Post-Constitution America: Night of the "Living" Dead
by Diane Alden

Recently, he wrote an article titled "When Tyranny Came to America," in which he outlines the history of the Constitution and how it "died" and what took its place.

The left would disagree with his conclusions, but so would all collectivist�statists of whatever political persuasion. They call it a living document, which to them means: subject to the whims of whatever is currently the trend or perceived needs of the "people," even if fulfilling those needs is unconstitutional.

The upcoming "Million-mother March Against Guns" is a case in point. Led by a friend of Hillary Clinton, Donna Dees-Thomases, these gals will wave the flag as they whittle away at the Second Amendment and the Constitution, which they use as cover.

The million mothers are marching not in support of getting criminals with guns off the streets, but rather denying them to citizens who don't commit crimes. Whether they know it or not, these well meaning moms are heaving the baby out with the bath water. As usual, the left is using women and children as a shield for its real intent, which is to pull the life support from an already critically ill Bill of Rights.

The "moms" are merely shills for the people who want to pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they want to keep. These moms don't really believe in the Constitution or its intent because they "feel" guns are nasty, smelly things and should be banned.

They have convinced themselves that what is wrong in the United States is that there are too many guns. They don't care to address the polluted moral and cultural climate that is really the "root" cause of the dissolution of the culture and the family. They don't want to pay attention to the fact that cultural and moral dissolution is at the base of violence of all sorts. Blaming guns is easier and symbolic. They don't have the real courage necessary to come right out and say they no longer believe in the Bill of Rights. Nonetheless, the other "root" cause of our national predicament is that government has become an entity whose existence is more important than the individual it is supposed to protect. There are over 100 million words in regulations and statues which describe everything we can and cannot do. There are 140 regulations on the construction of wooden ladders alone, and over 10,000 pages of EPA "law." This adds to our disrespect for all law. Law becomes incomprehensible and unknowable, yet government continues to crank it out. The "moms" will add more laws without addressing the real problem.

The government insurance policy to pay for all this is the tax system. Government thrives and grows while enslaving those who "contribute" to it. Under the careless eyes of Congress, the self serving court system and the growing, Caesar-like power of the executive branch the Constitution is close to being a zombie as it has ever been. With police powers granted to everything from the FBI to FEMA, from the Secret Service to the Small Business Administration and the IRS, we are moving ever closer to fascism.

Government couches the destruction of Constitutional guarantees with the language of compassion, while it continues to encourage dependency and expands its police powers.

Meanwhile, the left says it hates monopolies, yet it advances that aspect of government. The left hates what it considers the coercion of social conservatives, while it hypocritically coerces by demanding tribute and the acceptance of "rights", which are no where to be found in the Constitution.

But they don't care because they consider the Bill of Rights irrelevant anyway. Thus, the Constitution is "living" only in the sense that its corpse is still in the room. It is on life support and the left, politicians of all persuasions and the media point to it every so often saying, "doesn't it look natural."

Part of the reason for its zombie-like condition is that hardly anyone believes the rights of the people come from a Divine source as stated in the Declaration of Independence. Having become a nation that has rejected the divine, we replace it with a hollow shadow and call it humanism. We annul the Ten Commandments as a basis for common law, and replace it with the tyranny of political correctness.

The Un-Sovereign States

The individual states no longer possess the power intended by the Founders. The central government has assumed those powers and functions. Allowance for such a transfer may not be found anywhere in the Constitution.

However, through twists and turns of legal logic the courts have created a central government out of all proportion to the original intent of the Founders. Often times the reasons were for "good" causes. On occasion, the citizenry has handed such powers to the Congress and the Executive at the ballot box. This does not make it legitimate or right. The quid pro quo is that government returns pork, promises and programs to the voters, thus making it even more apparent that citizens are more dependent on government largess and benevolence than ever before and ever more apparent that we move closer to being a rabble with a plebiscite.

The original rights granted in the Constitution and the Declaration have been replaced by such as "rights" as abortion on demand. This new right was granted by the courts when it co-opted the role of the state.

Abortion on demand grew out of the perceived right to privacy under the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments. The court's contorted logic has tortured the "right of privacy" to include abortion on demand. Nowhere is this right specified in the Constitution. But changing times and the "living" document culminates in the barbarity of partial birth abortion and the use of abortion as birth control.

The 'right" to life, which is specified becomes somehow unconstitutional. This "right of privacy" has superceded it. Yanked out of the Constitution by combining several amendments and finding an implied right. This was another occasion when a perceived good overrode the intent of the Founders. One more time the federal court struck at the power of the state.

While there are those who look on this situation as a reaffirmation of "freedom" the action by the court opened the way for the court to overstep its Constitutional bounds on other issues, totally ignoring or trashing the intent in the original document. But no one cares because this newly discovered right to an abortion is desired by a segment of society thus making it "right" and humane.

Similarly, there is nothing in the Constitution calling for the "separation of church and state." That is a doctrine that comes from the courts. But everyone from politicians to reporters to the ignorant citizen keeps on repeating that fallacy as if it were the truth.

During the primaries, a young female reporter queried presidential aspirant Alan Keyes regarding his stance toward the constitutional question of "separation of church and state." Keyes admonished the reporter to show him where there was such a statement in the Constitution. Of course she was silent because there is no such right or separation. There is only the fact that freedom of religion is specified in the First Amendment, not freedom from religion. The federal courts invented the notion of "separation of church and state." Just as the federal courts once invented the notions which upheld slavery and the Jim Crow laws.

We now have a right to be free from cigarette smoke, a right for the spotted owl to take precedence over the rights of man, a right not to be subjected to prayer in public places, a right to ban prayer in public places, a right to take the life of an unborn and a right to ban free speech by disallowing an unpopular group�s right to assemble using the RICO laws.

But the greatest right of all, the real driving energy for expanding government is the right to be protected from all risk and misfortune. The original notion that government is there to protect us from government is dead. But then the phrase in the Bill of Rights and Constitution "shall not be infringed" is not part of the lexicon of the collectivists and expanders of government. They only apply that notion to those amendments of which they approve.

Statists, collectivists and the left need to take heed: when their power and influence are lost and a truly evil form of government arises, there will be no document around in any meaningful form to run to as a last resort � since crucial rights have been dropped and replaced with one form of license or another.

The left may eventually be free to marry a goat if they choose, but not free to speak against government or institutions or individuals. The guarantee of free speech will be replaced in order to rid us of "hate speech." However, the problem will arise, as it always does on these questions, about who and what will determine what "hate speech" is.

During the Nixon years and Watergate, the left sicced the "special prosecutors," on the Nixon regime. They now scream when the law they created is turned on one of their own i.e. Bill Clinton. Like many, left and right, who twist the Constitution to suit their notions, eventually those laws are turned on them.

At the rate we are going, there will be no right to protect life and property from criminals. There will be no right to self-protection against government because the citizen will find himself breaking "hate" crimes or speech laws, or accused of treason. Additionally, he will be disarmed and the overwhelmed system of justice and the courts will not be able to "redress" any of his grievances.

Eventually, the left will face an uncontrolled political power not to their liking. But that will happen after they have made the Second Amendment irrelevant, as well as the Fifth, the Fourth, the First and the rest. They will hold in their hands a document gutted and devoid of meaning. Its defenders will have been silenced, jailed, in exile, escaped or dead. There will be no one around to fight their battles and no document to use as reinforcement for claiming lost rights.

The Tyranny of the Collective

U.S. citizens have been dumbed-down by years of collectivist drivel taught in schools. Forced into feeling rather than thinking, Americans are at a crossroads. We have become "tolerant" instead of judicious and fair; inclusive instead of discerning; filled with self-esteem instead of intelligence and wisdom.

The citizens of the United States are accepting the death of the Constitution through corrupted language and devious and inhumane pressure to conform. They are accepting it because they are ignorant and apathetic and have replaced it with faux freedoms and political correctness.

As Charlton Heston said not long ago, "political correctness is tyranny with manners." Individuals now have labels applied such as "mean-spirited," "racist," "bigoted," "cruel" or "anti-environment" or whatever terms are used by the mindless collectivist folly of the moment.

The favored "rights" of the left have expanded while true liberty as contained in the Declaration and Bill of Rights are considered dangerous aberrations.

Celebrity Constitutional Scholars�NOT

Since the celebrity left does not believe in the "right to keep and bear arms" or the right to "private property," they give a sort of warped publicity to the anti-constitutionalists.

Leftist talk show host Rosie O'Donnell defends her right of free speech as she calls Bob Dole a fool or Newt Gingrich a nasty name. She blasts the NRA's right to promote its beliefs and maintains that even though the Second Amendment is part of the Constitution: "so what."

Robert Redford applauds the Clinton administration for confiscating lands in the West under the Antiquities Act. He could care less about the rights of the states or private property owners. It doesn't matter to him and the left that property owners are no longer allowed to use their land as they see fit.

New laws approved by the left say that an "endangered species" is more important than guarantees in the Bill of Rights. In their minds it is only proper that government confiscates millions of acres for its own purposes, even though that government does not adequately care for what it already has. It doesn't matter to them that the Founders never intended that government should own 40 percent of the national real estate.

Liberty and the purpose of the Bill of Rights is the loser and it is immaterial what the good intentions of the left are. According to them, Constitutional guarantees, the right of the individual states and the people are only as good as the federal government and the trend of the moment says it is. It is to their peril they refuse to recognize that constitutional guarantees are more important than any new theory or invented right. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights have been on the critical list for a long time. Currently, they are on life support, kept alive by a judicious few that care about such arcane matters as the intent of the Founders. Meanwhile, the doctors, i.e. the three branches of government fight over treatment. However, in the end expediency wins. A toxic overdose of medication is consistently administered and the patient is allowed to slip into that good night - one function at a time.

Like Lenin's corpse in the Kremlin, it will be primped, pumped with chemicals, then coated with wax and placed in an airtight container. U.S. citizens will look at the remains on national holidays as they ponder the once "glorious revolution."

Diane Alden is a research analyst, writer, historian and political economist. She writes a column for NewsMax.com, Etherzone, Enterstageright, American Partisan, KeepAndBearArms.com and many other online publications. She also does occasional radio commentaries for Georgia Radio Inc. Reach her at [email protected] or look for http://www.inflyovercountry after June 10, 2000.