Tag Archives: Constitution

Separate Money and the State, by Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on March 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

Why should the state control money? It’s a license to steal, and states invariably exercise it. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

The United States once had the finest monetary system in history. It was a system that the U.S. Constitution established. It was a system in which the official money of the United States consisted of gold coins and silver coins.

We often hear that the “gold standard” was a system in which paper money was “backed by gold.” Nothing could be further from the truth. There was no paper money in the United States. That’s because the Constitution did not empower the federal government to issue paper money. It also expressly prohibited the states from issuing paper money.

The Constitution used the term “bills of credit.” That was the term people at that time used for paper money. The Constitution expressly forbade the states from issuing “bills of credit” or paper money. It also did not delegate the power to issue “bills of credit” or paper money to the federal government.

Instead, the Constitution empowered the federal government to “coin” money. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, one does not “coin” money out of paper. One “coins” money out of such metallic commodities as gold and silver.

The Constitution also expressly forbade the states from making anything but gold and silver coins “legal tender,” or official money, which further established the intent of the Framers.

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Posted in Banking, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Government, History, Law, Money

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War and the Constitution, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on February 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

The Constitution isn’t perfect, but it once stood imperfectly between citizens and pure tyranny. No more. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

Can the president fight any war he wishes? Can Congress fund any war it chooses? Are there constitutional and legal requirements that must first be met before war is waged? Can the United States legally attack an ally?

These questions should be front and center in a debate over the U.S. involvement in Ukraine. Sadly, there has been no great debate. The media are mouthing what the CIA is telling them, and only a few websites and podcasts — my own, “Judging Freedom” on You Tube, among them — are challenging the government’s reckless, immoral, illegal and unconstitutional war.

All power in the federal government comes from the Constitution and from no other source. Congress, however, has managed to extend its reach beyond the confines of the Constitution domestically by spending money in areas that it cannot regulate and purchasing compliance from the states by bribery.

Examples of this are the numerical minimum blood alcohol content to trigger DWI arrests, and maximum speed limits. In both instances, Congress offered money to the states to pave highways provided they lower both numbers, and the cash-strapped states accepted the money along with congressional strings. These are bribes from the criminal consequences of which Congress has exempted itself.

The same takes place in foreign policy. Congress cannot legally declare war on Russia, since there is no militarily-grounded reason for doing so. Russia poses no threat to American national security or American persons or property. Moreover, the U.S. has no treaty with Ukraine that triggers an American military defense. But Congress spends money on war nevertheless.

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The Constitution Has Already Been Terminated, by John and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on December 7, 2022 | 4 comments

You would be hard pressed to find a clause in the Constitution that’s consistently observed. From John and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary.”—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

If there is one point on which there should be no political parsing, no legal jockeying, and no disagreement, it is this: for anyone to advocate terminating or suspending the Constitution is tantamount to a declaration of war against the founding principles of our representative government and the rule of law.

Then again, one could well make the case that the Constitution has already been terminated after years on life support, given the extent to which the safeguards enshrined in the Bill of Rights—adopted 231 years ago as a means of protecting the people against government overreach and abuse—have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.

Consider for yourself.

We are in the grip of martial law. We have what the founders feared most: a “standing” or permanent army on American soil. This de facto standing army is made up of weaponized, militarized domestic police forces which look like, dress like, and act like the military; are armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; are authorized to make arrests; and are trained in military tactics.

We are in the government’s crosshairs. The U.S. government continues to act as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that have been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence. Consequently, we are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.” With alarming regularity, unarmed men, women, children and even pets are being gunned down by the government’s standing army of militarized police who shoot first and ask questions later.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Law, Tyranny

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Doug Casey on Whether the US Could Soon Declare a “State of Emergency” Like Canada

Posted on February 25, 2022 | Leave a comment

As Canada goes, so goes the U.S.? From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:

Emergency

International Man: Historically, when a crisis takes shape, politicians declare a “state of emergency,” which allows government to take action in ways it’s normally not allowed to.

This tactic has been used over and over again to justify all sorts of government action, removal of individual rights, and more.

What’s your take on this? Does it prove that constitutional rights are just imaginary and can be arbitrarily taken away at any moment?

Doug Casey: First, contrary to popular belief, the Constitution doesn’t grant rights. You have rights as a human being regardless of what the Constitution says or doesn’t say.

For instance, the Second Amendment of the Constitution has to do with the right to keep and bear arms. Throughout history, one of the things that distinguished a free man from a slave was the fact that a free man didn’t need permission to bear arms. If he couldn’t bear arms, it was because he was a slave. It was one of the major distinctions between a free man and a slave.

The Bill of Rights is an excellent document, but it’s hard to rely on for moral guidance simply because the Constitution is a dead letter as a practical matter. It no longer means what it says or says what it means. The Constitution has been interpreted out of existence.

It’s good that rights are spelled out in the Constitution, of course, but rights are much more basic than any Constitution. Constitutions can be changed.

We shouldn’t be dependent upon political laws at all, simply because they blow with the political winds. The US Constitution has had a good run as a philosophical, political statement. In fact, it’s the best that’s ever been put into real-world effect. But the hoi polloi view it as an obsolete product of old, dead, white men—the patriarchy. White men and their artifacts, like Western Civilization itself, are now held in contempt by large sections of society.

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CIA Spies and Their Collaborators, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on February 17, 2022 | Leave a comment

In contravention of Federal law and the Constitution, the CIA collects bulk data and spies on us. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

In the past month, this column has twice addressed the unbridled propensity of federal intelligence agencies to spy on Americans without search warrants as required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

These agencies believe that the Fourth Amendment — which protects the individual right to privacy — only regulates law enforcement and does not apply to domestic spying.

There is no basis in the constitutional text, history or judicial interpretations for such a limiting and toothless view of this constitutional guarantee. The courts have held that the Fourth Amendment restrains government. Period. Last week, Congress got burned when the CIA released a heavily redacted summary of its current spying in the United States.

Here is the backstory.

When the CIA was created in 1947, members of Congress who feared the establishment here of the type of domestic surveillance apparatus that the Allies had just defeated in Germany insisted that the new CIA have no role in American law enforcement and no legal ability to spy within the U.S. The legislation creating the CIA contains those limitations.

Nevertheless, we know from statements of former governors of several states that CIA agents claim to be physically present in all 50 statehouses in the United States.

The agents who have infiltrated state governments didn’t arrive until after Dec. 4, 1981. That’s the date that President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, which purports to give the CIA authority to spy in America — supposedly looking for narcotics from foreign countries — and keep from law enforcement whatever it finds.

Stated differently, while Reagan purported to authorize the CIA to defy the limitations imposed upon it by the Constitution and by federal law, he insisted on a “wall” of separation between domestic spying and law enforcement.

So, if the CIA using unconstitutional spying discovered that a janitor in the Russian Embassy in Washington was really a KGB colonel who abused his wife in their suburban Maryland home, under E.O. 12333, it could continue to spy upon him in defiance of the Fourth Amendment and the CIA charter, but it could not reveal to Maryland prosecutors — who can only use evidence lawfully obtained — any evidence of his domestic violence.

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Posted in Government, Intelligence, Law, Privacy, Surveillance

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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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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, History, Law, Morality, Politics, Tyranny

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9/11 and the Politics of Fear and Self-Preservation, by Whitney Webb

Posted on September 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

The choice is ours. From Whitney Webb at lewrockwell.com:

We will either be remembered as a country that took freedom and liberty for all seriously or we will be remembered as a nation of cowards who, driven by fear, were willing to deprive this group, then that group, of their freedom — before losing that freedom entirely.

he 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 is a particularly somber one, not just because of the horrific nature of events of that day reaching its second-decade milestone, but because of how little we seem to have learned in that amount of time.

The fear and trauma generated by the events of 9/11 were used by the U.S. national security state and its civilian allies to great effect to divide the American population, to attack independent reporting as well as independent thought, to gut the anti-war movement, and to normalize the U.S. government’s overt and persistent degradation of the country’s Constitution. This, of course, is in addition to the illegal U.S. occupations and drone wars in the Middle East and elsewhere that were also born out of this event.

The true beneficiaries of 9/11

As a nation, the U.S. populace has failed to grapple with these realities, and many others, in the two decades since the Twin Towers and WTC Building 7 fell. Far from bringing any benefit to the alleged masterminds of the event, the results of 9/11 instead overwhelmingly favored the ambitions of a powerful faction within the U.S. national security state that had long sought to bring the dissident-elimination efforts it spent decades implementing abroad – from the Phoenix Program in Vietnam to Operation Condor in South America – home to roost.

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When the Constitution Fails Us, by Andrew Napolitano

Posted on September 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

When the Constitution fails us, it’s time for new arrangements. From Andrew Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

I have been writing for years asking if we still have the U.S. Constitution. That issue has come into sharper focus in the past 18 months as mayors and governors have created dictatorial powers and exercised those powers to interfere with personal autonomy in America. They have done this in utter disregard for the freedoms protected by the Constitution they have sworn to uphold by asserting that public health trumps personal liberty.

Here is the backstory.

Government is essentially the negation of freedom. If the values underlying the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights — maximum personal liberty and minimal government — are to be taken seriously, then we all know that government has gone so far astray as to make it unrecognizable to the revolutionaries who fought the British and the founders and framers who wrote and ratified the Constitution and its first 10 amendments.

Those underlying values are generally articulated in the first eight amendments, which restrain the government from interfering in personal liberty. The Ninth Amendment codifies that our rights are too numerous to list, and thus it requires the government to respect the natural unenumerated rights of all persons, in addition to those rights specifically enumerated.

The 10th Amendment reflects the ratifiers’ public understanding that the Constitution is a compact, voluntarily entered into by sovereign states; and when they entered, they only surrendered to the federal government those powers enumerated in the Constitution, and thus they retained the powers not surrendered.

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Woke Nonsense Is Warping Everyday Life, by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on August 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

Under the Biden administration, the rule of law, US borders, contractual rights, and race relations are crumbling. From Victor Davis Hanson at zerohedge.com:

Americans are growing angrier by the day, but in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or the Tea Party movement over a decade ago.

The rage this time is not just fueled by conservatives.

For the first time in their lives, Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their family’s safety and the American way of life.

The border is not just porous as in the pre-Trump past. It is arguably nonexistent. Some 2 million people may cross illegally in the current fiscal year, according to reports — with complete impunity. There is zero effort to stop them. Officials hector Americans daily to get vaccinated and tested for COVID-19. But they are mute about illegal entrants, some of them no doubt infected with the virus.

Have we ever had a president who made no pretense about destroying federal immigration law and asking of Americans what he does not ask of those entering the country illegally?

Joe Biden has also conceded that his moratorium on housing evictions defied a Supreme Court ruling. He added that he probably didn’t have the legal authority to ignore the court but didn’t really care.

As in the case of demolishing immigration law, the president seems either unaware or proud that he is insidiously dismantling the Constitution.

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Canceling the Constitution: Biden Hailed for Violating Rule of Law to Extend Eviction Moratorium, by Jonathan Turley

Posted on August 12, 2021 | Leave a comment

It’s clear that the Supreme Court considers the CDC’s eviction moratorium an unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’s powers, and its clear the Biden administration doesn’t give a damn. From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.org:

Below is my column in the Hill on the extension of the eviction moratorium — a move that his White House Counsel and most legal experts told him was unconstitutional. However, according to the Washington Post, Speaker Nancy Pelosi encouraged Biden to call Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe who reportedly advised hm that he had the authority. I have had many (and sharp) disagreements with Tribe over the years (including profane and personal attacks) but there is usually some good-faith underlying disagreement in controversies like impeachment. This is not such a case. I fail to see the credible basis for telling a President that the CDC can use the same authority that five justices just declared it did not have.

Here is the column:

During the 2020 presidential campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden told voters that the choice between him and Donald Trump was between the lawful and the lawless. He called for voters to support “the rule of law, our Constitution,” a choice repeated mantralike by the media to “end Trump’s assault on the rule of law.” Now, six months into his presidency, Biden is openly flouting the Constitution with a knowingly invalid extension of the eviction moratorium — and some law professors and advocates on the left are cheering him for it.

A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled on the authority of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to impose a nationwide moratorium on the eviction of renters during the pandemic. Some of us criticized the CDC order as unconstitutional. The reason is the breathtaking authority claimed by the CDC under a federal law that gives it the power to “make and enforce such regulations as in [its] judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases.”

I have long been a critic of such unchecked and undefined authority in pandemics. This, however, is a particularly chilling example. It would give the CDC authority over huge swaths of our economy to avoid even the possibility of the “introduction” or spread of a disease. It means that a Constitution designed to prevent tyranny and authoritarianism becomes largely irrelevant if you put on a white lab coat. After all, the law was designed to control disease, not democracy, as a public health priority.

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