Bill of Rights

For two long years this column, along with most other conservative writers, have trumpeted the mastery of the conservative message in the face of the rising tide of Marxist totalitarianism. The very mission statement of this column, “The light of freedom and truth in the defense of our republic”, is a clarion call to action.

Today’s conservative is most likely to be in the Patriot Movement or be in sympathy with the Tea Party Patriots’ aims. No surprises there, 60 to 80 million American voters agree very strongly with the Tea Party ‘platform’, if there is such a thing. If we have a platform it would have to be the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.

Consequences… they’re all around us. To most of us, consequences are the result of ill-considered actions or decisions. To the Marxist liberal there can be no constraint from mere consequences, because of the ‘purity’ of the liberal progressive motive. Purity of intent is a rising tide that lifts all boats in the murky shadow world of ‘communism light’. History is strewn with the debris of such philosophy.

The inner workings of the Marxist movement were displayed as never before, due to the intensity of the exposure provided by the conservative news media and the conservative blogosphere. The consequences of the last election haven’t all been felt yet… far from it.

That election tsunami was the direct result of the American voting public’s exposure to the monstrous statist ideology of Barack Obama, the main stream leftist media, his DeMarxist Congress, and the patriotic constitutional movements known collectively as the Tea Parties. It wasn’t even close. Americans prefer the Constitutional Republican/Tea Party by way over 60%.

Truth does count and people sense it. They seek it like a moth to flame. Truth and freedom… they are insuperable.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2011

The Drudge Report headline yesterday in red and all caps “SHOCK VIDEO: DEM CONGRESSMAN BRAGS: 'FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CAN DO MOST ANYTHING IN THIS COUNTRY'...”

If you’re inclined to get your week off on the wrong foot, you had no choice but to watch – knowing it would infuriate you.

But what Drudge highlighted wasn’t what that clip was about.

Instead, it was the essence of the political debate over domestic policy in this nation for the past century and likely for the next century.

First, the latest characters in this great drama. On one side of the debate was Pete Stark the Democrat Congressman from California – casually dressed to match the appearance of his constituents which betrays his 37 years inside the Beltway.

Then we see an ordinary American woman – unpolished and reading off a prepared statement. Stammering her way through a question she was taught by our inadequate education system to write over and over, but not trained in the oratory to deliver the final product.

She clumsily quotes the 13th Amendment and uses a highly emotive word like “slavery” in lieu of the better analogy of involuntary servitude. She chooses a shocking word because it’s the best way to convey her anger. Anger that gave her the energy to google all of her research and write-out her question.

She has an intuition, a sense that there is something that doesn’t seem quite right about the new Health Care Reform bill that gives all Americans the right to health care.

What she senses intuitively is one side of the debate of maintaining the existing Bill of Rights that was ratified with the original Constitution rather than supplementing it with a Second Bill of Rights.

The Second Bill of Rights are a list of entitlements that all Americans are to be given such as health care, housing, employment compensated by a living wage, and an education. These are positive rights and are often regarded by Democrat politicians (like Rep. Stark) to be on the same level as negative rights since FDR introduced this litany in 1944. 

Aside from your rights as a potentially accused criminal, the original Bill of Rights consists mainly of rights that you as an individual can perform as an action and the government cannot infringe on your right to perform that action yourself. The woman used the Founding Fathers description of “inalienable.” They are also called negative rights because each individual has these rights and it is a violation for another person to prevent these actions from happening. 

The major issue that is being debated right now is not so much philosophical, but the realization – made worse by a bad economy – that in order to implement the Second Bill of Rights for all Americans, then there must be an infringement on the liberty and property of other citizens. Either by requiring those with the necessary skills to provide these services for Americans who could not otherwise have them or by enforcing on the most productive citizens a punitive tax burden needed to adequately fund the former.

In this particular clip, the woman discusses an overlooked aspect of the health care debate which gets to the heart of the real-world consequences of implementing the Second Bill of Rights.

In order to have the right to something like health care, then it must be delivered to us by professionals who will likely not be compensated appropriately for their services. So doctors and nurses will be forced to provide health care services to people they would otherwise not deliver care to.

The same thing would happen if other positive rights are given to us.

For a person to have the right to be employed at a living wage there must be an enforcement of employers to hire people and pay them a minimum amount predetermined by authorities. Likewise engineers and construction workers would have to designate property to build homes and apartment buildings for every American to live in so the land cannot be used for commercial interests. And teachers must educate everyone, even those who fail and drop out. A plight that sounds remarkably similar to doctors having to spend more time treating patients that have used their money to diminish their health with bad food and smoking without paying anything for health care over the past few years.

The framework of these debates pits FDR's promise of a Second Bill of Rights against the original Bill of Rights. Everything in the Second Bill of Rights is based on you getting something from someone else and that infringes on someone else's liberty and property.

The three documents, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and The Bill of Rights are the model from which America draws its freedoms. Those freedoms, and the industry and genius of a free people, are responsible for the astronomical success of the great American experiment.

Many, back in the days of King George the Third and the Revolution, didn’t believe that people could self govern, that instead the guidance of a firm but benign ruler was necessary as the common man simply could not be trusted to make life decisions for himself. Europe was essentially a series of post medieval fiefdoms. A rigid caste/class system ensured the status quo.

With the discovery of the new world, the colonizing of America sent hints of freedom back to the old world. The restless and independent who chaffed under monarchical rule responded and fled to this new land, where a man was free to worship as he pleased and prosper through the efforts of his own labor, far from the courts of Europe. This led to a fierce independence and a love of the country that had given them so much.

The Revolutionary War brought together some of the best minds in the colonies to formulate the founding documents of our fledgling republic. I’m one of those that believe that the documents were God-given. God was a very big part of our founders’ thinking and their lives, and it shows in the wording. I’m more and more convinced that the founding documents should be read, examined and wondered over by every citizen. The language is simple and easy to understand. You cannot read these works and not feel uplifted.

Since we felt so strongly about it, Dee created a page on our website, tabbed ‘Our Founding Documents’. Click on it and you can read and copy all three. You’d be surprised what a working knowledge of the founders will do for you the next time you tangle with your liberal uncle. I need to thank Dee for her magnificent work on the site. Take a look around and let us know what you think.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2010

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL…

I have a friend who insists that Americans have been emasculated. That somehow we just aren’t what we used to be. I take umbrage with a world view that American exceptionalism has somehow fallen by the wayside. It’s very true that the liberals would LIKE to see an androgynous Homo-Americanus that they could mold into their perverted Utopian one-size-fits-all Marxian world.

The 1960s produced some startling social demographic changes starting with the ’sexual revolution’. It’s also true that they made some inroads in that direction by the attempted feminization of the male population through the radical feminist movement, with the resultant ‘compliant’, ’sensitive’ male that we’ve heard described as ‘metro-sexual’ and other less savory descriptions. It’s significant that when they obtain the resultant male they’d been looking to produce, they weren’t satisfied with him either and went around complaining that men aren’t masculine and assertive. The other problematic half of that equation is that the type of female that is produced by adherence to feminist ideals is not the kind of woman a real male wants anyway.

1960s Feminist Demonstration.

I don’t intend to demean feminists. They are what they are and they do what they do. Just don’t get mad at us if we don’t care to play in that ball court.

America was drugged to sleep in the 1960’s. We had a steady drumbeat of socialist dogma coming from our news media and our universities. We had hundreds of thousands of American men fighting a war thousands of miles from home that was never CLEARLY defined for the American people, and an active communist fifth column operating pretty much in the open in our schools. The main stream Americans, the ones no one ever heard from in what is now called fly-over country, knew pretty much only what the available news media of the day was telling them and its message had already been largely usurped by the liberal hard left, which was also making inroads into the Democratic party.

The long overdue civil rights movement, which it should be remembered was opposed ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY BY DEMOCRATS, was piggy-backed into the “Great Society” of President Lyndon Johnson and was a democrat-for-life social welfare modern plantation system that exists to this day. Keeping minorities in poverty rather than lifting them from it. Still, Americans embraced what was good in it and the result has been a far more integrated and color blind society.

President Lyndon B. Johnson

The advent of talk radio, the internet and instantaneous communications have changed everything. The lies of the left no longer go undisputed. In fact, they are usually challenged in minutes instead of hours or days. We as a people began to start paying attention to what our kids were being taught in our public schools. We came out of the haze that had been produced by the frenetic 60 hour working weeks of the 80s and 90s and saw what our resultant inattention had wrought. We saw our country and our freedoms being stolen from us.

Another miracle occurred… we started talking to each other. People from all over this country rediscovering what is meant by AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM and the blessings that are the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – that it is our duty and sacred trust to maintain the freedoms that have been gained at so great a price. Millions upon millions of Americans are rising up and saying HELL NO!

This is it. This is the new year. This is 2010. This is the YEAR OF THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION. LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD!!

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2010

There are a lot of self-important and self-aggrandizing ‘power brokers’ in Washington that won’t be there come this time next year. It’s not just the tunnel-visioned hypocrites in the Senate that are in the cross-hairs either. The House of Representatives has MUCH to answer to the American voters for also.

Look for the DeMarxists to try to drive a wedge between the GOP and the TEA PARTY CONSERVATIVES. The facts are that the VAST majority of this country do identify themselves as conservative, for all the bleating of the lame stream socio-marxist media and the Maobamatons of the administration. The very people they have been crapping all over for years have been bulking up on the CONSTITUTION and the words of the FOUNDERS, the BILL OF RIGHTS and the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. They have remembered WHO and WHAT they are.

The Americans Are Coming!

All prognostications for next year’s elections are indicating grim prospects for politicians whom the American voter has determined are responsible for, and are in favor of, the OPPRESSIVE legislation now working its way through Congress. Whether by active or passive support, Americans are taking note and remembering. No matter if it was in favor of the massive pork ’stimulus’ funds the DeMarxists voted for themselves, or the fraudulent and UNCONSTITUTIONAL health care bill, to the economic disaster that is CAP and TAX, to the upcoming and soon to be introduced AMNESTY FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS – better known as the DeMarxist welfare constituent voter-for-life bill.

Americans have also figured out who and what was responsible for the economic collapse in the first place. The hysteria generation that worked so well that first time hasn’t done so well recently, have you noticed? The pandemic they worked so hard to gin up. When was the last time you heard about that? Notice the layers of lies they have piled on about the incipient environmental disasters we DON’T face, which are peeling away like the skins of an onion.

The CITIZENS AND TAXPAYERS OF AMERICA HAVE PLAINLY HAD IT. There is a new revolution out there and it’s growing in intensity daily. We will not be denied. It’s our America and we will preserve it.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2009

Recently an article was published in CNN Money quoting the Air Transport Association, an association of executives from the airline industry, predicting there would be approximately 7% fewer airline passengers this summer due to the economic conditions now in the United States.

I would state as a former primarily vacation airline passenger that the reduction in Americans traveling during the summer months has declined for discretionary travel steadily since 9/11.

Not out of fear, but due to the fact now that traveling to vacation destinations for many Americans is more hassle free driving than flying anymore.  Driving to California from Arizona takes six hours by car, but now can take just as long or longer by air.

It isn't simply the expense involved, it is the invasive security procedures now conducted for domestic travel in the United States that is primarily to blame, in this writer's view.

It has gotten to the point where the surveillance industry in this country is one of the fastest growing industries, and largest stakeholders in government contracts.

So lucrative has this industry become and vital to the U.S. government domestic surveillance program that the Department of Homeland Security is now purchasing, with stimulus monies, full body scanners for major domestic airports, to be used primarily against its own citizens due to the free entry and exit passes awarded international travelers during and prior to the Bush Administration.

Since most of the incidents which have compromised American citizen's security have been from foreigners as demonstrated by 9/11 and the shoe bomber incident, the focus on domestic travel rather than international security does seem backward, since "foreigners" actually travel from outside the U.S. in order to get here in the first place, or breach the U.S. borders and enter illegally through our borders with Canada and Mexico.

At the present time it take no less than two full hours prior to flight time in order to undergo the security checks for both passengers and baggage.  And though it was a British citizen responsible for the shoe bombing incident, all domestic travelers in the U.S. are now required to remove even their shoes before boarding.

That doesn't take into consideration the amount of time that is also lost waiting on the tarmacks for flights to depart or arrive due to the amount of both domestic and international flights, many of which are less than half full.

Deregulation of our national airports has actually resulted in more pollution, and higher costs in the long run.  And crowded airports that have made most vacations anything but relaxing.

In fact, since my last experience flying to a funeral for a relative on the East Coast from my home in the West that took more than twelve hours to complete with the new "shoe removal" requirements, I haven't flown in four years.

The American people were not the cause of 9/11, yet it is the American people who are now being strip searched and monitored in ever increasing degrees domestically, while the international airport procedures are becoming less and less secure with each passing year.

I guess so that at least the next potential international terrorist is not denied the opportunity to visit Disneyland, or attend the next global corporate board meeting.

Expect to now be charged more and more fees in order to take your baggage with you.  It appears banking practices have now infiltrated the airline industry.

Soon, I'm sure, there will be additional fees instituted for those bag lunches, and the privilege of those xrays prior to boarding at the security checks.  Also charges for the upgrades for the shoe removal procedures in order to now track your carbon footprints. 

We wouldn't want to interfere with our "free trade," agreements, or the "free market" competitive airline industry and their profit margins in order to effectively reduce that non-existent excess carbon instead in perhaps restricting U.S. international ports of entry and flights, now would we? 

Apparently not if it affects the lucrative gadget industry stakeholders and their economic growth at the cost of the American taxpayers obviously.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/15/news/economy/summer_air_travel/index.htm

Below is an excerpt from the Sixteenth American Jurisprudence, Second Edition, Section 256, which affirms that the U.S. Constitution, unless and until LAWFULLY amended as contained within it's express provisions, is a contract between the federal and state government and it's people, and the defacto Law of the Land. 

As a contract itself and in spite of U.S. history almost from the moment it was ratified by the 13 original colonies, any and all interpretations or applications of the provisions contained within it under the "common law" upon which contract law is  based according to the Magna Carta (used by the founders in their deliberations) by any and all judicial authorities at both the state and federal level is to be done using the "common useage" English definitions in such interpretations or applications pursuant to "contract law doctrine." 

The footnote citations relate to U.S. case law which enforces this restatement and can be researched after pulling up the Am.Jur citing for a listing of footnoted case laws at any local law library:

Section 256. Generally. The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, whether federal [29] or state, [30] though having the form and name of law, is in reality no law, [31] but is wholly void, [32] and ineffective for any purpose; [33] since unconstitutionality dates from the time of its enactment, and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it, [34] an unconstitutional law, in legal contemplation, is as inoperative as if it had never been passed. [31] Such a statute leaves the question that it purports to settle just as it would be had the statute not been enacted. [36] No repeal of such an enactment is necessary. [37]

Since an unconstitutional law is void, the general principles follow that it imposes no duties, [38] confers no rights, [39] creates no office, [40] bestows no power or authority on anyone, [41] affords no protection, [42] and justifies no acts performed under it. [43] A contract which rests on an unconstitutional statute creates no obligation to be impaired by subsequent legislation. [44]

No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law [45] and no courts are bound to enforce it. [46] Persons convicted and fined under a statute subsequently held unconstitutional may recover the fines paid. [47]

A void act cannot be legally inconsistent with a valid one. [48] And an unconstitutional law cannot operate to supersede any existing valid law. [49] Indeed, insofar as a statute runs counter to the fundamental law of the land, it is superseded thereby. [50] Since an unconstitutional statute cannot repeal or in any way affect an existing one, [51] if a repealing statute is unconstitutional, the statute which it attempts to repeal remains in full force and effect. [52] And where a clause repealing a prior law is inserted in an act, which act is unconstitutional and void, the provision for the repeal of the prior law will usually fall with it and will not be permitted to operate as repealing such prior law. [53]

The general principles stated above apply to the constitutions as well as to the laws of the several states insofar as they are repugnant to the Constitution and laws of the United States. [54] Moreover, a construction of a statute which brings it in conflict with a constitution will nullify it as effectually as if it had, in express terms, been enacted in conflict therewith. [55]

An unconstitutional portion of a statute may be examined for the purpose of ascertaining the scope and effect of the valid portions. [56]

The numbers in [brackets] are footnotes that refer to court decisions. You can look them up in the American Jurisprudence at any law library.

Juries in the United States have the right and power to judge the law as well as the facts. This means that a jury can acquit a defendant for any reason or none and need not give any reason for it's decision. Therefor bad statutes that are unconstitutional or immoral can be set aside, or good laws that are misapplied can be ignored. This is called "jury nullification."