Category Archives: Constitution

Ironclad Safeguards For … The Sovereign

Barack Obama, Bush, Constitution, Crime

The American constitutional system provides the sovereign with ironclad safeguards against accountability.

As was the case with “W,” the national debt alone is reason enough to impeach the sitting president, Barack Obama. But so high is the constitutional threshold for finding a president guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors—that justice is seldom swift or sure. “The procedure for impeachment,” writes historian Paul Johnson, “is that the House presents and passes an impeachment resolution and the Senate convicts, or not, by a two-thirds vote.” (A History of The American People, p. 504.)

According to InfoPlease, Since 1797, the House of Representatives has impeached sixteen federal officials. These include two presidents, a cabinet member, a senator, a justice of the Supreme Court, and eleven federal judges. Of those, the Senate has convicted and removed seven, all of them judges. Not included in this list are the office holders who have resigned rather than face impeachment, most notably, President Richard M. Nixon.”

“The Small Fry.”

It’s a case of crimes and no punishment.

Although preeminent liberal professor Jonathan Turley disagrees, history attests that the Constitution has proven close to useless in safeguarding natural liberties.

Related:
“Liberal law professor: Obama is the danger.”
“Five myths about impeachment.”

Independence? It’s ‘EZ-Pass Up Our A-S’

America, BAB's A List, Constitution, History, Individual Rights

Some independence: It’s “EZ-Pass up our a-s,” says Myron Robert Pauli, Ph.D.

238 years ago in Philadelphia, a group of Americans adopted the world’s most famous grievance list against the British Empire and declared our independence. As Thomas Jefferson stated, “… unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men … ”

With some guts, guns, and help from Louis XVI, we secured our independence – that was the good news. The bad news was that America was left with the task of self-government. It didn’t start that well with squabbling local governments full of rogue demagogues appealing to indebted yahoos with paper money and contract repudiation. Alarmed men like Washington and Hamilton supported a federal government to keep the yahoos in check. Others like George Mason and Patrick Henry preferred 13 local independent confederacies over one big (potential) tyranny and became the Anti-Federalists.

Jefferson and Madison went along with the Federal idea with a Bill of Rights attached to limit the potential tyranny. And Ben Franklin prophetically said: “I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

Fast forwarding to 2014, and we now celebrate our independence with military displays. We spend more on our Armed Forces than the rest of the world combined. We can kick anyone’s butt, even with such exemplary soldiers as Lynndie England, Chelsea Manning, Nidal Malik Hasan, and Bowe Bergdahl and with one hand tied behind our back! Even our Coast Guard has a larger budget than the British Navy! We can invade anyplace and install “democracy” in primitive cultures in the form of Diem, Thieu, Maliki, Karzai, or HumptyDumpty, until Americans get tired of the expenses and the troops returning in body-bags, without limbs and with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Our President can execute 16 year old Americans on his whim-wham by pushing buttons controlling drones. The local cops now are equipped with lasers, tasers, radars, ladars, mMine-Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles with turreted 50 cal machine guns, and even drones. Millions of bureaucrats, contractors, etc. can read our e-mail, regulate our soft drinks, fondle our privates, access our bank accounts, deny medical treatments, and track our movements.

It’s EZ-Pass up our a-s – and even small children can come equipped with transponders. Americans can be held incommunicado for years if captured on a “battlefield,” such as Chicago, provided the president labels them “terrorists.” Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, thermal discomfort and painful positioning is how we “secure these rights” in the 21st Century. Unless there’s permanent organ failure, it isn’t torture!

Our educational system spends more money than anyone else to churn out ADHD-drugged up functional illiterates with masters degrees and tons of student debt. The accredited over-tested narcissists having gone through years of New Math, Leave No Child Behind, Ebonics, Political Correctness, Common Core, and dozens of other bureaucratic fads taught by burned-out teachers in a system where administrators outnumber teachers.

Our Federal Reserve can miraculously create trillions of “dollars” at the press of a computer tab and, lo-and-behold, the banksters and hedge funds are bulging with newfound wealth. My 401k can rise $1000 while I’m in the bathroom. General Motors can turn out clunkers indefinitely and the people shout Amen! Employment drops 5 percent and inner cities resemble Hiroshima in 1945 while the Dow hits new highs.

But whatever corrupt rot, bureaucracy, dysfunctional hyperpartisan politics, or authoritarianism has evolved – it was not imposed on us by “terrorists,” Nazis, Commies, Martians, or even Mexicans, but by our own making (as Franklin foresaw). The self-government that was supposed to “secure these rights” now keeps us in a gilded cage with 500 TV channels in the Empire of the Welfare-Warfare State.

In the 1960’s show “The Prisoner,” Patrick Mc Goohan, “Number 6” was held captive in some “utopian ‘Village’” and asked, “Who is Number 1?” That’s easy, baby. It’s US! USA!! U-S-A!!!

****

Myron Pauli with his late, lovely wife.

How2PickUpWomen

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

Free Spaying For Stalinists

Constitution, Feminism, Healthcare, Law, Private Property

“Free Spaying For Stalinists” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Today we celebrate the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, on July 4, 1776. Just how little is left, in 2014, of the Declaration’s unalienable rights was demonstrated by the Supreme Court’s ruling, in the case of the Secretary of Health And Human Services versus three faith-based, family owned businesses.

Having found a way to affirm the constitutionality of the unconstitutional Obamacare in the first place, a scurrilous SCOTUS, a branch in a tripartite tyranny, agreed to allow Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp., Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. (arts-and-crafts), and Mardel (Christian books) a miniscule degree of freedom in the use of their property. The individuals who own and control these businesses had objected to paying for what they consider abortifacients. Instead of being compelled to cover 20 FDA-approved methods of contraception favored by their employees, the firms will be permitted to pay for only 16.

The obsequious are celebrating. The owners, the Hahn and Green families, were facing crippling fines of “$475 million per year for Hobby Lobby, $33 million per year for Conestoga, as well as $15 million per year for Mardel.” By dictate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), a refusal to pay for employees’ healthcare all together would have resulted in hefty penalties too.

The U.S. government—originally founded to uphold, not calibrate, the people’s leave-me-alone rights to life, liberty and property—had claimed that the free exercise of religion did not apply to for-profit corporations. The legal loadstar followed by government and Court alike is not the unequivocal Constitution—it instructs Congress to make no prohibition on the free exercise of religion—but rather the equivocating Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). …

Read the complete column, “Free Spaying For Stalinists”.

Our German readers can now follow this column and other worthy writers in the JUNGE FREIHEIT, a weekly newspaper of excellence.

Editors wishing to feature the “Return to Reason” column in their publications, pixel or paper, please contact Bookings@ilanamercer.com. Or, ilana@ilanamercer.com