CONSTITUTIONALGOV.NET

As I have spent the last 2 ½ years (the time at which I became awake) trying to awake my friends and associates as to what is going on in America, I find that I have made very little progress.  Spending over two years devoted to something and seeing very little progress is disheartening to say the least, but there comes a point where one just gives up as seeing ones efforts as an exercise in futility.  For those of you who know me, you know I don’t give up that easily.  An exercise in futility or not, I will continue to hound you to wake up albeit the frequency of my requests will be diminished because frankly I have a business to run and grow and can only devote limited time to political endeavors.

The title of this piece is “One Day You’ll Wake Up and It’s Gone.”  I want to hammer this point home to you today.  From a personal perspective, I know the meaning of those words in my professional life.  Many of you have been fortunate enough to avoid the impact of this recession; I wasn’t that fortunate, but I wouldn’t trade that misfortunate for anything.  In the time that I was laid off from my job, as most of you know, I have taken great financial losses, but I’m still making it.  I may have gone through my personal and retirement savings, but I still own my home (even if it’s worth less than half what I paid for it).  I’ve started a business which is finally making enough money per month to support my expenditures, and I am happier than I have been for a very long time.

I learned a lot about myself when I was laid off, and I learned not to take anything for granted.  More important than anything else, I reacquainted myself with God, and for the first time in my life, I finally believe in God and feel a personal relationship with Christ.  This is no small thing for a former agnostic, and I am grateful everyday for having achieved this relationship with Christ.  What I wish to share with you today is that one day you will wake up and find that everything is gone.  I’m here to try to encourage you to wake up before that happens.

While slumbering myself, during the George Bush administration, the Patriot Act was passed.  Do any of you know what is in the Patriot Act?  Do any of you know that your 4^th amendment rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution have been reduced due to the Patriot Act?  The Patriot Act allows for warrantless wiretaps.  The 4^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that you have the following rights:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. 

When your private telephone conversations can be tapped without a warrant said Act allowing it, and the act itself being committed is in direct violation of the 4^th Amendment.  So you say you don’t care, you are willing to give up a little portion of your rights and freedoms to stop terrorists because that was the argument made by politicians (specifically Republican politicians at the time the Act was debated and passed).  No one bothered to adhere to the maxim by our Founder Benjamin Franklin who stated:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Maybe you are willing to give up essential liberty to purchase your temporary safety, but I am not for history shows us that freedoms given up are not easily returned and eventually all freedom is lost resulting in tyranny.

When President Bush and Congress (where the Democrats were the majority in both houses) in 2008 bailed out the financial industry through the TARP program against the will of the American people, I really woke up.  For those of you who argue that this was necessary to keep America from collapsing financially, I can simply state that we will never know because we were never allowed to see what would result.  The TARP program has done nothing to fix the toxic assets held by the banks.  They still hold these toxic assets to this day.  The Federal government simply propped up the banks, but they did not solve the problem, and there were and are banks that lent responsibly and do not have a problem with toxic assets.  The TARP program has merely prolonged the inevitable.  The collapse will eventually occur if it was ever going to occur in the first place.  The only thing the TARP program did was bailout irresponsible banks while burdening responsible banks.  Whenever the government picks winners and losers, we all lose.

And picking winners and losers didn’t stop there.  The government initially under the Bush administration and then later under the Obama administration bailed out both General Motors and Chrysler.  Those of you who cried, we must bail out GM and Chrysler because their American car companies that we can’t allow to go bankrupt, I ask you, how did that work out?  After pouring several billions of dollars into each of these companies they both went bankrupt.  Even worse, instead of going through a traditional bankruptcy procedure following the long established bankruptcy rules, the Federal government once again stepped in, picking winners and losers and placing union interests above share holders in direct violation of existing bankruptcy laws.  Chrysler was sold to Fiat as part of its bankruptcy proceedings and in violation of law over 700 Chrysler dealerships were closed.  Does this sound like successful intervention by the Federal government?  Of course, it doesn’t, but we weren’t allowed to see how things would shake out if GM and Chrysler just followed the normal process of filing for bankruptcy and reorganizing their companies under the existing bankruptcy long established procedures and laws.  We weren’t allowed to see that happen because of the unions. 

For those of you who haven’t woken up yet, there’s more.  As if bailing out the banks and car companies wasn’t enough, the Obama administration decided it was now time to take control of your health care.  In direct contradiction to the will of the vast majority of Americans, the Congress rammed through a nearly 3,000 page health care overall in which to this day we are still finding all of the little Easter eggs planted in this Un-Constitutional legislation.  Businesses are already warning that they will drop their health care plans and just pay the government fines (taxes) because it will be more cost effective for them.  That means that eventually this legislation will lead to a single-payer system.  For those of you not keeping up, that means socialized medicine (government run health care).  Enjoy!

But that wasn’t enough control for the Democrats.  No my friends, they want more.  They are now about to finalize and pass financial reform another 2,000 + page bill, a legislative effort led by Senator Dodd (Countrywide scandal) and Barney Frank (who said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are fiscally sound right before they required a 65 billion dollar bailout).  Speaking of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the leading causes of the financial crisis along with AIG, nothing in the financial reform legislation says anything about reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  In fact, what many believe largely led to the financial crisis was the ending of the Glass Steagall Act provisions of the post 1929 stock market crash.  Instead of completely rewriting financial reform that has nothing to do with reforming what caused the financial crisis, the Congress simply could have reinstated the Glass Steagall Act, but that would make far too much sense, and would be too simple for such an intellectually elevated Congress to ponder.

For those of you still asleep, your peaceful slumber is nearing an end.  There is not much time left before you will be forced to awaken.  You are about to awake from your dreams to the present day reality which is a nightmare.  You are about to find that the day you wake up, it is too late, for it is already gone.

Ripping to shreds yet another section of the U.S. Constitution

With the democrats lacking the votes in the House of Representatives to pass the existing Senate health care bill S.B. 3590, Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY), House Rules Committee Chairman, has come up with the following “brain child” of the left known as the “Slaughter Solution.”  Adopt a rule in the U.S. House of Representatives that states that the House deems the Senate’s health care legislation approved.  No vote will be taken in the house on S.B. 3590, rather they will vote on whether or not to pass this new rule.  If they obtain a majority of the votes in the affirmative for the rule, then subsequently S.B 3590 will be deemed approved by the House and sent to President Obama to be signed into law.

There’s just one little problem with Representative Slaughter’s proposal.  It slaughters Article I, Section 7 of the United States Constitution.  It is in Article I of the Constitution where we find the powers and limitations of Congress.  And it is Section 7 of this same Article where the Framers clearly spelled out the rules legislation must follow to become law.  In clause 2 of Article I, Section 7, we find the following specific language used by the Framers of the U.S. Constitution:

Every bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a law, be presented to the President of the United States; if he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the objections at large on their journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the bill, it shall be sent, together with the objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a law. But in all such cases the votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and nays, and the names of the persons voting for and against the bill shall be entered on the journal of each House respectively. If any bill shall not be returned by the President within ten days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the same shall be a law, in like manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their adjournment prevent its return, in which case it shall not be a law. (Emphasis mine)

If the Slaughter Solution comes to pass it will decimate Article I, Section 7, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution.  And this section of the Constitution should never be taken lightly.  By voting on the rule change and not the actual legislation, Article I, Section 7 would forever be changed by this precedent in the House of Representatives.  We all know that a Section of the Constitution cannot be so altered without a Constitutional Amendment.  This type of legislative tactic even being discussed by the House of Representatives should be offensive to the entire electorate.  This type of brazen power outside the bounds of our rule of law which finds its supremacy in our Constitution should be viewed by the American people as yet another step toward tyranny by our government.

Let me provide a visual of how a bill becomes a law under our Constitution so that we can behold the detour that the Slaughter Solution invokes.

A Basic Description of How a Bill Becomes a Law Under Article 1, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution

 

 

The Slaughter House Rule of How a Bill Becomes a Law

 

 

How the Health Care Legislation Should Really be Passed under Article 1, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution

Now the health care legislation is actually more complicated than the above because there are presently two bills.  One bill passed the House of Representatives H.R. 3692 and one bill passed the Senate S.B. 3590.  These are two very different bills, and if the Congress was actually following Article 1, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution the flow of the healthcare legislation becoming law would look like this:

 

See folks, things aren’t so simple when we follow the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, instead of the “Slaughter Solution.”  The Framers of the Constitution purposefully made it this way, so sweeping transformational legislation could not pass so easily since our Federal Government was supposed to be limited in nature.  It saddens me greatly to see our Constitution so perverted by the corruptocrats in Washington D.C.  It was Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who said in 2006 that she was going to drain the swamp of D.C.  Yet, here we are in 2010 with the swamp ever deepening and Speaker Pelosi proudly presiding as swamp monster while her cronies wade with her ever deeper into the slime and sludge.

The only possible good that can come of the Slaughter Solution is that it will render the entire legislation un-Constitutional.  I would bet that even some of the more liberal members of the U.S. Supreme Court would find the Slaughter Solution wholly un-Constitutional.  For that we can hope, but it sure isn’t to the people’s advantage to place their hopes on the U.S. Supreme Court doing the right thing.  If we put our fate in the hands of the Supreme Court, we may be highly disappointed.  As the words of Frederic Bastiat remind us:

The law…has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose.  The law has been used to destroy its own objective.  It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting, and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect.  The law has placed the collective force [of government] at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others.  It has converted plunder [of property] into a right, in order to protect plunder.  And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.[1]

Should the Slaughter Solution pass and go into effect and the U.S. Supreme Court uphold such a ludicrous rule to pass sweeping legislation, we will be living under Bastiat’s prophetic admonishment. 

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[1] W. Cleon Skousen, The making of America: The Substance and Meaning of the Constitution, (National Center for Constitutional Studies 1991, 2007) p. 355.

On Monday morning, March 8^th, Ann Kirkpatrick, Congressional Representative (D-AZ), appeared on Fox and Friends explaining how she has introduced legislation to force the Congress to take a pay cut.  She has led by example by donating 5% of her salary to deficit reduction, but is Representative Kirkpatrick really worried about deficits?  Representative Kirkpatrick voted for the House’s health care bill (H.R. 3692).  Anyone with an ounce of common sense and an understanding of legislation historically going way over budget knows that any of the Federal health care bills in the Congress will be trillions of dollars over budget adding to the Federal deficit.

After speaking to her staff Monday morning, I promptly faxed Representative Kirkpatrick  the following letter:

Dear Representative Kirkpatrick,

This morning I watched you on Fox News and wish to commend you for your legislation to have the Congress take a pay cut.  I further appreciate that you have donated 5% of your salary toward the national debt.  Unfortunately Representative Kirkpatrick, you have already voted for the biggest budget deficit bill to come through the Congress when you voted in the affirmative for H.R. 3692.  I know the Democratic Party has tried to spin that this health care legislation is paid for and does not add to deficits, but, you know as well as I do that no large federal program such as this has ever come in within budget.  Common sense and history tells us that this bill will add trillions of dollars to the federal deficit.

More importantly, you have absolutely no Constitutional authority to legislate national health care, and there is no provision in the enumerated powers found in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution to force an individual mandate on the citizenry to purchase health care insurance.  At no time in the history of the United States has the federal government forced a citizen to make a purchase of a good or service, but that is exactly what the individual mandate which is included in every piece of health care legislation we have seen come through the Congress including H.R. 3692 which you voted for will do. 

I realize Representative Kirkpatrick that you ran in part on bringing affordable health care to the citizens of Arizona; however, I think maybe you are confused by the legislative powers of a State Legislator versus a member of the House of Representatives.  The States retain the powers to legislate health care for their citizens, but the Congress of the United States does not possess the same powers.  I draw your attention to the arguments made by Senator Orrin Hatch on the Senate floor during the debates for their health care legislation, Senate Bill 3590.  With all due respect, you swore an oath to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, so it is my hope you will start doing so by remaining within the enumerated powers provided to your branch of government within that Constitution.

The following is an article that I wrote highlighting Senator Hatch’s salient points on the lack of the Congress’s enumerated power to legislate an individual mandate to purchase health care insurance.  I encourage you to read it in its entirety, and to change your position and vote NO on any health care legislation that has an individual mandate contained within it.

The letter went on to include an article that I had written back in December which you can find here.

3/18/2010 Update:  Slaughter Rule (Solution) passes the House of Representatives on a vote of  222-203.  Ann Kirkpatrick voted yea on the Slaughter Solution and has also released a statement that she will vote yea on the fixes bill.  She claims to be representing her District.  Apparently Representative Kirkpatrick is unaware of the over 70% that want the Congress to start over with health care reform legislation.  In addition, Representative Kirkpatrick apparently has absolutely no regard for the U.S. States Constitution and specifically Article 1, Sections 7 and 8.  Thank you Representative Kirkpatrick for being an utter failure during your freshman year as a Congresswoman.  I hope you’ll enjoy your return trip to Arizona and that you are never elected to public office again.