Our Disappearing Republic

 I have spoken about a two tiered justice system in which people who are "connected" are immune from the laws that the rest of us have to obey.  Many of those posts were provoked by articles here at Townhall.com by Kurt Schlichter. Well, Schlichter has an even more pointed argument today entitled Do We Even Have a Republic Anymore?. The destruction of the republic as it has been understood really started to slip away in 2010, though it has been incrementally destroyed for at least 100 years.

Schlichter starts out by explaining what a republic actually is. Republics have been tried before, most notably in ancient Rome, before the Caesars took power.

The idea of a republic is that the people, through their representatives, get to make the laws that govern the country, but it appears that’s no longer a thing. What if you made a law, and no one enforced it? Is there even any point to the exercise? And if we can make all the laws we want and not have them enforced except in the limited manner that the people hired to enforce them choose, are we even a free country?

Well, it appears that our garbage elite does not think so, and it’s ecstatic about it.

What Schlichter is alluding to is the way that republics secure the "consent of the governed." It is only when the governed agree with the laws passed, that one can govern without having a comprehensive and invasive police state. The United States was not designed to be a police state.  It was designed to be a place where the people voluntarily followed the law.  

But it gets even worse. Now, not only do the governed have no say in the laws made in their name, but these laws are not even applied equally to everyone:

Our elite has decided to take upon itself a sneaky little veto of its own and to just not enforce laws it doesn’t like, or even worse, to selectively enforce laws against its political opponents. You know, you and me.

...snip...

In the case of undermining the entire premise of a democratic republic, the excuse is that they aren’t changing the law but exercising “discretion,” as if Founders thought it would be a genius move to allow the people we hire to run things have the discretion to completely ignore us and consistently do the exact opposite of the law our representatives passed. Or the elite just doesn’t like what we decided, and since we’re knuckle-dragging Jesus gun people who don’t understand how there are 643 genders, we have no moral right to self-determination. It’s easy to ignore the demand of the citizens if you effectively make them non-citizens.

Welcome to America 2021, a nation that drives its legitimacy, to the extent it retains any, by acting with the consent of the governors. There are a lot of ways to describe a country where the powerful make political decisions without the input or consent of the governed, but “democratic” is not one of them.

At the moment President Asterisk has created a crisis on our Southern border. But would there be a crisis if people did not want to get in? And the reason they want to get in, whether even they realize it, is because our government has traditionally been a republic whose laws were driven by the consent of the governed. It is what, along with the government's protection of property rights, made us a free nation. It needs to be controlled, but we definitely want people to desire to come in to our country. What our garbage elites are trying to turn is into is a country like the old Soviet Union from which people want to escape.

We can not let them.