Self Ownership, Obamacare, and Abortion Rights

I was asked to publish the following article at the Savvy Street.  I agreed, but I wanted to revise it a bit.  The revised version is entitled The Ninth Amendment, Self-Ownership, and Abortion Rights.  

The Supreme Court has noted that abortion is not mentioned in the U. S. Constitution.  It is not.  Neither is it mentioned explicitly that every individual owns his or her own life.  Yet those rights acknowledged explicitly in the Constitution in the First and Second Amendments would seem to have a basis in an assumption that every individual owns his or her own life.  The right to self-ownership is surely one of the rights that was meant to be protected by the Ninth Amendment.  "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

The Ninth Amendment is the most important amendment in the Bill of Rights philosophically because it recognizes that an individual's rights are not just a grant of government.  It recognizes, as did the Declaration of Independence, that all men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness --"  It is the Ninth Amendment that recognizes the sovereignty of the individual in accordance with our philosophy of government spelled out in The Declaration of Independence.

Tragically, those who seek to expand the powers of government far beyond its enumerated powers in the Constitution, have never wanted to acknowledge the sovereignty of the individual.  His broad rights to self-ownership, to freedom of conscience, and to freedom of association have been subject to frequent violation by government too eager to control the lives of its citizens.  The central role of the Declaration of Independence and of the Ninth Amendment have both been denied.  This means that many government overreaches that should have been held unconstitutional on the basis of the Ninth Amendment have not been so thwarted.  The Ninth Amendment has been almost totally ignored.  This has led to many very contorted rulings by the federal courts trying to find some protection of rights that many Americans believe they have somewhere in the Constitution.  Justice Clarence Thomas has been notable for his lone attempts to point this problem out.

It has been noted by many that the Justice Alito argument that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution and therefore is not a right recognized by the Constitution, opens the door for making a similar argument against a right to same-sex marriages, the use of contraceptives, and interracial marriages.  Based on the Alito argument, each of these rights might be returned to the states for legislation limiting or protecting them.  These rights, as is the case with an abortion right, must have their proper basis in the right to self-ownership and freedom of association, both of which should be seen as protected by the Ninth Amendment.

The abortion rights decision by the Supreme Court has greatly angered many people, most of whom have consistently voted for the Democratic Party, though a sizeable fraction of Republicans also believe in abortion rights. The Democratic Party has been most vociferous in its denial of the right to self-ownership in all contexts but one and in its denial of the protections of the Ninth Amendment.  The existence of an abortion right must start with a woman's ownership of her own body. 

One of the best examples of the Democratic Party interfering with the right to self-ownership was the enactment of Obamacare.  Every Democrat Senator and 87% of the Democrats in the House of Representatives voted for Obamacare.  They spent an incredible amount of political capital on this highly unpopular legislation.  While there were other reasons why many Democrats wanted this control over the maintenance of every American's mind and body, many wanted and understood that they were  really asserting a principle that no one owned their own mind and body exclusively.  They asserted that there was a collective ownership of every person's mind and body, which gave the collective, acting through the government, the right to dictate how every American would maintain his or her own mind and body.  The principle of collective ownership of our minds and bodies was explicitly noted in the first income tax return Obamacare applied to that designated the tax penalty line Shared Collective Responsibility.  I made the argument at the time that this assertion of collective ownership was the real issue with Obamacare, but almost no one supported me in this.

So now many women are furious that their abortion rights may be limited by the state they or other women live in.  They insist that they own their own bodies and should have the right to decide for themselves whether they will have an abortion or not.  Unfortunately, it does not dawn on them that if there is a right to self-ownership, then it applies far more broadly than just to abortion issues.  It surely also applies to the right that every individual, man or woman, has to determine how they will use and maintain their bodies.  It applied to Obamacare and many other examples of government limits on our board sovereign individual rights to self-ownership, including the ownership of our labor and our freedom of contract.  But no, selective assertion of a broad principle is all they care about.  Because of that failure to think in terms of principles, the Supreme Court now has no basis to assert any national abortion right.  The matter has been turned over to the states to decide.

I believe a woman has an abortion right, but its boundary is limited by that time when the development of a fetus makes it a human being protected from murder, or by when it is capable of independent life.  I am not asserting where that boundary is.  That is a thorny problem.  Perhaps that is a problem best left to the states and the more local beliefs of the people who live in those states.  However, wherever those decisions are made, if a woman has an abortion right, it is critically dependent upon her right to self-ownership.  Women who want to assert this right, ought to assert the right to self-ownership for every individual, man or woman, in all the contexts to which it applies.  If they do this, government will be far more limited than it is today and everyone but a few invidious special interests will benefit immensely.

Ilya Shapiro on Supreme Court Confirmations

Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute testified on 20 July 2021 before the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court .  He made the following major points:

1. Politics has always been part of the confirmation process.
2. Confirmation fights are now driven by judicial philosophy.
3. Modern confirmations are different because the political culture is different.
4. Hearings have become kabuki theater.
5. Every nomination can have a big impact.
6. The hardest confirmations are when there's a potential for a big shift.
7. The Court rules on so many controversies that political battles are unavoidable.

He concluded:

The ever‐​expanding size and scope of the federal government has increased the number and complexity of issues brought under Washington’s control, while the collection of those new federal powers into the administrative state has transferred ultimate decision‐​making authority to the courts. The imbalance between the executive branch and Congress has made the Supreme Court the decider both of controversial social issues and complex policy disputes.

So should we reform the confirmation process? I’ve come to the conclusion that we should get rid of hearings altogether, that they’ve served their purpose but now inflict greater cost than any informational benefit. With instantly searchable records that nominees now have, is there any need to subject them, and the country, to an inquisition? Or maybe senators could hold hearings in closed session.

In the end, all “reform” discussion boils down to re‐​arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And this Titanic is not the appointment process, but the ship of state. The fundamental problem is the politicization not of the process but of the product. The judicial debates we’ve seen the last few decades were never really about the nominees themselves. They’re about the Court’s direction.

The reason we have these heated battles is that the federal government is making too many decisions for such a large, diverse, and pluralistic country. Let Congress decide truly national issues like defense or (actually) interstate (actual) commerce, but let states and localities make most of the decisions that affect our daily lives. Let Texas be Texas and California be California. That’s the only way we’re going to defuse tensions in Washington, whether in the halls of Congress or in the marble palace of the highest court in the land.

My Comments: 

Basically, the federal government is too damned big and presumptuously and injudiciously has taken on far too many powers, some of which should have been left at the state or local government levels.  People who live in different parts of the country commonly have different interests and values.  The many federal powers often conflict with these differing interests and values.  The federal legislative branch has defaulted on making those constitutional decisions that were assigned to it, allowing the executive branch to grow into a behemoth administrative, regulatory state issuing many controversial edicts, often bafflingly formulated.  As a result of the burgeoning administrative state, the Supreme Court has had make many more decisions regarding both "controversial social issues and complex policy disputes."  Ignoring the wisdom of the Constitution sure has disastrous consequences!

You have done good work here Ilya Shapiro.

Celebrating the Declaration of Independence Day

The Second Continental Congress agreed upon the 13 colonies of America becoming independent on 2 July 1776.  We should celebrate Independence Day on 2 July, as Benjamin Franklin thought we would.

There was a still more important event on the 4th of July, 1776.  The Declaration of Independence was signed by the members of the Second Continental Congress on 4 July.  This document stated the fundamental principles that would define the United States of  America.  These ideas were uniquely revolutionary in 1776.  Revolutions as uprisings were not too unusual, but the principles of the Declaration of Independence were entirely innovative as a basis for a new nation.

On this great day, this Declaration of Independence Day, we should read these inspiring principles and renew our commitment to them.  Our beloved Declaration of Independence says:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.  Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shown, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

No nation had ever committed itself to the principle that all men were created equal before.  No government had ever stated that its purpose was to secure the rights of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Before this vision of the United States of America, nations had been dedicated to a few among a given tribal group or ethnic group.  In rare cases, a foreigner found to be particularly useful to the ruling oligarchy might be accepted into consideration for the nation's benefits.  But in the new United States, whose people were primarily English, Scots, Germans, French, Dutch, Swedes, Portuguese, Africans, and American Indians by ethnic origin at the time, all men were created equal, with unalienable rights, which it was the proper purpose of the government they were forming to secure for them.

Yes, the government long did not properly and morally follow through on the implementation of this principle for those ethnically African or American Indian, but its actions could always now be held up against the yardstick it had clearly stated in its foundational principles.  This universal recognition of human rights had never, ever been done by any nation before and is very rarely done even now by any nation.  The Declaration of Independence made the Civil War almost inevitable.  It also made the end of Jim Crow laws virtually inevitable. 

The Declaration of Independence puts a principled duty upon each of us to throw off the attempts of Government to abuse our individual rights.  It states that when Government fails to earn its legitimacy by ruling with the consent of the governed for the purpose of securing their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then we have both the right and the duty to provide new guards for the security of our universal and individual rights.

Our Constitution is a great document also.  The Constitution puts the means in place to organize the powers of government in such form as to achieve the goals and principles given to us in our sacred Declaration of Independence.  Our Constitution cannot be properly understood if this is not realized.  The context for interpreting our Constitution is the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  The widespread failure to understand the severe constitutional limits on the power of the federal government is a consequence of a refusal to recognize the fundamental principles of The Declaration of Independence.

Today, the 4th of July, is the greatest of all American holidays.  It is Declaration of Independence Day!  Love this day, love our Declaration of Independence, and celebrate its inspiring principles of universal individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  If we do not do this, we will surely lose our ability to exercise our many and broad individual rights.  It is the exercise of these rights that makes life worth living.  Live free or die!

The Democratic Socialists Used the Capitol Intrusion and its Associated Violence as a Reichstag Moment

The Democratic Socialists are socialists of the fascist persuasion.  Some say that cannot be because socialists are those who believe all the means of production and all property should be owned by the government.  I reject that argument.  Prior to WWII, the fascists were commonly accepted to be socialists.  They were nationalists, but there is no contradiction created by a nationalist socialism.  They did not generally believe the government should own all property or all of the means of production.  No, they were much more cunning than those Communists and the various off-shoots of Marxism.  It is very, very difficult to promote Communism in a developed society where property ownership is widespread.  It is much, much easier to promote fascism, a form of government which controls all of the means of production and all property, but leaves the pretense of ownership, along with many of its responsibilities, in the hands of the gullible or the crony allies of the government.  Fascist governments generally do form a close alliance with big businesses.  The most famous German form of fascism went by the name of the National Socialist German Workers Party.  Of course they fought a bitter street war with their primary socialist competitors, the Communists.  At the end of WWII, fascism had a generally awful reputation, so academic socialists rewrote the definition of socialism to exclude fascism.  I see no reason to accept their definition of socialism.  Total control of the means by which the People control, secure, and support their lives is socialism, whether the government takes such control by overtly owning all of the means of production and all property or not.

The Democratic Socialist Party of America has had a mix of fascist and Communist tendencies at least since the New Deal.  Many of its elite adherents had loved Mussolini in the 1920s and up until he invaded Ethiopia in 1936.  Many were Marxists and many praised the Soviet Union.  Today, most of Democratic Socialist Elite have beliefs that are a mix of fascism without the nationalist elements and woke offshoots of Marxist beliefs.  These Woke Fascists seek control of every aspect of our lives, but recognize that we Americans will not completely give up our property rights or our rights to choose aspects of how we earn a living.  They are slightly pragmatic idealists, but only slightly pragmatic.  As their stated ideal, they seek equal outcomes for everyone economically, even as they actually set up sweetheart deals with big businesses such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and others such as "green" energy companies, extreme environomentalists, abortionists, and labor union leaders who will sign on to their social programs to control the Deplorables.

The Deplorables are those who want to retain more freedom to choose their own values and to control their own lives than the Democratic Socialist Party Elite want to allow them.  Many of the Deplorables have excessive allegiance to the concept of a limited government under the Constitution as well as to the ideals of The Declaration of Independence.  They like being somewhat self-reliant and self-responsible.  This cannot be allowed.  The Swamp Creatures cannot prosper to extent of their dreams if this is tolerated.

So the Swamp Creatures launched attack after attack upon the President elected as the Deplorables rebelled against their modified fascist program of subjugation in the 2016 election.  One false accusation after another was created out of whole cloth by the Swamp Creatures centered upon the Democratic Socialist Party leaders, but also including many Never Trumpers who found that they could not exercise their usual power lust within a Republican administration under Trump.  There are plenty of fascists in the Republican Party also, though they are commonly rather less rabid in their quest for power.  These fascist allies reframed Trump's tendency to exaggerate into a strong commitment to constant lying.  They made up a claim that he was a stooge of Putin, then that he was wrong to seek to investigate the corrupt use of power by Biden and his family when Biden was Vice President, and now they claim he encouraged an insurrection to overthrown the "democratically elected" government.

The insurrection charge rests on the unauthorized mass entry of Americans into the Capitol building, property damage done there, violence against the police brought in late to deal with the intruders, and the fears of some Congress people and their staffs.  This was a riot, but it was not one incited by Trump, though it did include some who voted for him, along with some Antifa and some idiots who just love being involved in anything that gives them an excuse for violence.  Antifa is usually tolerated by the left, but it is essentially a nihilist group that has nothing to do with the followers of Trump and does not even like Biden.  They are against everything, except chaos.

The Elitist Socialists and Swamp Creators spent the last four years dreaming up ways to wrest control of the country from the Deplorables who elected their nemesis, Trump, President.  While claiming he was a liar, they repeatedly told the huge whopper that Trump was responsible for every death by Covid-19.  They claimed he was destroying the planet with his refusal to accept their anti-science catastrophic man-made global warming failed hypothesis.  They proclaimed him and all of his voters to be racists, even as Trump took great pride in the fact that so-called Blacks and Hispanics benefited far more from the booming economy under his administration prior to the onset of Covid-19 than they had under Obama/Biden and under Bush.  They claimed he was anti-LGBT, despite his long working history with LGBT people, his opposition to the Obama-backed DOMA and DADT, his appointment of Ric Grenell to be Ambassador to Germany and then his Director of National Intelligence, and his worldwide program to end discrimination against LGBTs.  In addition to their crazy attacks on him, they schemed up ways to run an unconstitutional election that would open up innumerable means to count illegitimate votes.  The result was that the unconstitutional election changes did result in untold illegitimate votes and that very likely resulted in the declaration that Biden was the winner.

An unconstitutionally elected president whose party was also undeniably commited to vote fraud is on very shaky grounds.  Much of the power of the presidency depends upon the freely given consent of the governed.  A constitutional election is the means by which legitimate consent of the People is determined.  The Deplorables did not give that consent.  They may well have been in the majority.  They most certainly do not believe that the election was a valid one and they are right.  In the USA, an unconstitutional election is not a legitimate election.

The Democratic Socialist Party Elite and Swamp Creatures know that they came to victory and total power by chicanery.  The Deplorables know this too.  The Democratic Socialist Party Elite and the Swamp Creatures are very uneasy and feel very threatened.  They used the Capitol intrusion as their Reichstag moment.  They brought in 25,000 National Guard troops in their fear of the People.  Then they grilled those troops, whom many had earlier called Storm Troopers back when leftist riots and violence were the norm in many cities they controlled, to find troops who were strong Trump supporters and remove them.  They are afraid.  Their fear is the cause of the rapidly developed effort to discriminate against the Deplorables in employment and in every social manner they can.  They have stampeded.  They forgot that they are supposed to turn the heat up slowly on the frog Deplorables so they will not jump out of the pot.  Their mad and inept dash for power may well prove to be their undoing in the next election.  They have been too overt in their power lust.

The Deplorables are in for a hard time.  They had better become more familiar with the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional safeguards for their freedoms.  They need to do a better job of defending their many and broad rights as individuals, if they want to maintain their ability to choose their own values and to manage their own lives.  Those idiot Socialist Elitists and Swamp Creatures do not care about your lives.  They think you are worthless people.  They claim you are all racists, though their own claim is clearly racist.  They claim every "white" person is privileged and a racist.  Most of you know you are not racists.  Most of you know you are worthy enough to choose your own values and to manage your own life.  Most of you know that those power-lusting Woke-Fascist Elitists are utterly wrong in claiming they can improve your lives by dictating your actions from Washington.  So do not let these Woke-Fascist fools get away with their evil power-grab.  Make the effort to maintain your individuality and the integrity and efficacy of your own mind.  There is no higher purpose in life.

Note:  I use Deplorables the way the Patriots called themselves Yankee Doodle Dandies in response to the British effort to put them down with a drinking song calling them such during the American Revolution.  Throw it at them.  Throw it forcefully.

Should the Deplorables Respect the Swamp Creature Declared Winner of an Unconstitutional Election?

The Chief Executive of the federal government is the highest elected officeholder in the great and exceptional United States of America.  The USA is great and exceptional because it is the first government ever established with the aim of being a legitimate government.  Governments achieve legitimacy only to the extent that they protect the exercise of the many and broad rights of the individual.  These rights accrue to every individual, which was recognized in our Declaration of Independence, yet denied initially in our otherwise quite great Constitution.  We had to fight a horribly bloody Civil War to  recognize everyone's basic right of self-ownership.  Unfortunately, the ideology of socialism, whether Marxist or Fascist or a mix of both with other strains of socialism, continues to limit the self-ownership of the individual.  ObamaCare was a dramatic example of our government limiting self-ownership, with its claims of shared healthcare responsibility and its limits on what health insurance we were allowed to purchase for the maintenance of our own life and health.  Most recently, we have been reminded that the primary socialist party in the USA does not honor the right of each and every citizen to have one and only one vote in a federal election undiluted by illegitimate votes.

Respect is absolutely due a President who uses his best effort to cause the federal government to pursue policies that protect the exercise of the many and broad rights of every individual.  A President worthy of respect would battle foreign powers bent on using force against Americans, domestic gangs and individuals who initiate the use of force to take what they want from others, and those presumptuous government officials who believe it is their right to use the monopoly of force held by government to hurt some of the people or many of the people.  Any society of significant size harbors evil people who  use force to make other people do their will.  Some do so claiming to do it for the good of others.  Some are simply uninhibited in their own wants.  We know this to be historically true.  We know this to be presently true.

Today, in America, it is those called the Deplorables who by and large assert their self-ownership, their right to choose their own values, and their right to manage their own lives.  They have a greater sense of self-responsibility than do the socialists.  The Deplorables do not want the heavy boot of government upon their necks.  They almost entirely work in the private sector.

Opposing them are the Socialist Elitists, who are sure they have the right to use the force of govenment to claim at least substantial ownership of every American, to indoctrinate and program Americans to accept heavy government rule using their monopoly on education and control of massive government contracts and welfare programs, and to regulate with a heavy hand virtually every economic activity of the People.  These Socialist Elitists gravitate to positions in education, media, lobbies, and government.  Those in government settle in comfortably into its myriad agencies and official positions.  The lobbyists fill law firms, promotion and publicist firms, professional groups, environmental groups, animal rights groups, firms promoting the interests of foreign powers, defense companies, alternative energy companies, and labor union leadership positions.  Almost all educators work in government-run schools or colleges highly dependent upon government grants and student loans and scholarships.  The media, whether print, broadcast or Internet based, want the power to control the news that gets to the People.  They choose what is newsworthy and put the spin on it that suits them.  Controlling information and its access is their game.  While the term swamp creatures is usually applied to those Socialist Elitists in government and lobbying positions, it ought to also include educators, media workers, and the many special interest groups that thrive on government money or laws biased to their special interests.

One of the Granddaddies of all Swamp Creatures is Joe Biden, the beneficiary of the highly unconstitutional election of 2020.  The unconstitutional nature of the election was assiduously planned and worked for by the Democratic Socialist Party that so craves power and harbors the great majority of the worst Swamp Creatures.  The unconstitutional election rule changes, which violated the election laws passed by the state legislatures as empowered by the Constitution, were generally designed to enable radical Democratic Socialist Party groups to cast the votes of the dead, non-citizens, those who had moved from a prior address, felons who had lost the right to vote, massive numbers of mailed ballots that never reached the addresses they were mailed to, and simply printed ballots pretending to be mailed-in ballots.  This power-lusting party arranged to prevent observers adequate access and viewing to monitor the nefarious activities at many of the ballot counting facilities under the control of the Democratic Socialist Party.  One does not do this if one is not cheating.  One does not do this if one has confidence in Americans to make a good democratic choice of their President.  But if you want desperately to put the non-campaigning, granddaddy of all Swamp Creatures into the Presidency, you do not want to have a democratic election protected by constitutional requirements.  And who cares about earning the respect of the American People when all you want is the right to Lord it over them.

The Socialist Elitists are those who lust for power over the American People and for the money they can extract from the productive work of the Americans in the private sector who are more harmed by government than helped by it.  The Deplorables serve as the hosts upon whom the Swamp Creature Parasites thrive.  Interestingly, many of the Socialist Elites defame the Deplorables because they understand the ignominy of being a parasite dependent upon its host.  These are the knowingly evil ones.  Of course, others are so deluded with their claims that they hurt the many for the benefit of the few weak, that they claim this as a badge of honor.  They resent anyone who attempts to strip this justification for their evil acts from them.  The Deplorables who would deny them the use of force to benefit the few weak are hated for depriving them of an easily attained and unjustified sense of virtue.  An act of virtue one gets credit for, which costs you little since you transfer the costs of others, is hard to give up.

Trump Derangement Syndrome -- the state of mind when a claimed Elitist is denied his false sense of morality and largely revealed as a parasite by a very self-assured critic determined to reduce the power of government to interfere with the People managing their own lives.  The Liberator is strongly resented.

I will grant that President Trump does not seem to be entirely self-assured as a man, but he was generally self-assured that those who view themselves as the Elite did not have the right to micro-manage the lives of Americans.  He reduced taxes and regulations to allow productive work to blossom to the absolute horror of the Elitists.  He was determined to control the borders so that the laws on immigration and nationalization were obeyed. He opposed the destruction of the carbon-based fuel industries.  He was an advocate for American manufacturing, while the Democrats continued to view manufacturers as rapists of Gaia and wished to chase them out of the country with a proliferation of highly irrational regulations.  He opposed the Elitist claim that China should be treated as a Most Favored Nation.  He was forthright about China's role in exporting its coronavirus and was critical about its human rights violations.  He recognized China's increased belligerence and determination to dominate the world militarily.  He pushed NATO members to live up to their commitments.   He favored the building of safe pipelines to deliver fuel around the country and to our ports.  He spoke up against violations of constitutional elections, while the Elitists and Swamp Creatures are counting on those violations to keep them in power even after the People will rise against them in the next election for their use of power excesses.  Because of these actions, the American economy had boomed prior to the advent of the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus invasion.  Black and Hispanic Americans had been the greatest beneficiaries of this booming economy.  President Trump took particular pride in their increased prosperity.

The Socialist Elitists responded to the Liberator's efforts with desperate claims he was a rascist and those who voted for him were also.  They claimed the Liberator was a despot and some kind of fascist.  They twice voted to impeach him on false charges. Their claims were indeed deranged, but they were widely believed in academia, the media, and in government.  This belief was near universal in the Democratic Socialist Party, which is not at all democratic, but is highly socialist.  The Republican Party also has its denizens of government power who opposed the Liberator's efforts.  National Review, The Bulwark, The Lincoln Project, The American Prospect, and a host of ex-officials who loved doing business in Washington the way it used to be done.  Even many Libertarians and Objectivists joined with the oppositon to the Liberator's efforts because he did not believe in open borders, free trade with thieves and slaveholders who were arming to the teeth for future wars of aggression, and traditional decorum.  Some even said they opposed him because he did not have sufficient trust in the foreign policy and intelligence advisors, despite the track record of their past decisions.  This included the backing many of them gave to the first nefarious attempt to impeach Trump and to the first successful attempt to impeach him on false grounds.  The Liberator was too disruptive for many Libertarians and Objectivists, who apparently have become traditionalists, or should we say conservatives, who would rather pursue a course of on-going compromise with the Socialist Elitists than be so disruptive as to do actual battle with them.

Should the Deplorables respect the swamp creature declared the winner of the unconstitutional 2020 presidential election?  Most certainly not.  Respect of the President is dependent upon the context that the President is actually trying to uphold his oath of office to protect the Constitution.

That context assumes the President actually believes in the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which Joe Biden has explicitly stated holds no role in American law.  If the Constitution is not held to be the instrument by which the federal government is held accountable to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, then one can understand the train of abuses of our Constitution that the Democratic Socialist Party is particularly determined to pursue.  It becomes easy for them to ignore the enumeration of the very limited powers of the government.  Unbounded by the principles of the Declaration of Independence, they re-interpret clause after clause of the Constititution to enlarge the powers of government.  The taxation power to fund the enumerated powers becomes an excuse to make any law as long as it includes a tax, as made clear by Supreme Court Justice Roberts' ruling on ObamaCare.  The regulation of commerce, intended to make the entire USA a free market for trade, is converted into a means to prevent those in the private sector from trading freely with one another.  The statement that the Constitution was intended to provide for the welfare of the People by ensuring their liberties, became a justification for any act said to be for their welfare, even as that act deprived individuals of their rights.  Even the principle of the Declaration of Independence that a legitimate government must have the consent of the governed is ignored by the Socialist Elitists.

Joe Biden has fully and willingly embraced these abuses.  This is the most solid of reason to deny this man any respect at all, let alone that measure of respect one would grant a man honestly trying to perform his duties as President of the United States of America.  To top this off, Biden is a long-time crime syndicate head.  He has abused his lifetime of public offices by selling his hold on government power to special interests, including the Russian faction in Ukraine and the Chinese Communist Party in Red China.  After Hilary Clinton's defeat, Joe Biden took a job at the University of Pennsylvania as the non-teaching Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor at a salary of $900,000 to lead the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, DC funded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  The Penn Biden Center was a transition depot for a number of Biden appointees, all of whom are tainted by its funding source.  Not too surprisingly, Biden has failed to recognize the great harm the CCP did in exporting its coronavirus to the rest of the world.  Biden believes that more trade with Red China is a wonderful thing.  This man is not only a power-luster, but he is knowingly willing to hurt America to further his family's wealth.

The Office of the President depends on the respect of the American People for much of its power.  Withhold that respect from Joe Biden.  He does not deserve it.  In fact, given his and his party's long train of abuses, we are obligated to oppose his program adamently in every case in which it erodes our freedom to exercise our many and broad individual rights.  For my part, I will honor those who stand with me on the bulwarks to defend our individual rights.

Governments derive their Just Powers from the Consent of the Governed

 "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, at to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.  Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security."

This quote from our Declaration of Independence directly addresses the purposes of a legitimate government founded in those purposes and upon the consent of the governed.  This great document is actually the foundation upon which our Constitution rests.  It advises the People to exercise prudence in overthrowing their government, but it also advises them that it is their duty to do so when that government develops a history revealing an attempt to place the People under an absolute Despotism.  Joe Biden explicitly and forcefully denied that the Declaration of Independence plays a legal role in our government.  He has clearly stated that he does not believe in the principles set forth in our Declaration of Independence.  His reason --- he has always been bent upon a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations.

Before the American Colonies rose up in rebellion against Great Britain, its Parliament, and its King, the People spent a decade during which at first only a few and then slowly growing numbers of them defied the government.  They tarred and feathered tax collectors, they smuggled goods, they armed themselves, and they manufactured goods at least in small quantities that they were told they had to buy from Great Britain.  They had no say in the selection of the members of the Parliament, which was quite absolutely controlled by those who saw themselves as the Elite and saw the colonists as the Primitives (Read Deplorables).

The leadership of the Democratic Socialist Party and many of its voters see themselves as the Elitists who by right should govern and control the lives of most Americans, who they call the Deplorables if they are in opposition to being so controlled and micromanaged.  Of course, they see many of their own voters as deplorables who are incompetent in the management of their own lives as well, but they are less likely to publically label them as such.  You have to think through what their policies imply about those Democratic Party voters to understand how deplorable the Elite believe a large fraction of their own voters to be.  These Elitists are the equivalent of the aristocracy of Great Britain who were the detritus for the Medieval Period.  Unfortunately, those who lust for power over others seem to recognize no limits upon their reign -- not the American Revolution, not the Constitution, and not 231 years of living more or less under our Constitution.  The evil lust for power over others is the great sin of many people.  It is the worst sin among us.  That sin is not lessened by the fact that most people who exercise the sin against us believe they are doing it for our own good.

We just had an election which was unconstitutional and very, very crooked.  It was unconstitutional because the constitutional requirement that state legislatures establish the voting laws was widely violated by election officials, by numerous court rulings, and by Democrat poll workers.  If only constitutionally valid votes were counted, President Trump would have been easily re-elected.  This would, at this time, certainly deprive many citizens of their vote, so there is no good way to correct this horrible fault.  One can only reform the voting system so that it never happens again, though the chances of that happening now that the Democrat Socialist Party completely controls the federal government is looking quite dim.

If only the counts were counted that were cast by legitimate voters, we will never know for sure who would have won the presidential election.  I think it most likely that Trump would have won, as do many other Americans.  There were just too many cases of votes being counted in Democrat strongholds with inadequate observation and with a failure to rigorously check the voter signatures of mail-in ballots.  There were too many cases of allowing votes to be cast by the dead, non-citizens, and those who had moved away from the address that they had voted from.  There were too many cases in which the voter registration roles were purposely very obsolete, in violation of federal law.  There were too many cases of people either receiving ballots they had not requested in contradiction of state law or cases of people being told they had been sent ballots that they never received.  There were too many tales of mail-in ballots being counted that had never been folded to fit into the required envelops.  There were too many cases in which barriers were put up to block the view of observers, where observers were required to be too far away to be effective, or where observers were told the counting was stopping, yet it continued once they left.  There were too many cases of thousands and even tens of thousands of votes being subtracted from the count that should only have increased or remained constant for a period.  There were too many cases of votes coming in from precincts at a rate that their counting equipment could not possibly achieve.  There were absolutely unbelievable votes from many precincts, both in terms of total numbers in terms of the division of votes between Biden and Trump.  This was a very, very crooked election and a large fraction of the American People understand that it was.

The election was unconstitutional, illegitimate, and invalid.  It was such because the Democratic Socialist Party has long planned to make it such and ensured that it was particularly crooked in those areas they have long governed locally.  The long Train of election Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evincing a Design to reduce the People under the absolute Despotism of the Democratic Socialist Party.

I am not yet at 1775.  I do not condone the violence and destruction that happened at the Capitol on 6 January.  I do think we will see many more such events if the election process is not made constitutional and fair.  I do not think Americans will sit quietly and obey the government when their sovereign and constitutional right to provide their consent to be governed has been violated.

I personally have no respect for the incoming federal government.  I have no respect in any case for people who want to usurp my freedom to choose my own values and to manage my own life.  At some level, many Americans do share this view, though very few to the extent that I do.  I have a huge resentment when anyone, especially people as stupid and wrongheaded as Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and a host of government bureaucrats, forcefully attempts to micromanage my life.  I will resist their despotism as much as I possibly can, but I will keep that resistance peaceful.  For now.

The federal government under the Biden Despotic Regime will make every attempt to prevent state government from making future elections constitutional and fair.  So if we are ever again to have a constitutional and fair election, we the People, will have to be insistent in our demands that the state governments insure such legitimate elections.  If this effort is not successful, then the time for rebellion will have come.  We must not allow the Despotic Elitists to control our sovereign, individual lives.

The 2020 Election was most likely stolen and is certainly illegitimate and unconstitutional

The 2020 election was a massively illegitimate election.  There was voter fraud on a large scale, but mostly there was fraud on the part of those hired to manage the election in political jurisdictions which have long been controlled by the Democratic Party -- now the Democratic Socialist Party.  This is the evolved party of slavery, the post-Civil War KKK, segregation and Jim Crow laws, President Woodrow Wilson's revived KKK, the socialism of the New Deal, the sloth and abject dependency of the Great Society programs, the envy and avarice that seeks to punish achievement, opposition to mankind's use of the resources of the Earth, forced government-school attendance without benefit of an education, forced subjugation to union organized crime and socialist thugs, discrimination against low cost of living and undereducated workers by means of a national minimum wage law, and of divisive group identity politics that among other evils embraces racism.  This party has always been eager to control the lives of others and very willing to do highly immoral acts to gain that power.  This party has always practiced coordinated and widespread acts or immorality to obtain the monopolist power of government to do harm to many Americans.

Subverting the will of the voters is just replacing the will of the Deplorables and those too dependent to manage their own lives with the will of the socialist elite.  That can't be bad, now can it?

The Democratic Party prevented Tea Party organizations from being recognized as tax-exempt organizations prior to the 2012 election by using the IRS for blatantly political purposes.  In the 2016 election they used the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the Russians, and the President and Vice President themselves to spy on the Trump campaign.  For most of the Trump administration they knowingly falsely accused Trump of collaboration with the Russians. Then they falsely claimed he was strong-arming the Ukrainian President for his own political benefit, ignoring the requirement that the President seek out and prosecute malfeasance in the Executive Branch, such as that of Joe Biden and his family working for foreign powers whose intention to hurt the interests of the USA is well-known.  Then Biden, the minion of the Chinese Communist Party, bought and paid for, claimed that Trump was responsible for every death caused by the Chinese Communist Party's release of the coronavirus into the world, which was actively aided by Biden.  Ever since they were surprised by Hillary Clinton's election loss in 2016, this party of evil has plotted ways to steal the 2020 election.

The Constitution says the election laws and processes are to be determined by the state legislatures, unless Congress intervenes.  Especially since Clinton's defeat in 2016, the Democrat Socialist Party has attempted to thwart the election laws of state legislatures by making changes in the voting process which are contrary to the laws of the state legislatures.  They have used the courts and state and local government officials to rule in favor of practices that are contrary to the state laws.  These changes sought by the Democrat Socialists have been consistently such that the validity of a ballot cannot be readily determined, or in many cases could never even possibly be determined.  In some states, the general mailings of unrequested ballots were not authorized by the state legislature.  In many cases, there was a requirement that the mailed-in ballots be verified by a signature check, which was not performed in many cases in any useful manner.  In many cases, many mail-in ballots were counted without benefit of observers.  Huge numbers of in-person ballots were also counted without adequate observer checks. There are analyses that show that hundreds of thousands of ballots were claimed to be counted in time-frames in which the counting machines available could only count a small fraction of that number.  There are many counties, especially those controlled by the Democratic Socialists, where the federal law requiring that the voter registration rolls be updated and accurate is disobeyed.  These voter registration rolls are filled with people dead and people who have moved away.  The Democrats have clearly been using these voter registration rolls to have the dead, the moved, the non-voting, and in many cases even the voting all vote for Democrats or at least for Biden.  Incredible numbers of ballots supposedly for Biden give a vote for Biden only, making it faster to submit many false ballots for him.  There are reports of mail-in ballots that were never folded, so they could not possibly have been mailed in as required inside two envelopes.  There are many indications that Democrat controlled areas simply threw out ballots for Trump, including military absentee ballots.  There are reports that ballots were substituted for Biden in the names of those whose Trump ballots were thrown out.  As a result, in many states the 2020 election was both unconstitutional and illegitimate.

Any election which a rational person believes to have been incapable of reliably determining the will of those who cast their ballot according to rational law established by their state legislature, is an illegitimate election.  There is very good reason to believe that a rational person cannot be sure what the election outcomes were in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  Because of that and the unconstitutional processes, the election results should not be certified in any of these states.  The state legislature then has to chose the electors for these states, since that is the constitutional requirement.  If these state legislatures want the will of the people to determine future presidential elections, or for that matter any state office elections, they must take responsibility to enforce election laws and assert their constitutional authority to prevent vote fraud and the unconstitutional changes of legislatively determined election practices.

It is critical that we invest the time and effort required to track down all of the violations of the state election laws.  We need to determine whether the people really wanted Trump or Biden to become President.  That knowledge is most likely available to us only after many months, and those state legislatures in the questionable states will have to make a choice before the will of the people is determined.  However, it is much more important to track down every law-breaker who has acted to keep the will of the people from being known and prosecute them to the very fullest extent of the law.  If we do not do this, the will of the people will never be known in future elections either.  We should be as diligent in tracking down the criminals who practice election fraud as we are murderers, rapists, and bank robbers.  Their prison sentences ought to be long, very long.  They are, in a most fundamental sense, traitors to the United States of America.

The courts will not provide a solution to the issue of who the legitimate voters actually voted for to become the next President.  The courts look at an iceberg and only allow what is seen above the waterline to be used as evidence for the size of the iceberg.  It is as if they would only accept as evidence for the value of the illegal drug trade that portion of the drugs that law enforcement actually was able to confiscate from the lawbreakers.  The same is true of vote fraud.  The odds are against Trump being able to win in the courts short of the Supreme Court ruling that there was an unconstitutional election resulting in too much uncertainty in several of the states, thereby requiring those state legislatures to make their choice of electors to go to the Electoral College.  The Supreme Court has an obligation under the 14th Amendment to protect the right to vote of individuals from state actions that interfere with their exercise of that right.  Many states have interfered with that right by tolerating vote fraud.

Whatever happens, the effort that will be put into investigating the massive vote fraud that has occurred will be much less than it ought to be.  Too many people, especially those of the Deep State and its many allies, just want to get rid of Trump, as we have seen for the last four or more years.  In addition, too many Americans do not have a sufficiently strong interest in either the Constitution or in letting the many Deplorables have their voices listened to in this or future elections.

The vote count as now reported shows Trump increased the number of votes he received in 2016 by 17.16%, but the total vote count of Trump plus Biden went up by 19.24%.  It sure seems implausible to me that the swampy, corrupt, wrongheaded, evil Biden was capable of getting so many Americans to vote for him that he could overcome a 17.16% Trump vote increase.  I truly do believe this election was stolen.

We must not allow this to ever happen again.  And we must limit the damage by doing all we can to help the Republican Senate candidates in Georgia.  Give them campaign contributions.  Also, support Trump in his efforts to reveal the vote fraud.  Judicial Watch and the Heritage Foundation have vote integrity programs that should be supported for the longer haul.  Those programs are not nearly large enough or broad enough, however.  It is critical that other liberty-oriented organizations focus on the prevention of vote fraud.  And of course, get after your state legislators to tighten up their election laws to prevent vote fraud.

Evil Biden wants to force Americans to register their guns and pay a high registration fee

Biden has a number of plans to discourage gun ownership.  Among them, he wants to raise the cost of gun ownership by holding gun manufacturer's responsible for any deaths or wounds caused by guns.  He also has a plan to force the registration of guns, which will be accompanied by a large registration fee.

Let us think about this as a matter of principle for a moment.  The right to defend oneself is a natural right and also an explicit constitutional right.  Freedom of speech is a natural right and also an explicit constitutional right.

Let us suppose that someone asks you if you think the person they want to marry will be a good lifetime partner for them.  You, as a friend, answer yes.  The marriage ends in divorce.  The divorced partner claims you are partially responsible for the suffering and perhaps financial losses they incurred due to the failure of their marriage.  Should they have the right to sue you for recovery of their losses?  Imagine if they could do this, what this would do to your ability to exercise your right to freedom of speech.  Whatever the actual impact your advice on the proposed marriage might have had, it was the responsibility of the individual receiving that advice to evaluate whether they should marry.  It was the responsibility of the married person to make the marriage work or if they could not do so, to realize that the mistakes or lack of effort were their own.

The gun manufacturer has no significant voice in how the gun they make is used.  It can be used rationally or irrationally.  It can be used responsibly or irresponsibly.  To hold the gun manufacturer responsible for the use of the gun is as nonsensical as holding the marriage advisor responsible for his advice.  Actually, I would be inclined to think that bad advice on marriage would make an easier case for responsibility for harm against the advisor.  At least the marriage advisor presumably has some knowledge of the two people whose marriage is being considered.

Gun registration and fees:  If the government can in principle claim the power to make you register as a gun owner and pay a high fee for doing so, what is to keep the government from next forcing everyone to register for the right to exercise freedom of speech and pay a high registration fee for doing so?  After all, if one right can be controlled, limited, and taxed if it is to be exercised then why would the government defer from doing the same to other rights -- freedom of speech included.  Just as the Democrat Socialist Party thinks guns can be used harmfully by hoodlums, so does that host of parasites believe that Deplorables do great harm with their speech.

Do you think the party of slavery, the early KKK, Jim Crow laws, the Woodrow Wilson second wave of the KKK, segregation, the welfare dependency of many American Blacks, mandatory government school holding pens minus education, that declared Trump voters Deplorables, and the party that has always thought it moral to steal elections, would not desire such control over our freedom to exercise our individual rights that all of them will not disappear unless we throw our minds, hearts, and souls into defending every one of them?

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is our most stalwart defender of the Constitution

Today is the 29th anniversary of the day our greatest Justice of the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, took his seat on the highest judicial court in the great United States of America.  For all his faults, President George H. W. Bush did do one very great service to our country -- he nominated and strongly supported Clarence Thomas to be a Justice on the Supreme Court despite the vicious attacks upon him during his confirmation hearings.

Justice Clarence Thomas has been a tireless and ruthlessly criticized originalist interpreter of the Constitution and of our laws.  He has written 190 opinions, which is far more than any of the other justices have written.  His opinions have had a strong influence on the conservative side of the Supreme Court.  Justice Thomas has been more ready than any other Justice to review prior opinions he believes were wrongly decided.  He is a man with a dedication to independent thinking, which makes him a spear in the side of those Democrats who insist a man is not Black unless he agrees with them.  Personally, I view Justice Clarence Thomas as an unusually rational man who has earned my highest respect and gratitude for his profound service to the rights of the individual, to the rule of law, and to justice, all of which are well served by our Constitution, of which he is the foremost defender.  Justice Clarence Thomas is a genuine hero.

If you want to learn more, read this article:

For 29 Years, Justice Clarence Thomas Has Been the North Star for Originalism on the Supreme Court by Mark Paoletta

Executive Branch Corruption Prevention vs. Foreign Contributions of Value

The President of the United States of America is constitutionally tasked with enforcing the laws of the nation within its constitutionally delimited powers.  That enforcement function implies that he must not allow corruption within the Executive Branch.  It is his duty to root it out, reveal it, and prosecute it.

During the Obama presidency, his administration had numerous incidences that appeared to be examples of severe corruption and which he ought to have seriously investigated.  However, it is highly plausible that Obama was actually involved in some or all of these instances of very plausible corruption.  None of these corruption instances were properly investigated.  It is not unusual for an administration to fail to investigate instances of corruption for fear of embarrassment or for fear that they will lose votes in the next election because they were caught in their planned corruption.  This is especially true of the Democrat Party, whose corruption is commonly so pervasive that they cannot even be embarrassed by the fact of it and are only ever embarrassed by the ineptness that caused them to be overtly caught engaging in it.

Now let me give you a few of the very plausibly corrupt actions that occurred by politicians under the Obama administration:

• Lois Lerner and the IRS holding up more than a hundred Tea Party, Constitutional Government, and Patriot tax-exempt status requests which kept many of them from expounding policy arguments that the Democrat Socialist Party did not want Americans to hear before the 2012 election.
• The Uranium One, whose controlling ownership was Russian, but also partly Canadian, deal to buy American uranium which required the approval of several Obama agencies, including the State Department, then headed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Prior to these approvals and during the approval process, huge donations were made to the Clinton Foundation by Uranium One officers and Bill Clinton was offered $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow at a meeting that recommended investments in Uranium One.
• Hillary Clinton stole more than 60,000 e-mails from the U.S. government while Secretary of State, routing them through an insecure server in the basement of one of her homes.  When these were demanded back, she destroyed about half of them, claiming they were only personal notes.  Even among those that were returned, numerous instances of information requiring secure handling were found.  The hard drive and other storage media for the e-mails had been destroyed, in violation of the legal requirement that the e-mails be returned to the government and for a proper investigation into security violations.  After Clinton had the e-mails destroyed she and the media pretended that Trump had called upon the Russians to steal these already destroyed e-mails.  This is the Democrat Socialist Party way to turn a violation of the law to advantage.  This invitation to steal narrative became part of the myth of Russian collusion by Trump.
• A deal was made by the Obama Attorney General Lynch with Bill Clinton on the tarmac of an airport not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her theft of the State Department e-mails and for any security violations.
• Violations of the FISA court requirements occurred at least four times in requests made by the Obama FBI and intelligence agencies for FISA warrants to spy upon the Trump presidential campaign.  This violation of law is at least as serious as the Watergate burglary that ended the Nixon presidency.  Numerous high-level Obama officials were involved in the Spygate scandal and were collaborating with the intelligence agencies and other persons in the United Kingdom, Russia, Australia, Ukraine and Italy.
• Vice President Joe Biden using his special envoy assignments with Ukraine and Red China to win sweetheart deals for relatives who had nothing to offer in exchange for large sums of money except the fact that they were related to Joe Biden.

Since Obama did not root out, reveal, and prosecute these likely cases of corruption under his administration, it is the very proper job that the following President do so.  Indeed, the following President would be slacking his responsibilities if he did not do so.

Ah, but note that in several of these cases there are actors from other countries.  During the 2016 election, had Trump actually received any useful information from the Russians on e-mails they may very well have stolen from Clinton's insecure home server, the Democrats would have said he had received something of value from a foreign country in violation of campaign finance laws!  This is a Get out of jail free card for a corrupt politician.  The same would have been true if Trump had received damning evidence against Clinton from a Canadian or a Russian source connected with Uranium One.

Now, the claim is being made that because Joe Biden is running for President, any evidence of his corrupt activities in Ukraine and China obtained by the Trump administration is something of value received from a foreign country in violation of campaign finance law.  So all a corrupt politician needs to do to be forever protected from investigations of his crimes is to be sure that the witnesses of his crimes are all foreigners and that he continue his political career without end so he can never be investigated and prosecuted.  What an incredible trick and the Democrat Socialist Party appears to have discovered its utility.  Corruption safe and forever.  Rather like Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton staying married forever, so neither can ever be forced to testify to the crimes of the other.  The abuse of power through foreign corruption and a political career are a marriage made in heaven, apparently.

As always, context is extremely critical in rational thinking.  One can understand how the campaign finance laws came to be and their intent.  One can understand how those who wrote the laws may not have anticipated the way the Democrats are currently trying to use these laws to prevent the proof of corruption of some of their leading politicians.  The rational man must understand that any valid intent of the campaign finance laws was to prevent corruption, not to enable it.  

The rational man understands that no campaign finance law can stand in the way of a President's core constitutional functions to execute the laws with proper respect for the individual rights of every citizen and that must mean to do so without corruption.  A President must be free to root out, reveal, and prosecute corruption in the Executive Branch of the government.  And we must note that both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden may have been guilty of corruption as officials of the Obama administration.  That very plausible possibility needs to be seriously investigated and to do so requires that foreign actors be able to deliver information about their deeds to the present administration headed by President Trump.

The Electoral College is Vitally Important

The Democrat Socialist Party wants to eliminate the Electoral College.  Others are pushing a compact among the states to have each state ignore the votes of its own citizens and award their electoral college votes to the Presidential candidate who won the plurality of votes in the nationwide election.  This interstate compact does not eliminate the Electoral College, but it does eliminate its purpose.

Both of these ideas would have awful consequences.  Among them are:

• Already extensive voter fraud will explode.  Contrary to the oft repeated claims of academics, who are in the pocket of the Democrat Socialist Party, that voter fraud is insignificant, actual election managers have known for decades that every Democrat Socialist Party Presidential Candidate has 150,000 fraudulent votes in Philadelphia.  New York City, Boston, Providence, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago will all deliver large numbers of fraudulent votes to the Democrat Socialist Party also.  Voter fraud can only operate on a massive scale where one political party has long held power over an area with a large population for a long period of time.  A nationwide plurality contest will make it much harder to triage the many cases of voter fraud for investigation.  With the Electoral College, one can focus voter fraud investigations on those areas where the vote will actually change the outcome of the state-wide election and the way its Electoral College votes are cast.

• The Democrat Socialist Party presidential candidate will spend even less time in rural areas of the country and in towns and small cities than they already do.  It is a great advantage to have the richest lode of one's voters crowded together in a few large cities.  Limited time and money can be far more effectively focused on these high density ant-nests of humanity than is possible for a candidate who seeks the votes of Americans living in lower population density areas of the nation.  Post-election maps will show even more of the nation in red even as a few dots of blue carry the Presidential election.  Future Presidents will be less and less able to claim that they are the President of all the People.  It will become ever easier for them to disregard those who live in fly-over country and to designate them the Deplorables.

• Legitimate government is government that protects the exercise of every citizen's individual rights.  Unfettered democracy is actually pressed to trample the rights of many citizen's in order to purchase the votes of a plurality of citizens.  In many cases, the interests of people living in cities and high density areas are different than those who live in lower density areas.  The city-dweller may be very happy to have all the products he needs that require natural resources as inputs to come from China, Africa, and South America.  He may be more ready to buy into environmental scare tactics than some who live in a mining area.  The city-dweller might be susceptible to using the government to drive down food prices at the expense of farmers and those who process and transport food materials.  The city-dweller likely has no interest in the fate of fishermen.  He is likely to want federal tax deductions for heavy state and local taxes at the expense of more rural people with less expensive governments.  The city-dweller will push for expensive subsidies for public transportation at the expense of people from lower density population areas.  City-dwellers and the Democrat Socialist Party are already very often seeking to force employers to pay high minimum wages such as the commonly demanded $15/hour wage.  Even in cities a minimum wage requirement does great harm to those who are little educated, have low work skills, or are little motivated to work.  But minimum wage requirements on the national level are even more devastating in rural areas where businesses have fewer potential customers and where the cost of living is commonly much lower.  Our Republic, under which the Electoral College is a key leg, was designed to discourage a portion of the disregard that an unfettered democracy has for individuals and minorities of the electorate.

• That party most eager to have a federal government which provides goodies to its voters while showing a great willingness to harm those who do not vote or who vote for another party will benefit most from keeping the Electoral College from doing the task it was set up to do by the Framers of the Constitution.  The Framers knew the dangers of democracy.  They knew that governments are biased in favor of increasing their power over the People.  They put many checks and balances into our system of federal governance in order to provide for our welfare by minimizing the dangers to individuals and minorities that democracies are inclined toward and by making it harder for governments to increase their power and control over the lives of the People.  When the state legislatures were no longer allowed to designate the electors to the Electoral College, the federal system was undermined.  The power of the states was diminished.  This made it easier for a party to ignore many states as it sought power at the federal government level.  

• A constitutional amendment is required to eliminate the Electoral College.  Such amendments are hard to pass.  An amendment ultimately requires the approval of three-quarters of the state legislatures.  This is pretty much an impossible task for the Democrat Socialist Party to achieve, since so many of the states are clearly to be ignored by them once they have eliminated the Electoral College.  The idea that everyone's vote should count in a Presidential election has a lot of naive appeal to many Americans, so the compact between the states that each state will cast its electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote across America has some appeal.  It requires the approval of many fewer state legislatures than does an amendment to the Constitution.  Many of the states to be ignored by the future government can also be ignored in the process of putting this compact into play.  I do wonder if once the People of a state have voted for candidate A, but candidate B wins the national popular vote, how stable the compact of legislatures will be when the People of that state find their own legislature betraying their state-wide vote.  For instance, imagine that Trump had won the popular vote.  Can you imagine the uproar in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and California when their electoral votes were cast for Trump?

• The entire plurality that Hillary Clinton won over Donald Trump was based on the vote in California, where Republicans are largely disenfranchised by a state election system that places Democrat Socialists running against Democrat Socialists for virtually every state-wide office in the general election and few if any Republicans are on the ballot.  This Democrat Socialist voting system is a strong voter suppression factor.  The interstate compact to award each state's electoral votes to the popular vote winner will encourage more states solidly controlled by a party to adopt this form of voter suppression.  All evidence to this point is that Democrats are more willing to suppress the vote of Republicans than Republicans are eager to suppress the Democrat vote. 

Most of the support for weakening the Electoral College is in the Democrat Socialist Party.  That is the same party that wants to have children, felons, and non-citizens vote, a $15 minimum wage, welfare for those who choose not to work, Medicare for all, no power except intermittent wind and solar, ever more federal land, regulations against any environmental harm that can be imagined by Chicken Little, catastrophic man-made global warming based on faulty physics and lacking any catastrophe, open borders with a welfare state, and which discourages people from having children.  There is no lunacy too loony for the Democrat Socialist Party which is well-represented by the donkey or ass and in some states also by the white segregationist rooster.

Hilary Clinton's loss of the last election brought on a new sense of urgency to undermine the Electoral College with her claim of a majority of the votes.  Actually, she only had a plurality.  What is more, the sum of the votes to the smaller government parties such as the Republican, Libertarian, and Constitution parties was greater than that for the likes of the Democrats, Green, Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Socialist Workers parties.

Rather than more unfettered democracy, we need more institutions and laws that protect individuals and minorities of all kinds -- not just racial, gender, or sexuality -- from the brutal use of force and the harms that a plurality of voters and their chosen power-hungry politicians are all too often eager to inflict upon them.

The Many Rights of the Individual

Two hundred and forty two years ago, the Second Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence, which states

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

The idea that every person has unalienable rights by virtue of the nature of man which are not dependent upon a government granting or recognizing those rights is very frightful to socialists or any other supporters of tyrannical government.  They hate the Declaration of Independence.  They hate the fact that it declares that the only justifiable reason for government is its dedication to the protection and support of every single individual’s rights.  They hate the fact that the Declaration of Independence states clearly that when government acts to deprive men of their equal, individual rights, then it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it.

The Declaration of Independence is not the only essential American governing document that the socialists hate.  Barack Obama declared in a radio interview when he was an Illinois state senator in its state legislature that he did not like the U.S. Constitution because it was a barrier to socialism.  Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan just wrote in the opinion of the four dissenting justices of the Supreme Court in the Janus case that decided that public employees cannot be forced to pay union dues that the majority were “weaponizing the First Amendment.”  The five justices of the majority had used freedom of speech as the reason for not allowing unions to forcibly collect union dues or even to collect them as a default unless a public employee underwent a process to deny the union the right to collect the money from his paycheck.

Justice Kagan and many others of the left have become very incensed that freedom of speech and freedom of religion have been used to thwart them in their dictation of how Americans can think and act.  They are terribly upset that people associating with one another in business were allowed freedom of speech in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010.  They have been incensed that some businesses have been able to escape infringements of their right to freedom of association by virtue of claiming their freedom of religion, whether in their hiring practices or in their wedding cake baking services.  The present session of the Supreme Court also used freedom of speech to deny the socialist California legislature to require organizations giving advice to pregnant women to tell them about their options to have an abortion.  Hence the socialists or Progressive Elitists are more and more horrified by the individual rights recognized in the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Unfortunately, those who favor a government whose functions violate the individual rights of some, often in the name of providing more security or comfort for others, have long been able to keep the courts from recognizing the many individual rights which were supposed to be protected by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.  It was recognized when the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution that individuals had many rights not explicitly dealt with in the earlier amendments of the Bill of Rights.

What are our individual rights, whether recognized by our government are not?

• The right to life, not to be supported, but to be allowed to act to support it ourselves, as we allow others to do so also.  This is a general right to manage our own life and to fully claim self-ownership.
• The right to determine our own actions and to undertake them, provided we do not act to prevent others from determining their own actions and undertaking them with all of us barred from the initiated use of force.
• The right to choose our own values and to pursue those values to try to achieve our own happiness.
• The freedom of conscience, the right to use our own judgment and to act upon it.  Freedom of religion is a subset of this right and is far from all-inclusive.
• The freedom of association, which is also the freedom to choose who we will cooperate with and for what purposes.  This includes our domestic partnerships, our business partnerships, our hiring choices, our freedom of contract, our choice of friends, and those we join in our recreational activities.
• Freedom of speech or communication of our thoughts and ideas in all the forms this may take.  The freedom of assembly is part of this, as it is part of our freedom of association.
• The freedom of privacy, or the freedom not to share those parts of our lives we do not wish to share knowledge of with others.  This includes the right to be secure in our papers, our homes, and such as prescribed in the 4th Amendment.
• The freedom of equal protection of our income and property and the other fruits of our labor and thought.
• The right to own and bear arms so that we might protect our own lives and individual rights.
• The right to fair and just treatment when accused of a crime as prescribed in our 5th , 6th, 7th, and 8th Amendments.

I will not claim this to be an all-inclusive list of our natural rights.  I do not claim that life is so simple that it is always easy to understand how one individual’s exercise of his rights will affect others as they try to exercise their own rights.  But, good societies and good governments -- legitimate governments – will always try very hard to make individual liberty their primary goal and will defer as much as is possible to the individual’s right to make his own value choices and manage his own life.  No legitimate government can take the stance that it is justified in violating the rights of some in the interest of other persons.  Legitimate government cannot violate any person’s rights.  It must respect the equal rights of every citizen and legal resident.

A society with such a legitimate government will be one which minimizes the use of force.  The government should act to prevent all individuals from initiating the use of force.  That government also minimizes its restraints on liberty such that its own use of force is also minimized.  Government which violates individual rights does so by the use of force or its threatened use.  Governments are commonly the worst abusers of the use of force in the nations of the world today.  There are no highly legitimate governments operating at this time.  Some are much less worse than others, but all are massive abusers of the rights of the individual.  The United States federal government violates very many of our rights today and American socialists and Progressive Elitists want it to violate many more of our individual rights.

Many Americans, whether socialists or religious traditionalists, want to use government to prescribe a moral code by which everyone is expected to live.  They are often certain that their moral code is right and that a good society can be achieved if only the government will force everyone to live by their moral code.  The fact that there is often more variation in the moral codes held by the political factions pursuing such moral code prescriptions by law than could possibly be encoded into law rarely dawns on them.  These same people, especially the socialists, are very inclined to either use government or extra-governmental force and intimidation to prevent dissenters from their moral ideas from exercising their freedom of speech, press, and assembly.  According to the socialists and sometimes those who speak for God, if you have morally wrong ideas, you forfeit your freedom of speech, press, and assembly.

No freedom is a freedom at all if one will not allow those you think are wrong from exercising their freedom.  There is no freedom of speech if a minority or a single individual is not allowed to state their own ideas.  There is no freedom of association if one is not allowed to discriminate in the choosing of those one wishes to associate with, even if that discrimination may be what many may call bigotry.

The Christian who refuses to associate with gay people is wrong in my opinion, but he is acting fully within his rights.  To make him bake a cake for a gay wedding may very well be an infringement upon his freedom of conscience.

The gay organizations that want to force non-discrimination against gay people outside of the government itself are very wrong in doing so.  They should be as determined to protect their own freedom of association and conscience as anyone else should be.  Imagine a law that requires every gay bar to bring in heterosexual people until they represent their proportion in the population at large among their customers each night when the federal inspectors come around to make a count at the bar.

Many of the religious conservatives were very unhappy about the Supreme Court ruling allowing gay marriages.  In fact, this should have been a very obvious requirement respecting freedom of association.  Unfortunately, our government does not actually recognize the freedom of association.  It also very much limits the freedom of contract in general.  In reality, people should have as much freedom in forming their domestic partnerships under contract as they would have in forming a business partnership.  If three men and three women wanted to form a domestic partnership, that is their right as much as it would be the right of one woman and one man.  The same is true for one woman and two men or for two men and one woman or for three men or for three women.  The government has no business interfering with such an exercise in freedom of association and freedom of contract.  What such domestic partnerships might aim to accomplish and their sexual relationships are not government business, except insofar as the adults entering into the contract choose to make those matters a part of their lawful domestic partnership contract.

A much more harmonious society results when government is not being extensively used as a tool to prevent individuals from exercising their broad and many individual rights.  There are many claims that we live in an very uncivil society today.  Well, what do you expect when we have to fight over the control of a government that is constantly willing and wanting to violate our rights.  When we have a government that loves to take more from the rich and redistribute it to the many more voters who are not as rich, do the rich not have a right to believe they are threatened by that government?  If the rich use their money and connections to manipulate the regulatory state so that it is much harder for small, upstart companies to compete with their larger companies, is it not reasonable that the small businessmen will be very upset?  If the federal government owns half the land in a state and it controls the use of that land so that the environmentalists on the left and right coasts are happy, is it not to be expected that many in the state where that land is not of use to them are going to be unhappy?  If you are a coal miner, a river barge operator, a store owner in a coal town, or a dock worker in Norfolk, VA, is it not reasonable that you will be very unhappy when the federal government decides that a pregnant woman eating only fish from a river downwind from a coal-fired power plant might according to very imaginative argument and highly cherry-picked studies of islanders who only eat seafood develop some problem due to mercury released from coal combustion so that coal-fired power plants are being shutdown?  Or you want to build an office building, but you have to wait 5 years before starting as you work through endless environmental studies which keep requiring you to spend more and more on the building itself, not to mention the lawyers fees.

Then there is the shear weight of the taxes.  You are young and you do not expect Social Security to be around in 40 years when you might retire, but you are paying into it out of every paycheck, instead of putting that money into your own retirement investment fund.  Medicare costs will exceed its revenues in 2026 according to the ever-changing projections, so if that program is still going to be around, you will have to pay higher Medicare taxes soon.  Meanwhile, you may still be struggling to pay off the money you borrowed to go to college.  Thanks to all of that loan money available, the colleges built themselves up like spas for the rich, but the education you received was no better and maybe worse than the education people received 30 years earlier, but you paid much more for it.

Perhaps you are struggling to start a new business and the paperwork required by the governments and by your business customers is overwhelming, thanks to big government.  Meanwhile, you need to buy equipment so you can expand, but the county personal property tax penalizes you for having that equipment, making it harder for you to hire more people.  The more people you hire the more the governments expect you to act as an unpaid tax collector.  If you do business across state lines, you now have to worry about collecting sales taxes for each and every one of many thousands of taxing authorities even though you have no presence in their areas and no vote to determine the taxes or the politicians who decide to levy them.  Imagine the deluge of paperwork now coming your way.

When the governments do too much and forget the principle that their legitimate function is simply to protect everyone’s equal individual rights, then it is pitting the people against one another.  Good people are simply trying to protect themselves from the hurt that the government can do to them.  Immoral people are very happy to try to wrest control of government so they can take advantage of most of the people.  If you think there are not endless numbers of schemes or conspiracies to do just that in Washington, you are very naive indeed.  The evil-doers are some foundations, environmental groups, people who want welfare, labor unions, educators, scientists, professions that want restrictive licenses, and many businesses, not to mention many politicians.

It is absolute pie in the sky nonsense to think government should hurt some and violate the rights of some in order to help some greater number or the most needy.  Government will start with some plausible such proposal that almost everyone will agree with.  After it has established numerous such programs, the people will no longer have the time or will to think about them.  The government arguments for the next set of programs can be much less plausible now.  Soon it is a free-for-all.  Soon one has what we have now, government for special interests.  The people are bewildered and no longer in effective control.  Some simply trust to the authorities, but most Americans are now very jaded.  But, this is exactly what should have been expected when we allowed government to disregard a strict adherence to its legitimate role as the protector of every individual’s many and broad rights.  When we give this up as a critical and essential principle, we give up all hope for a just, fair, and harmonious society.

Political Discord and Anger Rule When Government is Too Big

With great frequency, we are told that the extent of the political discord in America today is too great and we must tone it down.  This is impossible because we have allowed government too much power. A government with the power of our federal government, and for that matter with the extensive powers of our state and local governments, just has too many ways to do harm to most of us and to rob and punish us for the benefit of those groups who control the power of those governments.  It is the excessive power and its inevitable use to harm most of us, and to allow profit to others at our expense, that calls forth great passions about politics.

Once government exceeds the limits of its legitimate function in protecting the rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, self-ownership, and the pursuit of happiness with broad freedoms of conscience and association, government will necessarily do harm to some even if it tries to do the greatest good for the greatest number.  That is not the proper function of government.  People should act for their own good in the private sector, taking full advantage of their protected individual rights to do so.  It is not for legitimate government to do harm to anyone.  Indeed, the wonderful thing about the private sector is that it in no way requires that harm be done to anyone.

Yes, some people will not fare as well as others in the private sector.  But, at least they have the opportunity to choose their own values in the private sector and to pursue those self-chosen values. When governments have grown beyond their individual rights protection functions, they chose the values that government will pursue and they drag us individuals along whether we would choose those values or not.  The government chooses values and imposes values on all of us by force.  This use of force to pursue its ends is the essence of government.  It is fundamentally why government must have very limited purposes and powers to pursue those purposes.  The Framers of the Constitution recognized this and the people who ratified the Constitution did too.

We have perverted that Constitution for highly limited and principled government with claims that it allows government to do anything in a law that includes taxes because it has the power to tax. Hogwash.  It has the power to tax only to support the very limited powers enumerated in the Constitution.  We have perverted the Constitution by claiming government has the power to regulate anything and everything that involves or could in any way affect interstate trade.  We have perverted the Constitution by ignoring the broad 9th Amendment that recognizes that individuals have rights not enumerated in the Constitution.  We have allowed the 10th Amendment to be weakened.  We have reduced the ability of the states to exert influence in Washington, DC by removing their power to appoint Senators to the Senate to represent the interests of the states.  We have reduced the representation of the People in the House of Representatives by allowing massive and ridiculous gerrymandering of Congressional Districts.

We have established government-dominated and controlled educational institutions with a serious conflict-of-interest problem.  These government-controlled institutions have seen to it that young Americans are unfamiliar with their individual rights and with the very limited role of legitimate governments.  They further the discord and distrust in order to further increase the powers of government.  The legislative law-creation function has also been substantially passed to regulatory agencies with little oversight by the People's representatives in Congress.  As a result about 80,000 pages of new regulations are produced each year.  No one knows how many federal laws and regulations there are.  In short, we have removed most of the limits on government power.

Consequently, it has become a matter of life and death whether one's personal interests are under attack by government.  Or, one might be in a particular band of robbers who stand to make out like bandits if only that band can control the levers of power.  The individual who stands up and defends his individual rights stands literally to be murdered as the governments exert their power.  Few people choose to suffer immolation at the hands of a brutal government eager to enforce its laws and regulations by using whatever force it may take.  But, though one may not present oneself for such immolation at the hands of overwhelming force, this does not mean that one is not suffering passionately one's subserviance.

Powerful governments with wily special interest groups working constantly to gain control over some function or other of said governments, understandably causes many citizens, who either do not have the time or who lack the mental power to understand what they are doing, to become very suspicious. Many begin to imagine that forces are arrayed against them that may not in fact be attempting to harm them.  The fact that many factions are taking advantage of the People in general, will cause many of the People to imagine the worst of motives for many who may only be trying to protect themselves from harmful government force.  Both rational and irrational fears will become common. This is a necessary result of governments that pursue the idea of doing the greatest good for the greatest number, which is made even worse by the fact that such governments only succeed in generating a general warfare among special interest groups for power at the cost of our general Welfare.

When the Framers of the Constitution and the People who ratified it, established a new government under that Constitution, they wisely opened it with:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The document that followed described a highly limited government and the main opposition to the adoption of the Constitution was by those who believed that that government was too powerful, not too weak.  It was a highly limited government that the People looked to to provide for Justice, domestic Tranquility, the promotion of the general Welfare, and the Blessings of Liberty.

We have failed their vision.  We have abandoned the principles of legitimate and good government which they perceived.  We are paying for that with governments that create injustices, stir up passions that lead to violence and discord, that harm many in the interests of factions too politically savvy, and deprive us of many of our Liberties.

It is no wonder that we have little domestic Tranquility under these conditions.  Who controls the levers of government has become a matter of life and death.  The only way to escape this sad state of affairs is to return to a highly principled and limited ideal of government.  Government should first do no harm to anyone.  It should promote our general Welfare and domestic Tranquility by simply protecting our individual rights and leaving us free to manage our own lives.