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Dear Reader,
Today is a high and solemn day in the United States.
Yet no television headline broadcasts it. No firework celebration launches in recognition of it.
It is nonetheless a day worthy of celebration.
I refer to Bill of Rights Day. Today, December 15, is Bill of Rights Day.
On this day in 1941 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt summoned Bill of Rights Day into existence.
From whom:
- The officials of the government, and upon the people of the United States, to observe the day by displaying the flag of the United States on public buildings and by meeting together for such prayers and such ceremonies as may seem to them appropriate.
How many Bill of Rights violations did Mr. Roosevelt perpetuate to enact his New Deal? Or to prosecute the Second World War?
I do not know the precise number. Yet you can be certain the number is far from zero.
I let it go, nonetheless.
Today I heed the former president’s counsel to prayer and ceremony, however misdirected he may have been.
Thank God for the Bill of Rights
I thank the Almighty for the rights enshrined, gloriously, within the United States Bill of Rights.
Is there one among us who would not be jugged — at some point or other — for some transgression against the United States government absent these rights?
I do not exaggerate when I argue that the gulags would be full.
As once argued Baltimore’s sage, Henry Louis Mencken:
- Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent… Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
Imagine Government Without the Bill of Rights
Gold once shackled government expansion. It no longer does. Yet the Bill of Rights retains legal authority that shackles government ambition in ways gold could not.
The distinction is not without a difference.
Imagine our government liberated from the shackles the Bill of Rights binds it in. As I stated, the gulags would be full.
Yet due to the Bill of Rights a man can appear at Washington to dispute what he considers an illegitimate election — without fear of arrest.
He can likewise denounce government lockdowns and rage against mandatory vaccination of his person without fear of government censorship.
I am a practical man of course — and like you, I like to think at least — somewhat sane.
Thus you, like me, recognize that no right is unconditional and absolute.
The Supreme Court of the United States has even declared it.
A man is free to swing his arm wildly in the air around him. Yet that right enters abridgement when another fellow’s nose falls within that reach.
Likewise, a man may not screech “Fire!” in a crowded playhouse.
“The Constitution,” after all, “is not a suicide pact,” as once argued Justice Robert H. Jackson.
And how can the United States withstand national emergency under untrammelled exercise of the Bill of Rights?
Did not Mr. Lincoln heave certain constitutional liberties in the hellbox to prosecute the War of the Rebellion?
Did not Mr. Bush’s Patriot Act trespass against those same constitutional liberties?
And did not Mr. Trump hand Dr. Fauci near caesar-like powers?
Crisis!
Well friends, if Amendments One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine or Ten are in their way, if they require a little roughhousing… then Amendments One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine or Ten must endure a little roughhousing.
For example: We are told Earth confronts imminent “climate crisis.”
We are further told that only drastic and comprehensive government mobilization can save us.
How can government abide dissent under such grave conditions of emergency?
It cannot.
And so the tape must go across this man’s mouth. Government must likewise trespass additional constitutional rights to meet the emergency’s severity.
After all, the United States Constitution is nothing against planetary survival.
No Dissent Is Allowed!
What if the climate dissenter carries a kernel of truth with him? It makes no nevermind.
His truthful kernel cannot multiply. Else it would threaten the greater crop of unified government, government unified in favor of virtuous government action.
Let this scoundrel talk his mind, let this agent of Satan talk his mind… and who knows what falsity may next issue from his wayward oral orifice?
That Mr. Putin harbors no plans to conquer Europe?
Again, I simply do not know.
Bills of Rights Are Anti-Democratic
The Bill of Rights is often chained to our concepts of democracy. We are told the one goes with the other.
Rights equal democracy, democracy equals rights.
Yet is the Bill of Rights truly democratic? Or is the Bill of Rights the very negation of democracy?
Writer Kevin Williamson:
- All of the best things about our Constitution are the anti-democratic stuff like the Bill of Rights, which is America’s great big list of stuff you idiots don’t get to vote on. If we had put slavery up to a vote in 1860, it’d have won… 70 to 30. If we put free speech up to a vote today it’d probably lose.
Put free speech up to a vote among the federal bureaucracy and it will lose 94 to 6 — at minimum — depend on it.
The Only Good Bureaucrat
“The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head,” as said the abovesaid Mencken, adding:
“Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.”
The pistol is not yet within his clutch, though it may be close. He reaches for it nonetheless, graspingly, yearningly, constantly — always under the guise of benevolence of course.
Yet I conclude with Mr. Mencken:
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.”
I am with Mr. Mencken. Yet I would correct Baltimore’s sage on one particular.
He said that: “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.”
His sentence harbors one too many words — that word is the word “almost.”
Happy Bill of Rights Day!
Regards,
Brian Maher
for Freedom Financial News
