Are you finally ready to admit that a constitution can’t control a state?

By David McElroy · December 28, 2013

How many times have people told us that we should put our faith in the Constitution, because it’s there to protect our rights? Originalists tell us that the document is sacred. Progressives say it’s a “living document,” whatever they think that means this week. They both claim the Constitution protects us.

But time after time, we’ve seen that the Constitution can’t do the job it’s supposed to do — that of limiting the politicians who claim power over us. The document was carefully constructed to grant very narrow power to the federal government. And if anybody missed the intent, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments were added to make is clear that the government has no powers which aren’t specifically granted in it. Those amendments make it clear that the states and the people themselves retain any powers not given to the federal government.

How much more clear could that have been?

Has that stopped politicians from controlling both states and individuals? No. Congress invents whatever law it wants, justifying those laws in ways that would have confused and angered the men who wrote the document. The people of the executive branch routinely make up their own versions of laws, claiming vague power that Congress has theoretically given to them, but which violate the text and intent of the Constitution.

And the judges of the judicial branch routinely give us rulings that ignore the text and intent of the document — and which pander to the political need of the day.

The latest example of this is the ruling by a New York federal judge Friday that the NSA is perfectly free to collect pretty much any information that it wants to collect about Americans. Even though the NSA’s snooping is a clear violation of the intent of the Constitution, the judge says it’s fine because the government needs to fight terrorism. (A different judge issued an entirely different ruling earlier this month.)

Fighting terrorism seems to have become the all-purpose excuse for anything that any “authority” wants to do today. And even though it’s a clear violation of our natural rights and our alleged constitutional rights, it happens anyway. And where is this Constitution when we need it to protect us?

Toward the end of “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority,” Lysander Spooner wrote this in 1867: “But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”

Spooner’s powerful arguments are even more true today. I suggest you read all of “No Treason.”

I’ve argued before that the Constitution is a dead document with no specific meaning anymore. It’s just a relic that politicians invoke when they want to justify anything they choose to do. I don’t see how anyone can continue to pretend it has the power to protect our rights — when the power to interpret it and carry it out rests with the men and women who want to take our rights and money away from us.

There is no social contract. No one else can bind me (or you) to obey something we haven’t agreed to. But even if there were such an obligation, it’s impossible to get the people on the other side to live up to their end of the agreement.

If you’re one of those who’s counting on the Constitution to protect your rights, isn’t it time to admit that reality shows that no document can stop politicians from doing whatever they want? Isn’t it time to look to another strategy for protecting any rights you believe you have?

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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