Who Stole the Constitution?

 J. B. Shurk has an article today at the American Thinker that tells us just how far away from the founders Constitution we have wandered, and how far we must go to get some semblance of it back. The article is entitled Master Thieves Stole the Constitution, and in fact that is exactly correct. Some of them thought they were doing what was in our best interests, but on balance they were not. Others though knew precisely what they were doing, and why. We, the citizens who were being duped too often where unaware of just exactly what the thieves had wrought.

Everyone has a favorite adventure novel or movie in which a daring thief swaps something of immense value with something terribly fake. A forged painting hangs in lieu of the original on a museum wall. A bag of sand takes the place of a bag of jewels inside a pressure-sensitive safe. Lead bars are substituted for gold bullion in Fort Knox.

The American people are the victims of a similar kind of heist. Over the last century, master thieves have stolen their freedoms, representative government, and constitutional protections. Cheap knockoffs have replaced priceless American treasures.

The U.S. Constitution makes no mention of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Environmental Protection Agency, or the Internal Revenue Service. It says nothing at all about the hundreds of other administrative agencies and regulatory bodies that compose the federal bureaucracy. On the contrary, the Constitution is a blueprint for a small government with limited powers. Those powers are explicitly enumerated, while all other powers are explicitly reserved for the American people and the individual states.

I remember talking to someone who was planning to vote for a certain Democrat because he had made a statement about education, and she was very concerned about education having young children. I explained that education was a state and local issue and was nowhere in the Constitution. In fact, the Constitution had listed a very limited number of powers, among which education was not one. No matter.

One of the things the Department of Education does is grant money, which was taken from the taxpayers in the first place, back to the states. But of course, the grants have strings attached. You may wonder why schools now have so many adminstrators, couselors, and other non-teaching adults on the payroll. Well, blame it on the DOE. The grants government gives effectively give it control. Why would you give control of your schools and what they teach to some bureaucrat in D.C? This was supposed to be one of the things left to the states and the people.

The Environmental Protection Agency knows what’s best for your land. The Department of Education knows what’s best for your children. The Department of Health and Human Services knows what’s best for your body. Should you disagree with their “experts,” the Department of Homeland Security is eager to censor your social media messages as “disinformation.” Should you decide to defend your family and property from government intrusion, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives is ready to commandeer both. The Transportation Security Administration keeps a naughty list of citizens whose luggage must always be tossed. The Federal Bureau of Investigation loves to organize pre-dawn raids of citizens who too publicly oppose government overreach. Unelected government bureaucrats advise citizens which parts of the Bill of Rights remain in effect.

However else this system of government is described, it cannot accurately be called “representative,” “constitutional,” or “democratic.” It is not of the people, by the people, or for the people. It is of, by, and for the bureaucrats. It is a system that operates in secrecy and justifies its secrecy as the prerogative of “experts.” It looks nothing like the U.S. Constitution. It is a cheap and unimpressive forgery.

Please read all of Shurk's article.  Trump appears to be taking a wrecking ball to the deep state, but remember that we may only have a few years to undo what others have wrought.

Only Congress Should Make the Laws

 Today at Townhall.com Tom Knighton reports that the Firearms Policy Coalition Takes to Court to Argue Only Congress Can Create Laws. This has been a hobby horse of mine for as long as this blog has been running. The Constitution sets clear limits to the powers of each of the three branches of government. Congress makes the law, and the Executive branches...well executes the laws. If you are in an executive agency, you are not asked whether you agree with the law or not, or if you think the law should be changed. You are expected to faithfully execute the laws as written.

I am sure that I am not the only one who has been upset about this, but it is nonetheless good to see someone is attempting to get this very real problem of our federal government back in line.

Through the years, Congress has passed numerous laws. It's hard to keep up with exactly what is and isn't legal nowadays, though most of us manage to figure out the broad strokes.

As bad as that is, federal agencies have been empowered by Congress to essentially create new laws with the stroke of a pen. These regulations have the force of law but are created by faceless bureaucrats rather than our elected representatives. This has created issues regarding guns, the environment, commerce, and pretty much every aspect of American life. Now, an organization is doing something about it.

No, the Firearms Policy Coalition isn't the only one that has tried, but it's the one taking action at the moment:

Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) announced the filing of a brief with the United States Supreme Court in the case of FCC v. Consumers' Research, which is set to address the question of when and how Congress may delegate its authority to administrative agencies. The brief can be viewed at FPCLaw.org.

“Amici have a particular interest in this case for two reasons. Amici litigate cases in federal court around the country, and the question added by the Court concerning the availability of mootness exceptions is of great importance to Amici,” the brief explains, as “firearms cases frequently risk becoming moot, and the contours of the mootness doctrine are thus extremely important to Amici. Of even greater import to Amici is reigning in unconstitutional delegations of legislative power. Individual liberty, including the right to keep and bear arms, is routinely violated under the guise of broad delegations to administrative agencies.”

Knighton puts a very nice spin on why the Congress first started delegating law making powers to the Executive branch:

Look, I understand why Congress started empowering federal agencies to create regulations. Passing laws is time-consuming, and a lot of times, it's just not going to happen even when it probably needs to. By allowing agencies to enact regulations and interpret law, they can be more agile and, arguably, less beholden to political whims.

I am not so sure. I suspect that legislators are first of all political animals, not really interested in getting into the weeds of most issues. Most of them are lawyers, and don't want to do the work to become experts themselves, so pass the actual lawmaking on to the "experts." But this blurs the lines between the two branches. Rather, with fewer agency bureaucrats in the Executive branch, Congress could afford more specialists to do some of the heavy lifting while writing the bills. But while executive branch "experts" tend to stay on, Congressional staffers can come and go more freely. Moreover, by having Congress make the law, and preventing the Executive from making laws, we restore the balance making Congress more powerful while making the presidency less so.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

 Anyone who has been paying attention will know that the Biden administration was anti-gun, at least for guns in your and my hands, from the top on down. And while the Biden administration has been the most anti-gun, they are alone.  I think every administration has been anti-gun to a greater or lesser degree.  Of course, they all loved guns in government's hands.

Now, I have never understood this philosophy.  Being against a tool, an inanimate object, really doesn't make sense.  In many ways guns are like fire extinguishers.  You have them in case of need, but no sane person hopes to have a need.  Unlike Hollywood, where the police, for example, are drawing their guns on every show, most police officers never draw their guns, much less actually shoot them except to qualify annually.  Yet they all carry them, just in case.

Mike McDaniel at the American Thinker has a post today entitled Citizens stop armed attackers; the FBI lies in which he makes clear the degree to which the Biden administrations animus toward guns in private hands has distorted the FBI's statistics. McDaniel does this by comparing the FBI statics to similar ones from John Lott's Crime Prevention Research Center. As he notes, Lott has been rather famous in the gun community for carefully researched statistics, which he showed us in his book 'More Guns, Less Crime.' Here he looked at the effects of crime and gun laws on a county-by-county basis over time for all counties in the United States. It was stunning, and he made his research available to other statisticians. Nobody could refute Lott's statistics or his conclusions. So gun grabbers did what they always do: tried to impugn his character.

McDaniel writes:

But there’s another area of data collection and dissemination where the FBI has been deceiving the public, and Lott, once again, exposes their lies:

I’ve seen many cases of politicized data. Until January 2021, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs, and part of my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. During my time with the DOJ, I discovered that the FBI either missed or misidentified many cases of civilians using guns to stop attacks. For instance, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 350 active shooter cases identified between 2014 to 2023.

The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), which I run, has found many more missed cases and is keeping an updated list. As such, the CPRC numbers tell a much different story: Out of 515 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2023, armed citizens stopped 180, saving countless innocent lives. Our numbers even excluded 27 cases where a law-abiding citizen with a gun stopped an attacker before he could fire a shot.

The FBI’s lack of accuracy on this issue is no surprise. One of the most enduring D/s/c narratives is the idea that Normal Americans shouldn’t be allowed to have guns. They’ll just shoot themselves or their families, and worse, they might shoot criminals! Only the police should be armed because they’re the professionals. So of course, the FBI would support that narrative by claiming citizens virtually never stop active shooters.

Please go read the entire post and be aware that the government has been gaslighting you on this issue as well.

One Can't Have Public Virtue Without Private Virtue

 Selwyn Duke has an article at the American Thinker entitled As a Matter of Fact I DO Care What People Do in Their Bedroom. The title is a shocking statement to the modern ear. One imagines Duke to be some sort of busy body, a Karen. But Duke then clarifies what he means:

As to my meaning, no, I’m not Enid Strict The Church Lady (I don’t look good in a dress and I tend more toward Paul Harvey than Dana Carvey). Nor would I, as emperor, put CCTV cameras in everybody’s home; I’ve no interest in uber-intrusiveness. But I do have a strong interest in preserving civilization — and in restoring it in the first place.

Now, I so boldly made my statement to that woman because, in part, I aimed to strike a tiny blow against the very modernistic social norm of assumed libertinism. But the real problem with the “I don’t care what people do in their bedroom” line is that, translated, it amounts to (whether the person intends this or not):

I don’t care about character.

Or perhaps, “Character doesn’t matter.”

Here we get to the real issue. Christ said that the greatest commandment was to love God with all our hearts and minds. But the second was like it: to love our neighbors as ourselves. But man has a decidedly limited ability to love. With all that I have on my plate now, can I afford to love someone I hardly know? Yet we are called to this, and there is good reason to care, and care deeply, about what others do in private.

The elders among us may remember that the above line was used to justify Bill Clinton’s gutter-rat morals during his 1992 White House run. But “you can’t be one kind of man and another kind of president,” responded his general-election opponent, then-incumbent President George H.W. Bush. Really, though, Bush was just echoing greater thinkers, such as our Founders. To wit:

“Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private [virtue], and public virtue is the only foundation of republics,” stated our second president, John Adams.

John Witherspoon, a minister and fellow Declaration of Independence signatory, issued an even sterner warning. “Let a man’s zeal, profession, or even principles as to political measures be what they will,” he said, “if he is without personal integrity and private virtue, as a man he is not to be trusted.”

Yet, we may often be reluctant to advocate for private virtue thinking that our own short comings will likely be thrown back in our face. It probably has or will happen to you, and it is quite humiliating. Yet, as I have quipped to my granddaughter, "don't make my mistakes. Be an original and make your own."

This said, Chastity is just one of the Virtues (out of style though it is); as I illustrated in “Where Have You Gone, George Washington?” there are numerous others. Moreover, there have been individuals who struggled with Chastity but still did great things and even were, in reality, virtuous in other dimensions. Paul of Tarsus might have been one (it has been theorized that the “thorn” in his flesh could’ve been sexual temptation). And Augustine of Hippo certainly was, with his famous supplication, “Lord, make me a saint — but not today!” Yet there’s a profound difference between such men and those unabashedly living, as we euphemistically put it now, “alternative lifestyles” (as if at issue is embracing an organic diet).

This difference is implied in ancient Chinese sage Confucius’s lament, “It is not that I do not know what to do; it is that I do not do what I know.” It’s one thing to value and promote virtue but, owing to weakness, fall into vice.

It’s quite another to value and promote vice.

In Romans 3:23 Paul says that everyone has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Elsewhere Paul in Romans confesses that "For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me." So, despite even Paul's sins and iniquities, yet he provides a profound witness for Jesus as the living God coming to us as a man subject to all our temptations and weaknesses.  The Left has tried to paint Trump as a flawed human being but has failed in that mission because their candidates are also flawed and visibly so.  I think what voters have seen in Trump is his acknowledgement of this nature and yet he advocates for morally right positions both privately and publicly. Because it matters.

Duke closes with this:

We would do well to remember that apathy is not a virtue — and that the future belongs to those who care.

It is often too easy to decide that I just do not care. I have been at this for a long time, and sometimes I feel the weariness of it. Duke reminds me why I must keep on, because Truth matters, because virtue matters, just as He commanded.

Rearming the Military

 John Farnum has an interesting idea that deserves to at least be considered.  The idea, written about at Ammoland entitled Trump Should Order All Our Military Officers and NCOs To Carry Concealed At All Times. Obviously, there would need to be special training. Carrying concealed here at home is much different from carrying overseas and carrying in a war zone. It might involve renegotiating our Status of Forces Agreements with foreign countries where we have bases. But certainly, the President can order military members to carry on base even overseas.

With DJT now in office, we have a window of opportunity to officially endow our military Officers and NCOs with the very “good faith and confidence” to which we now give only hollow lip service.

All our military Officers and NCOs should routinely “go armed” (concealed pistols) at all times, on and off base. The authority to do so will be federal, and thus, it supersedes all local and state laws and regulations.

Of course, this will require compulsory training since military personnel, regardless of rank, currently have scant idea of what to do with a pistol (the unhappy case for the last one hundred years)!

Discreet, professional concealed carry is an art that requires specific equipment, training, and philosophical grounding and needs to be taught by experienced instructors who do it routinely.

Specific knowledge of how all this fits into our criminal justice system, indeed the entire “concealed-carry lifestyle,” including guns in the home, is also essential since these Officers and NCOs will be armed all the time, no matter where they go.

Please read Farnum's article. It is short, and of course short on details. But one must understand that he is talking about officers and senior enlisted, not your buck privates. It does require specific training and understanding of what a concealed carrier should do. Just because they carry concealed does not mean that they should go looking for trouble. Rather, they should be ready and able to defend themselves and others if the need arises.

The Truth About Covid Is Coming Out Slowly

 Over at PJ Media today, Ben Bartee has an article claiming that COVID Shots Cripple Immune System - Possiblt Permanently. You need to read the whole article, but the bottom line is that if you got the two Pfizer shots, your immune system suffered to some degree, and this may be a permanent fact of life. To quote Alex Berenson, "I don't use the term VAIDS (vaccine-induced AIDS), but I'm not sure how else to describe the T-cell changes the Yale team is finding." Bartee also critizes people like Sean Hannity who told us the jabs were safe.

The truth is slowly coming out. It is hard not to think that on some level this may be part of the globalist scheme to decimate the population of the world. But it is equally possible that the mRNA "vaccine" experiment was a case of extreme hubris and arrogance gone wild. In any case, read the story and make up your own mind.

No Second Amendment Means No First Amendment Either

Who is an adult, and what does it mean to be one? The Left seems to think that a child can make the momentous decision to permanently remove his or her sex organs because he wants to "trans." They also believe that a 14-year-old can make the decision to abort the child growing in her womb without parental consent. But an 18- or 19-year-old, while he can join the Army and carry a gun in war, cannot buy one for himself. This is what is at the heart of a federal lawsuit entitled Escher vs. Mason in Massachusetts.

 Ronald Beaty has an article at the American Thinker highlighting the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) lawsuit against the Massachusetts law banning those adults 18 to 20 years of age from possessing firearms. The article Massachusetts vs, the Second Amendment is about more than just the Second Amendment though. As Beaty points out, the Second Amendment protects the First Amendment and indeed all the other amendments in the Bill of Rights.

The rights acknowledged by, but not granted by, the Constitution are rights granted to each person by our Creator. Think about it for a moment: does the state have the ability to give you something it does not possess?  The state is a construct in which the people agree to grant it certain of their individual powers for the common good.  It is only legitimate so long as it operates within the boundaries of its constitution and that of the Constitution of the United States.  

In Massachusetts, a legal battle is unfolding that should resonate with every conservative who values the sanctity of the Second Amendment. Escher v. Mason isn't just about firearms; it's a litmus test for how we view adulthood, responsibility, and constitutional rights in contemporary America.

The Massachusetts law in question, House Bill 4885, strips legal adults aged 18 to 20 of their right to purchase, possess, or carry semiautomatic firearms and handguns. This isn't merely overreach; it's a direct assault on the clear text of the Second Amendment, which does not discriminate by age among "the people." If we are to take our Constitution seriously, we must defend the rights of all citizens, not just those deemed "mature enough" by the state's paternalistic gaze.

At the heart of this legal challenge lies a fundamental conservative principle: the inviolability of individual rights. The Founders did not carve exceptions into the Second Amendment for age. They understood that freedom and responsibility go hand in hand, which is why 18-year-olds have been historically recognized as adults -- capable of voting, joining the military, and, yes, bearing arms. The Militia Act of 1792, enacted shortly after the ratification of the Second Amendment, explicitly included 18-year-olds in the national defense, expecting them to be armed like their elders.

This historical precedent is not just a footnote but the bedrock upon which the plaintiffs in Escher v. Mason stand. They argue that there is no traditional basis for denying these rights to young adults. The Supreme Court's decisions in Heller and Bruen have made it abundantly clear that firearms "in common use" are constitutionally protected. Semiautomatic firearms and handguns are the dominant tools of self-defense in modern America. To deny these to a segment of the adult population is not only anachronistic but egregiously unconstitutional.

For a greater perspective on the Second Amendment and its relation to the First (and the rest of the Bill of Rights), also read Joachim Osther's post, also at the American Thinker today entitled Protecting the Second Amendment is protecting the First. Osther points to a book which should be in every conservatives library entitled No Second Amendment, No First: God, Guns and the Government.

No Second Amendment, No First is divided into three parts. In the first section, which is aptly titled “How the Biblical Worldview Gave Way To a Progressive Hive Mind,” Zmirak sets the stage by investigating the radical lurch of secularism that threatens the first two Amendments.

The Judeo-Christian worldview that enabled self-governing and was foundational to the development of the Constitution has deteriorated at the expense of secularism. Zmirak uses the Second Amendment “as the test case, the prime example, of how our political masters are confiscating our rights in the name of protecting us from ourselves.”

...snip...

The right to self-defense against despotic governments or tyrants is tied to the assumption that a human life has value. The value of life is derived from a Biblical perspective, and Zmirak uses these chapters to illustrate that this is the “proposition on which America is built… every liberty we cling to, each institution we value, flows from that assertion.” This is why we have the right and the duty to protect ourselves and others.

The most effective arguments for the First and Second Amendments start with the principles and experiences that led the Founders to codify them, and Zmirak articulately unfolds this in Part 3 of No Second Amendment, No First.

Please go read both articles today. Neither will take very long, and both are important. I will be following Escher vs. Mason closely and will follow up as I have time.