Stretched Beyond All Limits
The ritual abuse of the US Constitution is the root of the current chaos in America.
In my observation, there is a correlation between the increase in incivility and chaos and the distance we have placed between public policy and the Constitution.
Too many times we have turned away from the founding document that was created to be the cornerstone of a society, resolving the conflict between individual and collective, between individual actions and civil rights and preserving individual freedom in human culture that often tends toward a lust for power - the dominion over others - and tyranny.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed:
“Every nation that has ended in tyranny has come to that end by way of good order. It certainly does not follow from this that peoples should scorn public peace, but neither should they be satisfied with that and nothing more. A nation that asks nothing of government, but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the depths of its heart; it is a slave of its well-being, ready for the man who will put it in chains.”
Along with the basic principles and structure of our representative republic, the Constitution carefully outlines the limits to which government may act – and that those acts are to be considered illegitimate if they are not aligned with the expressed principles.
Not necessarily surprising because from the moment the Constitution was ratified, forces began expending significant energy trying to expand the enumerated powers, seeking “workarounds” for the limits that were placed there as means of protecting people against themselves. Somewhere along the line, the belief that the constitution would be OK with ignoring those limitations for the “right” reasons began to get traction.
Take discrimination for example. Discrimination can mean a simple, innocuous choice between competing alternatives – but it can also mean a mechanism by which a person or group is intentionally prevented access to some aspect of life, based on characteristics that have nothing to do with that avenue. You know what I’m talking about – choosing between car brands and models is an innocuous discrimination, restricting the purchase of some brands or models only to white or black people is a social ill that violates individual freedom.
Somewhere along the journey of history, people came to believe the Constitution authorizes discrimination as a remedy for discrimination. Using the previous example, if black people had been prevented from purchasing Corvettes, a program to deny whites the opportunity to purchase them, and to institute subsidies that incentivize blacks to purchase them, was considered constitutional because it was deemed to be the “right” thing to do.
But it is not.
If discrimination was wrong in the first instance, it cannot be right in the second. The only process that meets constitutional muster is to stop the prevention of Corvette purchases by blacks and let the people do what they would otherwise do in the natural course of events.
The Constitution is NOT a weapon or vehicle to remedy past sins by refocusing that same sin on another individual or group. It can’t be because every single time it is tried, every American is harmed by those efforts, even the groups the action is alleged to help. The role of government was never to make people equal by its actions. To even attempt that tears the nation apart, splitting us into classes of oppressed and oppressors, makers and takers, even if the alleged crime was committed centuries ago. The Constitution only protects the environment where people can be treated as equals, to be assured they will have equal opportunity to seek their own path and that they will be treated equally under the auspices of the law.
My wife and I were talking last night about the abuse of the Constitution, how the “right side of history” is often defined in unconstitutional terms, and just how much longer we are going to last as a constitutional republic.
I told her that all of this reminded me of the 1993 Michael Douglas movie, Falling Down.
We began to try to determine just what it is that binds us together as a country.
We decided it isn’t laws, location or even culture. It is a shared belief that in return for our allegiance, we receive the benefits guaranteed from our founding. In the case of America, those guarantees were set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
One of those guarantees is equal treatment under the law. No forced reparations, no “restorative justice”, no exposure to ex post facto treatment by the government.
This idea is a thread woven into the fabric of our country.
We are a country founded on the precept of individual rights. In support of those individual rights, we each also recognize that there will be variances in the benefits that we are guaranteed because we are all individuals – but because we accept individuality, we accept these deviations if they do not stretch the bounds far enough to violate our foundational beliefs.
This is the only way that a nation of 350 million people can breathe the same air, share the same land, and cooperate in governance.
Deuteronomy 24:16 (KJV)
16 The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.
SO MUCH FOR “Reparations” and “Restorative (In-)Justice!”
There was a time when everyone knew the government had no power to regulate a substance--alcohol in this instance. It took an amendment to the Constitution to allow it, and another to rescind. Nowadays, no one bats an eye at such a regulation.