The Constitution's Governmental Cage Match Works

 

Leave the cage alone!

The US Constitution brilliantly created a style of government that resembles, if nothing else in modern culture - the inimitable wrestling cage match. The recent kerfuffle over the Supreme Court has pundits coming out of the woodwork with suggestions ranging from a constitutional convention of states (there's a scary idea) to packing the court, a practice that could go on until there are 40 or 50 judges on the court and nothing would ever get done. The biggest complaint from my side of the political aisle is that allowing the packing of the court would make the court an arm of whatever party that packed the court more effectively.

This would be a very bad idea I believe. The Supreme Court is not, nor should not be an arm of the administration or of the congress. It serves as the arbiter between those two branches and the Constitution. While there is this idealism around how law and judicial justice should be free of contamination by religious tenets and beliefs, that's just not possible, especially since people who consider themselves non-religious bring their own ideology/religion to bear in how they view laws and justice. Marxism, socialism, atheism and other anti-Christian ideologies are as much religion as Christianity, Islam or Buddhism. 

The Western legal tradition draws most of its view of what is legal and what should not be from the stone tablets Moses dragged down from Mt. Sinai (and promptly broke). It says something that despite Israel's apostasy and Moses' temper tantrum, God made him climb back up the mountain and this time to carve a copy of the commandments out of rock. Western law is built on the code inscribed on those tablets.

There is a place in Revelation full of symbolism which seems to say that His people would, near the end of time, flee to a wilderness place of safety from rising persecution. I think He was talking about the United States, which in its time became a refuge from religious persecution for all sorts of Protestants fleeing Catholic persecution and more than a few Catholics who were on the receiving end of persecution by both church and state. 

One of the symbols for this refuge to which the "woman" (God's church invisible) flees is symbolized by another beast that was like a lamb but spoke like a dragon. Having confronted a bull buffalo once, I suspect that was what John saw. Don't mess with those guys. The buffalo would be an excellent symbol for a place of refuge. The American bison is pretty peaceful mostly, but threaten the herd or more foolishly, their calves, and they'll flip your car upside down and tramp on it. Later the lamblike beast

The point is that the Constitution was brilliantly designed to limit governmental power. It basically created a cage match arena that pits 3 coequal powers against each other if they disagree yet gives them the ability to cooperate when it makes overwhelming sense to do so. The Constitution surrounds the arena, limiting the fight to the inside of the arena and regulating what comes out of the arena to the rest of us.

As a conservative, I prefer to keep the power of the arena limited. Fight it out all y'all wish, but only let out of the arena what everybody is, if not happy with, at least able to accept with some grace. I admit I prefer my judicial system to lean to the right (Ecclesiastes 10:2), but that there should be some debate, I find healthy. The Supreme Court has made some bad decisions in the past, Dred Scott, Buck v. Bell, Plessy v Ferguson, Roe v. Wade (I know some will disagree violently with me on that last one, but I rather think that a decision that led to the death of more than 52 million unborn infants is one of the more horrible ones since Herod, Pharoah, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and others who took on themselves power to murder millions by government decree.

For closing in on 2 1/2 centuries, the system has worked to stem the tide of evil caused by greed, self-centeredness, lust for power and the odd burst of mass insanity. It's no surprise then that people with an agenda, facing a system that blocks them at most every turn would want to alter the Constitution or simply ignore it and do what they want. So far the venerable document has managed to hold on, balancing power to kind of hold at bay the principal articulate by Frank Herbert. "It's not that power corrupts, but that power attracts the corruptible." 

So long as we can make the urge to tyrannical power too difficult to accomplish within the arena, we'll be okay. But beware of those who would tear down the cage that holds them in. They are not your friends. They are enemies of America as it is.

© 2023 by Tom King

Why the "Star Spangled Banner" is NOT Racist!

Enough blood's been shed for your freedom - stand up out of respect!

There are four verses to the national anthem. None of them are racist. For the most part we stop singing after the first anyway, but there is no other reason for this than that a national anthem should not delay the baseball, football or basketball game, nor delay the president's speech or the flyover by the Air Force.

Lately, however, a line from one of the unsung verses has been used as an excuse for sitting down during the playing of the anthem by Americans concerned with institutionalized (you guessed it) RACISM in America.  Before you make assumptions about racism in our nation's anthem, you should perhaps read it for yourself.  Here's the "offensive" verse.

TRIGGER WARNING:  The Star Spangled Banner was written by a man with some education who used words and grammatical constructions suitable for reading by other educated folk - high school or maybe college level for our latest flocks of high school graduates more probably. So if you read at a fourth grade level, the only thing you are going to pick up in this verse of the anthem is that it uses the "S" word and will merrily jump to conclusions from there. I have added explanatory comments in italics for those of you from Rio Linda.

Verse 3

• And where is that band who so vauntingly swore, (he means the British Army)
• That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
• A home and a Country should leave us no more? (he means they want to defeat the USA)
• Their blood has wash'd out their foul footstep's pollution.(i.e. patriot blood has purified the stain on America's honor left by the British attacks)
• No refuge could save the hireling and slave (he's not talking about black people - see below)
• From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,(from getting their fuzzy butt's kicked)
• And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
• O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

 YES!  The infamous third verse of the national anthem does use the "S" word. In their desperate search for trigger words that wound their delicate sensibilities, the precious snowflakes who make up the Progressive Left automatically assume that when Key said "SLAVES" that the verse is racist. 

IT IS NOT! 

The slaves in question (and hirelings) that Francis Scott Key was referring to were not American negroes enslaved throughout the South.  Key was talking about the mercenary and conscripted forces of the British Army who were conscripted out of their colonies and conquests. None of these "slaves" to the British were American Negroes nor can be understood as such. Scott never meant for the term "slaves" to be construed this way.

Don't you love the way progressives get all animated over trigger words like "slave" as though only black people can be slaves?  I mean, how racist is it to assume that only black people can be slaves? This meaning was not inherent in how we used the word slaves back in Key's day. In the early days of the United States, anyone who was compelled to obey a tyrant, would be considered a slave no matter what color they were. The British Army often used conscripted troops, but to the American way of thinking, no one who served a tyrant, however willingly, could be consider any less than a slave.

The US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are not documents that allow much room for slavery anyway. Despite compromises within the Constitution over how to count slaves in apportioning congressional districts, there was such a disconnect between the high language of the preamble and the Bill of Rights that the abolition of slavery was an inevitability, built into the bones of the document itself.

In fact, years later at the outbreak of the Civil War, Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens in his famous "Cornerstone Speech", argued that secession was necessary to preserve the South's "peculiar institution" (slavery). Stephens argued that the US Constitution "rested upon the assumption of the equality of races". He claimed that because the Negro wasn't equal to the whites, the South must, therefore, secede or see slavery inevitably abolished. Yes, it took a while, but, in the end, the purpose of the Founders, equality of all men, was achieved. Though the principle of racial equality was established, again it took more bloodshed, and once again, the blood of patriots helped wash away the stain upon our national honor - or at least should have.

Once again, however, people in power wish to preserve the appearance of a gulf between Americans based on race as a way to keep a racial minority bound to the Democrat plantation. These "progressive" leaders attempt prove that there is such a gulf by claiming racism is so bad that black college students, for instance, should be segregated by skin color to protect them from having their feelings hurt.

Does anyone besides me hear the echoes of ancient bigotry in a policy like that. And we conservatives are faced with it on the extreme ends of our own political ideology. The alt/right Americans (many of whom support Donald Trump) who call decent Christian conservatives "cuckservatives" and race traitors are no better than their paternalistic elitist brethren on the left. They've swung so far to the right they have bumped butts with the racist Progressive left around on the far side of the Earth. That we listen to either of these groups with other than contempt and laughter worries me.

It tells me Jesus is not too far from making a second appearance to the squabbling children of Earth. And as to whether any of this stuff is going to get better or not, I don't think so. Just remember. The Second Coming is a rescue mission and not an occupation or conquest. We're going to leave it all behind to burn itself down. We'll be coming back later to replant and rebuild.

I'm really looking forward to that.

© 2016 by Tom King

The Ides of the American Republic

Roman Republicans understood that Caesar was the problem, but the mob in the
end brought down the Republic and gave themselves an Emperor anyway.

A lot of conservatives, especially the stubborn constitutionalists in the group keep reminding us all that we are a republic and not a democracy. Trouble is they do it on conservative websites where we already know that. I think everyone on the conservative side gets it that we are a Republic. We've talked about it enough. There's not a need to harp on that and nitpick at words of commentators who casually use the term democracy in commentaries. The real need just now is not to convince ourselves, but to convince the mob of the value of a Republic at a time, when the mob is clamoring for an emperor to rule them.

We are, in fact, a democratic republic (not the socialist kind, but the real kind). Such a structure protects us from mob rule as the founders of our nation intended. That said, we are also a democracy in the sense of one man/one vote. We are the opposite of an aristocracy, even though aristocracies may allow folk to vote.  That distinction should be made very clear so long as we are nit-picking. You can have a Republic of aristocrats as well as the democratic sort. In an aristocratic Republic, some men are worth more than others. It was one of the great flaws of the Roman Republic and it is one of the great flaws we have seen in the Republican Party of late.

Unfortunately, for the founding fathers to make this country work, they had to accept a more egalitarian to be sure, yet still a kind of class-based republicanism, in which slaves and women were not allowed to vote or were only counted as 3/5ths of a person. We were, at first, very much a nation of white males.The founders were, however, wise enough to build into the Constitution what Confederate VP Alexander Stephens called "the seeds of the destruction of our peculiar institution". He was referring, of course, to slavery, but I would argue that the founders also built into the Constitution an innate antagonism to any form of inequality. In doing so, the founders inevitably triggered societal changes that led to the emancipation of women and slaves, civil rights for all, fair treatment of native Americans and free market capitalism.

The elitist faction of our country have never been entirely comfortable with a government of the people, by the people and for the people. They've always seen themselves as a kind of American nobility and have always fought the tsunami of freedom initiated by the Constitution and Bill of Rights in one manner or another in an attempt to secure their positions at the head of society.  Along the way they clung to slavery, glommed onto Darwinism, eugenics and socialism, passed Jim Crow laws and used media as a social engineering tool to secure the place of our betters (themselves). The saw their rightful place in the world as at the top and have used wealth, influence and education to secure that position. It's not accidental that the first feature film, Birth of a Nation, glorifies the Ku Klux Klan. Propaganda got an early start as an art form in all media.

And always the Constitution and the people (whom the government is of and by) have pushed back. In large part this has been due to the teaching of the Constitution's values to children in school. Inculcating the idea that all men are created equal has had a powerful effect and is the secret to America's success and longevity. It's not surprising, then, that there has been such a powerful effort to rewrite history as taught in school and to downplay the importance of the very document that made this nation the first bastion of true freedom in the world.

Of course, the elitist new nobility had to stop that sort of nonsense. The lower classes might be taught to believe they were as good as the upper classes in America and they could not have that. So now we teach our kids to admire wealth and celebrity instead of courage and good behavior. We've taught our kids to laugh at the Horatio Alger stories, to deride moral courage and altruism and to sneer at the founders of our nation, criticizing them for the very sins their work helped our nation to eventually overcome and reject. Then they taught our children that there is no such thing as sin. And mind you that the organizations and individuals who now undeservedly claim the moral high ground are the very ones who throughout our nation's history who have defended the sins they now claim to abhor.

I do believe the battle has come to a head in this election where we have a choice between an outright socialist and an outright crony capitalist (which is itself little more than a corporate welfare state). Now, in this election we find out whether the more "democratic" American Republic has more backbone than the old class-based Roman Republic. Will we choose an emperor or will we, as the wife of the last great president of the United States once advised, "Just say NO!". 

Sadly, even if the Republican leadership does manage somehow to assassinate the disaster that is the Trump candidacy, we've already seen how this works out before. For every Julius there is an Augustus elevated by the mob, followed by a Tiberius, then a Caligula, a Claudius and then a Nero, followed by flames as the last of the Old Republic goes up in smoke. People say God's will will inevitably be worked out. Best hope His will doesn't include America going up in flames.

There is an ancient Chinese curse that goes, "May you live in interesting times."  Well this next few yours should certainly be interesting.

© 2016 by Tom King