The Foundation

“But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.” –John Adams

Government

“At the heart of the American idea is the deep distrust and suspicion the founders of our nation had for government, distrust and suspicion not shared as much by today’s Americans. Some of the founders’ distrust is seen in our Constitution’s language such as Congress shall not: abridge, infringe, deny, disparage, violate and deny. If the founders did not believe Congress would abuse our God-given rights, they would not have provided those protections. After all, one would not expect to find a Bill of Rights in Heaven; it would be an affront to God. Other founder distrust for government is found in the Constitution’s separation of powers, checks and balances and the several anti-majoritarian provisions such as the Electoral College and the requirement that three-quarters of state legislatures ratify changes in the Constitution. The three branches of our federal government are no longer bound by the Constitution as the framers envisioned and what is worse is American ignorance and acceptance of such rogue behavior. Look at the current debate over government involvement in health, business bailouts and stimulus packages. The debate centers around questions as whether such involvement is a good idea or a bad idea and whether one program is more costly than another. Those questions are entirely irrelevant to what should be debated, namely: Is such government involvement in our lives permissible under the U.S. Constitution? That question is not part of the debate. The American people, along with our elected representatives, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, care less about what is and what is not permissible under our Constitution. They think Congress has the right to do anything upon which they can secure a majority vote, whether they have the constitutional or moral authority to do so or not.” –George Mason economics professor Walter E. Williams

Liberty

“Can President Barack Obama and Congress enact legislation that orders Americans to buy broccoli? If so, where did they get that authority? What provision in the Constitution empowers the federal government to order an individual to buy a product he does not want? This is not a question about nutrition. It is not a question about whether broccoli is good for you or about the relative merits of broccoli versus other foods. It is a question about the constitutional limits on the power of the federal government. It is a question about freedom. Can President Obama and Congress enact legislation that orders Americans to buy health insurance? They might as well order Americans to buy broccoli. They have no legitimate authority to do either. Yet neither Obama nor the current leadership in Congress seems to care about the constitutional limits on their power. They are now attempting to exert authority over the lives of Americans in a way no president and Congress has done before. … All versions of the health care bill under consideration in Congress would order Americans to buy health insurance. If any of these bills is enacted, the first thing it would accomplish is the amputation of a vital part of our Constitution, and the death of another measure of our liberty.” –CNSNews.com Editor in Chief Terence Jeffrey

Faith & Family

“Hard work and self-denial were part of our national character – actually our Christian heritage. In recent years, the ‘sound economic values’ have eroded. … But the problem, you see, is that values and the character they produce aren’t divisible. People will not exercise restraint in their economic dealings while casting off restraints in their sexual and social ones. … Or turn on the television. There, people are indulging every sexual desire in the midst of a consumerist paradise – big homes, expensive cars and fashionable clothes. You can do anything you want. The ‘Calvinist restraint’ … didn’t preach chastity or thrift; rather it preached chastity and thrift. That’s because it saw both as proceeding from a common source: the Christian understanding of man’s nature and the purpose for which God created him. If you try to have the one without the other, you will get neither. Far from being obsolete, the old culture war is more relevant than ever. Restoring moral values across the board is essential to rescue a sagging economy as well as renew our nation’s spirit.” –author Chuck Colson

Culture

“Quick: when I say ‘Matthew Shepard,’ what do you think? A man killed because he was gay? Or just some poor sap in the wrong place at the wrong time? More on that in a minute. Hate crime legislation aimed at making it a federal crime to assault someone for being a homosexual passed the House last week, and could be on its way to becoming law. It sounds great, doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t be against a law that would prosecute someone for targeting another person based on bigotry and bias? What could be wrong with this scenario? Plenty. I’m all for prosecuting criminals for their acts, especially violent criminals. I’m pro-death penalty, if truth be told. I figure that if you deliberately take someone else’s life, you should pay by forfeiting yours. Not very PC of me, but there you have it. However, it bothers me that individuals may soon be prosecuted for not just the crime, but the ‘behind the scenes’ thoughts that may have contributed to that crime. … When we begin to prosecute for the thoughts behind the crime, we open a very wiggly can of worms that can’t be shut again. … Thanks to the pop culture myth that helped perpetrate the false reason for Matthew Shepard’s senseless death, we could now all be facing regulations that resemble ‘1984’ more than they do ‘Land of the Free.’ Is this really the direction in which we want to head?” –columnist Pam Meister

The Gipper

“Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than ensuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society. Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business … frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. Our party must be based on the kind of leadership that grows and takes its strength from the people. Any organization is in actuality only the lengthened shadow of its members. A political party is a mechanical structure created to further a cause. The cause, not the mechanism, brings and holds the members together. And our cause must be to rediscover, reassert and reapply America’s spiritual heritage to our national affairs. Then with God’s help we shall indeed be as a city upon a hill with the eyes of all people upon us.” –Ronald Reagan

Opinion in Brief

“President Obama keeps roaring out deadlines like a lion – only later to meow like a little kitty. Remember, for example, how he bellowed to cheering partisan crowds that he would close down the detainment facility at Guantanamo within a year? The clock ticks – and Guantanamo isn’t close to being shut down. It once was easy for candidate Obama to deplore George W. Bush’s supposed gulag. Now it proves harder to decide between the bad choice of detaining non-uniformed terrorist combatants and the worse ones of letting them go, giving them civilian trials or deporting them to unwilling hosts. Going back further to September 2007, candidate Obama postured about Iraq that he wanted ‘to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year – now!’ That ‘now!’ sure sounded macho. On Iraq, candidate Obama also railed that ‘the American people have had enough of the shifting spin. We’ve had enough of extended deadlines for benchmarks that go unmet.’ Talk about ‘unmet’ deadlines and ‘spin’– here we are in October 2009, and there are still 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The reason why Obama fudged on his promised deadline is that the surge in 2007 worked. American deaths plummeted. The theater is quiet. Iraqi democracy is still there after six years. Obama cannot quite admit these facts, but on the other hand he does not want to be responsible for undermining them. … The list of what a melodramatic Obama threatens or promises to do and what he actually does is endless.” –Hoover Institution historian Victor Davis Hanson

For the Record

“[O]n Thursday, the administration tried to make [the MSM] complicit in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department made available Ken Feinberg, the executive pay czar, for interviews with the White House ‘pool’ news organizations – except Fox. The other networks admirably refused, saying they would not interview Feinberg unless Fox was permitted to as well. The administration backed down. This was an important defeat because there’s a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they’re engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. There’s nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms. [James] Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand ‘the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties.’ They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other – and an otherwise imperious government. Factions should compete, but they should also recognize the legitimacy of other factions and, indeed, their necessity for a vigorous self-regulating democracy. Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimize and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian.” –columnist Charles Krauthammer

Reader Comments

“I have just finished reading the essay ‘The Rights and Obligations of Liberty’ and again thank Mark Alexander for putting words to some of my deepest concerns for our republic. Lately I read another essay that dealt with the many conservative think tanks that essentially sit around and preach to the choir when all those resources may be better spent reaching out to our future generations. This is not the case with The Patriot Post. There is such a great need to educate and inform both our nations educators and even more directly all students from grade school up in the Rights and Obligations of Liberty I do not know where to start. Clearly the children singing their mmm mmm mmm songs are the canaries in the mines of our public( or as some may say ‘government’) education system. I applaud the Essential Liberty Project for opening the vent shafts in our education system so that our children may breathe free the message about the Rights and Obligations of Liberty.” –Richard

“What great timing with this article! Today our package of 50 copies of the Declaration of Independence/Constitution came to the house. Even my husband and sons were more excited about that than the delivery of 50 cigars yesterday. Thank you for the good work you do.” –K.

“While I appreciate Mark Alexander’s grasp of constitutional principles I feel compelled to point out something to you. You lamented that most people under 50 have never had a basic civics course. Do you know a single state run academic institution that offers such a course? My observation is that 100% teach statism, advanced federalism, whatever you want to call it, the theory that big brother is the answer to all our problems.” –Gary

“‘Welfare’ means two different things, depending on whether it’s applied to individuals or to states. Our current government seems to think its job is to promote ‘specific’ welfare and not ‘general’ welfare. And that’s where the whole thing will fall apart because that’s where demagogues will promise the people whatever goodies they want in exchange for keeping the officeholders in power.” –Becky

The Last Word

“Back when I was a kid, the two major fears in America revolved around polio and Communism. Because the first disease was so prevalent and so often fatal prior to the miraculous cures wrought by Dr. Albert Sabin and Dr. Jonas Salk, neither of whom managed to garner a Nobel Prize for their heroic efforts, children were kept out of public swimming pools and were discouraged from having too much physical activity. It’s a wonder that our entire generation didn’t grow up to be hypochondriacs because if you were even slightly fatigued or had an aching back or a stiff neck, anguished parents started measuring you for an iron lung. The second disease, Communism, created its own form of hysteria. During the late 40s and early 50s, we had A-bomb drills in public schools. We grammar school kids were led to believe that in case the Russians hit L.A. with an atomic bomb, we would be safe so long as we dropped to the floor and huddled beneath our desks with our hands clasped tightly behind our necks. As everyone knows, there’s nothing better than tiny hands to ward off the effects of atomic radiation. To this day, I wonder who came up with that particular brainstorm. On the off-chance that the Russkies elected not to vaporize us, a lot of people were convinced that the plan to prevent tooth decay by introducing fluoride into our reservoirs was a Commie plot. The fluoride, we were warned, would turn our brains to mush and make us easy prey for the Soviet Menace. It’s taken about 60 years, but I am now convinced that the scaremongers were right. How else to explain American liberals except by accepting that the Commies contaminated our water supply?” –columnist Burt Prelutsky