Some Thoughts Related to the US Constitution

Some Thoughts Related to the US Constitution

Thomas Allen

Erroneous interpretations of the US Constitution, treason, term limits, rule of law, and disqualification for serving as President are discussed below.

Erroneous Interpretations of the Constitution
Many conservative leaders and spokesmen mislead their followers and listeners in at least three important aspects related to the US Constitution.
First, they imply or say that the US Constitution is a contract or agreement between the States and the US government. The US Constitution is not and cannot be a contract between the States and the US government. Before the States adopted the Constitution and acceded to the union formed under it, the US government did not exist. Thus, the US Constitution created the US government. Therefore, the US Constitution cannot be a contract between the US government and the States. Instead, it is a contract among the States, and it created the US government as the administrator of that contract. According to the preamble, it is the “Constitution for the United States of American” and, consequently, not the “Constitution of the United States of America.”
Second, they give the phrase “We the People” in the Preamble of the US Constitution a misleading, or worse a deliberately wrong, interpretation. They speak of “We the People” as though it applies to or means one body politic for the whole union. This is the old nationalist interpretation of Webster and Lincoln, and it is wrong. “We the People” referred to the nine body politics that acceded from the old union under the Articles of Confederation to form the new union under the US Constitution. Now, “We the People” refers to fifty body politics or States. It means “We the People of the States as States.” The drafters initially listed the thirteen States in the preamble. However, they were uncertain if all the States would secede from the existing union and accede to the new union under the new constitution. So, they did not list the States. Moreover, each individual State acting as an independent sovereign body politic adopted the Constitution; that is, representatives of the people of each State in that State’s convention adopted the Constitution. A plebiscite of the people as a whole, that is, all the people of all the States acting as one body politic, did not adopt the US Constitution, either directly or indirectly through a representative convention.
Third, they apply the first nine amendments to the States. Those who drafted and adopted these amendments intended for them to apply only to the US government and never to the States. Each State had similar provisions in its own constitution to restrict its State government. With perhaps rare exception, none were ever applied to the States until the 1930s, when the Supreme Court began to misinterpret the fourteenth amendment to apply the first nine amendments to States — this is the incorporation theory of the fourteenth amendment. (With this theory, federal judges began finding all sorts of things in the Constitution that are not there, such as, the right to an abortion.) Those who drafted and adopted the fourteenth amendment never intended it to apply the first nine amendments to the States. Moreover, because the fourteenth amendment was adopted illegally and at the point of a gun, it should have no weight, and honest, patriotic judges should ignore it. (Along with the general welfare clause, interstate commerce clause, necessary and proper clause, the fourteenth amendment is responsible for consolidating and concentrating nearly all political power into the US government and to reducing the States to mere administrative provinces.)
One would expect progressives, liberals, and neoconservatives to promote these three errors because they are Hamiltonian-Lincolnians, who want to centralize and concentrate all power into the US government for the benefit of the ruling elite. However, true conservatives should oppose these three erroneous interpretations. Any conservative leader or spokesman who supports any of the above errors, and especially if he supports all three, is an agent of the ruling elite or an ignoramus. Like the progressives, their interpretation of the US Constitution is Hamiltonian and Lincolnian and not Jeffersonian and Calhounian (the decentralization and dispersal of power). Therefore, true conservatives should not follow them.

Treason
Some conservatives claim that the people (the Deep State) within the US government who are trying to overthrow President Trump and remove him from office are guilty of treason. Yet, is this true?
Article III, Section 2 of the US Constitution defines treason as follows: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” (Notice the pronouns; they are plural. Obviously, each of the States individually [Jeffersonian-Calhounian] is meant and not all the States together as a single unit [Hamiltonian-Lincolnian]).
According to the constitutional definition, treason is warring against one or more States or aiding an enemy of the States. An internal coup to overthrow a president does not meet this definition of treason.
If one wants to find really treasonous actions, he needs only to look at presidents, Congresses, federal judges, and federal bureaucrats. These people have been warring against the States since 1861 and have been highly successful in destroying them in every way but name.

Term Limits
For years, people have been debating limiting the term of office for the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. However, much more than that is needed.
The argument against limiting the terms of Congressmen is that a Congressman with only two or three years of office is at a great disadvantage when he faces a bureaucrat with 20 to 30 years of experience of manipulating Congress.
To solve this problem, among others, the length of employment in the US government needs to be limited. No one should be allowed to receive a paycheck from the US government for more than, say, 10 or 12 years. That is, the total time that a person serves as President, Representative, Senator, a federal judge, appointed officeholder, civil servant, and a member of the armed forces when combined should not exceed 10 or 12 years.
One benefit of this total limitation is that employees will live most of their lives under the laws and regulations that they have enacted or enforced. Inferior judges who cannot read and understand the Constitution will not spend a lifetime making unconstitutional rulings. The top-heavy armed forces will less likely be overflowing with generals and admirals who are much better at politically correct politics than they are at being real generals and admirals. Moreover, the country would have a strong incentive to have well-trained and heavily armed militias, which would greatly aid the people in defending themselves from an oppressive government. Another benefit is that bureaucrats would have less incentive to build empires since they will not be there to rule over them. Also, far less information would be concealed from the people (if we really have a government of, by, and for the people, i.e., the people are the government, and governmental employees are the servants of the people, then employees of the government should keep no secret from the people). The advantages listed above are just some benefits of limiting the total employment in the US government. However, the most important benefit would be to move the government from a government of bureaucrats, by bureaucrats, and for bureaucrats to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
(Furthermore, prohibiting any former employee of the US government, i.e., anyone who has received a salary from the US government, from working as a contractor for the US government or for a company that grosses more than, say, 10 percent of its income from the US government after his termination of employment is desirable. Likewise, forbidding any former employee from serving on any commission, advisory board, etc. is also desirable. Such prohibitions reduces the likelihood of corruption.)

Rule of Law
Politicians are always preaching the rule of law. With rare exceptions, almost no Representative, Senator, President, or federal judge has ever attempted to keep his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the US Constitution, the fundamental law of the country. Once sworn in, they proceed to govern as though the Constitution did not exist. If the rule of law existed in the United States, the US government would be less than 10 percent of its current size, and most of the country’s problems would not exist.

Disqualification for Serving as President
A friend of mine once said that if anyone desires to be President, he should be disqualified because he is already displaying too much lust for power.

Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Who Is the Militia and What Is its Purpose

Who Is the Militia and What Is its Purpose

Thomas Allen

[Editor’s note: This article was written in 1995.]

    The short answer to who is the militia is every able-bodied man except for a few political leaders. The short answer to the purpose of the militia is to protect the people from their own government and foreign governments.
    The militia is not the National Guard. Congress established the National Guard to serve as a reserve force for the armed forces. The National Guard is akin to the Army Reserve except that it is under the control of the governors of the several states during times of peace (unless the President wants to use the National Guard to enforce federal edicts in a State). Because the federal government can require National Guardsmen to serve overseas, it cannot be the true militia because the Constitution does not allow the federal government to send the militia overseas. Furthermore, federal law recognizes the National Guard, in times of peace and war, as a component of the United States Army.
    The militia is not a collective right. It is an individual right. Historically and legally, the militia is the whole body of the people as individuals.
    That the right to bear arms belonged to the people individually can be easily substantiated by the comments made by the founding fathers:

        Fisher Ames: “The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing government, are declared to be inherent in the people.”
        Zachariah Johnson: “[T]he people are not to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them. . . . The government will depend on the assistance of the people in the day of distress.”
        Thomas Jefferson: “[N]o free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”
        Richard Henry Lee: “To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.”
        Patrick Henry: “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined. . . . The great object is that every man be armed. . . . [E]veryone who is able may have a gun.”

Other founding fathers made similar statements proclaiming the right — nay, the duty — of every able-bodied man to be armed. When these men said “the people,” they meant, in the words of George Mason, “the whole people, except a few public officers.”
    The reason for possessing arms is not for hunting or sport. The reason is for self-protection, self-protection not so much from criminals and foreign governments, but from their own government. A well-armed citizenry is needed to prevent a constitutional government from degenerating into a tyrannical government.
    Noah Webster summed up the purposed of an armed citizenry:

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.

    Alexander Hamilton, who favored a strong central government, stated the necessity of an armed citizenry:

This [a well-armed and trained militia] will not only lessen the call for military establishments, but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens.

   Obviously, these statements were made in the early days of the country. The people need to become much more heavily armed if they want to begin to match the firepower of the standing army and nullify the corrupt and despotic power of the United States government.
    Justice Joseph Story summed up the necessity of the militia in his Commentaries on the Constitution (1833):

The militia is the natural defense of a free country against foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample the rights of the people. The right of a citizen to keep and bear arms has justly been considered the palladium of the liberties of the republic, since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers, and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.

If there was ever a time for a well-armed militia, it is now.

Copyright © 1995 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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