Where is the danger? If, sir, there was any, I would recur to the American spirit to defend us; that spirit which has enabled us to surmount the greatest difficulties: to that illustrious spirit I address my most fervent prayer to prevent our adopting a system destructive to liberty.
Two days later, on June 7, Patrick Henry delivered a dramatic appeal for the need to add a Bill of Rights to the Constitution and also a stern warning should the States fail to do so in forming their first common government. He urged:
"Mr. Chairman, the public mind, as well as my own, is extremely uneasy at the proposed change of government.. I consider myself as the servant of the people of this commonwealth, as a sentinel over their rights, liberty, and happiness. I represent their feelings when I say that they are exceedingly uneasy at being brought from that state of full security, which they enjoyed, to the present delusive appearance of things. A year ago, the minds of our citizens were at perfect repose. Before the meeting of the late federal Convention at Philadelphia, a general peace and a universal tranquility prevailed in this country; but, since that period, they are exceedingly uneasy and disquieted ........ Make the best of this new government-say it is composed by anything but inspiration-you ought to be extremely cautious, watchful, jealous of your liberty; for, instead of securing your rights, you may lose them forever. If a wrong step be now made, the republic may be lost forever. If this new government will not come up to the expectation of the people, and they shall be disappointed, their liberty will be lost, and tyranny must and will arise. I repeat it again, and I beg gentlemen to consider, that a wrong step, made now, will plunge us into misery, and our republic will be lost."
I take the words, the advice, and the warnings of our Founders very seriously as they alone went through the tumultuous years when England sought to subjugate the American colonies and to deprive them of the rights and liberties endowed and reserved to them by the English Bill of Rights and even the Magna Carta, the threat of retribution by the King and Parliament for daring to assert those rights, the indignation of King George at the colonists for daring to remonstrate (protest) against his mistreatment of them, the humiliation of having the King disband colonial legislatures and assemblies, of having Royal governors and generals rule them, of being taxed without representation, and of having their guns and ammunition seized and destroyed, the threat of death by hanging for daring to declare their separation from England by issuing the Declaration of Independence and other such documents ("For the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor"), and the horror, death, and destruction involved in fighting for their independence. They were witness to the tyranny in the American colonies that those in England suffered for hundreds of years at the whim of the King. To them, individual liberty meant everything; it was something that was certainly worth fighting for. It was something that freedom-loving people felt compelled to do. In England, the country which gave us the history to support our founding documents, human rights and individual liberty were not associated with the reign of a King. Rarely did the English kings respect the many compacts they signed to recognize the rights of his subjects. Our early settlers and founders knew that if they were to enjoy the liberty that nature and God bestowed upon them, they would have to design a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." There must be no king, no monarch, no concentrated aggressive government. Government must be absolutely obligated to secure and protect every individual's natural (inalienable) and civil right.
We Americans today don't think like them. Heck, a good chunk of people in our country were allowed to come here illegally and have no meaningful connection to our gloried history and the foundation we have based on grand and noble principles. We are too far removed from the circumstances that led to the revolution. We've lost the revolutionary spirit.
Mr. Maharrey continues in his article America Embraces the Tyranny the Founders Fought to Reject:
"In America, law was king and constitutions stood as the supreme law of the land. It wasn't that the British system lacked a constitution, but its unwritten nature and the English conception of its place in the political order was vastly different than the one that evolved in the American states. In American thought, constitutions remained above governments. They limited the action of every governmental branch, and political systems were subject to words of their constitutions. In short, constitutions stood as the supreme law of the land, and the entire system of government flowed out of them. (In other words, the Constitution created the "common" or federal government and by consent of the people of the states that ratified the document, the government's powers were only intended to be those listed expressly in that compact).
In the English conception, the constitution was not a superior law set above the government. In a sense it was the government. The actions of Parliament, the courts and the King formed the substance of the constitution and were in no way limited by it.
In the British system, the people were not sovereign - Parliament was. In essence, the government itself enjoyed supremacy. As historian Gordon S. Wood put it in the Creation of the American Republic, any limits on Parliament were strictly theoretical - even moral and natural law restrictions. Constitutional and legal limits only bound lawmakers as far as lawmakers were willing to be bound.
For the Englishman, there was no distinction between the 'constitution or frame of government' and the 'system of laws.' They were the same. Every act of Parliament was, in essence, part of the constitution. Wood quotes Blackstone to make this point:
'The English constitution therefore could not be any sort of fundamental law. Most eighteenth-century writers...could not conceive of the constitution as anything anterior and superior to the government and ordinary law, but rather regarded itself, as 'that assemblage of laws, customs and institutions which form the general system; according to which the several powers of the state are distributed, and their respective rights are secured to the different members of the community.' The English constitution was not, as the Americans eventually came to see with condescension, committed to parchment.'
Wood makes the implications of this system crystal clear, writing, 'All law customary and statutory was thus constitutional.'
In a nutshell, the 18th century British system the Americans went to war to free themselves from rested on a living, breathing constitution. The government itself defined and enforced whatever limits it might have. Essentially, it was unlimited in power and authority.
As American political thought evolved, the English systems became absurd. Political power was conceived as limited, first by principle, and second by the will of the people as expressed through written constitutions.
The founding generation believed equity - justice according to natural law or right - bound and limited all political power. Government served a limited purpose, as Thomas Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence, 'to secure these rights,' life, liberty and property. It followed that the people establishing government retained the right and authority to maintain it within those limits. Government was not supreme; it was merely an agent of the people. Written constitutions served a limiting purpose. They provide the 'political bible' that Paine referred to, specifically circumscribing the scope of governmental power. As Paine put it: 'A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution, is power without a right.'
Within this philosophical framework, a sovereign government institution such as Parliament is fundamentally tyrannical.
Even a casual look at American governance today reveals a system having much more in common with the 18th century British model than the one the founding generation forged nearly 250 years ago. America operates under a 'living breathing' constitution with the U.S. Supreme Court taking on the role of sovereign.
In 1776, the British Parliament acted with absolute sovereign authority. Today, the federal government rules with that same kind of unlimited power. The federal government determines the extent of its own authority through the Supreme Court. Any limits on Congress or the president are merely theoretical, constrained only by the whims of five out of nine politically connected lawyers. Every opinion of the Supreme Court becomes 'part of the fabric of the Constitution.'
For all practical purposes, the federal government today operates without any limits at all. Everything the federal government does and approves is considered "constitutional." Even though the founders committed the U.S. Constitution to parchment, judges, politicians and academics have morphed the meaning of words and changed the character of the "supreme law of the land" into something that the framers and ratifiers would scarcely recognize.
Americans won the Revolution, but they squandered the fruits of victory in a quest for government solutions to every problem. Instead of a limited government committed to protecting basic rights - life, liberty and property - we have an institution that attempts to control every aspect of our lives.
We have become what our forefathers sought to destroy."
We have become what our forefathers sought to destroy and we have become the generation of Americans that our Founders feared - too weak, too skeptical, and too disillusioned to do what is right and what is necessary. The intentional tampering of the 2020 presidential election has proven to us mere peasants that we no longer have a say in government; our voices have become meaningless unless it is for the Democratic (demonic) Party. The creature created by the People with the Constitution has now become the Master. Political Parties have assumed the individual's Right to Vote and have used that right recklessly, dishonestly, and with evil and malicious intent. The end game is power..... eternal and unchecked power, as well as the transformation of the United States according to its grand scheme of progressive thought and equality in all things (except as it touches on the grand exalted political elites).
I have held this point of view for many years now, but the events of this election season have solidified my position. Sadly, it is a fatal position. When I bring up this subject with family, friends, and fellow patriots, most have much more optimism than I. They somehow believe that good and honesty and decency and love of country will win out and triumph over the consistently scheming and dishonest progressives (ie, Democrats). Good can never win out over evil when evil has the ability to rig the system and conduct themselves according to a different set of rules, standards, ethics, and morality.
It appears I am not the only one who thinks as I do. I was listening to the Rush Limbaugh Radio Show on December 23 when a caller, a woman named Angie from Minnesota, called in to comment on the situation in Georgia. She talked about the futility of voting and believing that votes are a sacred civic exercise by citizens. She talked about the futility of trying to do what is right for the country (aka, keeping Trump in office) because the Dominion machines, which have been proven to be programmable by a forensic audit, are in place to ensure the outcome of an election.
"Let's face it, it's a take-over" she said.
Here is the transcript of Angie's dialogue with Rush: (The Rush Limbaugh Show, December 23)
RUSH: This is Angie in Big Lake, Minnesota.
ANGIE: And I have a comment, and it kind of piggybacks on earlier when you were talking about the Georgia runoff with another caller. And what I think is I really - and I hate to be the Debbie Downer here. But I really think that this is a takeover. And this runoff in January, you know, get out and vote. People want to get out and march and, you know, really take it to the streets, and Trump is trying to do rallies and whatnot.
And I think it's just, unfortunately, a big waste of our time. The Dominion machines are here. They're in place; they're here to stay. Nobody's changing it. All the lawsuits that we're bringing forward, they just keep declining. We have thousands of people, election workers, poll workers that have come forward and said, you know, what they've seen. It's just everything's declined.
Dominion is here. They're not gonna change it, and if we can't clean up the election in November, it's really pointless for the January. I think this is a takeover. I really... I know everybody wants to get out there and get their votes in, and I think people are forgetting that these machines are programmable, and they are gonna continue. No matter how many votes come in for Trump.
