…and the Constitution is dead…or, at least on life support with a grim prognosis.  Without a people, government and judiciary willing to abide by what is written there, to be a nation of laws and not of “men”, we might as well put a match to the corner and watch it burn.  It is nothing more than a BBQ starter at that point.

Since the time of Woodrow Wilson, the second Progressive President (Teddy Roosevelt being the first), the Progressives have been trying to tear this country down.  Every one of them has done their utmost to render the Constitution meaningless for the better part of a century, and they seem to have finally gotten their wish.

Let’s break it down, shall we?

According to the Constitution, governmental power is split between three branches – Executive, Legislative and Judicial – so that they can act as a check and balance, and (theoretically) prevent any one branch from exceeding their authority.

Sadly, with the election of our current President, that is no longer in effect.  The President issues Executive Orders that impinge on the authority of the Legislative branch, and they just let it slide.  While the Democrats controlled two of the three branches, anything this President wanted was rubber stamped by the Legislative.

The Executive also ignores the Judicial.  The Supreme Court issued a ruling after the oil spill in the Gulf that the President could not wave his magic pen and issue a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf, yet he flipped them the Bird, and kept it in place anyway.  The President was told by a lower court judge that his Executive Amnesty must stop, yet officials in his administration continued to issue documents after that order came down.  To the judge’s credit, he has demanded that HHS officials explain why they have blatantly disregarded his order, and he’ll drag them into his court if necessary.

Let’s take a quick look at the Executive’s attempts at getting around the 2^nd Amendment by going after the gun sellers and ammunition.  First we have “Operation Choke Point” which is a multi-agency task force that goes after “high risk” industries – like gun merchants.  The governmental agencies contact the banks and “suggest” that they may want to no longer do business with these “high risk” industries.  This is nothing more than a back door attempt at negating the 2^nd Amendment.  SCOTUS has upheld on several occasions an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, so they are exploring other methods to keep guns out of the hands of law abiding citizens.  Then we have the excessive orders of ammunition by government agencies.  You could expect agencies like the military, FBI, etc. to order large amounts of ammunition, but the Postal Service?  Have they never heard the term “going postal”?  The USDA?  Seriously?  Are they planning to arm the cows like in the song “Cows with Guns”?  Oh, and then there’s the Bureau of Reclamation which wants to order 52,000 rounds of ammunition to protect the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead.  Is there a huge amount of crime being handled by the Bureau of Reclamation in that area that none of us is hearing about?

On the Legislative side, we have the Senate who completely ignored Section 1 of the Constitution regarding “all bills for the raising of revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives” when it came to Obamacare, when they wrote the first bill for the (un)Affordable Care Act – probably why they kept insisting the mandate was not a tax.  If it were a tax, it would not be legal unless the bill originated in the House.  Of course, John Roberts chose to ignore that part in his ruling.

Then there is the 4^th Amendment and the rash of “civil forfeiture” cases where governmental agencies and police forces are seizing peoples cash and property if they are “suspected” of criminal activity.  There is no warrant, in many cases no trial or conviction, yet the innocent people having their property stolen by the government, and never seem to get it all back.  If they’re willing to forfeit a percentage of it, they can usually get some of it back.

Continuing on the 4^th Amendment we have the stories of kids like Justina Pelletier who are taken by the State and held against their will, and the will of their parents, “for their own good.”  Again, no case is made, no warrant is issued, it’s just a government agency overstepping the Constitution and we sit back and yawn.  After all, it’s not happening to me, so why should I get worked up about it.  In Kansas, a woman pulled into her driveway and found a half dozen police and social workers, who did not have a warrant, and barred her from her home.  When she told officers to get out of her back yard as they didn’t have permission to be there, the officer in charge told her “doesn’t matter.”  Oh, yes sir…it does indeed matter…quite a lot.

This brings us to the Judiciary, in the form of the Supreme Court doing the job of the Legislative Branch, and taking away States’ Rights.  First we have Chief Justice John Roberts not once, but twice, re-writing legislation so that Obamacare (now SCOTUScare) could (loosely) be considered Constitutional.  It is not the job of the Judicial to write law – only to interpret it in light of the Constitution.  Yet, the first time Roberts re-wrote the law to call the mandate a “tax” (despite the Administration’s protestations all throughout the run up to its passage that it most definitely was NOT a tax), and just two weeks ago, he re-wrote it again by saying that Congress wrote a sloppy law that he had to fix, and that “shall be established by the State” did not really mean what Jonathon Gruber, Obamacare architect, repeatedly said it meant.  It was put in in an attempt to force States to start their own exchange or their people would not get the benefits of the subsidies.  I don’t’ know if the Chief Justice has some really nasty skeletons in his closet that someone is using to blackmail him, but he has gone out of his way to find the ACA Constitutional, up to and including rewriting the law.

Last month we “celebrated” the 10^th anniversary of the death of the 5^th Amendment when SCOTUS ruled in a 5-4 decision that “eminent domain” could be used to take property from law abiding citizens and give it to a private redevelopment company when “the general benefits a community enjoyed from economic growth qualifies private redevelopment plans as a permissible “public use” under the Takings Clause of the 5^th Amendment.”  Of course, the redeveloper lost financing, and the land still sits there unused.

Then we have SCOTUS killing not only the 10^th Amendment with their decision that forced same-sex marriage on the 13 states that had not yet enacted it through either popular vote or State legislative action, but have most likely killed the 1^st Amendment as well.

How is that you ask?

Let me run it down for you.

The 1^st Amendment essentially covers five things:  Freedom of religion, speech, press, petition of the government and association.  The reason the first two are religion and speech is that the founders knew what would happen if the government had the authority to dictate either one, and the press was included as it was their job to faithfully report the news as a check on governmental overreach.  Needless to say, they long ago gave up that job.

So, how does the same sex marriage decision affect freedom of religion?

In too many ways to really note here, so I’ll touch on just a few.

If a church wants to keep its 501c3 tax exempt status, a protection put in place because the power to tax is the power to control, it will have to abandon the moral dictates of the faith and perform same sex wedding ceremonies.  If they stand firm in what they believe, the government can (and probably will) revoke their 501c3 status.  During oral arguments before SCOTUS one of the Justices asked the Administration’s lawyer if the court were to strike down traditional marriage would churches keep their tax exempt status.  The lawyer’s reply, “We’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it, but probably not.”

Okay, so a church decides to stand firm, and lose their tax exempt status…what does that really mean?  That church will now be forced to pay:

• Property tax
• Sales Tax
• Income Tax
• Members of the church lose the tax write-off

Essentially, they would have to become a business which would then open them up to the burdensome regulations faced by small businesses.  Given that, probably less than 50% of the church body tithes on a regular basis, there is no way that a church can survive financially with these extra burdens placed on it.

Churches, whether they decide to abandon their principles or stand firm on them, will be forced to hire LGBT as staff if they want to keep their doors open, thus violating the freedom of association.

Faith based charities such as adoption agencies (currently about 75% of all adoption agencies) would then be forced to place children with same sex parents, despite their belief in the traditional family and its benefits to the child, or close their doors.  What then happens to those children?

This decision will also, inevitably I believe, lead to the death of free speech and right of association.  We are already seeing this with the attacks on people who speak up for traditional marriage.  Those who tout to be the most tolerant among us will literally shout down anyone who disagrees with them.  How long before defending traditional marriage is defined as “hate speech” and shut down?

As for freedom of association we’ve seen that, along with the freedom of religion, being trampled on with the lawsuits against Christian-owned businesses who have declined to take part in a same sex wedding ceremony because of their faith.  Not one of the couples who have filed suit in any of the cases were unable to find another vendor willing to be a part of their ceremony.  On the contrary, the business owners who declined to participate all made multiple recommendations of rival companies who did not have the religious objection to taking part, and all of those couples ended up using one of those recommendations.  Yet, the militant activists on the side of same sex marriage felt the need to make examples of these business owners for discrimination.  There was no discrimination.  Each of these owners had done business with gay clients for years, including those that sued them, and were happy to serve them.  They just could not participate, through their talents, in something their faith said was wrong.

So, let’s tally it up.  There are 27 Amendments to the Constitution, with the first 10 making up the Bill of Rights.  Of those 10, half have ceased to have any meaning as far as I can tell – the 1^st, 2^nd, 4^th, 5^th and 10^th.  The others deal with the rights of those charged with a crime and whether the government can force citizens to house the military.

How long before the other five are just abandoned?

It is sad to say, and I certainly never expected to see it in my lifetime, but The Great Experiment, the first Constitutional Republic in the history of humanity, has failed.

It has failed because “We the People” have failed.  We have failed to hold those in power accountable when they violate the Constitution.  We have failed to take the time to vet the candidates we vote for, if we even vote at all, just voting for whoever has the “D” or “R” next to their name.

Most importantly, we have failed to care.  To care about the freedoms guaranteed to us by the very document so many want to just toss away, or selectively enforce.  To care about the hard work it takes to make, and keep, something as complicated as “rule by, for and of the people” alive and thriving.  To care about what is happening with the people around us, and support each other rather than relying on government to “fix” and “take care” of everything and everyone.

That is how a tyranny is born.

Do we even care?

R.I.P. USA.  Born: 1776   Died:  2015

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