Rather than a king, like so many people seem to treat him, we see that the President is supposed to be a servant to the states. Executing the laws and powers of the United States, working with the representatives of the states in Congress to make treaties and appoint officers, and accepting foreign dignitaries is all done in service to the union of states. Does that sound like the most powerful man in the world?
Freedom of speech has been under attack in this country, and Colorado has been a big part of it. First, Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop has spent ten years trying to defend his right to not be compelled to create custom cakes with messages which violate his beliefs.
For the last two years I have been showing you how much our current government in Washington, D.C. is acting exactly as King George III did back in the 18th century. While King George’s actions led the colonies to declare independence, the states have not shown themselves as willing to defend their rights and those of their citizens now. Why is that?
The members of Congress are the employees of the people, and it’s about time we remind both the Congressmen and the people of that fact. As the representative branch of government, it’s the duty of Congress to represent the people and the states, not just their donors or advocacy groups.
Will Congress ever learn not to exceed its mandate and infringe on the rights of the American people? Not until We the People start firing those who keep doing so, and hire better representation for ourselves. Until then I suggest you both educate yourselves and your state representatives about the limitation of the powers of Congress, and their responsibility. . .
I’ve written before about the Convention of States movement, but this is a topic I’m frequently asked about. I know plenty of people both for and against such a convention, and I’ve written about their concerns as well. However, I’ve been asked to write not about the movement, but about the convention itself.
In short, we can expect nothing to really change, at least not under this administration. Unless and until we have a chief executive that will uphold the rule of law, not only against their political opponents but upon those in their administration, we will continue to see not only justice delayed, but justice denied.
While I cannot condone the obstructive acts committed by Mr. Fischer and others inside the capitol that day, there is plenty of evidence that their entry was sanctioned by the Capitol Police, that most of them were not violent or disruptive, and they did not get near enough to the House chambers to be considered obstructive.
With all the fingers pointing back and forth between the houses of Congress, the Presidency, and the Department of Treasury, the ones truly responsible for this mess is We the People. Yes, we have hired representatives that have spent more than they collected in taxes for decades.
I hope anyone who is aware of a case where someone has been caught up in an overly broad and insufficient warrant, will share this information with the individual and their legal team. This case may be an early step in reigning in government collusion with big tech to spy on the American people.
If proxy voting in the House, as established by H. Res. 965 of the 116th Congress, is found to be unconstitutional, that means every piece of legislation voted on in the house where a majority of members were not physically present, is null and void, since it did not legally pass the House.
America is in no less a crisis today. Are you a summer soldier or sunshine patriot? Will you shrink from the service to your state and your country? Or will you stand with me and earn the love and thanks of all Tennesseans and, in fact, all Americans? The choice is yours.
Just like after 9/11, we have government actors stoking the fears of the American people with calls of “We have to do something!” And now, just as then, they are taking what are legitimate concerns and stoking the flames of fear in order to pass legislation that can easily and predictably be used to deprive you of your rights.
When should a parent be denied the right to know about medical procedures performed on their children? Most of us have been rebellious teenagers, sure that our parents are out to get us, only to grow up and realize they were right. When does a teenager’s right to liberty supersede a parent’s right to oversee their minor child’s upbringing?
In short, the Food and Drug Administration’s flagrant disregard for the law and the public health they were tasked to protect shows it to be an utter failure. Add to that the fact that the act that created the FDA was unconstitutional when it was passed, and what do we have?
Could it be, that membership in the militia is a duty all Americans should willingly fulfill? In several countries around the world, military service is compulsory. Under American law, it’s only necessary to be part of the militia, to be willing, if necessary, to fight for your state and your nation.
To explain, I think we need to back up a minute. Think of how many choices you are truly able to make for yourself, choices that are not controlled by arbitrary rules, regulations, and laws. Decisions that are not influenced by others. How many choices are you truly able to make for yourself?
This bill takes its first jab at the federal government by pointing out the violations of the horizontal separation of powers. Article I, Section 1, Clause 1 of the Constitution of the United States says that all legislative (lawmaking) power is delegated to Congress. The President cannot make law via executive orders, and contrary to popular belief, neither can the federal courts, not even the Supreme Court, and Congress has no authority to delegate its lawmaking power to others.
I’m loath to use the term “Bill of Rights” lightly, for two very good reasons. First, the overuse of any term tends to diminish its value. Second, just because something claims to be a “Bill of Rights” doesn’t mean it actually is one. The bill may be very good, but that doesn’t mean it’s truly a Bill of Rights.
I understand the desire to find someone or something to blame. With all of the corruption in governments at all levels, we all would like to find some thing we can do to get our rights and liberties back. Let’s face it, the “Sovereign Citizen Movement”, along with so many other conspiracy theories, are just another distraction.
I often hear people say that we don’t own our property, but merely rent it from government. If your property can be taken to pay a debt that is a fraction of what you owe, then that statement may be true. What is described in this lawsuit does not sound like a free people with the right to enjoy, defend, and protect their property.
That means the only branch of the federal government legally capable of enacting laws is Congress. When an executive branch department or agency writes “regulations” with the force of law, those acts are not made pursuant to the Constitution, so they are not the supreme law of the land and are void.
Since We the People have turned responsibility for our own safety to various governments, we have no one to blame for these intrusive inspections and overbearing licensing requirements but ourselves. As James Madison warned, we enabled government to control the governed, but forgot that we needed to control government as well.
Imagine you have immunity for any bad actions you take. You’ve probably heard of diplomatic immunity, where officials of other countries are shielded from prosecution. Then there’s sovereign immunity, when the head of government cannot be charged. In America though, our legal system has come up with the idea of qualified immunity.
You may think the forceful suppression of hate speech is necessary for the public. I beg to differ, and I believe history shows me to be correct. Have you thought about what would happen should your views be deemed “hate speech”? To paraphrase Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, “He who lives by tyranny shall die by oppression.”
There are few things more universally feared and hatred than the IRS. When I’m asked about unconstitutional government agencies and point out that the IRS does exercise a power delegated to the United States, most people are gravely disappointed. Of course, while the IRS may legally exist, that does not mean that everything they do is constitutional.
There are many today that claim that the President is the most powerful man in the world and has vast powers, but legally that is not true. We declared independence from a man with just such powers. That is why we not only delegated to the United States a limited and enumerated list of powers, but why we delegated most of those powers to Congress, not the President.
Mr. Brunson’s case is audacious, and not just because of who the defendants are. He claims that a unique breach of national security occurred and that the only redress for this grievance is the removal from office of the President, Vice President, and most of the members of the House and Senate.
Should the United States implement a CBDC, then the failure of the republic would be complete. All it would take is the Fed refusing to honor cash and everyone would be forced to do business with one bank, the Federal Reserve. We would look more like Communist China than the country created by the Framers of the Constitution.
I guess I’ve gotten used to seeing courts come to the right decision in their own way, even if it seems twisted and convoluted. The question for me is, will this new-found respect for the rights of individuals and organizations to determine who they will do business with permeate throughout the federal judicial system?
So what is the actual cost of our constitutional illiteracy? Yes, it’s over $6 trillion dollars of money embezzled from the American people each and every year. It is also the volumes of rules and regulations, all considered to have the force of law even though they come from an agency that does not legally exist.
I fear this newfound ‘respect’ for what anyone wants to call marriage means the further destruction of the family with all of the associated societal issues. It’s important that we remember though, the Respect for Marriage Act is not the cause of these issues, but the symptom of the damage that marriage and the family has already suffered.
While writing my last two articles about the Virginia Bill of Rights, I became more and more impressed by the person who had written them. I decided to do some research on this little known, but extremely important Founding Father, and what I found did not diminish my opinion of him. So today...
I’ve been saying for quite some time that the solution to many problems is local, not national. This is a perfect example. The CDC has squandered any credibility they had and they have lost the authority to dictate medical decisions to anyone. Stop waiting for your elected employees to protect your children for you; stand up and do it yourself.
In point of fact, the court is using “freedom of speech” to suppress freedom of speech. It has placed “a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say” squarely in the hands of government. When any government has the ultimate authority as to what communication a privately owned platform must allow, then government has become the censor.
I’m sure you’ve heard of “Operation Crossfire Hurricane”, sometimes called “Russia-gate”. Carter Page was caught up in this investigation and sued the Department of Justice for lying to the FISA court in order to acquire warrants to surveil him. A district court recently granted the DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case. The reasons why and the logic behind them is worth looking into.
Unless We the People stand up to the long train of abuses the federal courts have committed against us and throw off such despotism, we condemn our children to live as subjects of an oligarchy rather than a free and secure people in a constitutional republic.
While the stay from the Supreme Court is good news, it doesn’t mean that Yeshiva University is out of the woods. My guess is there will be plenty of opinions, appeals, and legal maneuvering before this case is finally decided. As Thomas Jefferson said: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
While this case moves forward, and whether you live in California or not, I want you to consider this: The only reason this judge found for the churches is she did not believe the Director made a sufficiently compelling case to infringe on the rights of these churches.
When a government agent stands at your door asking to come in, do you know what your rights are? What would you do if that agent tries to enter your house illegally? If that day comes, the difference between liberty and incarceration may well depend on how well you know your rights and how prepared you are to assert and defend them.
I hope by now you have seen the jaw-dropping arrogance of the little talked about words of Associate Justice Kagan. While experience tells me she is not likely to pay any price for her bad behavior, much less the oath she took to support the Constitution of the United States, I can only hope that the American people will take this lesson to heart.
Most of us are aware of Double Jeopardy, the right to not be tried for the same crime twice, but the courts have adopted a “dual sovereign” doctrine to get around this pesky little problem. Two Supreme Court cases out of Oklahoma show how good intentions often lead to problems, and how the court makes up the rules as they go along.
Whether you think there should be term limits for justices on the Supreme Court, or federal judges in general, it cannot legally be done by simple legislation. What these Congressmen want to do requires an amendment to the Constitution.
Those who have stoked the fears of America becoming a theocracy have used the misinterpretation of Jefferson’s “separation of church and state” to effectively do what they claim to be avoiding: Establishing a national religion of secularism. This case is one small step for religious freedom in America.
Since 2014 the court replaced the flawed “Lemon Test” with a more constitutionally sound methodology. While, the District and Circuit Courts didn’t recognize this fact, the Supreme Court did. Will this new opinion help the lower courts recognize that a person’s right to freedom of religion isn’t subject to the government’s fear that someone may see it and think it’s an endorsement?
Did you ever imagine that a question about air pollution could end up changing the way governments work? That may be exactly what happened with the Supreme Court’s opinion in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency. What started as a question of whether or not the EPA’s plan to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from the electric grid...
What will the officials in these six states and the District of Columbia do? Will they recognize their mistake, that placing discretionary requirements on the exercise of a constitutionally protect right is both arbitrary and capricious? Will they learn from this opinion and begin to correct their infringements on the rights of the people they purport to serve?
After almost 50 years, a landmark decision of the Supreme Court has been overturned. Will it be remembered with other decisions like Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson? Only time will tell. After all of the furor when a draft of the opinion was leaked, we finally get a chance to review that actual opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health in its final form.
If We the People will pick up the Constitution, read it, and study it, we’ll find that our subjection to Washington, D.C., is not the law, but a result of our own actions. Washington, D.C.’s power is as fake as the emperor’s clothes in the Hans Christian Anderson story. Isn’t it time others join me in pointing out just how naked the government in Washington, D.C. really is?
There are plenty of problems in America today, too many to number most likely. I’m frequently asked what we can do. Too often, it seems everyone is looking to Washington, D.C. for answers. By studying the Constitution, and a couple of Supreme Court opinions, I think we can find some answers a lot closer to home.
Have you ever considered how money relates to speech? The federal government has. One of the issues with federal election law is the limitation on the use of money for a candidate to get their message out. What does the case FEC v Cruz have to do with free speech? More important, what does it show about the state of elections in America?
There’s a saying in many training communities, “The body will not go where the mind has not already been.” Another one you may have heard is the Five “P’s”, Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. The idea is simple; if you do not prepare beforehand for a given situation, you will not be prepared when it happens. But what happens when government preparations move from proper to totalitarian?
What do these two famous, or rather infamous, cases have in common? They denied rights to human beings because of their ancestry. While the precedent set in Scott was overturned by the Fourteenth Amendment, nothing has overturned the opinion in Korematsu. Laws that violated the supreme law of the land were used in both cases, and courts endorsed these travesties of justice.
Since the district court found that infringing on the right of certain people to keep and bear arms somehow did not burden the Second Amendment, they figured they were done. However, in an effort to cover their backside, the court determined that this question should receive intermediate scrutiny. But what is this “scrutiny”?
When is flying a flag government speech? That was the question before the Supreme Court in the case of Shurtleff, et al. V. City Of Boston et al. Could the City of Boston refuse to fly a Christian flag? Was the city required to do so? Or did Harold Shurtleff have the right to fly the flag of his choice on public property?
All this leaves us with the question of what the District Court for the District of Columbia will do? Will they recognize Mr. Quaglin’s right to have his detention reviewed by the court or will they look at the opinions of previous Supreme Courts and waffle? Time will tell.
The CDC, the states and cities that run the airports, the airlines, and everyone else were following a law that did not legally exist. That makes it just like all those who were afraid to say anything when the emperor walked around with no clothes. It’s worse than that though, because they also committed a federal crime.
What can you do when government actors abuse their powers? I’ve talked before about the right to petition the government for a redress of grievance and how the judicial precedent of sovereign immunity violates that right. But what happens when law enforcement or the justice department abuses their prosecutorial powers? How do you seek redress for a malicious prosecution?
The First Amendment prohibits Congress from passing laws that abridge your right to petition the government for a redress of grievance. Yet not only has Congress ignored that restriction on their actions, but the federal courts have piled on as well. Today, I will look at what the right to petition means, how that has been violated, and what the American people can do about it.
Misdirection is the stock and trade of both magicians and politicians. Over the years, the American people have been conditioned to focus on Washington, D.C. as both the source of our problems and their solution. In doing so, we are allowing those in our state and local government to steal our rights and our liberties right out from under our noses.
Imagine your rights are under attack. You seek assistance from those who have sworn to protect you, only to be attacked again. You reach out to what you think is your last hope, only to be rebuffed. Now consider how that must feel: To be abandoned by those who have sworn to protect you.
We all recognize that property can be foreclosed on for failure to pay a tax debt. What happens when the value of the foreclosure is greater than the debt owed? A case out of Michigan, recently appealed to the Sixth Circuit, seeks redress for just such situations. Eight citizens of Oakland County Michigan are suing the county for...
The governor who executes the laws of the Commonwealth work for the people. If they are unwilling to follow the laws created by the representatives of the people, they should be removed. If the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia are unwilling to hold their elected officials accountable, they have no one to blame except themselves.
So if you’re looking for someone to blame for the current state of our border, look no farther than your mirror. Rather than blaming the alien who broke the law, take responsibility for your choices that led to the fact that those laws aren’t being enforced in the first place.
Since We the People formed those state governments and elected those who hold office, then we are derelict in our duty as well. If freedom and liberty fall in America, if despotism and tyranny are allowed to continue, if this experiment in self government has failed and the sacred fire of liberty should go out, it’s because We the People have been derelict in our duties.
I got the idea for the Constitution Study while listening to a podcast reporting on the 2013 State of the First Amendment Survey. While the First Amendment Center has not issued a survey since 2019, based on what I’ve been seeing lately it’s still worth investigating. Let’s roll back the clock a few years, look at the state of the First Amendment...
The Constitution for the United States of America is the oldest national constitution in the world, and second only to the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in age. Two hundred and thirty four years is a good run, but that is no guarantee that it will continue. If we wish to uphold the Constitution and the Republic for which it stands, then it’s up to We the People to work to keep it. Otherwise, our future may look more like Napoleonic France, or worse, the Reign of Terror that proceeded it.
It appears most of the American people are willing to tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption. That means this abuse of the Constitution, the experiment in self government, and the consent of the governed is ultimately our fault. The question is, will the American people do anything to stop it before it becomes “law”?
There are a group of people for whom the phrase “Never Again” has special meaning. We were supposed to have learned our lesson from the Nazis. Lessons about the dangers of rhetoric without evidence, of emotion over reason, of treating groups of people as sub-human. We were supposed to have learned the dangers of unrestrained power and a lack of ethics.
