Tag Archives: Bill of Rights

Overthrow the Government: All the Ways in Which Our Rights Have Been Usurped, by John and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on September 15, 2022 | Leave a comment

Revolution is becoming more and more mainstream. From John and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“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.

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Killing the Bill of Rights, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on February 15, 2022 | 1 comment

The Bill of Rights has been enduring slow murder for decades, and the next few years may usher in its ultimate demise. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:

US Bill of Rights.Other images in this series:

In 2005, President George W. Bush allegedly addressed a meeting of Republicans discussing whether to renew the Patriot Act due to its possible unconstitutionality by angrily blurting out that the Constitution was “just a goddamned piece of paper!” If the story is true, it partly explains the numerous crimes committed by Bush and his associates, including the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq based on hyped and even fabricated intelligence. It also suggests the unwillingness of proponents of overriding executive authority to accept that the American people are the inheritors of a number of inalienable liberties to include freedom of speech and association, both of which were impacted negatively by the Patriot Act and the other legislation that followed.

I often think of George Bush when I observe the antics of Joe Biden and his claque of Trotskyites at work. To be sure, thanks to the Bill of Rights you can currently say anything you want in the United States, though there are limits on that freedom if one goes so far as to offend those who are powerful. If you do upset the oligarchs who run our country through corruption of public officials, they have a thousand ways to get you. I recently wrote an article on the use of lawfare to block people and views one objects to by taking them to court on some pretext and bankrupting them through legal fees and penalties. The court system hardly represents the people in any country. It is inevitably heavily politicized by the politicians that grant it its authority and ultimately represents the big money interests that the judges consider their real peers in the Establishment.

The United States government has in fact embraced the suppression of unpopular views and the nations and groups that it finds offensive through the use of sanctions, which are essentially punishments doled out arbitrarily as the government can issue a sanction on its own authority without having to provide any evidence or make a case. And when the White House sanctions a foreign government or group, secondary sanctions kick in to prevent anyone from exchanging goods or services with the targeted entity. I recently was on the receiving end of a Department of the Treasury demand that I stop writing for a foreign website which had been sanctioned. I was warned that I might be subject to a $311,562 fine if I failed to comply. Insofar as I could determine, the foreign website was only guilty of having strongly condemned United States foreign policy, as do I and many other Americans, but the threat of the government coming down with its thousands of lawyers meant that I and other US contributors terminated our relationship.

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The Police State’s Reign of Terror Continues … With Help from the Supreme Court, by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on October 6, 2021 | 3 comments

The belief that the third branch of government would stand apart from the other two and stop their depredations and tyranny, if it ever had any validity at all, now looks positively quaint. From John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges.”—George Carlin

You think you’ve got rights? Think again.

All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.

This is the grim reality of life in the American police state.

In fact, in the face of the government’s ongoing power grabs, our so-called rights have been reduced to mere technicalities, privileges that can be granted and taken away, all with the general blessing of the courts.

This is what one would call a slow death by a thousand cuts, only it’s the Constitution being inexorably bled to death by the very institution (the judicial branch of government) that is supposed to be protecting it (and us) from government abuse.

Court pundits, fixated on a handful of politically charged cases before the U.S. Supreme Court this term dealing with abortion, gun rights and COVID-19 mandates, have failed to recognize that the Supreme Court—and the courts in general—sold us out long ago.

With each passing day, it becomes increasingly clear that Americans can no longer rely on the courts to “take the government off the backs of the people,” in the words of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. When presented with an opportunity to loosen the government’s noose that keeps getting cinched tighter and tighter around the necks of the American people, what does our current Supreme Court usually do?

It ducks. Prevaricates. Remains silent. Speaks to the narrowest possible concern.

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Constitution Day 2021: It’s Time To Make American Free Again, by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on September 15, 2021 | Leave a comment

An amendment by amendment review of the Bill of Rights yields the distressing conclusion that Americans have almost no liberty left. From John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

The Constitution of the United States represents the classic solution to one of humankind’s greatest political problems: that is, how does a small group of states combine into a strong union without the states losing their individual powers and surrendering their control over local affairs?

The fifty-five delegates who convened in Philadelphia during the sweltering summer of 1787 answered this question with a document that called for a federal plan of government, a system of separation of powers with checks and balances, and a procedure for orderly change to meet the needs and exigencies of future generations.

In an ultimate sense, the Constitution confirmed the proposition that original power resided in the people—not, however, in the people as a whole but in their capacity as people of the several states.  To bring forth the requisite union, the people through the states would transfer some of their powers to the new federal government.  All powers not reserved by the people in explicit state constitutional limitations remained in the state governments.

Although the Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787, the fear of the new federal government was so strong that a “bill of rights” was demanded and became an eventuality.

Intended to protect the citizenry’s fundamental rights or “first liberties” against usurpation by the newly created federal government, the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments of the Constitution—is essentially a list of immunities from interference by the federal government.

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.

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A Domestic Terrorism Law? War on Dissent Will Proceed Full Speed Ahead, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on January 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

The US government takes the final steps to throwing out the Bill of Rights. From Philip Giraldi at strategic-culture.org:

What makes the current state of war against “terrorism” so dangerous is that the national security apparatus has been politicized, Phil Giraldi writes.

President Joe Biden has already made it clear that legislation that will be used to combat what he refers to as “domestic terrorism” will be a top priority. That means that his inaugural speech pledge to be the president for “all Americans” appears to apply except for those who don’t agree with him. Former Barack Obama CIA Chief John Brennan, who is clearly in the loop on developments, puts it this way in a tweet where he describes how the new Administration’s spooks “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about [the] insurgency” [that includes] “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”

The United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights, which includes freedom of speech and association, has been under siege for some time now. Government has always used its assumed powers conferred by a claimed state of emergency to deprive citizens of their rights. During the American Civil War Abraham Lincoln imprisoned critics of the conflict. Woodrow Wilson’s First World War administration brought in the Espionage Act, which has since been used to convict whistleblowers without having to present the level of evidence that would be required in a normal civil trial. During the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt erected concentration camps that imprisoned Japanese Americans whose only crime consisted of being Japanese.

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Three Reminders from The Bill of Rights, by Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on May 15, 2020 | 2 comments

Politicians ought to try reading the Constitution once in awhile. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

As a condition for accepting the Constitution, the American people demanded the enactment of the Bill of Rights immediately after ratification of the Constitution. They had been assured that the Constitution was calling into existence a national government whose powers were limited to those enumerated in the Constitution. But that did not satisfy them. They wanted a Bill of Rights to make it clear that the federal government was prohibited from doing the things that are listed in the Bill of Rights. There are several important things to notice about the Bill of Rights:

First, the Bill of Rights, does not give people rights. Our ancestors understood that rights come from nature and God, not from government. People’s rights preexist government.

Second, the Bill of Rights consists of prohibitions and restrictions on the federal government. Why is that important? Because our ancestors knew that the federal power would inevitably attract people to public office who would do the types of things that were being restricted. They would criminalize speech, especially speech that was critical of federal officials. They would ban protests against government. They would force people to subscribe to a certain religion. They would seize people’s guns. They would punish any malefactor by simply having civil or military agents take people into custody, incarcerate them, torture them, or execute them, all without trial by jury and due process of law. The Bill of Rights was to serve as a reminder that federal officials had no legitimate power to do any of these things.

Third, the Bill of Rights contains no emergency or crisis exception. That’s because our ancestors knew that historically crises and emergencies were the time-honored way by which people lost their liberties at the hands of their own government. During such times, people become afraid and their natural tendency is to look to the government to keep them safe and secure. They forget that the biggest threat to their liberty is their very own government, as reflected in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Thus, they eagerly trade away their liberty for “security.” Later, when the crisis or emergency has passed, they discover that the government is unwilling to give up the power it has acquired over them.

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A Limited-Government Republic versus a National-Security State, by Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on January 6, 2020 | 1 comment

What we have now is the exact opposite of what the founders had in mind. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

The worst mistake that the American people have made in the entire history of the United States was to permit the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state. That conversion has played a major role in the destruction of our liberty, privacy, and economic well-being.

What is a national-security state? It is a totalitarian-like governmental structure that consists of an enormous military-intelligence establishment with extraordinary powers, such as indefinite detention, torture, secret surveillance, and even assassination of both citizens and foreigners.

To put the matter into a larger context, North Korea is a national-security state. So are Egypt, China, Cuba, and Russia. And the United States. All of the regimes in those countries wield totalitarian-like powers.

It wasn’t always that way in the United States. Our nation was founded as a limited-government republic and remained that way for nearly 150 years. No Pentagon, no CIA, and no NSA. There was an army but it was relatively small — big enough to win battles against Indian tribes or a neighboring weak and impoverished country such as Mexico, but nowhere big enough to engage in wars around the world.

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The Destruction of American Liberty, by Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on December 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

Americans are not free, not even close. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, were a watershed event for the United States, not only because of the large death toll and property destruction but, more important, because they spelled the death knell for American liberty.

Americans had already lost a large portion of their freedom when the federal government was converted into what is called a “welfare state,” a governmental system that is based on the concept of mandatory charity. Examples of mandatory-charity programs include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, education grants, corporate bailouts, foreign aid, and every other program by which the government takes money from people to whom it belongs and gives it to people to whom it does not belong.

There is no way to reconcile a system of mandatory charity with the principles of a free society. A genuinely free society is one in which people are free to keep everything they earn and decide for themselves what to do with their own money. An unfree society is one in which the government mandates that people be good and caring to others.

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Betraying the Constitution: Who Will Protect Us from an Unpatriotic Patriot Act? by John W. Whitehead

Posted on December 3, 2019 | Leave a comment

The Patriot Act and its subsequent extensions have shredded a good portion of the Bill of Rights. From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org

“It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government.”—Thomas Paine

While Congress subjects the nation to its impeachment-flavored brand of bread-and-circus politics, our civil liberties continue to die a slow, painful death by a thousand cuts.

Case in point: while Americans have been fixated on the carefully orchestrated impeachment drama that continues to monopolize headlines, Congress passed and President Trump signed into law legislation extending three key provisions of the USA Patriot Act, which had been set to expire on December 15, 2019.

Once again, to no one’s surprise, the bureaucrats on both sides of the aisle—Democrats and Republicans alike—prioritized political grandstanding over principle and their oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution.

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The Bill of Rights Turns 230, and What Do We Have to Show for It? Nothing Good, by John W. Whitehead

Posted on September 10, 2019 | 3 comments

The Bill of Rights is well on its way to being rendered a dead letter. From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

It’s been 230 years since James Madison drafted the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, and what do we have to show for it?

Nothing good.

In America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

We can pretend that the Constitution, which was written to hold the government accountable, is still our governing document, but the reality of life in the American police state tells a different story.

“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, etc.), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called named of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago.

Most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.

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 (all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, the courts and the like)—would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.

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