On Being Hopelessly Compromised

           Or

  The Inability To

Unscramble Eggs

I used to think that we needed first to ‘get back to’ the Constitutiion, and only then could we move forward into the New Day, just waiting for us to inherit it, having learned our lessons the hard way.  But I have had second thoughts about that item on our Things To Do list.  For, what would it take to ‘get back to it’ - and to what version of it precisely???

—

I am feeling like the character that Charlton Heston portrayed in the film ‘Planet of the Apes’ when he discovered what Roddy McDowell, one of said apes, knew he was going to find out at some point: that the planet this astronaut had landed on, after a period of hibernation in his craft to withstand his journey into space, was his own, in his future, with the Statue of Liberty having toppled into the water, and the apes having taken over.

Why the feeling?  Because I had never realized that the Constitution was quite as tattered and tarnished as it has become over the years since its inception, until I just began reading a book, authored by two constitutional experts (Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Keith R.C. Guzman), entitled ‘Who Killed The Constitution?’1  The gist of it: We have been living in a charade all this time - all the way back even to the time that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were presidents.2  

Even some online lecture series’s sponsored by Hillsdale College never prepared me for the Full Monty - the shock of this full eye-opener.    

Example.  ‘Roads and Highways.’

I had vaguely assumed that the subject had something to do with the Commerce Clause,3 in aiding commerce between the states, and keeping tabs on its safety, etc..  But Madison indicates that that ‘broad construction’ was not the intention of the constitutional Framers; which he made very clear in his printed remarks vetoing such a proposed Bill (i.e,, for the federal Congress to finance roads, bridges, and canals).  Let me let the authors of this important book tell the story.

They open by quoting Madison: “I am constrained by the insuperable difficulty I feel in reconciling the bill with the Constitution of the United States to return it with that objection to the House of Representatives in which it originated.”  Why?  As Madison put it, “The legislative powers vested in Congress are specified  and enumerated [my emphases] in the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution, and it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised by the bill is among the enumerated powers, or that it falls by any just interpretation within the power to make laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution those or other powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States.”

"In plain English, Madison was saying that Congress had only a few powers.  Those powers, his contemporaries knew, were listed in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.  The power to build roads, bridges, and canals was not among them…Thus, Congress did not have the power to appropriate money for the construction of ‘internal improvements’ projects.

“Madison had heard the argument that the Commerce Clause…gave Congress the power to finance roads, bridges, and canals.  He would have none of it.  ‘“The power to regulate commerce among the several States” can not include a power to construct roads and canals…without a latitude of construction departing from the ordinary import of the terms…’

“Perhaps the most significant passage in Madison’s veto message came as he considered the idea that the General Welfare Clause provided Congress with power to fund roads and canals.  Taking up the more general question of how the grants of power to Congress in Article I, Section 8 were to be read, he wrote, ’To refer the power in question to the clause “to provide for the common defense and general welfare” would be contrary to the established and consistent rules of interpretation, as rendering the special and careful enumeration of powers which follow the clause nugatory and improper.’  His point was that since the Constitution provided a list of specific congressional powers, it followed that Congress must not have a general power to do whatever it wanted to do.  It would have made no sense for the Constitutional authors to say, ‘Congress may do a, b, and c, plus whatever it wants…”  (pp. 75-6)

Just so.    

  

Let it be noted that Madison was not against such a grant of power to the federal government per se.  He - precisely like Jefferson, sitting in the same Executive seat a few years before him - simply wanted it to be done the correct way: by constitutional amendment.4  No wishy-washy, ‘broad construction’ crap: playing games with the Constitution. As though it were “just a damn piece of paper”.  

As it has become - largely - in our day.  Something simply to play with.

By deviously minded characters.  In 

The Play.

That we have been engaged in.

Long enough.

And so; in sum:

The Constitution has come to mean whatever those in power at any given time want it to mean.  

A hopelessly compromised situation.

So, I say: 

Enough.

And I will take over now.   And lead us beyond this rough patch.  And into the light of

a - the - 

New Day.

And we will just have to accept this as an exercise in what happens when you try to do things simply on your own - and even with the best of intentions, to start with - without sufficient regard to the Larger Picture.  

Of which you are a part.  

Not arrogantly the whole.

At least,

not yet.

And just so, we move on.

Having learned our lessons.

Or at least, having been confronted with them.

To see how we do.

To pass The Test.

The Ring Pass Not.

Ascension (out of this mess), anyone else???…

—

footnotes:

1 I checked it out to check on my take on the 14th Amendment, as I expressed it in a recent blog (titled ‘On Living By The Rule Of Law.  Or Not’; 8 August), with a constitutional scholar - the expert interviewed on an email audio that occasioned my blog; the subject of the interview being ’The Incorporation Doctrine’.  Prof. Gutzman has written a number of books on the Constitution, and this is the one that I found in the Main Library in my home town. 

2 James Madison - the very ‘Father of the Constitution,’ no less!!

   And I thought the charade that voting has become in this country was bad…

3 “The Congress shall have Power: To…regulate Commerce…among the several States…” (Art. I, Sect. 8)

4 A notion that was still carrying on at least into the early years of the 20th century, when, in 1919, the (18th) Amendment, to prohibit the “transportation, sale, or transportation of” alcohol, was ratified (and repealed by the 21st Amendment in 1933).  And amendments have continued to this day.

   In one form or another…reading on:

--

P.S. And the further I read in this book, the angrier I get; how FDR basically stole the public's gold in the 1930s, and thereby debased the currency; and on, and on, and on.

     The Constitution has become - especially since the '30s - a piece of fluff and dross; hardly worth the paper it's written on.  (So George W. Bush was very close to the truth after all, when he characterized it - as I quoted above - as "just a damn piece of paper".  And treated it as such.)  The edifice that has been constructed on it is a scam, a sham; a fake, a fraud, a farce; an illusion, a delusion.  Precisely like the voting system has become in this country.
     So much for the rule of law...
     We need to come out of the dark of this institution into which we have been sentenced by venal people - politicians and judges alike, and their cronies in the MSM.  And move into the Light of a - the - New Day.
     We're going into a New Era anyway.  Qualitatively different.  An Era of Abundance.  Not lack.
     And certainly, not criminality.
     The likes of which we have certainly had enough of.  In our 3D, low-consciousness  attempts at self-governance.
     Time to come from a higher place.
     In ourselves.