The Unorganized

American Militia

King George didn’t listen to us either!

By Charles Pitts

The Bill of Rights was understood, at its ratification, to be a bar on the actions of the federal government. Many people today find this to be an incredible fact!

During the debates on the adoption of the Constitution, its opponents repeatedly charged that the Constitution as drafted would open the way to tyranny by the central government. Fresh in their minds was the memory of the British violation of civil rights before and during the Revolution. They demanded a "bill of rights" that would spell out the immunities of individual citizens. Several state conventions in their formal ratification of the Constitution asked for such amendments; others ratified the Constitution with the understanding that the amendments would be offered.

On September 25, 1789, the First Congress of the United States therefore proposed to the state legislatures 12 amendments to the Constitution that met arguments most frequently advanced against it. Articles 3 to 12, ratified December 15, 1791, by three-fourths of the state legislatures, constitute the first 10 amendments of the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights.

Bill of Rights Day is Tuesday, December 15th. But it is no longer a day of celebration. Instead, The Bill of Rights should be mourned, not celebrated. It is defunct. Intended as the bulwark of the right of decentralized self-government, it now serves mainly as an excuse for the opposite.

The purpose of the first ten amendments was laid out clearly by their Preamble. “Preamble?” You might ask. “What preamble?” Although the main body of the Constitution is never published without its Preamble, one could study American history for a lifetime without ever encountering the Preamble to the Bill of Rights.

That Preamble says that Congress is recommending amendments to the states because a number of states in ratifying the Constitution “expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added.” Since the people were afraid of the new Federal Government, the Bill of Rights was being added to hedge in the powers of the Federal Government more carefully.

So, for example, the Tenth Amendment stated what Thomas Jefferson called the underlying principle of the entire Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” In other words, the Constitution gave the Federal Government a few enumerated powers, period.

That is why the First Amendment begins by saying that, “Congress shall make no law.” Congress, not government generally. The point was to leave such questions in the hands of elected state legislators not corrupt politicians in Washington D.C.

The American Revolution was fought and won in the name of self-government via elections to state legislatures. King George III and Parliament insisted that those legislatures could legislate only when officials, essentially unaccountable to American colonists, said they could. The Americans rejected that idea. In fact, rejecting that idea was what made Britain’s North American colonists into Americans.

As a result, it is no surprise that six years after the Revolution ended, in the First Congress, the people insisted that the principle of local self-government — of Federalism — be made explicit through the Tenth Amendment and the other nine Amendments to the Constitution. They wanted explicit statements and assurances that the distant new Congress could not violate Americans’ most cherished rights — rights repeatedly infringed upon by the King and Parliament.

This was an uncontroversial understanding of things in the United States of America for the first century and more. The Supreme Court unanimously said in 1833 and thereafter that the Bill of Rights was a limitation solely on the Federal Government.

But the 20th century saw a great change. The Progressives of the early part of the century opposed constitutional limitations on government power generally, and the New Deal of the 1930s stood for the elimination of the Tenth Amendment from constitutional law. Congress’s power is essentially unlimited today, and federal courts have come to supervise virtually all state policies — solely on the basis of federal judges’ policy preferences.

No one today even pretends that the Bill of Rights serves its intended purpose of restraining the Federal Government. Quite the opposite!

Unfortunately none of this has changed under Obama, it has only gotten worse.

Obama asserts the right to detain – indefinitely – individuals they claim are a “threat to national security” without charging or bringing them to trial. Moreover the Obama administration has gone even further in claiming the right to assassinate both citizens and non-citizens they view as a “threat to national security,” without benefit of their Constitutional right to prove their innocence in a court of law.

Moreover, we are being continually criticized by a President who envisions our nation as arrogant. President Obama and his Radicalized Democrats believe America needs to be taken down a peg or two. The report that emerged from Homeland Security was issued with the sole purpose of silencing dissenters.

Obama is teaching us a pointed lesson through his propaganda arm, the drive-by-media: never again should we have the audacity to attend peacefully-conducted demonstrations and say anything about having to pay higher taxes, or condemn the Marxist ideology behind the administration’s radical agenda.

Meanwhile, according to the President and Department of Homeland Security, there is no more reason to call out the real threat to our country, which is the hateful and dangerous religion of Islam. In fact, we are not to think about such terms as the "War on Terror" against Islamic jihadists. That threat is now to be called "Overseas Contingency Operation, or a ‘Man-Caused’ Disaster."

But never fear. Our patriotic, American-flag-pin-wearing President Obama is doing his job to stem the tide against terrorism. The DHS report includes groups and individuals who are drawn to a single issue such as: opposition to abortion, illegal immigration, or same-sex marriage. God forbid if you attended a Tea Party or voted for a third-party candidate, or had the gall to brandish the candidate’s name on your car or have his campaign sign in your front yard.

Shamelessly, the Obama administration has also targeted our veterans and freedom fighters returning from Iraq and Afghanistan in this absurd and shocking dossier. Included are average law-abiding citizens who foresee more encumbering restrictions upon their Second Amendment rights. Lumped into this list of suspected terrorists are those of us who are rightly concerned about the loss of United States sovereignty.

There’s one thing however, this Marxist President and his administration have overlooked in their thinly-veiled plan to "remake" our country after socialist Europe, they’ve underestimated the independent character of the American people!

After nearly a century of catastrophic and bloody experimentation with Marxism in the rest of the world, Marxist thought appeals mainly to uneducated people who naïvely accept the lies of unproven Marxist ideology. Not so in our country! Americans have enjoyed God-given freedom and opportunity to a greater degree than any other people have ever enjoyed them, and they’re not about to give these things up for a false dream.

True, our education system has succeeded in persuading increasing numbers of voters to turn to government for their needs — but most Americans still believe in free enterprise, self-sufficiency (based on reliance upon God), and simple moral decency, rather than dependence on governmental theft and enslavement that we call socialism. America is still a land where just about anybody with a good heart, a good work ethic, and a love of God can succeed — despite a growing array of governmental obstacles that stand in the way.

Such citizens do not want Obama’s version of change. They believe as President Ronald Reagan said, "Government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem."

It should therefore not surprise anyone that grassroots Americans would rally at numerous Tea Parties to protest the enslaving policies of the Obama administration. What is surprising — though not entirely unexpected — is the way Obama and his Gestapo-inspired henchmen have stooped to belittle and distort these sincere, peaceful rallies, beginning with a Homeland Security policy aimed at identifying and suppressing politically-active conservatives. So be prepared, Obama's Gestapo goons soon may be at war with you.

Sadly, this is where the President and his fifth column Democrat Party have taken our country in a matter of months. They have cast aspersions on all those who will not yield to their brand of politics or skewed way of life. To add insult to injury, our views are somehow deemed racist because America proudly voted into office its first black President, and we disagree with him. American citizens who reject Obama’s socialism are castigated, and considered dangerous right-wing racist extremists.

The need for an “Obama Second Bill of Rights" has been championed by Obama ally and advisor Cass Sunstein, Law Professor at the University of Chicago, in a book entitled "The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More than Ever." Obama surrogate Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (D) Ohio recently demanded the implementation of a "Second Bill of Rights" at an Obama campaign rally.

The revival of the concept of a "Second Bill of Rights" puts a new face on Barack Obama's seven-year-old musings about the Constitution. The Constitution suggests that human beings have rights granted to them by God (or nature if one prefers) that governments cannot take away. The government cannot take away ones right to speak or own fire arms, jail someone without just cause, take property without just compensation, and so on. These are "negative rights" according to Barack Hussein Obama.

But the “Obama Second Bill of Rights" are "positive rights," things that the government must provide every citizen: jobs, education, health care, housing, etc. These are not things that people have the duty to acquire by their own effort, rather government, according to Obama, must be required to give every individual these things.

There are two problems with this.

First, jobs, education, health care, housing, and so on cost money. Governments, by their nature, cannot create the wealth necessary to provide such things. To get the money necessary to fund these socialist programs, governments must take it away from other people which it deems to have too much of it. In other words, redistribution or "spreading the wealth”, as Obama likes to call it. And no one, according to the “Obama Second Bill of Rights", has the right to keep their wealth if the government wants to use it for its own purpose.

Second, as Tom Palmer, who reviewed Professor Sunstein's book suggested, the very idea of an “Obama Second Bill of Rights" means that there are no God given or natural rights, but simply rights that the government grants or takes away according to its own convenience and whim.

Thus the implementation of an “Obama Second Bill of Rights" implies a complete reversal of the founding philosophy of the United States, that government should be limited and have only those powers that the people are willing to grant it. Instead, Obama believes government and not the people is all powerful and people only have the rights that government wills to grant them. Obama's Second Bill of Rights sounds very much like:

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS

Article 40. Citizens of the USSR have the right to work (that is, to guaranteed employment and pay in accordance wit the quantity and quality of their work, and not below the state-established minimum), including the right to choose their trade or profession, type of job and work in accordance with their inclinations, abilities, training and education, with due account of the needs of society...

Article 41. Citizens of the USSR have the right to rest and leisure... The length of collective farmers' working and leisure time is established by their collective farms.

Article 42. Citizens of the USSR have the right to health protection.

When a conservative acquaintance recently expressed disappoint with Obama's war on the Bill of Rights, I simply noted that it was inevitable. This is a party and a President that is hostile to private property, the anchor of all individual liberties and rights, and totally enamored of the managerial central state, the greatest modern enemy of all liberties.

Welcome to President Obama’s New Amerika comrade!

Obama’s "Second Bill of Rights"

Have we given up not just the Constitution, but the Declaration of Independence as well? An Obama presidency, with an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, could go a long way toward the completion of a European-style social welfare state that was begun in the New Deal.

In a 2001 interview on Chicago public radio, Obama lamented that “the Supreme Court never ventured into the issue of the redistribution of wealth.” The problem, he said, was that the court “didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution… that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberty.”

In this perhaps unguarded moment, Obama became one of the few liberal politicians candid enough to admit that the Constitution poses a fundamental obstacle to their agenda.

This is a popular theory in academic circles. It is the fundamental argument of Cass Sunstein, a colleague of Obama’s at the University of Chicago Law School (now on his way to Harvard), who is often mentioned as an Obama adviser and potential Supreme Court nominee, and the author of The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We need it More than Ever.

The second bill of rights idea derived from two famous speeches that Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave—one at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club during the 1932 campaign and his 1944 annual message to Congress. In the Commonwealth Club address, he spoke of the advent of “enlightened administration,” which would redistribute resources in accordance with an “economic declaration of rights.” In his 1944 message to Congress, Roosevelt said that “our rights to life and liberty”—the negative liberty to which Obama referred, had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” He claimed that “In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights.” This bill of rights included the right to a job, the right to food and recreation, the right to adequate farm prices, the right to a decent home, the right to medical care, and the right to a good education.

Of course, these are not “rights” at all—not in the sense that the framers and ratifiers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution used the term--but entitlements. From the founding until the twentieth century, the American regime assumed that government’s purpose was to secure pre-existing natural rights—such life, liberty, property, or association. Everyone can exercise such rights simultaneously; nobody’s exercise of his own rights limits anyone else’s similar exercise. Your right to life or to work or to vote does not take anything away from anyone else. We can all pursue happiness at once. Entitlements, on the other hand, require someone else to provide me with the substantive good that the exercise of rights pursues. The right to work, for example, is fundamentally different from the right (entitlement) to a job; the right to marry does not entitle me to a spouse; the right to free speech does not entitle me to an audience.

The New Deal is often described as a “constitutional revolution.” In fact, it was much more than that. It involved a rejection not just of the structure and principles of the Constitution, but those of the theory of natural rights in the Declaration of Independence—that, as Jefferson put it, governments are instituted in order to secure our rights. Roosevelt envisioned not a new constitution, but a new idea of what Sunstein calls “a nation’s constitutive commitments.”

As to this problem, Sunstein says that “The best response to those who believe that the second bill of rights does not protect rights at all is just this: unembarrassed evasion.”

Roosevelt anticipated no constitutional problem for the New Deal, for “Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form.”

Of course, there were severe constitutional problems with the New Deal, and Roosevelt ended up in a nasty campaign to “pack” the Supreme Court, the political reaction to which effectively ended the New Deal.

The economic bill of rights agenda has proceeded in fits and starts ever since, under the labels Fair Deal, Great Society and, it may be, whatever slogan will attach to “spreading the wealth around.”

Obama and academic liberals lament that the Supreme Court, once under the control of liberals in the Warren years, didn’t do more to advance economic equality. And most observers think that Obama will only have the chance to replace retiring liberals with new liberals on the current Court. The larger point is that liberals won’t need the court to implement the economic bill of rights, so complete will their majority be in the political branches.

Thus the real “change” for the American people, as Obama so candidly put it, is whether we want to repeal not just the Constitution, but the Declaration of Independence, in order to establish an entitlement state, or not.