To Impeach or Not To Impeach: A Constitutional Question.

It has been a long time since I’ve entered something on this blog, almost a year to be exact.  But the recent flap over the abortive impeachment efforts have been so ridden with pure partisan rhetoric and galactic class political spin, that, in my opinion, the major memes and posts on that bastion of political brilliance, FaceBook (FB), have only one thing in common from both sides… a nearly perfect ignorance of the very specific language of the relevant document: The U.S. Constitution.  As some of you know, I’ve not been shy about saying that in response to posts, so of course, several times I’ve been taken to task for being a Trump supporter (something several notches worse than being a serial killer in the views of the denizens of halls of academia), or accused of doing it simply to be a contrarian.  It seemed time to do something not reasonable in a FB post since it is necessarily long and detailed, and that is to go into detail to explain why I feel as I do.

I’m not a complete Pollyanna so I don’t actually expect the serious partisans to actually read this since they seem to be devoted to ignoring any opinions contrary to their own.  In doing so, they, of course, betray the reality that the truth does not matter to them since real seekers of some philosophical truth know the only way it is ever found is if the seeker is willing to admit the possibility they might be wrong and therefore remain open to hearing and considering the opposing ideas objectively.  Sadly, I’ve not yet encountered that attitude on Facebook, instead, only a theological-level, divine certainty in the righteousness of their own viewpoint while seeing all others as stupid or perhaps evil.

But for the surprising individual, if there actually is one left out there, who is even remotely interested, here is my own thinking on the issues.  But to make any sense of it I need to give a little foundation since my conclusions are the result a several factors building to it.  There was serious thinking and debate involved in the writing of our Constitution and I think it deserves to be seen as forming the reasons for its very deliberate word usage.  So here is my line of reasoning to arrive at my own position.

First we have to understand that the Constitution was created by a collection of very knowledgeable individuals who had carefully looked over a lot of political history and been influenced by political philosophies from Plato down to Locke and Montesquieu.  They fully understood that they were creating something new and untried, indeed, were forming a government that was, in its approach and style, contrary to the foundational philosophies of any other country in the history of governments.  Knowing that, knowing full well that they would be stepping on a lot of geopolitical toes, they were concerned about being misunderstood both then and down the road in (their) future.  So they wrote prolifically to each other and friends and in publications that are still with us and easy to find for anyone interested in the truth,

When I was in Law School (1971,’72, ‘73) I grew to be totally fascinated by Constitutional Law and jumped wholeheartedly into it.  The more I studied it and its creators the more impressed I was with the wisdom and foresight exhibited in this seminal document.  And I became nearly obsessed with the idea that what set us apart from other nations was the iron clad obedience to the rule of law.  It was, paradoxically, the reliance on the LAW of the day and until it was officially changed, that set us free as a people and apart from citizens of other countries.  In the course of that study, it soon became inescapable that our founders actually ended up re-defining what a Republic was up to that point.

Previously Republics were largely democratic meaning they relied on pure majority rule (well to be fair, the majority of those who were allowed to vote on the matter).  But our founders were dedicated to assuring the Declaration’s famous “rights” for all.  One exchange with Madison illustrated the problem.  He posited a group of three individuals in which two wanted actions that the third opposed.  It was clear the third individual’s rights were not recognized in that scenario where the two could outvote the one.  According to Madison, it made no difference ethically or morally If the group was composed of 3,000; 1,000 of them would have their rights overridden and that was not acceptable to the goals of the founders.  THe numbers changhed but the ethics did not.  So they morphed the traditional republican concept into a representational democracy – something totally new on the world stage.  To avoid one demographic sitting in continual power over others, the electoral college was formulated so the little guys, the rural areas would be operating on a leveled playing field, sometimes to the chagrin and irritation of the self-anointed brilliant citizens from the urban areas.  Without it today, we would be governed by the appropriately titled “Coastal Elites” while those rubes in the fly-over states should just accept that the citified people were ever so much brighter, so much more “woke” to use the modern parlance, and ought to be able to make the decisions for all the rest on matters political as well as moral.  The founders rejected that and went to some convoluted lengths to try to forestall it.

Further, although in other systems, notably Great Britain, the three primary governmental functions of executive, legislative, and judicial all existed, they were not truly separated and independent.  Our creation of them as separate and coequal branches was like none other.  In our system, uniquely, the real “bosses” were seen by the founders as being the people, and the government existed only to assure and protect the rights recognized and described in the Declaration of Independence.  We voluntarily gave the government the power to govern us AS WE, THE PEOPLE, WISHED IT TO, and the Constitution was the embodiment of the law that governed those we allowed to govern us.  It was not created to govern us, the people.  Indeed it derived it power from us.  Rather, it was written to govern the government.   We the people could take back that power via the vote.

What was also unique was that this government of, by, and for the people, could not require anything of the governed (us) that was not approved by ALL THREE of the branches.  The legislature had to first create the laws and pass them, but the executor needed to then approve them, and then, if further challenged, the judicial branch had to approved them as being in concert with the constraints of the Constitution.  It was an amazing set of checks to assure the survival of the rights of the citizenry.  Nothing like it had ever existed in the history of human governments.

The founders believed in the basic goodness of human kind under divine guidance, i.e. that we strove for the good as a general rule.  But they were not blind to the reality that some people “went off the rails” and could seriously damage the institutions they were creating.  Included, therefore, among the Constitution’s provisions were the rules for removing an elected public servant on any level from representative all the way to the president: a process called “impeachment.”

It was thought of by the founders, according to their correspondences, as an incredibly serious step since in doing so it was clear that the government took upon itself the power to override the wishes of its own bosses, the people who had elected that individual in the first place.  Consequently, since those day in Law School, I’ve been “hooked” into carefully watching impeachment proceedings — first about Nixon (I think they had a strong case for removal due to criminal acts but he resigned before they could hold the trial), then Clinton (I think he was a sleaze but did not commit an impeachable offense) and now Trump.  This is potentially the most serious thing the legislative branch can do… undertake the overturning of an election and remove an elected official from office.  If anything tests the strength of the constitution this is it. So I want to present my own thinking on the issue of impeachments and what is required and then apply that to this case.

Hamilton and Madison wrote voluminously about it and among other things, made it clear that this was not to be a matter of common politics.  Malfeasance in office was specifically declared by Hamilton to not be an acceptable reason for removal since it was so subjective.  Additionally, they purposefully did not want to emulate the British Parliamentarian system of “votes of confidence” as they saw it as inherently unstable and far too subject to political and partisan whims.

Matters reduceable to basic, even if serious, policy differences were ruled out as well and for similar reasons; such procedures were seen to be in opposition to the will of the electors who had voted for the individual likely because of the policies promised and in practice.

It is important too, o note another by product of the system they created.  It is important when looking at charges of obstruction of one branch or another, to understand that as a co-equal branch, the presidency could not logically “obstruct” the other branches since it was equal to and therefore not subservient to them (or vice versa).  You and I can obstruct a branch of government, but the presidency cannot, by definition, do it.  But that does not mean it can do just anything it desires.  If it appears to be violating some legislative powers or ethical standards and mores of the contemporary culture, it is the province of the judiciary, in the form of the Supreme Court, to determine one or the other of the branches must give way in that specific incidence.  Without a judicial finding and direction, and a subsequent violation of that finding and directive, one “equal” branch cannot be seen as obstructing the other.  Disputes over authority, and there were plenty of cases of it in the early days, were to be settled via the Supreme Court who, in such circumstances, had “the last word.”  If the court’s directives were violated, then and then only could there be movement to compel a specific action of obstruction or even contempt of court.

They also clearly noted that in order to assure that the action of impeachment was not strictly political (and therefore not allowed) it must be bipartisan in nature.  That is why a supermajority (2/3) of senate votes that would be expected to cross party lines was required for removal.  Due to real numbers it was virtually impossible to achieve a super-majority from just one party.

So what COULD be seen as an impeachable offense?  They settled on very well defined language describing with great specificity what the infractions were that could form the basis for an impeachment.  The wording is now famous and after the last weeks most know them by heart where they may not be able to quote any other sentence in the entire document.  To be qualified for impeachment, according to Article 2, Section 4 which reads:

“The President, Vice President, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

It is one of the clearest directives in the entire document consisting of terms with very specific and commonly understood meanings.  Or at least it was until political narratives sought to redefine them to suit specific agendas.  So lets examine them a little more closely.

First up was treason.  That is interesting because treason is the only crime specifically defined in the Constitution and the founders’ writings make it clear that was chosen to avoid the use of the charge as a political weapon to repress opposition to the government’s or President’s policies.  There have been only a handful of treason cases since our founding and in each one the court seemed to work to limit the definition even further.  Well, lest there be any confusion,  here is what Article 3, Section 3-1 says:

“Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”

What has become clear it that (a) levying war requires an actual capability of doing that (a standing army, for example) or providing aid and comfort to an enemy named in a declaration of war or hostilities, and, most importantly, (b) it requires an overt act, i.e. some conduct.  Mere intention or expression is not enough.  That was spelled out clearly in the decision of Cramer v. U.S., in 1945.

I could be wrong, but as far as I know we have not declared war on any of the parties involved directly or indirectly in all this.  So by definition, without a war, or at least some official declaration of a state of hostilities, treason cannot apply.

Moving on we have we have the next enumerated impeachable action…bribery.  Bribery, for a public official, meant the taking of something of value to influence their public service.  For example, taking money and in return, instituting policies favorable to the source of the money and usually (but not necessarily) to the detriment of other constituents.  Clear, huh?  Well, not so fast.  How about a bribe going the other way, i.e. offering some enticement to an individual or country based on the power of the Presidency to alter the behavior of that individual or foreign government?  That is closer to the action alleged in this impeachment process.

The problem with claiming that as an impeachable offense, is that it is, in fact, the very core tactic of nearly all geopolitical diplomacy.  Virtually every diplomatic “deal” is achieved by a series of “quid pro quo” agreements where, in order to get the foreign government or individual to do something we want, we offer inducements or, if appropriate, some negative potential “threat.”   For example, we threatened then applied sanctions on Iran and North Korea to influence their obsessions and work toward achieving nuclear capabilities.  An action hardly could be more of a direct interference in another country’s behaviors, aspirations, or plans than an onerous sanction that creates great economic distress.  We have brought countries into our “club” by offering them something they need such as money or defense.   The historical truth us that every diplomatic deal in history was achieved because the parties “gave something to get something” which is the very essence of a “Quid Pro Quo” agreement.  Does that mean that every President who strong arms another country is impeachable?  Be very careful with that one…  Answering “yes” means there is probably not a president in our history or in our future that would not be impeachable.

In this case, however, it was shown that the government in question, Ukraine, did not see the requests for a favor as pressure of any kind (according to interviews with both its President and Defense Minister).  Additionally, they did not do or act as requested, did not do any investigation or make any announcement of planning to do so, and yet, the funds allocated by Congress, though delayed, were nevertheless delivered within the timelines of the original grant and, on top of that monetary aid, war materials were delivered in the same time frame that the previous administration had refused to give at all.  There was no showing of fact indicating the delay brought any harm to Ukraine especially since they were not even aware of the delay.

One can spin that six ways from Sunday but since Ukraine suffered no detriment and we got nothing either, it is hard to see that exchange as a viable intended, much less consummated bribe since, when the smoke cleared, there was not any quid nor was there any quo.

The request may well have been stupid, even sleazy.  Moreover, because of its appearance as something personally beneficial to the President and not the country, it may well be an appropriate target for some form of approbation or public censure.  But it does not appear to have been a successful bribe and if it was an attempted bribe it didn’t get very far since even the intended victim did not see it as such.

So, moving on, what else ya got?

There was the argument proposed by the accusers, that no actual crime needed to be committed in order to have an impeachable offense, so lets look again at what, other than Bribery or Treason, is enumerated as impeachable offenses.  The words are pretty clear on their face.  “… or other high crimes or misdemeanors.”  Pay careful attention to the use of the adjective, “OTHER,” it’s a critical word in this sentence.  Remember the founders had long debates and sometimes literally fought over virtually every word in the constitution to make sure it expressed exactly what they wanted.

When the Constitution was written, “High Crimes” meant what today we call “Felonies” and misdemeanors meant what today we call, uh, “misdemeanors.”  (Ref. Black’s Law Dictionary of the time).  Both are types of crimes defined under both statutory and common law.  Some legal authors have seen the dichotomy as representing actions that are “Malum In Se” (actions criminal or abhorrent in and of themselves without the need for legal definitions such a murder or rape, etc.) compared to actions that are “Malum Prohibitum” (actions made illegal by statute such as speeding or jaywalking).  But even so, actions following those definitions were still understandable as crimes.  If they were not, then the phrase “OTHER high crimes and misdemeanors” makes absolutely no sense.  In a section as serious as this one, writing a nebulous set of definitions for conduct allowing for removal of office for the country’s executive branch seems so far beyond unlikely as to be unthinkable.

An interesting, if desperate, argument was made during the impeachment process that since we did not have a country yet we had no laws and no crimes to define.  Therefore the founders did not need a crime to be committed in order for action to be impeachable.   Really?  Ignoring for a moment their use of the legal term defining types of crimes, do you think if you committed a robbery in ANY jurisdiction of the time you could get away with it on the claim that there was no country and therefore no laws to break?  We had no end of local laws and statutes, and jurisdictions were still aware of and following British common law under which those terms were readily understood.  There was no country when Benedict Arnold was accused of treason so does that mean if captured he could not have been tried and punished?  That conclusion is utter nonsense and a desperate grasping at straws.

Read the definition of impeachable offenses again… slowly if necessary.  The wording of the Constitution does NOT say, “… or other things we don’t like.”  Nor does it say, “…or other actions congress decides are impeachable.”  It specifically lists two types of crimes with commonly accepted meanings.  I do not understand why that is so hard to comprehend other than a blatant partisan refusal to give up on the idea that there is, of course, an impeachable offense in here to let us hang the S.O.B even if we have to redefine words otherwise clear on their face.

Since the trial of impeachment deals with the existence of crimes by its own definition, then it is de facto a criminal trial where the standard of proof is, as it is in all criminal cases, and was under common law, guilt beyond all reasonable doubt.  One reason for trying to make the case that some criminality is not necessary, was to make the trial into more of a civil action where the standard of proof is “preponderance of the evidence.”  But I believe the precise wording in the Constitution defining the cause of action makes in inescapably a criminal trial.

That all leaves me with the inescapable conclusion that politically stupid as the President’s actions were, as inappropriate as they certainly were, under the very clear meaning and words in the Constitution, they did not rise to the level of an impeachable act.  And that failure would lead naturally to a filing for a directed verdict as soon as the prosecution’s case was made since no real case had been laid out.  Much was made over the issue of witnesses but I see that as simply a red herring and diversion from the failure of the primary action.

First of all, there were already de facto  prosecution witnesses inserted into the presentation via unchallenged cleverly edited video excerpts with no option to cross examine the witnesses by the defense team.  But setting that aside, in a trial, witnesses are called for one reason, to establish the facts of the case, especially when they are challenged or disputed.  The judge is there to establish and rule on matters of law to be applied to those facts – that is NOT the job of the witnesses.  The jury is there to overlay those facts (they are called the “triers of fact” for a reason) on the law as presented by the judge and render a verdict.

There is no available verdict of innocent, only “guilty” (meaning the defendant did the deed as alleged) or “not guilty” meaning only that the case against him or her was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt.  And impeachment is the only sort of criminal trial where, under the Consitution, the concept of “double jeopardy” does not apply so it is important to see a verdict of “not guilty” with no more meaning than it actually has.

But in this case, the “facts” were accepted by both sides.  The phone call and its general wording was not in question.  The question was only about the propriety and legality of the specifics of the call.   Impeachment is specifically NOT to be about policy disagreements which were at the heart of the committee’s witnesses, and that leaves only the issue of legality of the alleged conduct.  Various new “witnesses” whose policy agendas were in concert or opposition to the call or the President would not change the facts in question, and the final application of law was to be the sole purview of the judge and, in the end, a matter for the “jury” (the senate) to decide by a 2/3 vote.

The resulting vote was clearly partisan so the founders would not have accepted it anyway and would have likely declared the equivalent of a mistrial and sent everyone packing.  Both the impeachment hearings and the trial were completely along almost perfect party lines.

And now some of the more rabid in the opposition are still wanting to do it again. I think that is tactically, irrationally, illogically, and profoundly stupid and counter productive.  An election is coming up in a few months.  The proper solution, if the goal is removal, is to vote the one you see as evil spawn of the devil out of office properly and remove the issues stemming from a wildly partisan and very flawed process.  To continue down this already failed path merely serves to harden the hearts of his base, allows independents to see it as an apparently totally political and highly partisan move, and to see him as the victim, if not martyr, in this political theater.  I think if one wants to see someone else as president next term, continuing down this path, rehashing failed concepts over and over, ad nauseum, will only serve to aid his re-election bid.  So for those of you who so despise him and the very ground he walks on, if you continue down this path and if he wins re-election you will have no further to look for blame than the nearest mirror.

So there you have it. This is simply my opinion about the merits of the case as presented, it has nothing to do with my personal feelings about Trump as a president.  That does not and should not be a factor no matter what you think of him personally.  Because if personal animosity is allowed to be the foundation for impeachment and removal proceedings, then no future President is safe from this form of harassment and given the time spent on this to the detriment of needed governmental business, our whole system will simply grind to a horrible and pointless halt.

I, for one, think that will be the nail in our country’s coffin that ends it all and I do not wish to encourage any action or process that can lead to that result.

 

The Future of Conservatives is not in Changing Principles but in Changing their Application.

San Diego — Following the results of the 2012 elections, there seems to be panic in the ranks of Republicans.  How, they ask and rightly so, can a failed president whose every promise was not kept including unemployment numbers, GDP numbers, debt reduction numbers, ALL OF THEM worse than when he took office, have so soundly beaten the GOP candidate who was a successful businessman?

Hand wringing, blame laying, all are happening to the amusement of the liberals who are opining that there is an impending “civil war” among Republicans and that the party is as out of touch with reality as the Whig party was when it collapsed of its own obsolescence.  But is all of it, including the obituaries for conservatives, deserved or justified? In the aftermath of the election, spurred on by questions from several friends, I’ve given it a lot of thought.

In the process I have re-read (for the umpteenth time) the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (which I believe need to be treated as a necessarily conjoined set of documents).   I’ve re-read some of the important documents from our history and our founders including those of Locke, Burke, Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Adams (both of them), Hamilton, Franklin, Lee, Henry, and down to Lincoln.  Those are the patriarchs Conservatives claim as foundational authorities so have to be consulted to review the situation properly.

I’ve spent the last few days digging into my library of books by and about those (to me) visionaries.  It has been enlightening.  The result is I think in far too many cases, so-called Conservatives have failed to live under and up to the teachings of those founders they claim to revere.

First it has to be understood that there is a HUGE difference between the main-stream Republican Party and the core “Conservative” principles.  I tend now to agree that the Republican Party, as it has come to be, is a dinosaur whose extinction days are passed and it just hasn’t caught on.

While the Democrats pine for a world of the future that, despite a number of serious attempts, has never successfully existed, the Republicans (note I did NOT say “Conservatives”) pine for a world of the past that too, never existed and if it did, it was long ago and for a very short time.  Both parties fondly embrace a world view that succeeds only for the delusional or the blind partisan, a view that refuses to see, much less accept the world as it now is and as it has historically (in fact not fantasy) existed and evolved into the present.

I do not think that facing reality as it is, not as we want it to be, is inconsistent with being Conservative.  It is the core ethics and principles of the founders that we hold close, not the way some have applied (or misapplied) those principles in political environments that differ substantially and critically from the political environment today, nor, for that matter, how even the founders themselves had to apply them in THEIR reality and with their knowledge level of the world and even of their own country.

To avoid the fact that our world, in nearly all respects, is a very different place by nearly every possible measurement than it was 50 years ago, much less in the 1700s; or to assert that even a genius such as Jefferson, could, from the knowledge base and reality of the late 1700s, accurately have predicted the world of the 21^st century is also simply delusional.  Technology and geopolitical events are pushing us so rapidly that this is not even the world of Kennedy or Reagan. (I link those two names because Reagan was a Kennedy Democrat who actually never changed his philosophy and whose speeches were vintage JFK.  It was the party that changed.)

But if, due to a world in evolution or even revolution, the application’s needs have changed, must we also change the principles?  This is a crux and unavoidable question.  If it turns out that we cannot learn and adjust those core principles to demonstrate their application to OUR world, then there are only two explanations possible: They do not apply anymore or we are simply not yet able to see the answers.  Or, a third possibility, we see them and will not accept them.

Speaking for myself, I believe they DO apply and that the explanation for our poor application and articulation is in our own shortsightedness, not in shortfalls of the principles themselves.

We don’t even have to like all of the changes this new world has laid in our laps – change is always painful and avoided as long as possible — but we do have to acknowledge those changes and face them as a new and powerful reality that must be accommodated by and within our principles or they will crush us under the weight of the changing world.  As Will Rogers said, “Even if you are on the right track, if you just sit there you will get run over!”

So what changes are influencing this discussion?  One of the big ones, in some ways perhaps the most important one because unlike anal discussions of policies (which OUGHT to be the focus) it is highly visible and highly emotional in its impact, is a change in the national and regional demographics on several counts.

For one thing, it is noteworthy that the numbers of people of Hispanic origin are making up an increasing portion of our population and cannot be ignored in a political sense.  The same is true of an increasing Asian population.  But despite the differences upon which we too often focus, the real question is, are they, by nature, opposed to the core values of conservatives?  I don’t think so.

Hispanic culture is all about families and faith at its core.  No one can watch field workers and claim they do not have a work ethic!  Good grief, it is a powerful work ethic that will take them to strange lands, abusive environments, and truly back-breaking labor just to feed a family and try to elevate their status in one of the few countries where that is still possible.  What they want is opportunity and a fair shake.  If conservatives fail to grasp that, they are being idiotic and self-destructive.  And much can be noted similarly about refugees or immigrants from Asian countries.

It is true that the political cultures from which they are fleeing often were ones deeply rooted in patronage and corruption.  But those are not core values and most Hispanic and Asian people come here to get away from it.   We ought to understand and embrace their plight and then seek ways to make it work so that they will become, like my father-in-law was, a rabidly patriotic naturalized citizen.

But it is not as easy as simply opening the border to all that would like to come here.  Our economy is in a very rocky state and I think, following the election, it is bound to get far, far worse before it gets better.  To deny that immigration is linked to an effect on the economy in both good and bad potential ways is to exhibit both historical and economical naïveté.   If we cannot protect our borders and set immigration rules as the Constitution mandates then we really do not have a country at all.  I know some would prefer that, including our leader, but I personally do not.

A nation, a people, a country is defined by borders, language and culture.  That is certainly how the rest of the world’s countries define themselves so why should we exclude ourselves?  Still, no one can deny that our immigration policies are a shambles and that they neither protect us from the bad guys nor aid the good guys in coming on in.  Consequently I think it is a very Conservative view to push for immigration reform and acknowledgement of the good guys who have come here to better themselves and contribute to our prosperity while working to get the system under control.

But, and in this regard this is a critical question, have we as a people, much less we who claim to hold to Conservative Principles, become so dumbed down that we are incapable of recognizing both sides of the issue as having legitimate points; incapable of finding the common ground that will allow a solution even if it is, as are all solutions settled by humans, imperfect?

And immigration was not the only problem for our side.   Why on earth did we allow ourselves to be viewed as on one side or the other of issues of sexual orientation?  Jefferson said if it was not “breaking his leg or picking his pocket” he could deal with it.  Regardless of any personal views on homosexuality, it is a fact of life and, of more importance to this discussion, an increasingly active political bloc.   In and of itself it does not threaten violence or theft of my person or any of my rights (or any of yours) so what has some of us so intransigent and terrified of it?

Our choices are simple:  to slam the door on them because we may think they are lost to eternity and God hates them, and in so doing make of them a dangerous enemy force, or to re-examine the principles we say we hold dear and find a way to accommodate their numbers in our tent.  I think the latter is a better approach.

Being in my business I’ve known and worked with LOTS of openly homosexual folks: some were true salt of the earth types I trusted totally and liked very much and others were jerks I thoroughly disliked.  But I never noticed that dichotomy to be lacking in the straight world too… and I did NOT notice it being something predicated by a person’s orientation or life style.

And even if some of our ranks believe God hates them individually because of their orientation, that is an issue between God and them; it is NOT between us and them.  “Judge not lest ye be judged!” goes the Biblical directive.  If there is indeed a theological component to our side then why are some of us not adhering to their own text’s directive?  We need to get that entire discussion OUT of politics and leave it where it belongs: between an individual and their own conscience and belief system.   We need not prohibit it, but we also need not facilitate it.  Government should be silent on it.

I confess, I have a simple but strong semantic issue with what to me is a contradiction in terms: “Same Sex Marriage.”  But upopn serious reflection I realize that is because it affronts the language and definitions by which I was raised.  However I also study history and the truth is that the definition of marriage as I was taught to understand it, has but rarely been the definition used across the ages and across cultures.

And the big point is, to lose a powerful block that as seekers of individual rights ought to be flocking to a conservative tent, but are being driven away over a word, and a word of historically fairly recent re-definition at that, is truly cutting off our nose to spite our face!  And in the end does not solve ANY problem and simply leaves us disfigured.

The same can be said for any minority group even if that status exists only in their own mind.  Just as WE hate to be painted with the brush of association colored by the idiots in our own groups, we should not be painting their whole collection of possible voters with the same brush we use for the jerks and idiots that also share their skin color or gender or place of origin or whatever they use to set themselves apart from the main collection of Americans.  To do so, in my opinion, does violence to the principles we claim to hold dear.

Jefferson wrote that we were endowed with certain unalienable rights, rights not granted by government but by our creator, meaning, even to atheists, rights inherent in the human spirit regardless of where they came from.  But if we allow those rights to be limited by definitions that ONLY exist due to theological authority, then we are violating our own sacred Constitution.  I cannot help that the use of the term bothers me, but I CAN help what I do about it based on my reading of history and the words of the founders, comfortable or not.

We are supposed to see people as individuals not just through the filter of whatever group we can easily toss them into.  It is the other side that forces group separation and identification in order to create group dependence.  We are not supposed to be forcing group identification so that we can create group exclusions.  In fact, we are not supposed to be facilitiating much less forcing group identification at all!

Conservatives are supposed to treasure the individual and individual rights.  But that is not what unfortunately too many of our political side do.  And they do their hypocritical deeds and speeches vocally and stridently.  So how is it any wonder that members of those targeted groups, already looking for some, any excuse to cast stones in our direction, see us as haters and bigots and to be opposed at every turn when we play into the other side’s perfectly laid traps.

From our own ranks we too often spout psychology from before even the dawn of Freud and pseudoscience from the dawn of man and wonder why people will not flock to our standard.  No matter how impeccable the logic, if it flows from a faulty premise the result is not viable.

We should be the party of dynamic powerful women who make up half our population and probably more than half of our brainpower.  How can we exhort the undefined individual to be all they can be and yet still be OK with people wanting to pay women less for equal work?  Or still wanting to control stuff that is none of our, or the government’s business?

We have not had someone sufficiently articulate to simply explain that to us, equal pay for equal work is the same as equal work for equal pay — what is fair is fair.  Nor have we been able to articulate that it is not that we are saying they cannot have an abortion if that passes muster with them, their faith, and whatever other influences are in their life, we are simply saying we don’t want to pay for their choices… so long as it IS truly a choice.  I do not think (with EXTREMELY RARE and anamalous exceptions) that rape is ever a woman’s choice.  And the idiot that proposed a long outdated and invalidated theory that women cannot get pregnant if they don’t want to should have been tarred and feathered by every Conservative to hear of their idiocy if we want to show women we are on their side.

But again, government should be OUT of the abortion issue, out of the contraception issue, out of the bedroom entirely.  Just as it has no business prohibiting it, it has no business facilitating it either.

We focus on the parasites and self-proclaimed victims of our society, and God knows we obviously have more than enough of them; facilitated and perhaps perpetuated by the liberal world in an attempt to create a sufficiently powerful voting block of dependent personalities needing their “fix” of goodies at the government trough.  We look disparagingly at those who leapt at takers of house loans no one marginally sentient could have thought were likely to be repaid, and I think that scrutiny is proper and needs to root such activities out of existence because of its contribution to our current economic situation.

But in high-centering on that negative bunch of wanton losers, we overlook the poor wretches who have truly been blind sided by life through no real fault of their own.  Or worse, we lump them in with the losers.  We need to review our thinking to be able to recognize not only those against whom their physical or mental state of health has conspired, but those against whom this unneeded economical disaster has conspired as well.  We focus on the fraudulent and  ignore that in more than a few of the debacles involving home loans, the individual was unsure or uncomfortable with the deal but was pushed into it by overzealous and corrupt agents that claimed to be trustworthy to people unequipped by experience or education to grasp the truth of it.  No one wakes up some morning and wants to be physically or mentally sick or wants to lose their jobs, much less their homes, due to economic downturns or fraudulent sellers.

There are therefore, people in our society who are suffering through minimal or no fault of their own and as a generous people we have a duty to help them. Don’t read into this something that isn’t here: i did not say they had a RIGHT to our help, I said we have a duty to help them and that is a very different thing. The question is what institution should be in charge of that help. Should it come, for example, from the individual and/or private organizations dedicated to the task, or from the government dedicated to creating dependencies to assure re-election and the continuance of power?

If we, as Conservatives, truly believe it is the former, and we have any expectation of convincing those concerned about social justice that we are right, then we need to demonstrate that as best we can and also demonstrate and articulate how it is working to actually provide that help and, further, that it is working better than the government can do.  And even if we decided that the best collection point of monies for charitable use was via the government, who on earth can argue that government bureaucracy is likely to administer it best? You have to live in some parallel universe to believe that.  From the Post Office to FEMA to the state’s DMV, who can point to a single governmental “business” that is run more efficiently and productively than is done as a private business?

So yes, I think our side needs to make some major changes in the application of the principles they claim to hold dear, especially in how they interact with the rest of our citizenry.  They need to show that they actually believe in and mean to uphold the principles they espouse and the documents and texts they cite as authority whether it is the Constitution or some sacred text.

If Conservatives will do that, and both articulate and demonstrate them well, then we can show the other side for the disingenuous, dependency creating charlatans they are.   And THEN we can get to a discussion of the real issues and policies upon which an election ought to turn because we have taken the warm and fuzzy off of the table by the simple expedient of solving it.

But if we can’t – or won’t – adapt, then we will go the way of the Whigs and Tories and justifiably so.   And if that happens, it will be because all of those despicable labels hurled at us will have enough reality to them to stick and crush us.

And if we continue to let enough of the jerks in our ranks act like stupidly and callously… and get away with unacceptable comments or actions just because they are holding our banner… then by facilitating the hatred and bigotry, whether or not we individually share in it, we will surely deserve the results.  I believe those rotten apples are comparatively few in numbers but it doesn’t take very many of them under the heat of the media’s spotlight, to result in spoiling the barrel for us all.

The problem is I believe those devastating, perhaps catastrophic results for our country, results that I believe are facilitated by and sometimes pushed by Liberals as noted in previous posts, results that i believe will be so onerous in the end for all citizens as the U.S.A. slides toward the necropolis of history, will have to be laid at OUR feet because we were the ones that could have stopped it and chose, rather, fettered by a minority collection of individual weaknesses rather than freed by a majority collection of individual strengths, to stab our own principles in the heart.

And who could ever be proud of that?

 

Can A Transformation Based on Hate Be A Good Thing?

San Diego — Let me give you some dots to connect…

Obama announced and is openly pursuing a program to, in his words, “… fundamentally transform our country.”  In this he has the lock-step support of followers who see him as a political messiah.  This, however, is a very different goal than the founders had.  They recognized a distinctly American character, also easily recognized by early visitors and writers such as Alexis De Touqueville, and sought via the Constitution and its amendments, to protect it, not to change it.

But following the popularity of the works of European writers such as with Rousseau, Godwin, and Marx, starting with Woodrow Wilson many in his party slowly transformed what had traditionally been the political philosophies of the so-called progressives, into something new, and something very, very different than the culture that was being protected by the Constitution or, for that matter, different than the one held by early liberals and progressives alike.

By the time we get through the years to Obama, we find a man who is openly contemptuous of that document and speaks openly about its fundamental flaws, but without the integrity (and with the hypocrisy) required to take an oath to adhere to it and defend it and actually do that instead of working diligently and brilliantly to obliterate it.

I have written before about his adherence to and support of the works of those early social writers just mentioned.  I didn’t have to make anything up, I simply used his own writing and speeches and have shown where some phrases were lifted in their entirety.

To accommodate his dream utopia as formed and informed by his father and reverend and close associates during his philosophically formative years, one must first destroy the society from within.  They all knew this and wrote about it since they all studied the works of John Maynard Keanes, the economic god of the left, who wrote that you could only do that economically and the way to do it was to “debauch the currency.”   How to do that exactly was spelled out in the economic theories of Cloward and Pliven who were the mentors of the professors under who student Obama claims to have studied.  And they are certainly the approaches that appear to be implemented and are playing out pretty much as predicted.

And so a very successful effort is being made to transform the culture, which means that before the new order can be instituted, the old order must be destroyed or at least crippled.  There is a roadmap you can check to see if I’m speaking the truth here and it is from their own side.  From these same authors, now synthesized in the writings of Saul Alinsky, another mentor for the president and his close friends, are clearly spelled out the strategies needed to make all of that happen.  And the foremost is that the country must first of all tear itself apart.  And to implement that strategy, Saul observes, the best approach is to set the people upon themselves in a great class war, just like Marx predicted and said was necessary.  And then he tells how to do it.

But class war requires something that most Americans deplore and that only existed in the fringe elements because it was seriously discouraged by the founders and their philosophies.  And that something is systemic, cultivated, institutionalized hatred.  Of course there have always been examples one can point to of evil people wrapped in their own petty hatreds, but it was never a part of the official or sanctioned social fabric of our culture nor was it the social goals as outlined in the Constitution.

When evil was applied by or in the name of the government, and there is no denying that it was, it was an aberration and in direct conflict with the ethics, outlook, and morals embodied in the Constitution itself.  If there was a flaw, it was that sometimes it was not crystal clear about how abhorrent some behaviors among its citizens were and how much violence the allowing of those behaviors to continue would someday do to the document itself because, for reasons of greed and personal power, some individuals got away with despicable acts in the name of the country.  The real flaw was in the law makers who initiated or cowardly allowed such behavior to start or continue.

(A Quick “Aside:”  if you want to argue that the great flaw was the allowance of Slavery, I would agree as would many of the founders.  But in the short term the greater question was to have a country or not?  Once established, then the provisions of the Constitution itself allowed that particular evil to be abolished.  So the real message is that the Constitution provided the internal processes by which any “flaws” could be addressed without the kind of damage to the core document typical of trying to do an end run around it does.  And since that “flaw” had been corrected 150 years prior, it could not have been the one or ones referenced by Obama.)

But it was not the Constitution that encouraged it; it was a really a violation of the Constitution that allowed it until corrected.  You need to take the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as a single piece not two separate ones.  The grievances spelled out in the Declaration form the “thou shalt not” actions that the Constitution sought to prohibit the government founded under it from doing.  To understand the Constitution you must understand the grievances that inspired the Declaration.  And then apply them to our own government since we did not want to allow a new government being created to fall into the same behaviors and patterns as the one we were about to shed.  if you want to know how to interpret Constitutional provisions, especially in the Bill of Rights, you must read it in the context of the grievances set forth in the Declaration.

So now our leader wants us not to protect that founding document and its intentions but to transform it.  And from reading all of those authors noted above, he knows how it can be accomplished.  But part of the unintended consequences, known to him, but apparently not to his disciples, is that to do it you have to get people to hate one another.  And the easiest arena in which to create that hate is the economic one where using the directives of Uncle Saul, one can easily manipulate emotions from jealousy, to envy… and ultimately to hate.

We all tend to focus our thoughts on the topic of hatred in different arenas than to look at our own government (unless talking about the bigots on the other side).  Usually such discussions are centered around small fringe groups.  Skin heads and neo-nazis, supremacists of all colors (and yes, bigotry is not limited to certain skin colors or races), all practice focused hatred but are generally not in large enough groups to have much overall effect.

We also sometimes think of hatred as the purview of religions and sometimes it is.  Islam, the “religion of peace” for example, openly tells its followers, not, by the way, only a fanatical fringe but ANY follower who believes in the sacred words of the founder, to kill or convert all who are not Muslims and establish as a goal a world wide caliphate based on Islam.  The only way you can get a normally peaceful people to engage in Jihad to exterminate others based only on their beliefs, is via carefully crafted hatred. And to do that you set up the chain: jealousy, envy… and finally hatred.

But that is anathema to all things American where our Constitution forbids us to ever establish a State Religion a la King Henry VIII or some Ayatolah.  So how do we do it?  It was remarkably simple we had to create a category of entitlements or people who were, for oner reason or another, entitled to something the others were not.  We’re not talking about the natural rights spoken of in the Declaration or spelled out in the Constitution.  We are instead talking about government created “rights” because in doing that we can create the class divisions needed to start the process.

The American character was originally based on self-sufficiency but also in concern for our neighbors.  When one of our numbers fell on hard times we were expected to help them as best we could; not because it was mandated by the government and not through some government program, but because it was our individual responsibility.

And when the system was allowed to work unfettered, the rising economic tide lifted all boats and the few blind-sided by life were helped by private or faith-based charities.    But as the social experiments of the utopians started to come into play, the rising numbers of needy, resulting from the heavy caps on the production sources, overwhelmed the natural system and, right on cue, the government stepped in to “save” the “less privileged” it had created and thereby started to create dependencies and with them the beginnings of a systemic jealousy and envy. And with dependencies comes the real currency of tyrants: power.

Greece is now showing us the natural results of this.  Totally without money and utterly dependent on the largesse of their EU neighbors who have demanded, as a price for their help that Greece clean up its economic act, the now entitled and dependent citizens have turned on themselves and are rioting in the streets.  Envy has segued into hatred. People are rioting to have a bankrupt government keep providing their entitlements even when there is no money and therefore are angry at the government and at the OTHER governments for not keeping the trough full to their liking.

Here, in the US, we are on the fringes of that (and in California may be looking over the edge).  The Occupier Movement, driven by jealousy and envy and a complete disavowal of a “clean your own room or house first” approach, has evolved, predictably into a situation where envy and hatred are starting to merge.  And who is supporting that?  How to you get from envy to hatred?  Convince the envious one that they are somehow entitled and are therefore somehow a victim.

The American character, as noted before, was initially predisposed to help one another in times of need.  But the assumption was that such help was not a lifetime achievement award for galactic level laziness and at some point it would end and the person would return to productivity, leaving only the truly needy unable physically or mentally to care for themselves, that we had to collectively support.  That lasted only until, with the government’s help and support, the numbers feeling victimized and entitled became unworkable.

The strategy is a simple one: keep the economic instability to a point where the progression of jealousy to envy to victimhood to hatred is maintained, then turn it around by skewing it so out of balance and in favor now of the entitled class that the productive people themselves now feel victimized by those clamoring to take from them the products of their own work, and now you have done it: you have everyone hating everyone else and a simple push, a simple match or spark, is all it will take to bring the system crashing down waiting for a charismatic leader to step in to “save” it.

Our world’s history is full of such saviors usually carried into power on the shoulders of academia and the various victims in an unlikely alliance.  Stalin, Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, and before them all, Robespierre followed this historical progression.

So have we again reached critical mass?  Have we reached the tipping point where a single match will set us all at each other’s throats making way for the latest messiah?  Are we so far along and desperate to get our minds off of the situation we will fall for a war as the solution because we are so ignorant of the past that we will once again accept any jingoistic call to arms because we have been sold the old tale that our problems are NOT the fault of our own government but of someone else?

Will we be pushed into war with Iran to knowingly (on the part of the government) spike the price of oil which is critical to all of us and will make nearly everything more expensive to give us some external demon to hate?

Or will we simply be given a domestic demon in the form of someone from the other political persuasion that wants, oh horrors, to cut back on the entitlement gravy trough?

Right now the debt is about $1 million for every citizen.  Can you expect to pay that back in your lifetime?  No?  Then who will get to do it?  And if we keep debauching the fiat currency making each newly minted dollar worth less then the effective debt rises accordingly.  If ever there was an arbitrarily created scenario for disaster we are staring it in the face.

The only question is, are we going to fall for it?  Are we going to fall for the tactics to get us to hate each other and so take our eyes off the larger picture?  Or are we going to stand, collectively, and say if this is the transformation desired by our leaders then NO THANK YOU!  Instead, will we, as a people, prefer to recover the American Character as exemplified in the Declaration and Constitution?

instead of transforming it, are we more interested in trying to tweak and strengthen the areas that can profit from it by using the methodology spelled out in the document itself?  Or are we interested in creating for the office of president, the precedence that allow anyone occupying it to transform the country in his own vision and as he sees fit without regard to little problems like the citizenry, the congress,… or the constitution?

This is the simple question facing you.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that ANY of those people vying for the office are likely to do the latter.  But isn’t that what we OUGHT to be searching for and supporting?  If we don’t, and don’t do it soon, it will not make any difference and we will, like the citizens of Russia, Germany, Spain, Italy, China, etc. look up one day and ask how this could have happened.

And the answer will be… us.  We made it happen.  We didn’t just allow it to happen, we MADE it happen.

I’m an old guy and sincerely hope I will not live to see that day.

 

De Tocqueville on American Culture, Religious Influence, & Devotion to Equality

San Diego – Much has been made by modern secular progressives and liberals that Americans, including our Founding Fathers, were never all that enthralled with religion per se or with Christianity specifically.  They cite the 1st Amendment as evidence and conveniently forget both the words per se and the annunciated reasons for it.  And they especially ignore that while it mandated that the government never establish a State Religion (which they claim demonstrates their antipathy to religion in general), it also specifically protected the fee expression of religion by the citizens.  Oops…

Modern liberal spokesmouths would have you believe that any association with Judeao-Christian core values was utterly coincidental and that, as King Barrack said, we owed as much to Muslim influences as to Christian or Jewish ones for our founding principles.  That is a little hard to square with the Koran’s directions relative to Jews and Christians that the good Muslim will convert them or “smite their necks” as was done to Daniel Pearl and those who followed him into the merciful clutches of their  righteous Muslim captors.

Yet, In spite of that, the current attacks on both Jewish and Christian traditions coupled with the open acceptance of Muslim traditions does not seem even the slightest bit contradictory to the sycophants fawning before his majesty.  No one notices or finds anything unusual when the National Day of Prayer, started by President Truman and observed for decades is ignored and that at the White House the observation is cancelled because it might offend some groups.  Who, for instance?  Perhaps the 50,000 Muslims that came for THEIR national Day of prayer held on Capital Hill in 2009.  They had no reason for concern since the King had already declared that we were not a Christian Nation.  Now tell me Reverend Wright did not have an influence here…

It is hard for us, the non-readers and politically naive in 2011, to know whether that assertion about the lack of religious influence in the past was true or not. The disciples of our anointed one seem to decide truth not on facts but upon His  Sacred Words from behind the prompter.  And for the others simply too lazy to check facts, that appearance of uncertainty is precisely what liberals hope you conclude because in that vacuum of self imposed ignorance it is easy for nearly any gibberish to be sucked in to fill the void.

But, unfortunately for them, there were lots of eye witnesses who wrote prodigiously about it, not to mention the volumes written by the founders themselves because, as they noted, they knew they were creating something very different and wanted to be sure people later could understand their intent.  The founders would be astonished that modern people wishing to claim ignorance of intent or wishing the intent to be different than what is was, insist no such documentation exists.  For that to be true all libraries would need to be burned to the ground.  Based on the unwillingness of his adulating followers or the adoring press to verify the pronouncements however, they might as well be.

Surely there must be a few who did their homework and discovered the disconnect between his assertions and reality.  No problem, the answer cannot by definition be that he is wrong so it must be that the founders themselves were too close to it and too biased to assess, objectively, how early newly minted American citizens felt and therefore could not speak accurately for themselves. OK, but there is another source often overlooked or ignored and he had no actions to support or personal decision to explain.  In fact, he was not even writing FOR an American audience.

In 1835 Alexis De Tocqueville major French political thinker and historian (1805-1859) published the first edition and volume of his famous work, “Democracy in America”.  His timing was unique and fortuitous; he visited us at a crucial crossroads in American History and worked to capture the essence of American culture and values developing as, after two wars to assure our political stability and freedom from European colonialism, we transitioned into something unknown in the rest of the world, a country virtually obsessed with the concepts of equality. He was a true liberal before the term was hijacked by modern progressives.  He believed in objective observations and gave little credence to the value of power derived through some sense of elitism or anointed authority.

He noted the irony of having northern States, where old concepts of aristocracy were dead or dying and the loss of hereditary wealth and power generated an obsession with the work ethic and equality of opportunity to become the test of value, and a collection of southern States where a landed aristocracy, kept in place like the patricians of Rome and Ancient Greece by a slave-based economy, held on to those aristocratic values and ideals though he saw them as doomed to failure.

But, getting back to the main point here, he also wrote clearly about the role that religion played in the thinking of Americans and below are some quotes to that effect as he discusses the relationships between religion and the broader national culture.

“Moreover, almost all the sects of the United States are comprised within the great unity of Christianity, and Christian morality is everywhere the same. In the United States the sovereign authority is religious. There is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America, and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.

“The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.

“There are certain populations in Europe whose unbelief is only equaled by their ignorance and their debasement, while in America one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world fulfills all the outward duties of religion with fervor.

“Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which I was unaccustomed. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1851 ed.), pp. 331, 332, 335, 336-7, 337.

OK, let’s hear you spin those observations into assertions of secular deists only marginally attached to any religious values…

Also aware of the rise of socialistic philosophies in Europe he saw America as a great experimental testing ground and wrote of the “Political Consequences of the Social State of the Anglo-Americans” by comparing how European socialists and Americans dealt with the concept of equality in Volumes One, Part I, Chapter 3.  He not only recognized our great potential strengths, he also recognized our great potential weaknesses and the traps into which we might fall.

“But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom”

“…Furthermore, when citizens are all almost equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power. As none of them is strong enough to fight alone with advantage, the only guarantee of liberty is for everyone to combine forces. But such a combination is not always in evidence.

“…“Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude”.

It appears we have fallen into most of those traps.  It is one thing to espouse a personal philosophy that prefers socialism, or secular humanism flowing from Rousseau and Godwin and Marx over the philosophy flowing from Locke and Burke and Jefferson.  Those are legitimate debates to be had.  But they need to be held based on facts not on wishes, and they need to be based on a history that corresponds to reality not on a re-written version that ignores inconvenient facts.

If one believes that religion per se is inherently negative and we, as a country, should turn away from such “superstitions” that is their right.  But it is disingenuous at best and openly deceitful to try to base such an argument on a fabricated history which claims that we NEVER were a religious culture or that the religious tenets of our culture flowed from anything other than Judaeo-Christian roots.

It was De Tocqueville who coined the phrase that “In every democracy the people get the government they deserve.”  if we continue to vote based not on historical realities or on easily verifiable truths but on concepts openly opposed to our long held values then we will get what we deserve but not something that will preserve the nation as we know it.

When we as a democracy, allow all three branches of government to ignore or de facto repeal our Constitution and then allow the media to abrogate its job of finding the truth in favor of supporting its own biases, then all that is left to us is our votes.  And when those votes are primarily cast by people who believe they are entitled to feed at the government trough, and who, as De Tocqueville noted above, “… want to bring the strong down to their level,” and who prefer, “equality in servitude to inequality in freedom”  then as I have said before,  we are truly doomed.