Constitution Day?

Today is "Constitution Day."

This has to be a cruel joke.

Not a single person who signed the Constitution would agree that the United States is governed by or subject to the Constitution in any meaningful sense.

The fundamental structure of government created by America's Founding Fathers no longer exists. The separation of powers has been replaced by "The Administrative State," and the system of federalism ("states' rights") embodied in the 9th and 10th Amendments and vigorously defended by Madison and Jefferson has been destroyed by what is today a powerful centralized federal government.

The values behind the Constitution have been abandoned. By joining the modern secularist trends and repudiating the Christian foundations of the Constitution, the courts have stripped the Constitution of all meaning. The oath to "support the Constitution" or to be "attached" to its principles likewise lacks any meaning.

America is no longer under the British Crown. America is no longer under the Articles of Confederation. And -- not just de facto, but (arguably) de jure, -- America is no longer under the Constitution. Anyone taking an take an oath to "support" a Constitution which no longer exists must not be oblivious to Secularism's march toward tyranny.

Does the Constitution uphold private property? At one time it did, but no longer. In 1933, a state of "national emergency" was declared. Some researchers contend that wartime powers were invoked to suspend the Constitution. World War I produced legislation ("The Trading with the Enemy Act") which was conscripted for duty in Roosevelt's "war" against the "Great Depression." Congress approved his Executive decrees which essentially declared all those who might believe in a Constitutional Free Market to be "enemies" of the State, and the gold of all these "enemies" was confiscated.[7]

In 1973, a special Senate committee led by Senators Frank Church and Charles Mathias confirmed that

Since March 9, 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency. [H]undreds of statutes delegate to the President extraordinary powers . . . which affect the lives of American citizens in a host of all-encompassing manners. This vast range of powers, taken together, confer enough authority to rule the country without reference to normal constitutional processes. . . . A majority of the people of the United States have lived all their lives under emergency rule. For 40 years, freedoms and governmental procedures guaranteed by the Constitution have, in varying degrees, been abridged by laws brought into force by states of national emergency. [A]ctions taken by the Government in times of great crises have - from, at least, the Civil War - in important ways shaped the present phenomenon of a permanent state of national emergency.[8]

In 1943, the Supreme Court ruled that it could not be said for certain that an admitted member of the Communist Party, holding positions in the Communist Party's National Committee and being the Party's nominee for Governor of Minnesota, was not "attached to the principles of the Constitution."[9] In addition to working for the violent overthrow of Representative Government, the Communist Party denies the legitimacy of private property. But that was no problem for the Court.[10] Through "New Deal" policies, the "organic law" of the Founders was completely overturned. According to such organic charters as the Declaration of Independence, human beings are created by God with unalienable rights to life, liberty and property. These rights exist prior to the State. No longer. The "theoretical basis" of property rights embodied in the "New Deal" was "far different from what it had been"[11] under America's organic law (e.g., the Declaration of Independence: rights given by God, unalienable by the State):

Property rights, from this [new] perspective, are simply a "delegation" from the state to the citizenry . . . . No longer did "property" represent some prepolitical "natural" entitlement; it now represented a public policy judgment by the state that, overall, important social values would be realized by leaving certain controls in the hands of ordinary citizens.[12]

To facilitate the State's unalienable rights over the citizens, "a fourth branch of government"[13] was established, which, to use Madison's words in The Federalist, "may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."[14] For years, government officials with strong Communist leanings had "urged differing degrees of governmental ownership and control of natural resources, basic means of production, and banks and the media of exchange, either with or without compensation."[15] Between 1913 and 1937, most of the planks of the Communist Manifesto had been put into law in America[16] by high-ranking government officials, including President Roosevelt;[17] officials who had taken a solemn oath to "support the Constitution," and therefore, according to the Court, officials "whose attachment to the general constitutional scheme cannot be doubted."[18]

Today the oath to "support the Constitution" is not taken seriously. This is because oaths in general are not taken seriously. At the time the Constitution was written, an oath was understood to be a solemn declaration made to and in the presence of God. In 1961 the US Supreme Court ruled God out of the oath of office. But removing God from an oath is like removing water from a swimming pool: all that is left is an empty shell. The Court in Cole v. Richardson correctly noted that the oath had been reduced from a solemn and weighty act of eternal consequence to a mere "amenity."[1]

No one takes an "amenity" seriously. The rise of Secularism has meant the decline of oaths. Prof. Sanford Levinson, having been admitted to practice in California, suspects that

many of us did not reflect with any great seriousness on the[] meaning [of the loyalty oaths we have signed]. Assuming that we noticed them at all, many of us probably treated them roughly the same way my law students responded to part of a document that they are required to submit to the Bar Association as part of the process of becoming a lawyer. All applicants must sign a statement indicating that they have read the Code of Professional Responsibility and pledge their adherence to its demands. The overwhelming majority of my students freely indicated that they had perjured themselves: They had not in fact read the Code, and they treated the affirmation that they had as a mere formalism, not to be taken seriously . . . . How many of us who have taken loyalty oaths are any different?[3]

I have read and heard many Professors of Constitutional Law admit that they do not require their students to read the Constitution from "We the People" to "ratifying the Same." Indeed, with the current controversy over "originalism" or "original intent," it may be academically unfashionable to require students to read the complete text of the Constitution.[4] The great constitutional scholar E. S. Corwin was

told that Professor Powell of Harvard carefully warns his class in Constitutional Law each year against reading the Constitution, holding that to do so would be apt to "confuse their minds." Certain it is that of the 6,000-odd words of the constitutional document, at least 39 out of every 40 are totally irrelevant to the vast majority, as well as to the most important, of the problems which the Court handles each term in the field of constitutional interpretation.[5]

It is not stretching credulity to claim that a large proportion of law students who have successfully passed a Constitutional Law class in law school have never actually read the Constitution.[6] And as the quest for high salaries in legal practice begins (to pay off school loans) the likelihood of taking time to read the increasingly-irrelevant Articles of the Constitution becomes even smaller. As a result, no one can seriously doubt that a large percentage of people who have been admitted to the Bar or have assumed public office and have taken a solemn oath to "support the Constitution" have never even read the Constitution in its entirety.



Transport any of the Founding Fathers into the first decade of the 21th century. Let them look at our schools, our tax-rates, our mortality rate for pre-born children,[20] and ask them if they will take a (secular) oath to "support the Constitution." I dare say none of them - except perhaps Alexander Hamilton - would take such an oath.[21]

Constitution Day by Harry Browne

A Very Inconvenient Document by Vin Suprynowicz

The Most Successful Fraud in American History by Gary North

Is Our Government Legitimate? by Laurence M. Vance

Walter Williams, in The Freeman, Ideas on Liberty, published by The Foundation for Economic Education, explains why James Madison or Thomas Jefferson could never make it as a political candidate today.

BOVARD » Celebrate Constitution Day Bush-Style

Remembering the Constitution

America's Founding Ideals -- The New American