When the Constitution Fails Us
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.
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.
There are two approaches to this question: A formal and a functional approach. Formally, the Constitution is still the supreme law of the land and enjoys vitality. Formally, the government the Constitution established persists in America. But functionally, as an instrument of restraint, the Constitution is an abysmal failure. The feds regulate, tax, coerce, steal and kill, and they bully the states — as they see fit. Every day, some government official who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution violates it with impunity.
None of these violations — short of the War Between the States — has been more public, affected more people and produced more harm than the executive orders issued by mayors and governors in the name of public health. Even the states caved, as very few tried to protect the liberties that the Constitution guarantees.
It will soon get worse.
As the Biden administration grows more fearful of its inability to control the latest strains of COVID-19, it will begin to use coercive means to compel mask-wearing and vaccine administration. These so-called health measures are essentially experiments that, when administered coercively by the government, violate the letter, values and lessons of Nuremberg.
If vaccines work, why do we need masks? If masks work, why do we need vaccines? If I am a free person, why do I need the government telling me how to be healthy? If only the legislative branch of government can write laws, why do we allow mayors and governors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to do so? If the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, how can government attack the rights the Constitution protects? If freedom is our birthright, what has become of it?
The time has come to nullify government interferences with personal autonomy by disregarding them, and to threaten seriously to leave and ignore the governments that hate our freedoms. If we don’t do this, make way for voluntary servitude.
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