexico is only one; I have an aunt by marriage who’s from Honduras).  If your name is Nguyen you’ve got Vietnamese ancestors, if you’re a Kim you’re of Korean descent, and if your family name is Johansen your ancestors were Scandinavian.

 

Only if you’re a full-blood Indian do you have some small claim to not being descended from immigrants (and yet your ancestors did immigrate, albeit thousands of years ago rather than mere hundreds).  Otherwise, you’re not very far away from people who lived in another country, and came here as immigrants (though some Hispanics’ families have been here for a very long time; some families in New Mexico have been here for three or four hundred years.  And as conservatives, we welcome other immigrants – from France, from China, from Argentina, from Sudan, from India, from wherever.

 

For the American dream that brought our ancestors here is the same dream that brings today’s immigrants.  And we want everyone who wants it to have access to that dream.  It’s just that we want them to reach for it legally.  Jesus told His disciples, in another context, that “he who does not enter by the door into the fold of the sheep, but climbs up some other way, he is a thief and a robber.” (John 10:1)  He was saying that someone who tries to get into the kingdom of heaven by other than the divinely appointed means has no right to the kingdom.  And the principle applies here.  If someone’s not willing to go through the legal process of becoming a resident of the United States, he has no right to live here – and the government ought to send him home, with instructions to do it right the next time.

There was some fuss during the 2008 campaign about Barack Obama not wearing a US flag lapel pin.  I never could see what a pin does or doesn’t prove – as far as I know Ronald Reagan didn’t wear one either, and no one questions his patriotism.  I’ve never even owned such a thing, which means that even when I wore a suit I didn’t wear a flag pin.

 

In fact, I’ve never been much of a flag-waver.  Even after the beginning of the War On Terror, in September of 2001, I’ve never thought that merely waving the flag around proved anything, or accomplished anything.  I don’t have anything against the flag – far from it – but I’ve found that a lot of people wave the flag as though that’s all they need to ever do.

 

So what exactly is patriotism?  I’ve already implied that it’s not flag-waving, and I want now to explicitly say so.  After the beside-the-point criticism, Obama began wearing a flag pin, but that certainly didn’t cause or reflect an alteration in his views.  It was merely a political move (and some people were so gullible that they swallowed it whole).  Waving the flag didn’t make Obama patriotic, nor did it prove him so (and his words and actions have consistently proved the opposite).

 

Yet that’s what people mostly look at, it seems.  They equate patriotism with flying the flag – whether just on July 4^th, or at other times.  They think that if someone talks about “this great nation” then he’s patriotic, and if he doesn’t, he isn’t.  But it’s easy to make gestures.  It’s easy to mouth words.  There’s an old science fiction story by John W. Campbell called “Who Goes There?”  The story later became the basis for a movie called The Thing.  In the story there’s an alien which, if it gets hold of a living creature, is able to ingest that creature and actually become that creature – dog, seagull, man…  It gets hold of one of the scientists stuck in Antarctica during the winter, and becomes him so successfully that, after the discovery that the “man” is really a monster, one of the truly human scientists speaks of it mouthing prayers to a God it hated.  It’s possible for human beings to be equally false – they can pretend they’re patriotic, when in fact they want to destroy the United States.

 

Patriotism isn’t what you do, or what you say.  It isn’t a matter of external actions, but internal commitment.  Though He wasn’t talking about this matter, Jesus said something that’s relevant here: “That which proceeds out of the man, that is what defiles the man.  For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness.  All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.” (Mark 7:20-23)  In other words, a man isn’t an adulterer because he commits adultery – he commits adultery because his heart is unfaithful.  He doesn’t become a liar by lying, but rather lies because he’s a liar.  It’s what we are inside that – sooner or later – expresses itself through our words and actions.

 

Thus, genuine patriotism isn’t just chanting “USA!” during the Olympics, or cheering when Toby Keith sings about putting a boot in Osama bin Laden’s nether parts (except Keith used a different term), or waving a United States flag around.  There’s nothing wrong with these things – but they are not themselves patriotism.  They don’t mean anything unless they spring from genuine patriotism.  And that is what’s inside.

 

Patriotism is loving your country.  It isn’t blind stupid adherence – true patriotism can never utter the words, “My country, right or wrong!”  When his country is wrong, a true patriot tries to return it to the proper path.  Nor is it adherence to the government.  Administrations come and go – I’ve lived through Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush, and now I’m living through the Obama administration.  One of these presidents I loved, one I don’t really remember, one I don’t remember at all, some I tolerated, and some I loathed.  But my country isn’t any of these presidents – it’s the United States of America.

 

Patriotism isn’t refusing to criticize.  Though she didn’t realize it, Hillary Clinton was exactly right when she said that it’s not unpatriotic to criticize the government.  She of course was defending scurrilous and unwarranted personal attacks on George W. Bush, but what her actual words mean is true – dissent is a cherished American tradition, and a patriot can and ought to dissent when the country goes in directions that he sincerely believes are wrong (which means that we conservatives are, by Hillary Clinton’s own definition, patriotic when we criticize Barack Obama).

 

But patriotism is love.  The reason I show my love for my wife is that I really do love her.  The reason patriots show their love for their country is that they really do love it.  And that’s what sets patriots apart from those who just wave flags.  People like Barack Obama will wrap themselves in the American flag if that’s what it takes to get into positions of power – and then they’ll turn right around and burn that flag, figuratively if not literally, when they see an opportunity to express their true convictions.  But a genuine patriot, while not necessarily walking around painted red, white, and blue, loves his country, and will never do anything to hurt that country.

 

There have been plenty of Americans who had the chance to turn on the United States, and refused to do so.  They were patriots.  George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, and many, many others stood by their country when it would have been much easier and safer to turn traitor.  And there’ve been Americans who, though they may have talked a good game, proved in the end that they didn’t love the United States – Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Alger Hiss…Bill Clinton, Barack Obama…

 

I’ll take, any day, someone who never shows or mentions the flag, but will fight for his country, over someone who makes a big deal out of the flag but has no more love for the United States than he does for Edinburgh’s Hibernian Football Club.  The former is a patriot.  The latter is merely a fake.

 

 

Conservatism is a philosophy of principle.  We don’t make our decisions or formulate our policies on the basis of emotion, temporary expediency, popular opinion, polls, or what some other country thinks we ought to do in order to serve its interests.  We have a set of principles, and they underlie all our decisions and policies.

 

It’s possible to state these principles elegantly, and in a rational order.  I may do that some day.  But here and now, I’m going to state them “country style” (and I am a country boy – when I was a kid our phone was a party line, and we were only the second party on that line; I lived 40 miles from school, and 16 miles from where the school bus stopped; the nearest town was 10 miles away, and had a population of 21; the closest school was 20 miles away, only covered the elementary grades, and had two rooms…compared to me, Loretta Lynn’s a city girl).  That is, they’ll be pithy, and perhaps colorful; they certainly won’t be in William F. Buckley’s English.    J

 

1. I don’t have a right to your money, and you don’t have a right to mine.

 

2. TANSTAAFL – there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch; everything you get free, someone else is paying for

 

3. The more the government gives away, the more it has to take away from someone

 

4. Your rights end where my nose begins – you don’t have the right to punish me in order to exercise your rights (I got that phrase from my foster father)

 

5. “Abortion rights” is a bald-faced lie – there is no such thing as a right to commit cold blooded murder

 

6. If the Constitution doesn’t give the government the authority to do something, the government doesn’t have the authority to do that thing

 

7. The function of a judge is to interpret the law; he has no right whatsoever to make law

 

8. By reducing spending and taxes, the government will allow you to have more money – and it’s your money

 

9. Government isn’t the solution to the problem – government is the problem! (that’s what Ronald Reagan said)

 

10. If more government spending and taxation is the answer, you asked the wrong question

 

11. The world doesn’t owe you a living

 

12. It is immoral to force me to pay for “art” – or anything else – that I find offensive to my religion

 

13. The first amendment’s religion clauses protect the church from the state, not the other way around

 

14. The Constitution is suitable only for governing moral, religious people; it cannot govern those who are immoral and sacrilegious (John Adams said it first; this is my paraphrase)

 

15. If you don’t like Christianity, don’t go to church

 

16. It is an exercise of constitutional rights, not an infringement of them, to pray in school

 

17. “The people” in the second amendment means exactly the same thing as it means everywhere else in the Constitution

 

18. The Bill of Rights exists to protect me from the government

 

19. Any politician, program, or policy which will lead to less liberty deserves to fail

 

20. No politician deserves public office who does not, from the heart, believe that to act contrary to the Constitution is the most immoral public act he can perform

 

21. Any politician who decides that his office is his by right, deserves to lose the next election

 

22. If you don’t like the bums, throw ‘em out!

 

23. If you want the government to leave you the ---- alone, then quit electing people who think the government’s nose belongs in your business

 

24. That government governs best, which governs least (Thomas Jefferson said that one)

 

25. Conservatism works every single time we try it, as Ronald Reagan proved

 

26. The greatest American president of the 20^th century was Ronald Wilson Reagan; the greatest president we never had was Barry Goldwater

 

27. We’ve had decades of almost uninterrupted liberalism, and it’s failed!

 

28. We don’t need more tired, failed, stupid ideas – we need conservatism

 

29. The problem isn’t so much the Democratic Party, but liberalism, no matter what party it’s in

 

30. You want freedom?  Then quit electing socialists!

 

31. The best way to end the War On Terror is it win it

 

32. There is no such thing as “the war in Iraq.”  There is the War On Terror, and Iraq is one of the two main theaters of operations in that war.

 

33. The US invasion of Iraq was the best thing that ever happened to that country

 

34. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists (that’s the Bush doctrine)

 

35. Anyone who wants to surrender to the terrorists is not only giving aid and comfort to the enemy, he’s asking for his own subjection to tyranny

 

36. We didn’t start the War On Terror – the terrorists did

 

37. The unalienable rights that the Declaration of Independence names are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; there is no unalienable right to be happy regardless of circumstances

 

38. The founding fathers of this country were, mostly, professing Christians, and their political views were, without exception, what we today would call conservative

 

39. You don’t have the right to never be offended

 

40. There’s a very good reason we don’t trust the media – they’re not trustworthy

 

Actually I could go on.  But 40 seems a good start.  Of course a lot of these principles grow from others, and if I wanted to rigorously comb through this list, and eliminate redundancy, it wouldn’t be too hard.  But part of saying things straight out, without subtlety, is sometimes repeating yourself.  And the fact is that you can’t repeat this stuff enough; after decades of liberal propaganda in the schools, in the media, and from government officials, the only time to fault a conservative is when he doesn’t keep hammering on the subject.

I've just now posted the last in my series on the Bill of Rights.  Until and unless another series rears its (hopefully) not ugly head, my posts will be the sort of thing you're probably more used to.  I have in mind posts on the USS Constitution, how to have a lasting marriage, the necessity of one's word meaning something, and a "sermon" or two, as well as other notions.  Whether any of these will appear on your screen, and how soon they may do so, I don't know.  But you've got an idea now just how far my posting may range.    :)

Keep your eyes on this spot for more of what I have to say - unless of course my opinions don't interest you, in which case you're clearly not in possession of your senses.   

The Bill of Rights

Amendment X

 

This amendment is a companion to the ninth.  That amendment says that just because the Constitution enumerates certain rights, doesn’t mean that rights which the constitution doesn’t enumerate don’t exist.  In other words, if the Constitution mentions rights A, B, and C, but doesn’t mention D, E, and F, the latter rights are still rights that the people retain.

 

This amendment says, “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 ninth amendment speaks of rights, and the 10^th addresses powers.  But the meaning is essentially the same.  The 10^th amendment is a limitation on the federal government, just like the Constitution and the other amendments in the Bill of Rights.

 

The Constitution grants the federal government certain powers (note that these powers are grants to the government; they do not inhere in the federal government, and if an amendment to the Constitution withdraws one of those powers – for instance, a repeal of the 16^th amendment, which grants the government power to levy individual income taxes – then from the moment of the amendment’s ratification the government would not have that power.

 

And there are powers which the Constitution does not grant to the federal government – for instance, the power to regulate education (thus, the Department of Education is unconstitutional).  Rather than leave it to everyone to draw the obvious conclusion, that the federal government doesn’t have the power to regulate education because the Constitution doesn’t grant that power, this amendment specifically says that such powers remain in the hands of the states, and of the individual citizens.

 

I addressed education in the post on the ninth amendment, saying that the citizens have the right to determine for themselves what form their children’s education shall take.  And equally, under this amendment the power to regulate education rests not with the federal government, but with the states and the people.  A state, assuming its constitution allows it, has the power to create its own department of education – but the federal government does not.  A city, assuming the state constitution permits it, has the power to form its own school district.  A group of neighborhood parents has the power to form their own education association, to erect a school, and send their children to it.  This 10^th amendment deprives the federal government of the power to regulate education, and reserves it to the states and the people.

 

And other powers equally fall under this amendment.  Any governmental power which the Constitution doesn’t grant to the federal government, remains in the hands of the states and the people.  And any federal exercise of such powers is a usurpation.  It is a violation of the 10^th amendment; it is a robbery by the federal government, with the states and the people as the victims.

The Bill of Rights

Amendment IX

 

The ninth amendment to the Constitution is one of the most important in the entire Bill of Rights.  They’re all important, of course, but some are more directly so than others, and this is one of that group.  The ninth amendment says, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

 

That has a very simple meaning, though the liberals don’t seem to get it (or if they do, they disparage the meaning, and trample upon it).  It means that just because the Constitution lists rights A, B, and C, without mentioning D, E, or F, that doesn’t mean that we don’t possess the latter rights.  We do possess them, and this amendment says so explicitly.  In modern English we could say, “The Constitution lists certain rights; the rights the Constitution doesn’t list, still belong to the people.”

 

That is only right, it is only fair, and it is eminently in keeping with the philosophy of the founding fathers.  The idea behind the Constitution is that the people create government, and give to it the powers they deem necessary for its functioning – and no more.  And any power which the people do not give to government, is a right that they retain – for a governmental power has its corresponding right.

 

For instance, the government, by constitutional provision, has the power to tax.  That requires a corresponding diminution of our right to keep what we’ve earned.  The Constitution limits the federal government’s power to tax, and correspondingly increases the amount of our paycheck that we have a right – not a privilege, but a right – to retain in our own pockets.

 

The government has the power to create and fund military services.  Those who are in the military must, in order for the military to function, obey orders without talking back.  This is a diminution of GIs’ right of free speech, and it’s a necessary one, for if soldiers could debate orders and vote on whether to obey them, we could never have won the Revolutionary War, never mind any other conflict the United States has become involved in.

 

But where the government does not have a power, the people retain in full the corresponding rights.  For instance, the government doesn’t have the power to break down your door in the middle of the night, without a warrant, and haul you off to a torture chamber.  You have, therefore, the corresponding right to bar the police from your house unless they have a warrant, and you have the right to due process of law before any punishment comes down on your head.  It is true, of course, that the Bill of Rights addresses these issues, protecting you from unreasonable search and seizure, from arrest without a warrant or probable cause, and from punishment without trial.  But you see the principle – a power the government does not have, is a right that you do have.

 

Of course the Constitution doesn’t list all the powers the government conceivably could have had, but doesn’t.  That would turn the document into an unwieldy thing, and that wasn’t the aim.  Part of the goal of the framers of the Constitution was that it be accessible to anyone with a good education.  They wrote it in English, and they kept it as brief as possible, so that any citizen who could read good English could read and understand it.  Therefore it isn’t a list of everything the government cannot do, but rather a list of those limited things the government can do.  And everything the Constitution doesn’t specifically grant the government power to do, is a right you retain.

 

But there were people who still weren’t entirely sure that the Constitution was a sufficient protection against a usurpatory federal government.  They insisted that they couldn’t support the proposed Constitution unless there was a bill of rights which provided even further protection to the people.  That’s why we have these first 10 amendments to the Constitution.  And this ninth amendment is part of that, and it is what we might call a general reminder to the government: If the Constitution doesn’t specifically say that you can do this or that, then you can’t – and it is a right that the people retain in full.

 

For instance, the Constitution nowhere authorizes the federal government to interfere in how you educate your children, for their education is your responsibility, not the government’s.  You retain, therefore, the right to educate your children as you see fit.  If you and others in your area choose to form a private school where the basis of the curriculum shall be the Bible, you have that right.  If you prefer that your city create a government school district, where children shall go to school, you have that right.  If your community unanimously prefers home schooling, then you have the right either as separate families or as a consortium of families to choose, buy, and use the text books you prefer.  It is your right, because the Constitution doesn’t give the federal government power over the matter.

 

This amendment doesn’t leave that to chance.  Though it is, I think, painfully clear that what the government has no power to do is a right you retain, those who crafted the Bill of Rights decided that it was better to be too careful than not careful enough.  They put in this amendment, so that the federal government could never say, “Well, the Constitution doesn’t say it’s a right of the people, so we can legitimately go ahead and do it.”  Though the government has in fact acted that way (a major reason we need a conservative resurgence in American politics), this amendment makes it clear that such federal action is illegitimate and illegal; this amendment says, explicitly, that if it’s not a clear constitutional power of government, it’s a right you retain.

The Bill of Rights

Amendment VIII

 

The eighth amendment to the Constitution ensures that the law may not punish under the guise of legitimately protecting society, nor may it punish out of proportion to the crime in view.  This is an amendment where judges have, on occasion, proven themselves bereft of sense.

 

As I’ve done frequently, I’m going to quote the entire amendment:

 

Excessive bail shall not be required nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

 

There is, of course, room for interpretation here.  What bail or fine is excessive, and what is reasonable?  That of necessity depends on a number of factors.  Bail that would be excessive for me would be mere pocket change for Donald Trump, and a fine that he could pay without noticing it would bankrupt my family for generations.  But with the variables in mind, this amendment does in fact forbid judges to set bail that is ridiculously high, or to impose fines that are out of proportion to the crime in question; equally fines that are part of legislation – for instance, set fines for speeding – may not be excessive.  The government may not, in administering justice, seek to impoverish people – or, for that matter corporations.  The only fault I could find with this provision of the amendment is that it doesn’t include excessive taxes in its prohibition, for the government has constructed its tax policy in a clearly punitive way, levying excessive tax rates on those whom it dislikes – generally, the most productive companies and individuals among us.

 

The second part of this amendment contains language that we’re all familiar with.  We might say, for instance, that having to put up with a particular manager is “cruel and unusual punishment.”  But the language has a very real meaning.

 

First, cruel punishment is unconstitutional.  It would be cruel, for instance, to mandate the amputation of a hand to punish a thief (it would, though, be effective, as Saudi Arabia has proved).  It would be cruel to punish a welfare mother who’s abandoned her children, by sentencing her to death.  It would be cruel to execute people by means of slow torture.  It would be cruel to deliberately subject prisoners to unhealthy conditions (e.g. forcing them to work in malarial areas without benefit of medical care).

 

And second, punishment that is unusual is also unconstitutional.  This is, ironically, the only part of this amendment which can reasonably militate against capital punishment.  In some parts of the United States execution has become unusual simply because states have outlawed it, or judges refuse to impose it, or prisoners sit on Death Row so long that they die of old age.  But in 1791 capital punishment was by no means unusual – it was, in fact, what would have befallen George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and others if the Revolution had failed.

 

And that leads us to the most common judicial use of this amendment – to do away with capital punishment.  Is it cruel, by definition, to execute someone?  There are cruel means of execution – for instance, burning at the stake – but that does not mean that execution itself is, inherently, cruel.  And there are methods of execution which are far less cruel than the usual means of committing murder.  Lethal injection, for instance, is essentially nothing more than surgical anesthesia in fatal doses; when the executioner administers it properly, the subject goes to sleep, and dies in his sleep.  And given the heinousness of murder, it is hard to say that execution is a cruel punishment for the crime; indeed, execution is the only punishment which fits the crime of murder, and the main thing about a cruel punishment is that it is completely out of proportion to the crime.  With capital punishment being proportional to the crime of murder, it takes some wresting of the word to turn it into “cruel” punishment.

 

And the only reason that execution has become, in places, an unusual punishment is that judges or legislatures have deliberately made it so – and that hardly fits the meaning of this amendment.  As I’ve already pointed out, those who wrote this amendment wouldn’t have found execution unusual; indeed, what they would have considered unusual (and probably cruel as well, to the victims) is allowing murderers to live for decades at the expense of the taxpayers.

 

So any use of this amendment to oppose capital punishment is specious.  Those who wrote it had no such intention, and would have found such an intention bizarre.  And while I don’t wish the death of anyone – no sane person does – the fact is that if we are to have a civilized society, we must effectively punish those who commit crimes.  We must mete out punishments which fit the crime.  And if a punishment does in fact fit the crime, then by definition it cannot be a punishment which this amendment prohibits.

 

The Bill of Rights

Amendment VII

 

There isn’t a whole lot to say about this amendment.  Here’s the text:

 

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed

twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

 

Back in 1791, when the Bill of Rights went into effect, $20 was a lot of money.  The founding fathers weren’t saying that even trivial disputes merit the full majesty of the justice system (back then the system was about justice, and possessed majesty; today it’s about legal technicalities and frequently has as much majesty as a mud puddle).  Rather, they were saying that serious disputes merit a jury trial.  I don’t know the “exchange rate” between then and now, but given how much inflation has advanced just in the past 20 years, I would venture to think that in today’s money, that $20 would be quite a few thousand.  In any event, the principle is clear – in disputes involving serious sums, there is a right to a jury trial.

 

The second right in this amendment is similar to the prohibition against double jeopardy.  Here it isn’t, of course, a prohibition against re-trying the fact, for determinations of fact are not the same thing as putting someone on trial for his life.  But this amendment prohibits the government, or anyone else, from summarily ruling contrary to the decision of the court.  For instance, if there’s an appeal from a conviction for murder, the appellate court can’t just pick a decision out of a hat – the appeal must proceed “according to the rules of the common law,” in order to protect the defendant.

 

The Bill of Rights

Amendment VI

 

If there’s a right which our society has abandoned without a fight and without even knowing that the right exists, it’s the first one in the sixth amendment to the Constitution.  Let me quote the amendment in its entirety:

 

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

 

Note that first right – the right to not merely a public trial, but a speedy one.  How many criminal trials have you heard of lately which were speedy?  Usually it takes years to get a criminal before the judge.  For instance, in 2006 a man who was already wanted on a murder charge killed a deputy with the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office here in New Mexico.  He didn't go on trial until 2008.  Of course these delays serve the criminals, but it’s still an abrogation of their rights.

 

The next right is that of an impartial jury.  Note that the amendment doesn’t say “a jury which pays no attention to the world around them,” though that’s what defense lawyers seek.  One can read all about the crime, and form opinions based on his reading, and still be impartial – for impartiality in jury service means making a decision only on the basis of the evidence, and it is actually easy to do that.  It is, therefore, unnecessary to eliminate from a jury everyone who’s already learned something about the case, and formed an opinion on the basis of what he’s learned; all that a defense attorney really need do is ascertain that the prospective jurors can and will form their verdict solely on the basis of the evidence in court.  Obviously judges have disagreed with this, but judges – unlike the Constitution – think in legalese rather than in plain English and common sense.

 

Next, all those accused of a crime have a right to undergo trial in the district where they crime occurred.  Now the impartial jury clause does modify this – if there is no possibility of empanelling an impartial jury in the district, then there is room within the language of this amendment for a change of venue.  But the commentary above applies – impartiality and ignorance are not the same thing.  There is, therefore, no good reason to casually apply for, much less receive, a change of venue just because – for instance – the local TV stations have covered the story of the crime.

 

Then someone who’s accused of a crime has a right to know what crime the authorities are charging him with, the evidence against him, and the witnesses who claim that he did it.  Discovery is one part of our legal system which I support and which is actually part of the Constitution, and this right is the basis for discovery, wherein all the evidence the prosecutor possesses he must make available to the defense, as well as all the witnesses he intends to use at trial.  I think it’s obvious that the framers of the Constitution didn’t intend to allow criminals to go free whenever they pleased, but they concluded that it was better to protect the rights of the innocent, and occasionally see a guilty person escape justice for a time, than to construct a system which would habitually convict the innocent by depriving them of full knowledge of what they were facing.

 

Next, the accused has the right to compel defense witnesses to testify.  For instance, if someone saw another person commit the crime, but doesn’t want to testify because he hates the accused, the accused has the right to compel that witness to testify.  Again, the purpose is to protect the innocent against unjust prosecution and conviction.  If it weren’t for this provision, it would be possible for my neighbor to “denounce” me to the authorities – as was the case during the French Revolution, the Nazi Regime in Germany, and the Soviet Union – and for me to endure trial and conviction without ever having the chance to examine witnesses who know that I didn't commit the crime.  This provision – indeed, this entire amendment – has as its purpose preventing the United States from becoming the sort of place Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were.

 

And finally, this amendment guarantees the accused a right to a lawyer.  That right isn’t something that sprang into existence with the Miranda decision, but has existed since the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791.  And this is one government expenditure that I don’t mind – that is, the use of a public defender who receives his pay from the government, in cases where the defendant can’t afford a lawyer himself (the outrageous fees that lawyers charge is another issue; in my opinion, if Congress and other legislative bodies had fewer lawyers in them, our laws would be comprehensible to everyone, there would be far less need for lawyers, and their fees would come down lest they lose business altogether).  A lawyer to defend you is a right, not a privilege; it goes back to the founding of this country, not to the 1960s.

 

This amendment deals with the rights of accused criminals.  Most of us will never find ourselves in that position – most defendants are career criminals, who are criminals because they’re simply not smart enough to make it in the law-abiding world.  But every person who finds himself accused of a crime possesses these rights – including housewives and corporate managers, Wal-Mart employees and apartment maintenance people.  Whoever you are, if you find yourself in that position, you have all these rights.