Perspective: What Would the Founders Say?

I wonder what the Founding Fathers would think about what is going on with our current Administration. If we still taught Civics and the Constitution in high school, perhaps more of us would be as fearful about government’s power as the Founders were. The Founders feared government so much that they added amendments to the Constitution to protect the people. Consider these:



First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.”



Second Amendment: “The right to bear arms shall not be abridged.”



Forth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause supported by Oath.”



Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people.”



Let’s begin by listing a few items that we have recently learned about that would have given the Founders concern.



• The Government has obtained access to phone messages and e-mails of certain members of the press without prior notification or Court Warrant.

(1st Ammendment)



• The government wants to register all who own arms. (2nd Ammendment)



• The Government has obtained access to our phone messages, e-mails, Facebook, etc. without prior notification, probable cause or Court Warrant.

(4th Ammendment)



Now, let’s visit some recent actions of the Executive Branch of the government that should give us pause viz a vis the 10th Ammendment.

• Who authorized the IRS to extend their purview to harass certain political groups

• Why is the President expanding the use of drones to kill enemies on foreign soil without informing anyone, including the leader of the foreign country involved?

• Why is the president unilaterally, without consulting Congress, authorizing a tax on coal with the announced objective of shutting that industry down? By the way when his party controlled both houses of Congress, that body voted against this scheme

The Founders would have been appalled at these power grabs by the Executive without congressional approval.

Now it is true that during wartime Presidents such as Lincoln and Roosevelt did exercise extreme powers. In the case of Lincoln suspending the right of habeas corpus in the civil war, and Roosevelt imprisoning Japanese Americans in WWII.



In the case of Obama one does not know if we are war or not. He never labels those who do want to attack us as “Terrorists” and then just recently he announced that the war against Terrorism is over. OK, if there is no war just bad criminals that can be handled by the police, does the Administration have to violate our Constitutional Rights to manage criminal activity? This is the central question that we need to ask ourselves as We the People.



If history were still taught, students would know that this would not be the first time that a democracy was taken over by a dictator. What if Obama, a Solinski protégé, decided he had to abort the Constitution in order to transform the country in the name of “social justice”. Wait, Obama’s campaign pledge in 2008 was that he would transform the country in the name of social justice! Transforming the country is exactly what Hitler had in mind for Germany when he, as duly elected Chancellor of Germany, burned down the Reichstag, the equivalent of our Capital Building, and took over the government. And you know how that worked out!



Now, we can just complacently sit by and watch our government do these un-constitutional things and go about our business in a blasé fashion and just trust the government, or we can demand better answers and better behavior! Remember Ben Franklin’s advice: They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty. Our Founding Fathers are probably rolling over in their graves and probably at mach speed considering the complacency of the press and the main stream citizenry.