Subtitled:
’Tis A Puzzlement
Some background first. When I dropped out of university to go on a systematic search for Truth, it was not just for spiritual truth, but for truth regarding the American form of government as well. I forget how the latter specific subject first came up for me, but I remember well the area of concern. It had to do with the application of the Bill of Rights.
When I read The Bill, it seemed clear to me that it applied to the federal government, as a check on any additional power(s) that it might attempt to wield over and above those powers specifically assigned to it by the U.S. Constitution, including any further Amendments to it over the succeeding years, and as specifically clarified by the 9th and 10th Amendments in The Bill. For whatever reason, I felt so strongly about this issue that it was almost as if I had been one of the Founding Fathers myself, and was wondering what had happened to my/our handiwork over the years, and when, and why. So that at one point, many years ago now, when I was still living in the Los Angeles area - my home base for most of my growing-up years - I drove to UCLA and spent a day researching in the stacks of their Law School Library for some clues, as to how and when the Bill of Rights had been turned on its head, and from a set of governing issues applying from the States to the federal government, had been made to apply from the federal government to the States. And at last I found a clue.
I had started my search by looking into Supreme Court decisions from the ’30s, during the Roosevelt years, when I figured the switch had been made, in FDR’s attempts to pull the nation out of the Depression, and more powers might have been ceded to the federal government to accomplish that effort. I was aware that he had attempted to ‘pack the Court’ during his time in the presidency, to get a majority that might go along with his attempts to strengthen the role pf the federal government in such a pursuit, and, failing in that rather cynical maneuver, had - in effect - to wait for the Second World War to accomplish that mission,(1) so I knew to start my (re)search in the later years of his time in office, with the Court obviously having kept to the letter of the law until then. And it was during that particular time period that I found what I felt I was looking for.(2)
It had to do with an issue regarding ‘freedom of speech,’ which came up in 1941, I believe it was, or at least shortly thereafter. A young man in some state or other had either trampled on the American flag or burnt it - I forget which - as a public protest regarding either the looming war or at the beginning of the one that the nation entered into on December 7th, 1941.(3) His action was deemed by his state’s laws and judicial decision as a criminal act, but on appeal all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court (and one wonders who supported him financially in that effort), his lawyers managed to get a verdict of acquittal from that august body, on the basis of the aforesaid idea, as specified in the First Amendment.(4) And we thereby became, and have become, further and further, more of a national form of government, rather than a federal form, ever since.
And then a potentially crushing blow to the concept of federation, and consequent crowning blow for the concept of a strictly national form of government here in the U.S., came with the decision in Roe v. Wade, in 1973, on abortion, er, ‘rights’. Which was, strictly - to say, constitutionally - speaking, a state issue, which should never have been taken up to the national level.(5) And so it should rightfully be overturned.
And then, in the meantime, there is the interesting decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. the Colorado Human Rights Commission, where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Colorado was unconstitutionally biased against the religious beliefs of a (custom) cake artist.(6) Which, er, cut against the grain of the desire of the ‘liberals’ (let’s call them what they are: far Left activists) to impose their perspectives on things on the country as a whole, rather than having to do it piece meal, so to speak. But the salient point here? That the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision should rather be a state issue too, by the same token, and not make ‘a federal case out of it’. So, more than one ox can be gored in all this legalistic flimflammery that has been going on in this country. What can cut for you in one instance can cut against you in another.
Oh what a tangled web we weave/when first we practice to deceive…
Outfits like First Liberty feel, as its president says in the letter quoted below, that “Religious freedom will be won or lost primarily in courtrooms. It is a fatal mistake to think elections will stop organizations like the ACLU and radical government officials. Unless we win in the courts, our religious freedom will fall to wealthy radicals who seek to banish religion to the irrelevant fringes of American life.” (Emphases in original.)
A fatal mistake to think elections will stop…
…or to say, that state law will stop… - oh, wait. That will stop this sort of thing. Or not. In a federal form of government. In which the citizens of a particular state elect representative who will do their bidding, including the terms of their state’s constitution, and the subsequent rule of law therein. And the people can make a choice as to which state in which they choose to live. Based on its state’s constitution. To say: - as I say - on its
rule of law…
The bottom line:
The only question here should be around what it means to be an American citizen over and beyond - above - a citizen of a particular state in the Union. (As presumably clarified in the 14th Amendment, but which has, in practice, ended up muddying the waters.) Whereby, if you don’t like some particular feature of the constitution - i.e., the rule of law - of a particular state, you can move to another state. As regarding, e.g., Concealed Carry laws. And such a federal form of government has that sort of value. So, where do you draw the line, between what rights you have as the citizen of a particular state in the U.S., and as an American citizen as well??
Supposedly, our rights are obtained, and guaranteed, via our various state constitutions, and our federal, constitution, in their specific terms. But if there is an encroachment involved, or ‘fudging,’ over a period of time, in the workings of said contracts…
As I said at the beginning, in the subtitle to this blog:
’Tis a puzzlement.
Until…
…we learn to be crystal clear in our laws.
And then leave the whole exercise behind. The ‘exercise’:
the training ground - in a realm of free will; to say, of a classroom - of learning to live - with integrity; and with the education gained from experiencing the consequences of our actions - within Law.
And then move into
The New.
Call it
Graduation Time.
—
footnotes:
(1) albeit with a ‘priming of the pump’ in getting the Japanese to fire the first shot. As I had heard about back at university, in a course on American History offered by a young Lecturer who had researched that subject. But whose course I didn’t take, for being so involved in my pre-Med studies. But the subject stayed with me. As part of my deep - one could almost say my insatiable - desire to find out the Truth of things, in a lot of areas. Which desire has stayed with me down to this day.
But to continue.
(2) There was a ruling during the ‘30s that seemed to have begun ‘the process’ that I was looking for, but it wasn’t definitive, wasn’t the Eureka moment that I was looking for, the precedent setter. Which the legalistic concept of stare decisis - of ‘let the decision stand’ - would cement the shift in place.
(3) “A day that will live in infamy,” Pres. Roosevelt intoned in righteous indignation to Congress, and the American people. Which has occurred presciently. And will be treated as such for other reasons, when that particular truth comes out. As it will.
Along with all others. In The Day of Reckoning to take place. At the end of
The Play. And the beginning of
The Real Thing. When all is said and Done. On the one hand.
And Begun on the other. To say, on the other side of
The Great Divide.
(4) I was later - in a book by the esteemed constitutionalist Judge Robert Bork - to find that the decision was based on the legalistic idea of ‘incorporation,’ a fancy word indicating - pretending to indicate - that all of the Bill of Rights was ‘incorporated’ in the terms of the 14th Amendment. Which was, and is, a fallacy. The ’14th’ neither says, nor was it intended to say, in effect, that ‘All of the rights and powers formerly reserved to the States or to the people shall now reside in the federal government’. But Judge Bork was too much of a lawyer, whose adherents are trained in such legalistic, er, niceties as the power of precedent, to object to the concept, and decided, for whatever all reasons, ‘not to make an issue of it’.
A shame. He was on the right track in life.
The track, that is to say, of Truth.
(5) One major value of a federal form of government being that the individual states can be laboratories for experimentation with ‘the law,’ and other states can, then, learn from that experiment, either in a positive or a negative way, for their own establishment of Law. And thus, the laws of New York State, say, can reflect the values of the majority of its citizenry, and the laws of Iowa, say, can reflect the values of the majority of its citizenry, and people can move to the state of their choice. Now, there is pro-Choice at work.
(6) “In the Masterpiece precedent, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that the Court cannot allow regulations that are ‘hostile to the religious beliefs of affected citizens.’ He said that officials ‘cannot act in a manner that passes judgement upon or presupposes the illegitimacy of religious beliefs and practices.” (Quoting from a letter from the ‘President , CEO and Chief Counsel’ of a ‘religious rights’ organization, First Liberty.)
Um….just curious: “Cannot act” in that manner, based on what law? On your personal feelings, Judge Kennedy et al of the majority in that decision?? And as for the “religious beliefs of affected citizens” being curtailed by some action or other of the state, what about the ‘religious’ practice, by such as Muslims, of female genital mutilation? And of their religious ‘right’ for Islamic
husbands to beat their wives??
Complications…
…requiring us to live by Clear Law. And so, e.g., in this country, there are laws against such as violence done to another person.
—
P.S. And speaking of the Democrats, and their sellout to their far Left fringe, which has been going on for long enough:
The Democrats, in their outrageous and unrelenting attacks on a duly-elected American president (who fortunately has had broad enough shoulders to shake it all off), have chosen to repudiate the concept of a two-party system and the idea of a loyal opposition. Let them lie in the bed that they have made for themselves. Speaking of lying. And cheating. And stealing. In their corrosive attempts to hijack the U.S.A., and turn it into merely a part of a region of their Masters’ totalitarian New World Order. A project destined to fail. But only for one reason.
Because the universe has Purpose; and that purpose is Good.
As ‘men’ (quoting from the Federalist Papers), under the creative pressure of Necessity, come into greater harmony with their better natures, and thus can be trusted to do such things as
fly.
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