Let Us Bring The U.S. Constitution Out of Exile

Reference is made to Judge Andrew Napolitano's book, The Constitution In Exile.

"God is not the author of confusion", wrote the apostle Paul in the Bible, I Corinthians 14:33. The Bible book of Acts quotes the apostle Peter, Acts 10:34, to say God is not a respecter of persons. Thus, the nation's founders, inspired by God's Word, sought to create an ordered society based upon impartial rule of law, in total renunciation of their Old World experience of capricious and arbitrary decree of royalty. "Lex Rex", they declared, not "Rex Lex"--the law is the king, not the king the law. The result of this proposition was the U.S. Constitution, which although initially far from perfect, still represents a work in progress towards the formation of a more perfect union.

The nation's founders also recognized the morally-fallen nature of man, based on the Bible scripture of Jeremiah 17:9, saying "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desparately wicked: who could know it?" No man can be entrusted with too much power, to exercise it equitably and justly. Accordingly, in their design of the U.S. Constitution, the nation's founders left much ruling sovereignty to individual states, wisely assigning to the federal government only those obligations of which individual states are administratively and logistically totally incapable, e.g. carrying on foreign relations, providing for a national military defense, coining and printing a common national monetary currency, and resolving interstate disputes. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments clearly spell out this legal mandate.

Today, however, the states have become virtually subservient vassals of the federal government. The development of this situation was long in coming, at least since the turn of the 20th century if not earlier, caused mainly by crisis situations in the which the federal government seized extraordinary powers in order to deal with national emergencies--usually war. Then when the crises passed, the federal government refused to surrender the usurped powers back to state and local control. Today, the recission of individual Constitutional prerogatives is also based on fear of imagined crises which might occur only--but have not yet occurred--if we allow individuals to exercise as they please their Constitutional civil liberties. Thomas Jefferson once said, "Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty." Unlike the intent of the nation's founders, our basic civil liberties are no longer seen by government as God-given and thus inviolable by human authority. On the contrary, they are granted and rescinded according to the momentary political expediencies of governments. The First Amendment free speech rights are now especially under challenge. For example, George Mason law professor David Bernstein wrote a book called, You Can't Say That!, in the which he copiously illustrates how anti-discrimination laws are killing free speech rights. Then, the DVD Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, featuring Ben Stein, documents how science professors are being fired from their jobs at prominent universities, for having the temerity to suggest, contrary to scientific orthodoxy, that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is flawed, and divinely-created design is a better plausible explanation for the origin of life. (It should be interjected here that, as neither creation nor evolution have ever been observed in actual process, neither can be claimed to be proven scientific facts, but are both merely plausible speculations.)

America was not founded by cowards, and the apostle Paul wrote in II Timothy 1:7, "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." Yet today, the doctrines of political correctness and majoritarian consent silence all but the most brave from speaking their honest minds on those issues of life so greatly important to us all. In the TV series All In The Family of four decades ago, Archie Bunker said out loud the thoughts millions of Americans were thinking, but did not themselves dare to publicly verbalize.

The purpose of Constitutional civil liberties is to protect individual American citizens from either government or majoritarian mob-ocracy. We must bring the U.S. Constitution back from exile, if individual citizen freedom is to survive: it is no test of the strength of Constitutional freedoms, if the only exercise thereof we permit are those with which we all unanimously agree. As Justice Charles Evans Hughes once observed, we must endure the Constitution when it pinches, as well as when it comforts. Otherwise, society will never benefit from the wisdom of the few brave souls courageous enough to say, "vox populi vox humbug!", and tell the nation those inconvenient truths of life we all so desparately need to hear.

-LKM