John R. Houk, Blog Editor
© September 18, 2022
The Off-Guardian Saturday (9/17) picked up a John
& Nisha Whitehead post on The
Rutherford Institute originally dated
September 14. The Rutherford post has a bit more expanded and
direct than Off-Guardian which reads, “Overthrow the Government:
All the Ways in Which Our Rights Have Been Usurped.” The Off-Guardian
remove d “Overthrow the Government.”
And to be fair to Off-Guardian, Whitehead does not offer a
clarion call to overthrow the Dem-Marxist tyranny in the U.S. Government but
concludes with the power to change is in the hands of WE THE PEOPLE without
offering advice on how WE THE PEOPLE can effect change.
That which Whitehead does very effectively is itemize just
how a Big Centralized Government has eradicated the Original Intent of the U.S.
Constitution, especially the first Ten Amendments known as The Bill of Rights.
One thing I’d like to mention that Whitehead does not is
Political Parties did not exist at the beginning of the Constitution. However,
the process of National (well… 13 newly independent sovereign states)
debate to accept or reject the U.S. Constitution quickly developed two
political factions: The Federalist
faction promoting constitutional ratification and the Anti-Federalist faction
rejecting ratification in favor of preserving a Confederation of
loosely aligned independent states.
As the Constitution was ratified, the Federalist faction
became a really not at all well-organized Federalist Party
while the Anti-Federalists began to emerge into today’s Democratic Party.
Thomas Jefferson (3rd President) led the early Democratic-Republicans.
George Washington and John Adams became attached to the Federalists but my
sense is no political party authority was ever enforced among Federalists.
Today’s two dominant Political Parties (Democrats and
Republicans) are both culprits in eradicating the Original Intent of the
U.S. Constitution so that Big Government rules beyond the authority provided by
the Constitution. If WE THE PEOPLE continue to support the status quo of a
uniparty Two Party System we deserve the tyranny WE THE PEOPLE experience.
John and Nisha Whitehead how the uniparty Big Government has
decimated the Bill of Rights. I like Rutherford’s title better, but I like Off-Guardian’s
article organization better. Ergo I am cross posting the latter.
JRH 9/18/22
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10 Ways in Which Our Rights Have Been Usurped
By John and Nisha Whitehead
September 17, 2022
We the people are the rightful
masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but
to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” -- Abraham Lincoln
It’s easy to
become discouraged about the state of our nation.
We’re drowning under the weight of too much debt, too many
wars, too much power in the hands of a centralized government, too many
militarized police, too many laws, too many lobbyists, and generally too much
bad news.
It’s harder to believe that change is possible, that the
system can be reformed, that politicians can be principled, that courts can be
just, that good can overcome evil, and that freedom will prevail.
So where does that leave us?
Benjamin Franklin provided the answer. As the delegates to
the Constitutional Convention trudged out of Independence Hall on September 17,
1787, an anxious woman in the crowd waiting at the entrance inquired of
Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A
republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”
What Franklin meant, of course, is that when all is said and
done, we get the government we deserve.
Those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights
believed that the government
exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect,
defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.
Unfortunately, although the Bill of Rights was adopted as a
means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today,
the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.
“We the people” have been terrorized, traumatized, and
tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares
nothing for our lives or our liberties.
The bogeyman’s names and faces have changed over time
(terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, a viral pandemic, and more
to come), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called name of
national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at,
undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of
Congress, the White House, and the courts.
A recitation of the Bill of Rights—set against a backdrop of
government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture,
eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body
scanners, stop and frisk searches, vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and the like
(all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, and the courts)—would
understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of
rights we truly possess.
What we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust
document adopted more than two centuries ago. Sadly, most of the damage has
been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.
Here is what it means to live under the Constitution,
twenty-plus years after 9/11 and with the nation just emerging from two years
of COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates.
The First Amendment is supposed to protect
the freedom to speak your mind, assemble and protest nonviolently without being
bridled by the government. It also protects the freedom of the media, as well
as the right to worship and pray without interference. In other words,
Americans should not be silenced by the government. To the founders, all of
America was a free speech zone.
Despite the clear protections found in the First
Amendment, the freedoms described therein are under constant assault. Increasingly,
Americans are being persecuted for exercising their First Amendment rights and
speaking out against government corruption.
Activists are being arrested and charged for daring to film
police officers engaged in harassment or abusive practices. Journalists are being
prosecuted for reporting on whistleblowers.
States are passing legislation to muzzle reporting on cruel
and abusive corporate practices. Religious ministries are being fined for
attempting to feed and house the homeless. Protesters are being tear-gassed,
beaten, arrested and forced into “free speech zones.”
And under the guise of “government speech,” the
courts have reasoned that the government can discriminate freely against any
First Amendment activity that takes place within a so-called government forum.
The Second Amendment was intended to
guarantee “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Essentially, this
amendment was intended to give the citizenry the means to resist tyrannical
government. Yet while gun ownership has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme
Court as an individual citizen right, Americans remain powerless to
defend themselves against red flag gun laws, militarized police, SWAT team
raids, and government agencies armed to the teeth with military weapons better
suited to the battlefield.
The Third Amendment reinforces the
principle that civilian-elected officials are superior to the military by
prohibiting the military from entering any citizen’s home without “the consent
of the owner.” With the police increasingly training like the military, acting
like the military, and posing as military forces—complete with heavily armed
SWAT teams, military weapons, assault vehicles, etc.—it is clear that we
now have what the founders feared most—a standing army on American soil.
The Fourth Amendment prohibits government
agents from conducting surveillance on you or touching you or encroaching on
your private property unless they have evidence that you’re up to something
criminal. In other words, the Fourth Amendment ensures privacy and bodily integrity.
Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment has suffered the
greatest damage in recent years and has been all but eviscerated by an
unwarranted expansion of governmental police powers that include strip
searches and even anal and vaginal searches of citizens, surveillance
(corporate and otherwise), and intrusions justified in the name of fighting
terrorism, as well as the outsourcing of otherwise illegal activities to
private contractors.
The Fifth Amendment and the Sixth
Amendment work in tandem. These amendments supposedly ensure that you
are innocent until proven guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you
of your life, your liberty or your property without the right to an attorney
and a fair trial before a civilian judge.
However, in the new suspect society in which we
live, where surveillance is the norm, these fundamental principles have been
upended. Certainly, if the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or
lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset
forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.
The Seventh Amendment guarantees citizens
the right to a jury trial. Yet when the populace has no idea of what’s
in the Constitution—civic education has virtually disappeared from most school
curriculums—that inevitably translates to an ignorant jury incapable of
distinguishing justice and the law from their own preconceived notions and
fears.
However, as a growing number of citizens are coming to
realize, the power of the jury to nullify the government’s actions—and thereby
help balance the scales of justice—is not to be underestimated. Jury
nullification reminds the government that “we the people” retain the power to
ultimately determine what laws are just.
The Eighth Amendment is similar to the
Sixth in that it is supposed to protect the rights of the accused and forbid
the use of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the Supreme Court’s
determination that what constitutes “cruel and unusual” should be dependent on
the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing
society” leaves us with little protection in the face of a society
lacking in morals altogether.
The Ninth Amendment provides that other
rights not enumerated in the Constitution are nonetheless retained by the
people. Popular sovereignty—the belief that the power to govern flows upward
from the people rather than downward from the rulers—is clearly evident in this
amendment.
However, it has since been turned on its head by a
centralized federal government that sees itself as supreme and which
continues to pass more and more laws that restrict our freedoms under the
pretext that it has an “important government interest” in doing so.
As for the Tenth Amendment’s reminder that the
people and the states retain every authority that is not otherwise mentioned in
the Constitution, that assurance of a system of government in which
power is divided among local, state and national entities has long since been
rendered moot by the centralized Washington, DC, power elite—the president,
Congress and the courts.
Thus, if there is any sense to be made from this recitation
of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual freedoms have been
eviscerated so that the government’s powers could be expanded.
It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with
these three powerful words: “We the people.” As the Preamble proclaims:
We, the people of the United
States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure
domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general
welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do
ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.
In other words, it’s our job to make the
government play by the rules of the Constitution.
We are supposed to be the masters and
they—the government and its agents—are the servants.
We the American people—the citizenry—are supposed to
be the arbiters and ultimate guardians of America’s welfare, defense,
liberty, laws and prosperity.
Still, it’s
hard to be a good citizen if you don’t know anything about your rights or
how the government is supposed to operate.
As the National Review rightly asks, “How
can Americans possibly make intelligent and informed political choices if they
don’t understand the fundamental structure of their government? American
citizens have the right to self-government, but it seems that we increasingly
lack the capacity for it.”
Americans are constitutionally
illiterate.
Most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their
basic rights. And our educational system does a poor job of teaching the basic
freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For instance, a
survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a little more
than one-third
of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S.
government, while another one-third (35 percent) could not name a
single one.
A survey by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found
that only
one out of a thousand adults could identify the five rights protected by the
First Amendment. On the other hand, more than half (52%) of the
respondents could name at least two of the characters in the animated Simpsons television
family, and 20% could name all five. And although half could name none of the
freedoms in the First Amendment, a
majority (54%) could name at least one of the three judges on the TV
program American Idol, 41% could name two and
one-fourth could name all three.
It gets worse.
Many who responded to the survey had a strange
conception of what was in the First Amendment. For example, a
startling number of respondents believed that the “right to own a pet” and the
“right to drive a car” were part of the First Amendment. Another 38% believed
that “taking the Fifth” was part of the First Amendment.
Teachers and school administrators do not fare much better.
A study conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis found
that one
educator in five was unable to name any of the freedoms in the First Amendment.
Government
leaders and politicians are also ill-informed. Although they take
an oath to uphold, support and defend the Constitution against “enemies foreign
and domestic,” their lack of education about our fundamental rights often
causes them to be enemies of the Bill of Rights.
So what’s the solution?
Thomas Jefferson recognized that a citizenry educated on “their
rights, interests, and duties” is the only real
assurance that freedom will survive.
As Jefferson wrote in 1820:
“I know no safe depository of
the ultimate powers of our society but the people themselves; and if we think
them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome
discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their
discretion by education. This
is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”
From the President on down, anyone taking public office
should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and
should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. One way to ensure this
would be to require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution and
pass a thorough examination thereof before being allowed to take office.
Some critics are advocating that students pass the
United States citizenship exam in order to graduate from high
school. Others recommend that it must be a prerequisite for attending college.
I’d go so far as to argue that students should have to pass the citizenship
exam before graduating from grade school.
Here’s an idea to get educated and take a stand for freedom:
anyone who signs
up to become a member of The Rutherford Institute gets a
wallet-sized Bill of Rights card and a Know Your Rights card.
Use this card to teach your children the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.
A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes
a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the
government operates, and willing to do more than grouse and complain.
As I point out in my book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People and in its
fictional counterpart The
Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” have the power to make and
break the government.
The powers-that-be want us to remain divided over politics,
hostile to those with whom we disagree politically, and intolerant of anyone or
anything whose solutions to what ails this country differ from our own. They
also want us to believe that our job as citizens begins and ends on Election
Day.
Yet there are 330 million of us in this country. Imagine
what we could accomplish if we actually worked together, presented a united
front, and spoke with one voice.
Tyranny wouldn’t stand a chance.
Constitutional attorney and
author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute.
His book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is
available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at john@rutherford.org
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