Election Angst

On November 8^th, the last ballots will be cast for Representatives, Senators and a President. At the risk of betraying my age, I recall when nearly all voting was done on election day, and local newspapers and TV devoted as much time to reps and senators as they did to presidential campaigns. Election coverage shared space with other important national and world news.

No more. Reps and senators get comparatively little press exposure. World news, to the extent that it is noticed at all, is colored to cause the least embarrassment possible to Obama. Most news from all sources is devoted to the two major candidates for president. This CEO, the chief executive of a republic, has, over time, assumed powers far beyond the boundaries of Article II in our Constitution. The rest of the central government exists in the shadow of the President. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Presidential elections have become winner-take-all cage fights, in which the victor is expected to reward supporters and use the powers of office to punish opponents. Instead of a calm and orderly process in which a republic simply replaces one patriotic chief executive with another, elections have become a national trauma, a high-stakes blood sport between irreconcilable factions. Should the psycho Hillary win, is there any doubt she will keep her promise to silence her enemies, beginning with Breitbart News?

In a recent post at the Rutherford Institute, John W. Whitehead wrote,

American presidents have anointed themselves with the power to wage war, unilaterally kill Americans, torture prisoners, strip citizens of their rights, arrest and detain citizens indefinitely, carry out warrantless spying on Americans, and erect their own secretive, shadow government. These are the powers that will be inherited by the next heir to the throne, and it won’t make a difference whether it’s a President Trump or a President Clinton occupying the Oval Office.

The office of President of the United States, first held by George Washington who turned down tyrannical powers offered up to him by the Continental Army, has become tyrannical. By tyrannical, I refer to the definition provided by John Locke: one who exercises power not found anywhere in the Constitution is a tyrant. The next president will have all such powers, those currently in the hands of Obama. If history is a guide, he or she will pile on more.

John Adams’ government of laws has fallen prey to a government of men. The source of our national angst is anxiety over how the next president will implement despotic powers that no American President can rightfully claim. Public tranquility and free government are impossible under these circumstances.

Whitehead closes his column with, “It will be we the people—not the president, the politicians, the corporate elite or the media—who will suffer the consequences when freedom falls and tyranny rises. They may justify violating our freedoms in the name of whatever phantom menace-of-the-month threatens “national security,” but we will always be the ones to pay the price.”

Our governing institutions are incapable of reform, of reversing accelerating despotism. It is up to us, via Article V, to restore free government. We are the many; our oppressors are the few. Be proactive. Be a Re-Founder. Join Convention of States. Sign the COS Petition.