2 posts tagged “bill of rights”
I am embarrassed to say I did not realize that December 15 is the anniversary date of the Bill of Rights – the first Ten Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Mark Alexander points out that on December 15, 2007 it will have been 216 years since the Bill of Rights were ratified. Alexander also has an awesome essay on the emergence of the first Ten Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
It is an excerpt from the Patriot Post entitled, “To secure these rights …”
JRH 12/17/07
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“To secure these rights...”
By Mark Alexander
Excerpt: Patriot Post Vol. 07 No. 50
14 December 2007
“The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” —Alexander Hamilton
Saturday, 15 December, is the 216th anniversary of the adoption of the Bill of Rights, the first Ten Amendments to our Constitution, as ratified in 1791.
The Bill of Rights was inspired by three remarkable documents: John Locke’s 1689 thesis, Two Treatises of Government, regarding the protection of “property” (in the Latin context, proprius, or one’s own “life, liberty and estate”); in part from the Virginia Declaration of Rights authored by George Mason in 1776 as part of that state’s Constitution; and, of course, in part from our Declaration of Independence authored by Thomas Jefferson.
James Madison proposed the Bill of Rights as amendments to our Constitution in 1789, but many of our Founders objected to listing the Bill of Rights at all, much less as “amendments.” Their rationale was that such rights might then be construed as malleable rather than unalienable, as amendable rather than “endowed by our Creator” as noted in the Constitution’s supreme guidance, the Declaration of Independence.
Alexander Hamilton argued this point in The Federalist Papers, the most comprehensive explication of our Constitution: “I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous... For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?” (Federalist No. 84)
George Mason was one of 55 who authored the U.S. Constitution, but one of 16 who refused to sign it because it did not adequately address limitations on what the central government had “no power to do.” He worked with Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams against the Constitution’s ratification for that reason.
As a result of Mason’s insistence, ten limitations were put on the Federal Government by the first session of Congress, for the reasons outlined by the Bill of Rights Preamble: “The Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution...”
Read in context, the Bill of Rights is both an affirmation of innate individual rights (as noted by Thomas Jefferson: “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time...”), and a clear delineation on constraints upon the central government.
However, as Jefferson warned repeatedly, the greatest threat to such limitations on the central government was an unbridled judiciary: “Over the Judiciary department, the Constitution [has] deprived [the people] of their control... The original error [was in] establishing a judiciary independent of the nation, and which, from the citadel of the law, can turn its guns on those they were meant to defend, and control and fashion their proceedings to its own will... It is a misnomer to call a government republican in which a branch of the supreme power [the judiciary] is independent of the nation... The opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.”
In Federalist No. 81 Alexander Hamilton wrote, “[T]here is not a syllable in the [Constitution] which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution, or which gives them any greater latitude in this respect than may be claimed by the courts of every State.”
That admonition notwithstanding, the federal judiciary has become “a despotic branch.”
Indeed, since the middle of the last century, judicial despots have grossly devitalized the Bill of Rights, asserting errantly that our Founders created a “Living Constitution” amendable by judicial diktat.
For example, the Left judiciary has “interpreted” the First Amendment as placing all manner of constraint upon the exercise of religion by way of the so-called “establishment clause” and based on the phony “Wall of Separation” argument. At the same time, the courts have asserted that all manner of expression constitutes “speech.”
The judiciary and legislatures have undermined the strength of the Second Amendment, a right of which James Madison’s appointee, Justice Joseph Story, referred to as “...the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers...”
Equally derelict is the manner in which the Tenth Amendment has been eroded by judicial interpretation.
In Federalist No. 45, Madison outlines the clear limits on central government power established in the Constitution: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”
Alexander Hamilton added in Federalist No. 81 “...the plan of the [Constitutional] convention aims only at a partial union or consolidation, the State governments would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty which they before had, and which were not, by that act, exclusively delegated to the United States.”
There was a very bloody War Between the States fought over offense to the Constitution’s assurance of States’ Rights.
All is not lost, however.
Sunday, 16 December, is the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party (1773). The “radicals” from Marlborough, Massachusetts, who threw 342 chests of tea from a British East India Company ship into the Boston Harbor in protest of tyrannical rule, did so noting, “Death is more eligible than slavery. A free-born people are not required by the religion of Christ to submit to tyranny, but may make use of such power as God has given them to recover and support their... liberties.”
Three years later, this rebellion had grown to such extent that our Founders were willing to give up their fortunes and lives, attaching their signatures to a document that declared, “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.”
Judicial and political despots, take note.
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The Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial is becoming a fount of smoking gun proof that there is an Islamist agenda operating as a Fifth Column in America. I stand in near angry disbelief that the MSM is not hammering the significance of the documental proof that big buck Islamist organizations (deceiving Americans that they are Moderate Mohammedans seeking the American dream) are clandestinely conspiring like criminals to subvert American culture and infiltrate American politics with goal in mind – providing special religious benefits not afforded long time foundational religions (i.e. Judeo/Christianity) to delude the non-practicing Christians into conversion into violent Islamist Theo-political Mohammedans.
This is categorically wrong to allow this to happen.
It is fundamentally immoral for the MSM not to be reporting with emphasis the American Homeland agenda of Islamist organizations. The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus forbid this deluded MSM adherence to Political Correctness. The MSM media is so rabidly fringe Left they do not have ears to hear or eyes to see that a fulfillment of an Islamist agenda will be the end of the MSM as we know it.
American soldiers dying in the Middle East fighting terrorism so that the Left and the Right in America can have the right of Freedom of Speech; yet if the Islamist Agenda were only to half complete the MSM media would be forbidden to write freely about Mohammedanism once their ears and eyes opened.
There is NO Freedom of Speech in a Mohammedan society. Freedom of Speech can lead to insulting dialogue, monologue, writing or speeches about Mohammedan and Allah. That is “Speech” NOT PERMITTED in Mohammedan society. People loose their lives for such public sentiments in the Middle East – legally.
Make no mistake; any accommodations to a Mohammedan Theo-Political society will end the American Constitutional Bill of Rights. There would be one set of laws for non-Mohammedans and another set for American-Mohammedans. THAT WILL FRACTURE OUR NATION AND OUR SOCIETY: America would cease to be the Land of the Free and home of the brave. America would spiral into a status of Third World nations, i.e. a status of continuous rioting until either the non-Mohammedans (secular and Christian Americans) or the American-Mohammedans extra-Constitutionally battled for a new rule of law. It would be a winner take all scenario and the loser no doubt will be heinous persecuted (it would not matter if the victor were non-Mohammedan or Mohammedan) for the perceived injustices that was heaped upon the eventual victors.
I know this is an extreme case scenario that may never actually come to fruition; however look at the pattern of Third World nation rioting and depravity AND look at the boldness of Mohammedans to riot in Western Europe and individually attack and/or rape non-Mohammedans in Western Europe. The pattern is escalating in Western Europe already.
If America chooses now to nip scheming Islamist organizations in the bud now, Constitutional legal measures can prevent potential future horrors of the future.
Related SlantRight.com Posts:
2. Dreher: A Gem of an Editorial Exposition about American Islam
3. Muslim Brotherhood Transnational Project Comes to America
4. It is Cliché, but Really – America Needs to Focus on the Islamist in our Midst
5. Fifth Column Radical Islamists Use Western Perks –
JRH (Hat Tip: American Congress For Truth E-Newsletter)
