Liberty, by Peter Mancus

 

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54. The Hamilton-Jefferson conflict continues. It is a conflict between Statism and Liberty. Statism is winning. Liberty is losing.

55. All of the major Founders and Framers expressed a personal belief in a Creator or Deity.

56. Today, many champions of Statism are atheists or agnostics who believe that civil authority is the source of all rights and that inalienable rights do not exist whereas many champions of Liberty believe a Creator [or Nature] is the source of all rights and that inalienable rights do exist.

57. The conflict between Statists [godless or god fearing, with or without a belief in inalienable rights] and Patriots [godless or god fearing, with a belief in inalienable rights derived from a Creator or Nature, and a strong commitment to maximize Individual Liberty per a Constitutional Rule of Law,] is growing. This conflict appears to be moving toward a flash point that will trigger overt insurrection and civil war. Many Patriots believe that many Statists have an agenda: to eliminate the idea of a Creator [or Nature] as the source of rights and to make a godless civil authority the sole source of rights. Statists believe X. Patriots believe Y. It remains to be seen how long X and Y can co-exist. A key challenge in our lifetime is coming to terms with this Statist-Patriot conflict. What Statists and Patriots believe appears to be 100% irreconcilable.

58. All laws contrary to the "supreme law of the land" are null and void, per the U.S. Supreme Court. Hence, no citizen is required to obey any law that is unconstitutional.

59. Legal and Constitutional are not necessarily the same. A law can be the former without being the later, even if a judge has not yet declared the law to be unconstitutional.

60. This nation was not united before September 11, 2001, and we are substantially less united now than before. This is because civil authority is using September 11 as another alleged necessity to gut individual liberty, in contravention of the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights, Liberty, Freedom, our Way of Life, our Constitutional Rule of Law, are increasingly becoming causalities of September 11. Patriots cannot, and will not, let that happen indefinitely.

61. The primary purpose of the Bill of Rights was to impose legally enforceable restraints against civil authority and to deny civil authority the exercise of arbitrary discretionary powers. Sadly, we are increasingly surrendering Liberty to civil authority and civil authority increasingly exercises unfettered, arbitrary powers. This is the opposite of what the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are about. Americans have come full circle relative to the Constitutional Rule of Law. Civil authority's train has jumped the Constitutional tracks. We are headed for a horrific, national scale, unprecedented, political-legal train wreck with a staggering body count and billions of dollars of destruction to our infrastructure and economy.

62. This train wreck can be, and should be, avoided. For this train wreck to be avoided, it is imperative that civil authority, and citizens, recognize that civil authority is out of control. We — as a nation — have broken faith with the Founders and the Framers. Most of civil authority and too many citizens fear freedom. We are living under the functional equivalent of, at best, a Judicial Aristocracy, or, at worse, Judicial Despotism. The Judiciary has seduced and co-opted the other branches of government. The Judiciary has done this by granting all branches of government immunities from civil authority's violation of Constitutional restraints, in contravention of the First Amendment's Right to Petition civil authority for redress of meritorious grievances.

63. This train wreck was set in motion by the so called "least dangerous branch of government"—the Judiciary. Anyone who believes that the Judiciary is the Guardian of the Constitutional Rule of Law and the Champion of Individual Liberty should read the following:

  • Max Boot's Out of Order: Arrogance, Corruption, and Incompetence on the Bench, ISBN 0-465-05432-3;
  • Raoul Berger's Government By Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment, ISBN 0-86597-144-7;
  • Henry Mark Holzer's and John A. Pugsley's Sweet Land of Liberty?: The Supreme Court and Individual Rights; and
  • John E. Wolfgram's "How the Judiciary Stole the Right to Petition," which is available on line at: www.constitution.org/arbus/wolfgram/ptnright.htm.

64. All branches of government are dangerous.

65. Governments are especially dangerous when each branch of government enjoys immunities from its wrongdoing, each branch gangs up in unison against ordinary folk, governments collect too much money in taxes, governments convert tax money into a bigger sword which governments wield to impose further oppression, governments pervert the language and the law to interpret away rights and to reduce rights to privileges, governments brainwash their cops and military personnel to function as government goons who commit horrors in the name of the law, and governments manipulate citizens against themselves by spewing forth rhetoric and concepts that cannot withstand close scrutiny.

66. Make no mistake: civil authority's agents, especially judges, use language as a powerful tool to increase civil authority's powers and to insulate civil authority from its enemies, real and imagined.

67. Government is alarmingly dangerous when it repeatedly blows through Constitutional red lights; when it stiff arms citizens' petitions for redress of meritorious grievances; when it fails to obey its own laws; when it insists that citizens must turn perfectly square corners—on a dime, while it arbitrarily, at its leisurely pace, turns well rounded corners—outside the Constitution's limits; and when it coerces citizens to pay an increasingly heavy tax burden while eroding rights.

68. The U.S. Supreme Court is charged with enforcing the U.S. Constitution by maintaining a proper Constitutional balance. It is supposed to be a neutral umpire between civil authority and citizens. Starting in the 1830's, however, and continuing to date, the U.S. Supreme Court has done all of the following: 

  • it invented the Doctrine of Governmental Immunity. Per that doctrine, it granted the Judiciary, the Executive and the Legislature, and many of their subordinates, legal immunity from lawsuits. Immunity conflicts with the First Amendment's Right to Petition for Redress of Meritorious Grievances. Such immunities mock the Right to Petition. When the Right to Petition is gutted, civil authority has laid down the following challenge to citizens: wear your chains and shut up or take up arms and fight. 
  • it invented the Doctrine of Judicial Review. Per that doctrine, it boldly declared that it alone has the power to decide what the Constitution means, how the Constitution should be applied and what is and is not Constitutional. 
  • to consolidate its power to be sole interpreter of the Constitution, it declared that all judges must follow its decisions—its legal precedents. This set up a "follow the leader" situation. This arrangement assumes that the "leader" is correct, wise and leads prudently and Constitutionally. [This "follow the leader" concept reminds me of what happened to the U.S. Air Force's famous Thunderbird fight demonstration team a few years ago when they were flying T-38s. On a training flight over the desert, the leader, Thunderbird No. 1 (the equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court) failed to pull up from a loop. He flew himself into the ground. Since the team was flying in their famous tight diamond formation, with pilot Nos. 2-4 looking at No. 1, those carefully selected, hand picked, gifted pilots, self-destructed. While it is true that problems can arise when everyone is free to go their own way without any authority holding it all together, what happened to those Thunderbird pilots illustrates well what can happen when the "leader" commits an error.] 
  • it put all judges in a logical trap: all judges take an oath to uphold, support and defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Simultaneously, all judges, per the U.S. Supreme Court, are required to obey all "controlling" legal precedents. [This system assumes that all previous court decisions are Constitutional, which is an erroneous assumption. The real law is the Constitution, as worded. What a judge or a panel of judges says is the law is only the Judiciary's interpretation of the law. That interpretation is not a substitute for the real law—the Constitution. Thus, all judges face this stark conflict: When deciding a case, does a judge honor his or her duty to obey his oath and adhere to the Constitution as the "supreme law of the land" or does the judge "follow the leader," even when the "leader" is wrong?] 
  • it ruled that the Bill of Rights is not binding on the states. [That ruling allowed the states to become oppressors and do the feds' dirty work for them, which triggered the 1860-1865 Civil War.] 
  • then, after passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, it invented the Doctrine of Selective Incorporation of the Bill of Rights Against the States via the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This doctrine was invented in belated realization of the intolerable harm the states were imposing on their citizens after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Bill of Rights is not binding on the states. 
  • in the process of inventing this Doctrine of Selective Incorporation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that only those rights which it, and it alone, deems are "fundamental" to what it describes as "ordered liberty," as determined by it, and only it, are binding against the states. [Think about what rights should be declared "fundamental".] 
  • to further consolidate its power to be sole arbitrator as to what is the law, after ordering judges to obey it, judges, in jury trials, now order jurors to obey them. Trial judges, therefore, serve as conduits for compelling jurors to obey the U.S. Supreme Court. Typically, all trial judges order jurors to obey what the trial judge tells them is the law. Rarely, if ever, are jurors instructed that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land and that they have a duty to first enforce the Constitution. Thus, jurors are reduced to determining only what are the facts and are ordered not to judge the law. This is because the Judiciary is adamant that it has a monopoly on the right to determine what is the law and to insist that all must kowtow to its interpretation of what is the law. 
  • by inventing these doctrines that hog tie citizens, it devalued U.S. citizenship.

69. The U.S. Supreme Court created serious legal and practical problems when it invented the Doctrine of Governmental Immunity, when it invented the Doctrine of Judicial Review, and when it ruled that the Bill of Rights is not binding against the states. An abbreviated specification of some of these problems follows.

As to the Immunity Problem, all of the following is true:

  • Government Immunity conflicts with the peoples' Right to Petition. Immunity places government above and against the Constitution and the people.
  • Immunity allows government to hide behind its wrongdoing and to stiff arm the people with impunity.
  • Immunity makes a mockery of citizens being sovereign and of the idea of the Constitutional Rule of Law.
  • Immunity is a throw back to the Divine Right of Kings to rule arbitrarily with no accountability.
  • When cloaked with immunity, civil authority and its agents have no incentive to do a good job because they know that immunity protects them from repercussions of doing a bad job.
  • Immunity undercuts, dilutes, and perverts the essence of rights.
  • Citizens have no rights and have lost control of civil authority when civil authority can violate citizens' rights and escape accountability by hiding behind immunity.
  • Immunity, coupled with civil authority's prolonged abuse of its powers, motivates citizens to resort to force to hold civil authority accountable or to replace it.
  • Immunity begets insurrection and civil war.

As to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that the Bill of Rights is not binding on the states, all of the following is true:

  • That ruling encouraged the states to abuse their citizens and to continue to treat slaves as property instead of as human beings.That ruling laid the foundation for the 1860-1865 Civil War.
  • That civil war was exploited by Statists who used the alleged necessity of that war to increase civil authority's power and to reduce individual liberty.

70. Victim disarmament laws [which is a more accurate description of prior restraint gun control laws] have their origins in slavery and racism. This is because from the late 1600's to 1865, slave owners in the colonies and in the United States feared uprisings by armed slaves; therefore, they passed race-specific laws that targeted slaves to keep slaves disarmed.

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