There can be a difference between what a person likes and what they are willing to force on others.
Most of my preferences lean conservative: liberty, family, and keeping government out of my life.
The difference between me and political conservatives is that I don't believe it's ever ethical to use government or legislation to force my preferences on others. Therefore, I can't be politically conservative.
Another difference is I'm no fan of the Constitution. A fatal mistake was made when the founders established a political government where liberty had existed before.
For many years I was desperate to believe in and support the Constitution, and saw it as the greatest achievement in human government. Only after I stopped believing in political government of any sort could I see the Constitution clearly.
The Constitution was presented as a gift, but once unwrapped turned out to be worse than a lump of coal. It may have been the sneakiest Trojan horse in history.
I won't criticize you if you still believe in Santa or the Constitution, though.
The Constitution utterly failed to protect liberty from government; it is useful only as a measure of how deeply criminal the federal government has become.
Even conservatives seem to like the Constitution only when it aligns with their cause, ignoring it when it doesn't. Most of them happily sidestep the Constitution for their political preferences, which they want imposed by government.
They generally want immigration control, drug prohibition, federal law enforcement, an abortion ban, a permanent military, and other things which are not permitted under the Constitution. Those Big Government programs are as far from "conservative" as you can possibly get, yet they see no conflict and throw the Constitution under the bus when it gets in the way of what they want. How can they criticize the other side for doing the same thing?
The only justification for government is to protect the rights of people. Yet government is the only real threat to our rights in normal life. When something doesn't work as advertised, dump it, and learn from the mistake.
At least I'm honest when I call the Constitution a mistake and point out it's a dead issue since the federal government refuses to be constrained by it.
I'm often harder on political conservatives than I am on the statist Left. I believe conservatives ought to know better and I'm disappointed when they don't.
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I read your blog on occasion, and tend to agree with you nearly all the time. But on this issue, I must say that I am at odds with if not what you think, than the way you have expressed it.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the constitution as written, is the best document ever written as a means to be used to govern a nation. The problem lies in the fact that humans are the ones who are the ones that are intended to follow and interpret the constitution. And as we all know, the very first thing about humans is that they will always attempt to tilt the field of play to their side, so that the ball, puck, gamespiece or what ever the marker that is being used, in our case, the money and the votes of the American, will slide towards the side that they choose, no matter how fair they might seem. And both sides will do so, with no sense of decency or moral problem. After all, they feel like they are doing what they are doing, for the " greater good" don't you know?
It was because the founding fathers knew the tendency of men was to do exactly this sort of thing, that they wrote not just the bill of rights, but especially the 9th and 10th amendments. As a message and as a means of checking the federal government into submission. Of course, the founding fathers also meant for the weakest of the 3 branches to be the Supreme Court, and what instead has happened, mostly due to the last 50 years of the Democrats use of them, has been that the SCOTUS has now become one of the strongest of the 3 branches of government, especially since the Democrats have found that they could often not get legislation passed the normal way, and so they used the court system to get their agenda through, bypassing the other 2 branches of government completely, and using the court system to change laws. And the courts have gone along willingly, wanting to have a hand in crafting legislation from the bench, ala Roe v Wade, which most legal minds will admit was a bad law resting on a poor foundation.
So the constitution itself was not written poorly. It was written not as a check on the population, but rather as a check on what the federal government was and was not allowed to do. Where the citizens went wrong is that, as Jefferson was alleged to have said, that the tree of liberty needed to time to time be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants, we have failed to maintain that bit of wisdom in our hearts and minds, and to be ready when the federal government stepped on or over the lines of the constitution. And we all know that the missteps have been many, and they have gotten much harsher over time. The first time anyone, from anywhere attempted to pass an anti gun law, they should have been met with an armed citizenry, ready for a fight, to the death if necessary, to remind those so called leaders that the 2nd amendment says shall not be infringed, and that it means what it says. If they don't drop that matter, then the citizens will drop the politicians right where they stand. And then they needed to be ready to do so.
The same when in the past, just like in New York, where they began their stop and frisk, which was clearly against the 4th amendment, and possibly the 5th, if people would followed those cops, with guns, and made them let the person walking leave, untouched, or they would find that they had best be ready for a gun battle, maybe the mayor of the city would have rethought his way of addressing the violent crime in the city differently than breaking the law, as spelled out in the constitution.
We could go on, but I know that you get the idea. The constitution is only as strong as the people who are willing to stand by it and defend it, with their own blood or lives are strong. I know that in this day and age, it is a hard thing to say, that you are willing to stand up and carry arms against the government, who those of us from a certain age were taught to honor and respect, but to instead be willing to fight and die trying to stop it, no matter the odds against you.
tlk78@yahoo.com
The only thing that might have saved the Constitution is if the very first sentence had said, clearly and repeatedly, that killing politicians is never a crime, and there would be no penalty for doing so for any reason IF it could be shown that the politician had ever violated any part of the Constitution in the slightest way-- not subject to lawyerly/governmental interpretation.
DeleteTo rely on the majority to hold government accountable is to plan to fail. They won't ever do so. If the founders had understood human nature, they would have known this.
Establishing a state-- even if you believe you are doing it right, is never the right thing to do.
The Covenant of Unanimous Consent is better than the Constitution.