Neither the ancient Romans nor our British ancestors had written Constitutions. Their supreme law was whatever the Senate or King-in-Parliament determined. While the United States has a written Constitution, it’s honored in the breach, and is often twisted to suit the social justice goals of political opportunists. Time and neglect rendered the supreme law of the land a corrupted dead-letter known as a living and breathing Constitution in which the hard clauses that established the three branches, and little else, remain. In comparison, our quaint and written Constitution is an anachronistic memory of the living and breathing beast that replaced it.
The 17th Amendment of 1913, of course, upended the Framers’ federal design. Under a newly democratized Congress, the march of egalitarian equality progressed in fits and starts to this day, but with a twist. Hyphenated groups increasingly claim special privileges and find justice based on something of a sliding and shifting scale of intersectionality in which native-born Americans are at the bottom. After fifty years, what was once derided as “affirmative action,” evolved into diversity and extra privileges and immunities for the various American identities, illegal aliens and muslims. While none of this is backed up by Article I law, the unintended yet entirely foreseeable outcome of an ever-increasing Congressional democratic element is less equality.
Hand-in-hand with a hierarchy of rights and privileges are unwritten and unspoken exceptions to the scale of justice, the rule of laws and regulations. One of the exceptions is that justice is different for those near the top of government and those who are not.
In large ways or small, we’ve all experienced the petty jackboot of government. The IRS promised nasty outcomes if I didn’t cough up $30. A local in my hometown went to prison for shooting a bald eagle. Traffic light cameras. Remember the elderly vet in Montana financially ruined and imprisoned by Obama’s EPA for digging ponds on his farm?
For the average person, much of American law evolved into something of a snare. We aren’t always snared, but a vindictive prosecutor or regulator has a flexible toolbox of instruments at-the-ready to make nearly anyone miserable. Ask Lt. Gen. Flynn. On the other hand, for the un-average person, the law for real crimes, both felonies and high crimes against the Constitution curiously don’t apply to certain elected or appointed high officials.
At a presser in the midst of the recent impeachment follies, stand-up comedienne Nancy Pelosi said “No one is above the law.” I don’t recall if she told this whopper before or after publication of Peter Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption, Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite. If, like me, you’ve wondered why the US spends so much on foreign aid, it’s the source of many millions in kickbacks to the elite’s friends and family, like those of Slow-Joe Biden.
The intelligence community knows all of it, yet doesn’t leak the dirt to media as long as the crooked politician, as Chuckie Schumer related, don’t threaten the intel folks. Don’t think of it as corruption. Consider it political symbiosis. It also means many elites, in both parties, are fatally compromised and incapable of, in the ultimate challenge, to observe their oaths of office. It’s what crosses my mind every time a grandstanding senator like Lindsey Graham promises to get to the bottom of Obamagate . . . then does nothing.1 So, despite the open secret of Obama’s attempted coup d’état, the high criminals walk free, write books, and get slurpy well-paid gigs at CNN or MSWhatever.
While their outward target remains President Trump, they actually work to depose you and me, We the People who framed the government they hope to finish off. Oh, if they prevail and aren’t punished, there will still be elections, except they won’t matter. Ask Bernie. Venezuela and Russia have elections too. While I wouldn’t be disappointed with hanging, drawing and quartering the plotters, I’m a reasonable citizen and would settle for a couple dozen well-deserved impeachments and felony convictions, beginning with Hisself.
All of this is really bad news in a republic where the supreme and statutory law theoretically exists to secure equal justice. We have popular elections, referenda, democracy and laws all over the place. No other people are so politically involved, yet our prosperity and liberty increasingly hinge on the outcome of presidential and congressional elections. Per our written Constitution, it wasn’t supposed to be this way.
What is the appropriate response to government, the supposed caretaker of law, that operates outside the law to the detriment of the people? We know what the American Founders would say and do. Not an insignificant number of their indictments of George III involved his corruption of the law, including the British constitution itself. Eight of them denied equal justice, and one dealt with Crown influence over colonial judges. This anachronism, of one set of laws for Englishmen in England, and another for the king’s colonial subjects in America lead to civil disorders, then civil war, revolution, and independence.
Who granted immunity under a different set of unwritten laws to our “betters” for bribery, graft, perjury and murder? Shall the crimes for which private men suffer the worst punishments exempt those with the power and influence? Shall the laws that aim at the prevention of crimes patronize the highest, and become a noose to the innocent they’re designed to protect?
Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies, anachronistic corruptions of what William Gladstone described as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the hand and purpose of man.”
1. The seminal moment for me was the Brett Kavanaugh made-for-TV spectacle. Senate Judiciary Committee GOP lawyers, including former prosecutors, melted away in fright at the thought of cross-examining an obviously lying woman, Christine Blasey Ford.
2. Chuck Schumer recently threatened the lives of two Supreme Court Justices.