Letter from Chief John Ross, "To the Senate and House of Representatives"

[Red Clay Council Ground, Cherokee Nation, September 28, 1836]

Early in the 19th century, while the rapidly-growing United States expanded into the lower South, white settlers faced what they considered an obstacle. This area was home to the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chicasaw and Seminole nations. These Indian nations, in the view of the settlers and many other white Americans, were standing in the way of progress. Eager for land to raise cotton, the settlers pressured the federal government to acquire Indian territory.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830

[This was the Jackson-era legislation authorizing the president to transfer Eastern Indian tribes to the western territories promised (falsely) "in perpetuity". The actual relocation culminated in the 1838 "Trail of Tears" forced march, one of the most shameful occurrences in the history of federal domestic policy.]

The Madison worker uprising shook up the US political landscape. State governments that were peacefully going about their business forcing workers and communities to pay for upper class gluttony are facing resistance on a scale they had not imagined.

"In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell

Is there any limit to the outrageousness of the GOP lies?

Is there any limit to the capacity of a large number of our fellow citizens to accept these lies?

If it were in the interest of the ruling oligarchs to convince a majority of the public that the earth is flat, could they succeed?

This is, after all, a public almost half of which refuses to accept evolution – the central coordinating concept of modern biology. And approximately half of the GOP primary voters believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

These unsettling thoughts came to my mind when I heard Michael Steele remark that "not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job." This from a man who held a government job as Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. That remark was echoed by Mitch Daniels, the Governor of Indiana and Sarah Palin and I can testify that I have heard it elsewhere.

I am old enough to remember the days when what Americans were told to fear most was "Creeping Communism."

There were even hearings. There was a blacklist. There were arrests and even a couple of executions.

In the end all communism turned out to be creeping towards was its own extinction.

We may not be a lucky with the new creep we're facing today: Creeping Ignorance.

For those of you who didn’t know it everyone who works for the federal government works for us!

That’s right! We are their employers’ a/k/a bosses because the moment they accepted our taxes in salary in exchange to do the work we hired them to do, we became their bosses.

You may asked, “But why are they such lousy employees?”

And the answer is, you tell me!

Please look in a mirror and look yourself straight in the eyes then ask yourself, “If I employ everyone who works for the federal government why are they such lousy employees,” and don’t be surprised if the answer comes back, “Because I’m a lousy boss.”

Employees have to be supervised and we taxpayers aren’t doing a very good job of supervising our employees!

Now you may be asking, “How am I supposed to supervise employees of the federal government?”

Well, a few of the ways it’s done is:

1. Attend town hall meetings and ask a lot of questions. Asking questions will let your representative know where your head is at and whether or not his/her thoughts are in-lined with yours.
2. Volunteer to work on the campaigns of the people running if you believe their goals for the country are in-lined with yours.
3. Voice your concerns at the polls. Voting says, “not no, but hell no!”
4. When any of the representatives from any state goes off the deep end let them know how you feel by writing them. I personally don’t agree with sending emails because they are too impersonal.
5. Learn the steps to impeachment and get out there and collect those signatures. You might start out as the lone ranger but as times goes on others will join you. You might not collect enough signatures because those who are afraid of authority and those who disagree with you won’t sign the petition but believe me, the word will get back to the incumbent or the individual whose running!

Now that we know what it takes to be a good boss it’s time to ask yourself, "Are our employees earning their keep!"

This is how much we pay our federal employees

$193,400 Majority Party Leader

$193,400 Minority Party Leader

$223,500 Speaker of the House

$174,000 Senators / Congress

$208,100 Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

$199,200 Associate Justices

link others (general, foreign, military, etc. pay schedules)

What’s not included in the salaries are non-taxable and taxable expenses and taxpayer paid benefits.

How many bosses pay their employees more then they pay themselves?

How many bosses provide benefits to their employees that they aren’t giving themselves?

Cuts should start at the top and the cuts I’d like to start with are the salaries and benefits of our top government officials!

How about you?

Who are they? The richest 1 percent. And maybe the next 9 percent.

Who are we? All the rest.

Which poses an interesting question.

How has a tiny fraction of the population – which is diverse in many ways – arranged for their narrowest economic interests to dominate the economic interests of the vast majority? And, while they're at it, endanger the economic well-being of our nation, and bring the financial system of the whole world to the brink of collapse.

They have money.

We have votes.

Theoretically, that means we should have the government. Theoretically, government should be a countervailing force against the excesses of big money, take the long view for the good of the nation, and watch out for the majority. Let alone for the poor and downtrodden.

Hey, Sarah P.:

You could not have planned it better yourself.

Like a petulant 2-year-old, the hyperbolic analyses of the Tea Party's primary victories need a timeout. Political America should quietly listen to a mostly forgotten, gravelly voiced United States senator from Illinois.

The focus on the unorthodox winners in Delaware and New York, and how they might affect the Republicans, obscures the fissures in the Democratic Party. We're left with a dispiriting amalgam: voters who believe that virtually no good can be done by government and voters for whom virtually nothing is good enough.

For both cadres, there is an evil lurking everywhere: compromise. It's a synonym for weakness and a reason to batter and berate an opponent, whether in your party or another.

How stupid are you?

Think things are bad now? Take a look at what could happen if Republicans retake Congress in November.

1) Shut down government to stop health care bill.

2) Attempt to privatize Social Security.

3) Spend every waking hour investigating the Obama administration.

4) Repeal the 14th amendment -- divest immigrants' children of citizenship.

5) Cap and trade? Forget about it. Not only are conservative activists aggressively campaigning against Democrats who support cap and trade -- legislation that mandates emissions reductions -- but they are also trying to unseat moderate Republicans who support cap and trade and replace them with ultraconservative, often Tea Party-backed politicians.

6) More disastrous economic policies like the practices that caused our financial crisis.

7) Kill or drastically slash Food Stamp program.

8) Roll back and repeal equal rights for gays.

9) Abandon the unemployed.

10) Paralyze one branch of our government.

War Is A Racket is an in your face kick-ass book exposing politicians thirst for wars-for-profit.

Quotes worth committing to memory:

At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their income tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dugout? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried the bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in Battle?

Out of war nations acquired additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few—the self-same few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill. p. 24

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to “about face”’ to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or being killed. p. 33

Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the “war to end wars.” This was the war to make the world safe for democracy.” No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason. No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a “glorious adventure.” p. 35

To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket. We must take the profit out of war. We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war. We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes. p. 42

An enlightening read brilliantly written.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State today urged Congress to reject an appeal for public funding of "faith-based" charities that discriminate in hiring on religious grounds.

One of the most critical functions of government is to protect our health from hidden dangers in our homes, schools, and workplaces. In particular, we rely upon our government to protect us from dangers that we, as individuals, are powerless to address. Major milestones in the field of public health improvements in the last century include vanquishing threats like botulism, smallpox, and polio, as well as protecting people and the environment by tackling chemical contamination left over from decades of unregulated dumping of hazardous wastes. Today, we face another urgent call for our government to step in and protect future generations from a serious health threat that lurks in schools and homes.

A plot of Wall Street interests to overthrow President Roosevelt and establish a Fascist dictatorship, backed by a private army of 500,000 ex-soldiers and others, was charged by Major Gen. Smedley D. Butler, retired Marine Corps officer, who appeared yesterday before the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities, which began hearings on the charges.

Pay attention now, you're about to read about the biggest and most successful scam in History.

In its first year of existence, the Tea Party movement made clear what it was angry about: the first black American President, health-care reform, taxes, deficit spending, "lib-rhuls," socialists, Hitler, emergency "bailouts" to stave off a new Great Depression, and – in general – Big Government.

Now, however, with its first genuine national spokesman – Republican Senate candidate from Kentucky Rand Paul – the public is getting a clearer sense of what the Tea Party is actually for. It is a movement intended to enshrine "owner rights," along with states' rights, as the bedrocks of the American system.

In an astute op-ed piece in the Christian Science Monitor, James Bovard points out that the love of liberty by the Tea Party crowd usually takes a backseat to a hatred of President Obama and the Left. After attending a tax day Tea Party event in Rockville, Md., a suburb of the nation's capital, Bovard reported that the Tea Partiers oppose big government from the Left but not from the Right. Big government from the Right usually involves warfare and its accompanying enhanced police powers at home, which usually severely erode the liberty Tea Partiers claim to stand for. For example, the tea sippers extended their pinkies in a salute to torture, harsh policies toward Iran, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They didn't seem to mind the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping and vacuuming up of ordinary Americans' phone calls either, according to Bovard.

Having recently reached 74 years of age, if one were to ask me what's my greatest disappointment in life, a top contender would surely be the level of misunderstanding, perhaps contempt, that black Americans have for the principles of personal liberty and their abiding faith in government. Contempt or misunderstanding of the principles of personal liberty and faith in government by no means make blacks unique among Americans, but the unique history of black Americans should make us, above all other Americans, most suspicious of any encroachment on personal liberty and most distrustful of government. Let's look at it.

Congress, particularly the U.S. Senate, boasts established rules for members to delay legislation. These rules have historically been reserved to ensure proper deliberation and consideration on the most important issues facing the nation. Recently, however, the Republican Party embraced these obstructionist tactics to subvert progressives so much that they have rendered the government dysfunctional.

They don't trust government. They don't trust politicians. They don't trust science or scientists. They don't even trust an official birth certificates when they the issuing state provides a photocopy.

You know who I'm talking about. So exactly how do this growing movement, broadly described by the moniker, Tea Party, intend to govern, should they get their way? Like all radical far left or far right populist movements through out history, they don't even trust one another, at least not entirely.

In the last five years, salmonella outbreaks have seeped through America's industrial food supply; contamination in Chinese factories found its way into commonly-prescribed American drugs; and drugs from major U.S. pharmaceutical companies had to be recalled even after being declared safe by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

For all the moaning from deficit hawks, the U.S. budget is simply not in crisis. If investors were losing confidence in our nation's ability to pay off its debts, we'd see a major reduction in demand for U.S. Treasury bonds. And we do not, in fact, see any such reduction. Last week the Treasury sold $21 billion in 10-year bonds, and investors were clamoring for them in such droves that the government had to turn away nearly 80 percent of them. If investors were really worried about the U.S. paying back its debt, they'd demand a very high interest rate from the government to compensate them for the risk they were taking. But in fact, interest rates are remarkably low. That 10-year bond currently fetches a yield of around 3.9 percent. For entire years of President George H. W. Bush's reign, the yield was above 8 percent, often eclipsing 9 percent.

"Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

Recently there's been a lot of speculation about why the mood on the right has turned so sour. Some observers attribute it to the lack of leadership at the top of the Republican Party, the surreal reality that Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have more influence than do elected Republicans. Others say it's a poisonous combination of economic angst and racial hatred. But there's a more obvious explanation: we're witnessing the death throes of conservatism. The right-wing ideology that ran the US for thirty years has proven to be a total failure and the passage of healthcare reform was the final nail in its coffin.

In case you've forgotten, classic conservatism promised to keep us safe, reduce the size of government, lower taxes, and manage the economy. Republican broke each of these commitments.

Among the deprived are 1 percent of blacks in several Southern states. Meet one community.

Word came last October that the federal government had earmarked more than half the required financing to hook up 10 homes on a Mississippi back road to the municipal water system in the city of Ruleville, six minutes away by car. As lead hell-raiser in the 7-year-old battle to get potable water piped to his snatch of Drew-Ruleville Road ever since the local well gave out, Robert Martin was glad to hear the news. But he didn't get overly optimistic.

Time and again, he and his neighbors had had their entreaties to get municipal water rebuffed. In part, they were told it was not cost-effective for either a public water supplier, or any of the private ones that accommodate wealthier residents in Mississippi's countryside, to service a handful of outlying households in Sunflower County.

There are "poll numbers that pretty convincingly correlate believing idiotic things with having less education, and not believing idiotic things with having more education."

I know some scary smart people who never graduated from high school, and I know some real doofuses with graduate degrees, so I understand that the number of years of formal education that someone has racked up is no guarantee of intelligence. But every once in a while, I see some poll numbers that pretty convincingly correlate believing idiotic things with having less education, and not believing idiotic things with having more education.

A recent example is a Harris poll that asked whether each of 15 statements about Barack Obama is true or false. In every single case, the less schooling people had, the more likely they were to believe that false things are true.

For example, 18 percent of Americans with high school or less education think that the president may be the Anti-Christ. That's right, nearly one out of five people who are eligible to vote, same as you, believe Obama is the bad guy in The Omen. But only 13 percent of people with some college believe that; and 9 percent of college graduates; and down to 4 percent of people who've had some post-graduate education.

The week of March 15, thousands of Tea Party activists from across the country descended on Capitol Hill for one last coordinated surge against "Obamacare" and to voice opposition against big government.

Concern about massive jobs losses due to unfair Chinese trade practices is reshaping the American political battle lines over trade, with labor winning new and sometimes unlikely supporters in its fight for stronger policies to protect American workers.

There has been a lot of talk recently about non-defense discretionary spending. But what is non-defense discretionary spending? What does it do? How much of the budget really goes to this category? And would it really be so easy to cut back? Our new interactive tool can help you answer these questions.

No government, government entity, individual, or group, including religious doctrines has the right to determine how an individual should live his or her life; as long as, the individual's actions are in accordance with the Law of Fairness and the Laws of Nature. No individual, group , government or government entity has the right or authority to impose their will through the use of deception, threat of deception, threat of force, fraud, coercion, threat of initiated force or initiated force on any individual or their offspring who has reached the age of reasoning.*

Wall Street Vampires: Lately, a lot of Americans, myself included, have used the blood-sucking monsters as a metaphor to describe the Wall Street billionaires who rule us, and who are ruining us. Like so many awful stories of the past few years, it turns out that these Wall Street vampire-billionaires really exist, literally. Like all vampires, they live in remote castles, and feed themselves by luring poor, desperate humans into their dens, hooking them into blood-pumping machines, and sucking out their plasma for mind-boggling profits.

While there are many serious issues surrounding the foster care problem, it is still a viable solution for the over 500,000 children in foster care homes. Yet one of the major challenges is the insufficiency of qualified homes for children to be placed in.

The experts discuss the three biggest issues impacting the foster care problem: as mentioned, lack of good homes, limited budgets the system works with, which in turn does not pay a care giver very much, and government ineffectiveness.

Children placed in homes often exhibit antisocial behaviors, low self-esteem, post traumatic stress disorders and depression.

Despite criticism that President Obama presides over an all-boys' club, there are several female all-stars in his administration, as picked by NARAL President Nancy Keenan.

Why are Americans filled with so much hate and intolerance when hate and intolerance breeds fear and violence?

After reading Marcia Muller's Pennies On A Dead Woman's Eyes and the character Sharon McCone making the above statements in addition to:

In the 50s we hated the Commies.

In the 60s we hated the hippies, drug feigns, and protesters.

In the 70s we hated feminists.

In the 80s there was the backlash against liberals.

In the 90s government commissioned studies on how to control and use the religious right.

As a nation we don't discriminate on our hatreds.

Those above statements prompted me to ponder the mentality of humans.

Single-payer is a complete government-run health insurance system under which everyone is covered, e.g., Canada's system. The "public option" is a single federal insurance plan that would compete with private insurance companies.

Yesterday, Senate Democrats working on health care reform reached a compromise on the public option that will create a network of nonprofit insurers and allow Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 to buy into Medicare. The right has hypocritically opposed a government-run public-option while simultaneously defending Medicare. On his radio show today, Fox News host Glenn Beck called Medicare what it is — a "government-run health care plan."

DUBLIN, Ireland — Police officers, government officials and bishops of the Catholic church in Ireland have been harshly censured in a report on clerical child abuse over three decades in the Archdiocese of Dublin. Coming just a few months after an equally harsh report on the ill-treatment of children in Church-run industrial schools, the latest revelations have shocked Catholics and non-Catholics alike throughout the island.

The following is a letter from SPLC President Richard Cohen to CNN President Jonathan Klein.

July 24, 2009

Jonathan Klein
President
CNN/U.S.
1 Time Warner Center
New York, N.Y. 10019-6038

Dear Mr. Klein,

As an important and respected news organization, CNN has a special responsibility to ensure the accuracy of its reporting. We have written to you before about our concern that Lou Dobbs repeatedly fails to live up to this standard in his reporting on immigration. Now, Mr. Dobbs is again trading in falsehoods and racist conspiracy theories, questioning President Obama's American citizenship....

The truth about the president's birth is not in dispute. It has been verified by Factcheck.org, among many other serious news organizations, and his official birth documents have been made public. CNN itself has repeatedly reported on the falsity of the claims of the "birthers," and the network's esteemed legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, recently called those claims "a joke." As you know, even Mr. Dobbs' frequent fill-in anchor, Kitty Pilgrim, debunked the birthers on the July 17 edition of Mr. Dobbs' own CNN show. The fact that Mr. Dobbs suggests otherwise on CNN — while real CNN reporters tell the truth — is both deplorable and an embarrassment to all serious journalists....

As he has in several other instances, Mr. Dobbs, in taking up the birthers' claims, is adopting an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that originated on the radical racist right. As Gawker.com has reported, this particular conspiracy theory was first developed by an open anti-Semite and circulated by right-wing extremists who cannot accept the fact that a black man has been elected president of the United States. Among its adherents was neo-Nazi James von Brunn, the alleged murderer of a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., this June. Von Brunn had helped spread the birthers' claims on the Internet and attacked the "dishonest & conspiratorial Media" for not taking them up.

This is not the first time Mr. Dobbs has pushed racist conspiracy theories or defamatory falsehoods about immigrants.... Respectable news organizations should not employ reporters willing to peddle racist conspiracy theories and false propaganda. It's time for CNN to remove Mr. Dobbs from the airwaves.

Sincerely,
J. Richard Cohen
President

Southern Poverty Law Center
400 Washington Ave.
Montgomery, AL 36104

A full century-and-a-half before President Barack Obama began mesmerizing the country with his moving oratory, another Black man gave what some call his greatest speech.

Frederick Douglass had not only a White parent and fatherless upbringing in common with America's future leader; he also shared Obama's vision to change government. It was in Rochester, New York, July 1852 when the ex-slave challenged White slavery opponents to step up their game, giving the speech that author David W. Blight describes as "abolition's rhetorical masterpiece."

"Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today?" Douglass asked. "What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim."

For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for "bad blood," their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all.

The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. "As I see it," one of the doctors involved explained, "we have no further interest in these patients until they die."

WE MUST AMEND THE CONSTITUTION IMMEDIATELY OR AMERICA IS DOOMED... DOOMED, I TELL YOU, DOOMED!We need to amend The Constitution to ban gay marriage (because people getting married to show their love of each other is an abomination… and because the idea of two guys or two ugly chicks making out with each other is just gross… and we can’t stop thinking about what it would be like)!

We need to amend The Constitution to ban the burning of the American flag (except by the Boy Scouts… and anyone who wants to dispose of a flag the way it is supposed to be disposed of, never mind that you can’t make people respect a symbol by passing laws which order them to)!

We need to amend The Constitution to ban abortion (because the wealthy can ALWAYS find doctors to take care of THEIR wives, mistresses and daughters)!

We need to amend The Constitution to allow school prayer and the reading of the Bible in school (even though Jesus said “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men.”)!

We need to amend The Constitution to permit the use of the word 'God' in the Pledge of Allegiance and the national motto (because if WE are going to suck up to him, we damn sure want everyone else to be required to, also)!

We need to amend The Constitution and we need to amend it NOW, because the sky is falling on our heads… AAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!

For all of the ideologues who think that amending the Constitution is the appropriate way to enshrine their particular prejudices and passions and to force others to obey them, I want to ask you a question. Very simply, "Have you ever actually read The Constitution?"

The Constitution is a relatively simply document. It's only 4543 words long, which isn’t all that much longer than this article. One key thing that is important about the Constitution is not what it says, but what it does NOT say. The Constitution does NOT say anything about social rules or moral conduct of ‘we the people’ of The United States. The Constitution is an owner's manual of how to operate our government. It does not tell its citizens how to live their lives. In fact, with the exception of our disastrous foray into social policy with the 18th Amendment, which gave us both prohibition AND well financed organized crime, there is nothing in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or any subsequent amendment which deals with dictating social or moral behaviors or beliefs to the American people.

The Constitution itself does not say anything about WHEN, WHY, or FOR WHAT REASONS it should be amended. THOSE questions are left up to the citizens and the legislators of The United States to answer. Article V of The Constitution, in its entirety, says:

“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.”

Thus, whenever someone raises the issue of amending the Constitution, the first question that should be asked is: "Is the issue itself appropriate for inclusion?"

Nowhere in the Constitution is a single word which even speaks to specific imposed restrictions on the rights of the citizens, unless you count treason, insurrection, piracy, counterfeiting, malfeasance in office or other such defined crimes as rights which are denied to ‘we the people’. It doesn't even speak to obligations of ‘we the people’ TO the government, though it does speak of obligations which the government has to ‘we the people’. In fact, other than talking about issues such as voting, or rights before the courts, the Constitution itself barely even deals with individual citizens.

Amending The Constitution is, and was intended by the framers of The Constitution to be, a VERY difficult and VERY time consuming process. It is not supposed to be something that happens very often or for trivial reasons. To see how meaningless a constitution becomes when it can be easily and frequently amended one need only look at the state constitutions of either Texas or Alabama. While state constitutions average around 36,000 words, the Texas state constitution is 80,806 words long and has been amended at least 632 times in 136 years (although Texas voters subsequently rejected at least 176 of them after our legislature passed them). The Alabama state constitution is, unbelievably, an even worse document than the state constitution of Texas. At 357,157 words, the Alabama constitution is about 40 times longer than the US Constitution and even three times longer than the longest national constitution of any sovereign nation in the world (India, whose constitution has 444 articles, 12 schedules and 94 amendments, with a total of 117,369 words) and it has been amended at least 798 times (the last amendment was #799, but the Alabama legislature itself couldn’t even keep track of how many there were and, as a result, Amendment #693 doesn’t even exist) in 108 years with most of those amendments affecting only single individual counties or even cities, or regulate such minutiae as the salary of the Greene County Probate Judge.

Amendments to state constitutions, such as the one now being called for in Iowa by those scared to death by the idea of two people of the same sex even holding hands, often also seem to ignore the fact that the US Constitution takes precedence over them and has this little thing known as Article IV which includes such provisions as the Full Faith and Credit Clause (Section 1: “Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.”) and the Privileges and Immunities Clause (Section 2: “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.”).

As difficult as it is to amend the US Constitution, it is therefore necessary and proper for both the Legislative and the Judicial branches to interpret and even expand on the meanings of both The Constitution AND of its 27 amendments. Please note, however, that while the very names of those two branches tells us of THEIR roles in that process (to ‘legislate’ and to ‘adjudicate’), no such power is given to the Executive branch, whose task is to ‘execute’ the laws and provisions of The Constitution and the other two branches. This was yet another aspect of our Constitutional government which was not understood by King George (Bush) II or his cronies in crime. Many people who want to use legislation (either federal or state) to counter or go around provisions of The Constitution, however, also show their ignorance of the document as Article VI specifically states that “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

The Constitution of the United States was not conceived or written to tell ‘we the people’ how to live their personal lives or even to place burdens on them towards their Society or their government. It does, however, tell the government how to operate and imposes obligations on it towards ‘we the people’. The Constitution is not a downward directed document, written on the mountain and handed down to ‘we the people’ by a supreme being who must be obeyed. The Constitution was not written by the government to ‘we the people’. The Constitution was, instead, written by ‘we the people’ to tell our government what limits and restrictions are placed upon IT, and what powers and authority are granted to it by the citizens who agreed to be governed by it. I wish people would realize that when they think about using The Constitution for shaping American society according to their own preferences or to try to tell people how to live or what morals they should adopt based on their own prejudices, bigotries and beliefs.

So, if The Constitution focuses on the operation of our government rather than on the behaviors of its citizens, where does the whole debate about our rights originate? The framers of The Constitution believed in ‘natural rights’, the idea that people, by their very nature, HAVE (not ‘are given’, but by birth ‘have’) certain rights which precede the establishment of any government. When The Constitution was written, there was a huge debate about even listing the rights of the citizens of The United States because some feared that the very fact that some rights were enumerated within The Constitution would mean that there would be those who would later argue that rights which were NOT enumerated in The Constitution were not ones which the citizens would have. In Federalist #84, Alexander Hamilton asks “Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?” and writes that "a bill of rights is not only unnecessary but even dangerous” for that very reason. James Madison told Thomas Jefferson that “I conceive that in a certain degree ... the rights in question are reserved by the manner in which the federal powers are granted.” The fear of many was the very idea that enumerating ANY rights within The Constitution be interpreted by any moron as meaning that citizens only had rights BECAUSE of The Constitution. The very intention of the framers was to emphasis that the entire purpose of creating The United States was to protect the rights of the citizens and that the very idea that rights had to be ‘given’ TO ‘we the people’ was monarchical and anathema to everything they believed in and stood for. Connecticut’s Roger Sherman, in his own proposed draft of a Bill of Rights says that “The people have certain natural rights which are retained by them when they enter into Society.”

Much of the concept of natural rights which the framers believed in came from John Locke, the great philosopher and theorist of natural rights. He believed that the primary justification for even founding any government was specifically to make those rights more secure than they would be in a state of nature (a Society with NO government). Thus, the very reason to join together IN a governed Society is to provide ‘we the people’ with protection of those rights by being part of a collective, governed Society which is not present in a lawless Society, in which the strong are able to prey on the weak and take those rights away from ‘we the people’. This is where the framers showed their true genius and foresight by giving us the 9th and 10th Amendments to The Constitution, the “if we forgot something, it’s covered, also” amendments.

The 9th Amendment, in its entirety, states that:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

The 10th Amendment, in its entirety, says that:

“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.”

These are both very interesting Amendments. The 10th is usually used to support arguments which advocate State’s Rights against federal power by people without an awareness that States do not have rights, only powers (as specified in the literal wording of the Amendment), and that those powers are granted by the citizens. It is usually ignored that the 10th tells us that, IN ADDITION TO having rights, as provided for in the 9th, ‘we the people’ ALSO have power. By the very wording of The Constitution, our government only has certain powers and authorities (specifically spelled out within The Constitution), while ‘we the people’ have rights IN ADDITION to powers and authorities.

While there has been a lot of talk about the 10th Amendment, especially since the end of Reconstruction in The South, and since the movement towards recognizing the civil rights of ALL citizens in the 40s, 50s and 60s, the 9th may very well be the most ignored part of the entire Constitution. There even seems to be more case law that is based on the 11th Amendment (“The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.”), which was passed in response to one single Supreme Court case in 1793 (Chisholm v. Georgia), than there has been based on the 9th. Most of the court cases which would seem to be obvious ones about the retained rights and powers of the citizens under the 9th and 10th Amendments, such as Roe v. Wade, typically hinge on arguments which use the provisions of the Section 1 clauses of the 14th Amendments regarding Due Process and/or Privileges and Immunities (“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”) as their foundations.

Why IS the 9th Amendment so rarely raised, utilized or argued in American Courts? I think it is, very simply and fundamentally, because both the courts and our government are afraid of it. If we followed the literal provisions of the 9th Amendment, both the courts and our entire government would have MUCH less power over the citizens than they would like. If we observed the provisions of the 9th Amendment, the citizens would never have the burden to prove that they have certain or specific rights, the government and the courts would have the burden to prove that they DON’T. The party on whom the burden of proof rests has a MUCH more difficult case to make than the one which has the presumption of being correct or innocent. No government in history has ever wanted to bear that burden when they are challenging their own citizens, and courts are a function of government.

Into this fray go those who advocate that The Constitution favors the government over the governed. One of the most prominent advocates of reading The Constitution as only protecting enumerated rights was Judge Robert Bork and his famous ‘inkblot’ interpretation of the 9th Amendment. About the beliefs held by Judge Bork and those who interpret The Constitution using the same flawed concept of ‘originalism’ which he uses (that the only rights belonging to the citizens are those which are specifically spelled out in The Constitution and that any other ‘discovered’ rights are illegitimately ‘created’ by the courts) The Oxford Companion to The Supreme Court of the United States says:

“Yet this skeptical view of unenumerated rights would have the practical effect of converting the original scheme of limited [and] defined powers [of the government] in a sea of individual rights into a scheme of limited enumerated rights in a sea of [unlimited] government powers.”

I would also ask those who advocate such positions as Judge Bork’s for his ‘original intent’ interpretation of The Constitution, “Why do you think that the framers of The Constitution destroyed all of their notes and minutes from the entire Constitutional Convention if not to keep those who followed them from relying on their intent and, thus, giving us the freedom to make this country what we want it to be and to be able to adapt it to the changing needs of Society?” While I have my own beliefs about requiring legislators to specify the goals and objectives for any legislation that they create (in order to make it easier for us to get rid of that legislation later), I can find no fault with the wisdom of the founders to deny us the knowledge of their ‘original’ intentions.

Anthony de Jasay, the Hungarian-born libertarian anarchist philosopher and economist who is best known for his writings against ‘the state’, talks about using a ‘Presumption of Liberty’ concept of natural rights. De Jasay argues that “liberty should be presumed, not because we have a “right” to it, or because it is the most important value or goal, but because it follows from the requirements of epistemology and logic.” In other words, instead of appealing to a person’s preference for liberty, logic dictates that liberty should be presumed. The critical rationalist and philosopher of science, Gerard Radnitzky, was so impressed with de Jasay’s case for the presumption of liberty that he stated that “for the first time the political philosophy of libertarianism and of classical liberalism has gotten a solid base in logic and epistemology.”

There is much to be considered by anyone who would advocate amending The Constitution with a goal of enshrining bigotry or prejudice within it, or of using it to take away rights from our citizens. To do so would be against every idea upon which The United States was created. I personally think that there should be (at least) four levels of rights and powers which should be considered by anyone who thinks they should have the right to tell everyone else what freedoms they do and do not have. They are, in order from highest to lowest:
1.) Rights that are retained by the people;
2.) Rights that are voluntarily surrendered by the people to the government;
3.) Rights that are suppressed by the people in our ‘voluntary’ association in a governed Society; and
4.) Rights that are repudiated by the people through the granting of certain powers and authority to the government.

Governments may have power, but only people have rights, and it is simply wrong for anyone to try to use our Constitutions to try to take away ANY of those rights. That is a ‘right’ which I do not believe anyone of ‘we the people’ ever gave away to anyone else.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

I want to acknowledge books and the Internet for giving me invaluable assistance in being able to use my mind and to write articles such as this. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Special thanks must be given, as is common for my constitutional articles, to The Oxford Companion to The Supreme Court of The United States (second edition), edited by Kermit L. Hall.

Thank you for reading this article. Please read my other articles and let me know what you think. I am writing them not to preach or to hear myself think but to try to create dialogs, debates and discussions on the nature of American government and how we can build upon and improve it based on what we have learned over the course of the 225 years of The American Experiment.

Rhys M. Blavier
Romayor, Texas

"Truth, Justice and Honor... but, above all, Honor"

© copyright 2009 by Rhys M. Blavier

I've been suffering under the wrong paradigm for decades. All this time I thought what mattered was "reality." How wrong I've been. Somewhere in the transition from trying to wade through the CBO's analysis of President Obama's budget and putting it aside to read some James Thurber, I had an epiphany.

Before my epiphany, if you had asked me about some problem or policy, I would have tried to analyze it -- asking, or even answering, what I thought were pertinent questions. Say we were talking health care. I would have looked up what we spend on it, life expectancies, infant mortality, disease survival rates, etc. I might have wanted to know what the cost drivers are, how much we spend for each year of life saved, how we compare to other countries. That sort of thing.

Like a lot of folks in this state, I have a job. I work, they pay me. I pay my taxes and the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit. In order to get that paycheck, I am required to pass a random urine test with which I have no problem.

What I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don't have to pass a urine test.
Shouldn't one have to pass a urine test to get a welfare check because I have to pass one to earn it for them?
Please understand, I have no problem with helping people get back on their feet.

I do, on the other hand, have a problem with helping someone sitting on their A--, doing drugs, while I work. . . .
Can you imagine how much money the state would save if people had to pass a urine test to get a public assistance check?

Something has to change in this country -- and soon!!!!!!!

I guess we could title that program, 'Urine or You're Out'.