In the second century BC, the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, realized that in order to preserve his status and his great achievements, constant vigilance would be required, even after he was gone from this mortal coil. When you are in it for the long haul, one can’t allow the ramparts to go unguarded, or the miscreants will inevitably look to erode your position. Greatness, and great ideas, are unlikely to be gotten easily, and one must be a ferocious warrior for their defense. So Emperor Qin Shi Huang made sure no one would threaten his position, even in the afterlife. He assembled in his capital city of Xi’an an army of over 8000 warriors, led by generals, and armed to the teeth, accompanied by a full cavalry of chariots and horses. The army was there to eternally defend his position, his power, and his greatness. If some usurper wanted to war with his immortality, it was war they would get.
Well, its long past time we who man the Ramparts of Civilization assembled some warriors. If you are a consistent reader of this blog, you are likely aware of what has been the gathering storm over the last twenty years, and the storm has descended upon us in full fury, and become a war for the future. It shouldn’t have caught us unawares, but admittedly, we are ill prepared, as we felt our defenses were essentially insurmountable and inviolate. We were wrong, and the barbarians are at the gates.
Since the 1960s, a generation of attacks on the formidable fortress of liberties and rule of law that is the Constitution of the United States has progressively eroded its foundations. What once seemed eternal and impenetrable, has now found itself with massive holes in its edifice and its very future is in peril. If you think that civilization should be ruled by deliberative law and not by decree and the whims of the elites, you better pay some damn close attention.
The Supreme Court of the United States, considered since the founding, the apolitical arbiter of the law based on constitutionality and precedence, has joined the ranks of the barbarians. In three major decisions this week, the court found that a law passed by the legislative body is defined by its intent and not its specific meaning, that democratic processes do not move fast enough whenever the state has determined that a “fundamental” right exists even when it was not apparent it existed before, and that the state could determine the makeup of communities based on its vision of fairness. The thought of the framers that the third branch stood to thwart, to check, the other two branches deviation from the constitution, was pounded to sand.
The specific”laws” and “rights” upheld were not of issue. What was of issue was the checks and balances system that made this particular democracy a citadel for freedom, individual rights, and limited government. The Constitution held that if the wording of a law or its expression was unconstitutional, the law was to be rescinded, and the deliberative process to be again undertaken to secure a constitutional law. By policing the law’s specifics, the rights of individuals to vote for representatives who would uphold their individual rights and hold them accountable by the laws they developed would be secure. According to the Supreme Court, a law is now only established by its intent, and its specifics can be adjusted in any way the state determines efficacious. How does one make sure one is in compliance with such metastasizing laws? Who can now determine whether any of the expressed rights of the Constitution are secure, or they all exposed to the interpretation of the currents and personalities of the current day? Justice Scalia – the last of the Mohicans – expressed better than any in his dissent the fundamental principles that have been sacrificed to the altar of “fairness”:
Those civil consequences—and the public approval that conferring the name of marriage evidences—can perhaps have adverse social effects, but no more adverse than the effects of many other controversial laws. So it is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact— and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.
[W]hat really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003. They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. They see what lesser legal minds—minds like Thomas Cooley, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly—could not.
Each of the decisions should be read in their entirety. The war is being fought now on every front. The government of the founders, the government that was declared as emanating from We the People, is under full assault. It is a government that can rule you by regulatory decree. It can determine whether your exercise of religion will be infringed by those that would have you submit to their versions of correct behavior, regardless of how it humiliates or degrades your view. It can force you to pay for the sloth of others, and can force you to ignore their misfortune. It can drive your education and your facts. It can declare science settled, and victories defeat. It’s your father, your mother, your cradle, and your grave.
The war has been fought for some time, and those that would make the founders vision unrecognizable have always been sensitive to your weakness in naively believing these fundamental beliefs were important to all. When you go to that voting booth, and it is at the voting booth that the armies of change are fundamentally engaged, you better stop voting Republican or Democrat, as they are two birds of a feather. It is time you seek those who are warriors for the founders principles, and those who are barbarians of change. Find such warriors, and put your money, and your vote, where your future might have just a breath of a chance. If you don’t, you will find our freedoms forever buried, like the terra cotta warriors of Xi’an, a museum exhibit to a past greatness long gone and buried.
