There are an increasing number of quiet rank-and-file Americans who are now resolving, in their minds, that the standing U.S. President is not a king, or unilateral decider of war and peace, and does not have constitutional powers greater than that of the Congress and the Supreme Court. I was talking a few days ago to a learned veterans’ law judge, in Washington, DC, about the Article 1, Section 8 powers which Congress, over the last ninety-five years, has delegated to the Executive Branch without constitutional amendment. He heartily agreed with me that any power reposed upon the Legislative Branch by the Framers could not be arbitrarily shifted to another branch of the federal government without consent of the people, that is, if the American nation is still, as according to Abraham Lincoln, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
He also agreed with me that any act of Congress, subsequently signed into law by a standing President, that removes one of the specific Article 1, Section 8 powers from the purview of the Legislative Branch, is unconstitutional on its face. This particular veterans’ law judge also lamented the fact that most graduate attorneys from most of the noted law schools, know very little about the U.S. Constitution when they complete their required studies. For some reason, the most tenured law professors, at such universities as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia, are teaching the young legal minds of tomorrow that everything is fine and dandy in the federal government, that there are no real imminent problems of constitutional law facing the nation.
How absurd it is for the 110th Congress, comprised mostly of lawyers, to debate the constitutionality of, for example, an executive surveillance policy, such as wiretaps and cyber-snooping circumventing the FISA Court, of how it infringes upon the 4th Amendment rights of American citizens, and give full credence to long-time laws that have been basically unconstitutional for the last ninety-five years, such as the Federal Reserve Act. It’s as though the arrogant, supposedly educated, pundits of the federal bureaucracy consider the American people incapable of determining, on their own, what is right or wrong, that any type of unconstitutional law can be passed under the noses of an apathetic electorate. The egregious conduct over the last nine-decades of a few scurrilous elected and appointed federal officers, by their success in pulling-the-wool over the eyes of the American voters, making them believe that whatever act Congress passes, and that the President signs into law, is legally and constitutionally binding, has really changed the course of history for the worse. It has been successful in turning a democratic constitutional republic into a plutocratic oligarchy, or a nation ruled by a very wealthy few under a permutated constitution.
Carefully consider that the current Democratic and Republican nominees for President are all millionaires, very wealthy and affluent people, and that none of them are daringly caring enough to openly admit that there are some fundamental things very wrong with the basic operational framework of the federal government. They are cunningly skirting, in their campaign rhetoric, the basic cause for the symptoms of bad government, which they emphatically say that they want to change. For it was the philosopher, Aristotle, who quipped in the 9th Century B.C. that the basic form of an entity, such as government, determines directly what derives from it, that impurity breeds impurity, error derives error, and evil derives evil. A governmental status-quo is meaningful only to those businesses and individuals who benefit from it, and the current status-quo, a nation where 98-percent of the wealth has been engineered to reside in the hands of the affluent 2-percent of the population, is only benefiting the wealthy. Yet, this has happened through subtle, seemingly legal, changes in the democratic infrastructure of the American republic. As the highly respected television journalist Bill Moyers, emphatically wrote, in his 1988 book “The Secret Government,” the shredding of the U.S. Constitution, and democracy, has occurred in the wake of the rise of the imperial presidency. In the book’s afterward, Moyer’s wrote,
“When the founders of the American republic agreed on the Constitution, they determined the kind of nation this was to be. It was not to be the home to arbitrary power. The rules would see to it. The playing field of government was to be level, and the three players – the executive, legislative, and judiciary – would be guided by ethical and constitutional constraints. Each was empowered to blow the whistle on the others if they failed to play by the rules. Thus the Constitution is essentially a procedural document; the Framers did not prescribe future policies for the country by the manner of choosing what those policies should be. For example the Constitution does not say the United States cannot go to war. As Edwin Firmage, professor of law, former White House Fellow, and constitutional scholar, explains in his “War Powers and the Doctrine of Political Questions,” “the Framers understood that the reasons for going to war must be left for every generation to work through within the political branches of government. Whether the United States should go to war and under what conditions are political questions. But the way to go to war is not. The Founders put that in the Constitution, our basic book of rules. They gave Congress (and only Congress) the power “to declare war and to grant letters of marque and reprisal” (government commissions authorizing privateers to seize enemy vessels).”
In the same vein, the Framers gave Congress (and only Congress) the power to coin money and to determine its value, along with seventeen other non-transferable powers. The 18th clause of Article 1, Section 8, popularly called the elastic clause due to how it has been cunningly stretched way out of proportion as to its intended purpose, states very clearly that Congress has the power to effect any law that is, both, necessary and proper to the execution of the Article 1, Section 8 powers. The word necessary is the linchpin for understanding the Framers intention for inserting the clause into the Constitution. Necessary is defined as that which is essential to a particular function. A particular law might be conveniently expedient to the pragmatic execution of a legislative power, but it has to be more than that to be constitutional, it has to utterly essential to the execution of the legislative powers. This very logical caveat clause, created by the Framers, was intended to severely limit the number of unnecessary laws which would improperly expand the power of the federal government, especially the Executive Branch.
A secret illegal government almost always flourishes in secret and through illicit undisclosed acts. Perhaps the concerted, but hardly publicized, statements of several families of 9/11 victims carry home the impact of undisclosed government behavior, in the wake of the 9/11 Commission Report. One private lawyer, the husband of a wife killed in the WTC tragedy, quipped in 2007 that “if all of the relevant material evidence against the Bush administration, not properly considered by the 9/11 Commission due to Executive Branch non-disclosure, were brought before a federal grand jury today, an indictment against the U.S. Executive Branch, especially the White House, for orchestrating the carnage that resulted from the WTC, and Pentagon bombings, would certainly be rendered.” This general attitude has been shown, and expressed, by more than 160 victims’ families.
Moreover, in 2005, a national poll was taken of 2,000 U.S. middle-class working citizens which revealed that 72% of the responders fully believed that the federal government had a substantial hand in the 9/11 tragedy. So, if this has been an overwhelming consideration among the American people, why hasn’t the evidence been assembled, for the sake of justice, by those “faithfully” executing the laws comprising the federal criminal code? Why haven’t the media earnestly published what is, apparently, important news about probable federal involvement in the 9/11 debacle? People, for some reason, today joke about the Nixon White House of the early 1970s, when its basement was secretly turned into an illegal enforcement division of der fascist Fuhrer, Richard M. Nixon, for the express purpose of carrying out blatantly illegal covert operation against the American people. Presently, the media, and administration touting pundits, are convincingly making it seem to the republic that another Watergate, and Iran-Contra, could never possibly again occur.
Another consideration about the federal government, that every eligible voter should ponder, is that, of the 100 U.S. senators in the 110th Congress, 82 of them have a net worth of, at least, a million dollars. The remaining 18 are very close to being millionaires. Of the current members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 123 of the 435 representatives are worth more than a million dollars. Of the remaining 312 representatives, 85 % have holdings of over $700,000. Rep. Jay Inslee, of Washington State’s First Congressional District, was elected to the House when he was a county prosecutor, making under $60,000 per year.
In ten years time, having been re-elected three times, Inslee is now worth between $96,000 and $565,000. I personally think that his ten-year financial boon was primarily due to the $130,000 per year raise he got just by being elected to federal office. Of course, Inslee just didn’t get up one morning and decide to run for the federal legislature. He was first approached by some very prominent, and financially affluent, corporate officers who thought that their multi-million dollar multi-national businesses could benefit from his representation in Congress. Contrary to popular belief, Inslee, as well as the other 434 representatives in the House, didn’t pay for their first election, and subsequent re-election, campaigns. They might have contributed a token ten-percent, or less, of the total costs, but most of the monies came from affluent contributors who lobbied for their influences in Congress.
As may be surmised from the foregoing facts, term limits for U.S. Representatives and Senators are not such a bad idea. George Will wrote an outstanding book, a treatise on the imperative of requiring term limits, entitled “Restoration.” In his work, Will made substantial arguments against allowing millionaire senators, and representatives, to secure their re-elections through the money wrought through special interests. The deliberative legislative process is greatly hampered by long-term senators and representatives catering to the whims of the standing presidential administrations and the money offered by special corporate lobbyists . Of course, Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain are wealthy affluent politicians who command the public interest through the key substrate of political success, taught in Poly Sci. 101, which is name recognition bought with the mother’s milk of politics, money.
Honesty, integrity (doing what you say you will do), and legality no longer play a concerted role in getting a person elected to federal, and state, office. For what the voters don’t know about Obama, Clinton, and McCain may be much greater than what they do know, courtesy of the very skewed media. For example, disgraced ex-New York Governor Spitzer, husband and father, was probably purchasing the services of high-dollar call girls at the same time he was prosecuting pimps, prostitutes, and organized crime as New York Attorney General. Common sense dictates it all didn’t begin in the Governor’s Mansion. Had someone threatened to expose him to the public then, no telling what he would have done to protect his illicit personal interests. Nonetheless, Spitzer is worth well over a million dollars, and his public disgrace is, to him, negligible compared with what money can buy for his future.
I recall Lincoln’s profound words, said at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in November 1863, when he solemnly stated, “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” I suppose that same thing may be say of the nearly 4,000 GIs who have perished in a totally unnecessary and unjust war in Iraq. How about the near-4000 killed on 9/11? If the majority of the concerned U.S. citizens resolved today to put a stop to unconstitutional government, there is nothing on earth that the controlling 2-percent of the population could do to stop it. The power is, and will remain, with the will of a majority of the American people.
Norton R. Nowlin took M.A. and B.A. degrees in the social and behavioral sciences from the Uiversity orf Texas at Tyler, studied law for one full year at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, in San Diego, California, and earned an ABA-approved advanced paralegal certification from Edmonds Community College, in Lynnwood, Washington. Mr. Nowlin has also attended LaJolla, California’s National University and Malibu’s Pepperdine University to attain graduate credits in business management and economics. Mr. Nowlin also attained a Texas State Teaching Certification, in social studies and psychology, from the University of Texas at Tyler. A political scientist, certified educator, paralegal, published essayist, poet, and free-lance fiction writer, Mr. Nowlin resides in Northern Virginia with his wife, the renown math tutor, Diane C. Nowlin, and their two very intelligent cats.