Understanding the Complexities of the American Constitutional System

Most people today have no true sense of history.

Even sadder still, most people today do not want to take the time to study history to come to a knowledge of the roots of order in Western civilization, and even most native born citizens of the United States of America have no understanding of the Constitution, its background, and its meaning as explained by the framers themselves in The Federalist, which were a series of eighty-five articles written by Alexander Hamilton (fifty-nine articles), James Madison (twenty-one articles), and John Jay (five articles), who wrote under the pseudonym of “Publius,” published during between the end of the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787, and August 17, 1788, as delegates to state ratifying conventions considered to approve or reject the proposed Constitution. The principal purpose of The Federalist was to refute criticisms made by anti-Federalists who feared powers of the government proposed by the Constitutional Convention to replace the moribund and ineffective Articles of Confederation, which were adopted in 1781.

As I explained to my college students decades ago, one cannot criticize the governmental structures created by the Constitution or their operation unless one understands what purposes those structures were designed to fulfill, which is an entirely separate matter from the fact the document was an expression of Judeo-Masonic religious indifferentism and Pelagianism. The structures themselves are neither good nor evil necessarily, but it is entirely irresponsible not to understand why they were created and how they were intended to operate.

To wit, without preempting the commentary that I will be writing about the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Learning Resources, Inc. v. Donald J. Trump, suffice it to say that President Donald John Trump emotional screed against the Court’s decision that invalidated most of the tariffs he sought to impose under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, which included his nonsensical histrionics that he can do pretty much “anything” he wants to do, demonstrates an utter lack of familiarity with even the most basic of the American constitution’s actual governing powers, both delegated and implied, to the three branches of the Federal government and the division of powers between the Federal government and the state governments included in the original Constitution and as amended since its ratification on June 21, 1888, when the State of New Hampshire’s ratifying convention ratified it as the ninth of twelve states to do so (Rhode Island was the last, on May 29, 1790, to do so, almost fifteen months after the Constitution had become effective on March 4, 1789):

WASHINGTON — President Trump launched a scathing attack on Supreme Court justices Friday after suffering a 6-3 defeat on the legality of his “reciprocal” and fentanyl tariffs.

“I’m ashamed of certain members of the court, absolutely ashamed, for not having the courage to do what’s right for our country,” Trump said in the White House briefing room, after two justices he nominated — Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch — voted against his signature trade policies.

“They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution. It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.”

Trump said that the three Democrat-nominated justices — Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor — were automatically against his policies and are a “disgrace to our nation.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, a nominee of Republican President George W. Bush, wrote the majority opinion finding that Trump misused emergency powers to enact the tariffs.

The president said it’s possible that Roberts, Barrett and Gorsuch were “being politically correct, which has happened before, far too often with certain members of this court.”

“In fact,” Trump said, “they’re just being fools and lap dogs for the RINOs and the radical-left Democrats.”

He said that for Barrett and Gorsuch, the ruling should be “an embarrassment to their families.”

The remaining three Republican-nominated justices — Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas — dissented and Trump singled out Kavanaugh for praise, gushing, “I’m so proud of him

The president went on to say that some of the opponents of his tariffs who argued before the court were “real slimeballs,” in possible reference to Neal Katyal, former President Barack Obama’s solicitor general, who argued against the tariffs on behalf of two educational toymakers.

“These people [opposed to tariffs] are obnoxious, ignorant and loud,” Trump said. “They’re very loud, and I think certain justices are afraid of that. They don’t want to do the right thing. They’re afraid of it.”

Trump also ripped the justices for not issuing a decision sooner following oral arguments in November — which allowed the amount of money subject to refunds to grow to $175 billion and delayed his plans to attempt to use a different legal authority to replace the tariff scheme.

“They should have released this a long time ago,” Trump said. “We waited months, and that gave uncertainty. Now we have certainty, and I think you’re going to see the country get much stronger because of it.”

The president promised to impose a new 10% global tariff under a separate trade law to replace the “Liberation Day” baseline tariff that the justices had invalidated.

Trump is due to deliver his annual State of the Union speech next Tuesday before a joint session of Congress, which traditionally is attended by a cohort of justices.

 “They’re barely invited. Honestly, I couldn’t care less if they come,” Trump said. (Trump rips Supreme Court justices for tariff ruling: 'Unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution'.)

Donald John Trump is not a constitutional scholar. He has not read the text of the Court’s opinion and would be bored if he read it as his eyes would glaze over with utter disinterest and disdain. He believes that the other two co-equal branches of government are not, in fact, co-equal and must rubber stamp everything he wants them to approve. The framers, though, did not create a monarchy, whether with absolute powers or delimited by traditional practices and/or by law. Presidents do not get to demand their way and then to throw emotional tantrums when they do not get what they have demanded

In this respect, of course, Donald John Trump is no different than former Presidents Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetro, who railed at the justices following their Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, January 10, 2010, decision permitting the use of so-called “dark money” during elections, and Joseph Robinette “Autopen” Biden, Jr., who tried on no less than two occasions to issue executive orders forgiving federal student loan debts in defiance of the Court’s striking down those orders and, famously the way he railed at the Court following its decision in the case of Thomas E. Dobbs, Mississippi State Officer v. Jackson Women’s Organization, June 24, 2022, which overturned the Court’s decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973. The demagogue named Charles Schumer, then the Majority Leader of the United States Senate, said that the justices who had voted to overturn Roe v. Wade would “reap the whirlwind,” thus issuing a not-so-veiled threat against the justices, to whom then Attorney General of the United States of America, Merrick Garland, would provide Federal protection as required by law, prompting a deranged man to travel to suburban Maryland in effort to assassinate Associate Justice Brett Michael Kavanaugh and his family.

It is disingenuous for anyone who criticized Obama/Soetoro and/or Biden for their own tirades against court decisions they did not like to give Donald John Trump a pass for attacking the justices personally or for daring to say the following:

Despite the rebuke from the Supreme Court, the president is scoffing at the need to get Congress involved in enacting tariff policy.

"I don't have to," Trump said when asked why wouldn't he just work with lawmakers on tariffs. "I have the right to do tariffs, and I've always had the right to do tariffs."

The majority ruled that Congress has the power to write tax policy, which includes tariffs. (WATCH: Trump announces 10% global tariff after Supreme Court strikes down his sweeping policy.)

As intemperate as this is even by Donald John Trump’s own very low standards of personal decorum when faced with adversity, it should be remembered that Andrew Jackson clashed with Chief Justice John Marshall to the point of actually saying, “John Marshall has made his decision. Let him carry it out,” after the Court had ruled in Worcester v. State of Georgia, March 3, 1832, that states had authority to prosecute non-Indians for being in Indian territory as it is the province of the tribes (in this case, the Cherokee, who would later be forced by Jackson to undergo a massive relocation in the infamous Trail of Tears that was every bit as racialistically genocide as what the Zionists have long done to the Palestinians and what the Turks did to the Armenians in 1915), which were given the status of foreign nations in the Constitution.

Abraham Lincoln had utter disregard for any and all federal court decisions he believed interfered with the amoral, murderous conduct during the War between the states that his Federal troops stood by as Federal judge in Maryland and was pistol-whipped by a crowd upset with the fact that he was about to render a decision unfavorable to his war policies:

On May 27, 1862, Maryland's Talbot County courthouse was surrounded by Union troops to support federal Provost Marshals in the arrest of Judge Richard Bennett Carmichael. Four Provost Marshals barged into the Judge’s courtroom and bloodily bludgeoned him with the butt of a pistol in front of his jury and civilian spectators. Prosecuting attorney J.C.W. Powell rushed to the judge’s aid and the crier of the court ran to the window to call for the Sherriff, but both were physically subdued. All three were sent to Fort McHenry for imprisonment.

The next day the federal War Department issued a press release stating that the Judge had been imprisoned for treason. The press release was published in every major Northern newspaper and in Europe as soon as the news crossed the Atlantic. Judge Carmichael and attorney Powell were imprisoned for over 9 months under the harshest conditions without trial or charges ever placed against them.

These men were imprisoned and denied their basic constitutional rights to have legal counsel challenge the validity of their imprisonment, to be presented with charges, to have the government’s charges reviewed by a civilian court, to confront their accusers or to provide a defense in a civilian court of law. All these constitutional rights were denied because the President had suspended the sacred right of habeas corpus, an act that the Constitution had granted solely to Congress and not the Executive.

The Judge’s imprisonment for treason, as professed by the federal government, became established history for over 160 years touted by follow-on historians who simply relied upon the statements issued by the government. This was indicative of how history recorded the imprisonment of so many other Maryland political leaders, newspaper editors and other citizens imprisoned under the suspension of habeas which denied their right to present a defense or to even publicly proclaim their side of the story. The free press was grossly impacted by the suspension of habeas with numerous newspapers who presented dissenting views shut down or had their editors imprisoned and where the threat of such retaliation caused many others to remain compliant and not question the Executive.

With today’s technology to digitally search thousands of official records along with historical newspapers across the globe, the actual history of Judge Carmichael’s arrest can now be told - and it had nothing to do with secession or traitorous activity.

Judge Carmichael got the attention of Secretary William Seward in June of 1861 by sending a petition along with 48 others, to the Maryland Legislature detailing how Union soldiers had entered Queene Anne’s County and had placed themselves as a military police superior to civilian authority and were conducting unlawful searches, arrests and imprisonments and had unilaterally suspended habeas corpus to those they detained. This document recorded in the Maryland Archives is hugely important in understanding President Lincoln’s early suspension of habeas enacted just weeks prior. The President’s first suspension was touted as a military necessity to protect a narrow supply corridor between Philadelphia and Washington. With Carmichael’s communication to the Legislature, we find it was also suspended in places in Maryland far removed from this supply route and for totally different reasons as well.

Secretary Seward in learning of the Judge’s communication, issued a directive to General John Adams Dix to have the Judge imprisoned in Fort Lafayette for “treason” and to have the arrest conducted in the Judge’s courtroom to maximize the public impact. General Dix however did not act upon this directive at this time but continued to monitor the Judge. As a circuit court Judge, Carmichael was also a Judge in Queen Anne’s County and shortly before the state elections in November 1861 the clerk of Queen Anne’s Court, Madison Brown, was arrested and temporarily imprisoned by Union troops. Brown was running on the “Peace Party” ticket as a candidate for the Maryland Appellate Court during the upcoming state election and was just one of many Maryland political candidates that had been harassed and even imprisoned by the occupying Union troops prior to the election. Judge Carmichael had the offending military officers charged by the grand jury for the unlawful imprisonment of Brown and others, but the Union military simply relocated the charged officers outside of the Judge’s jurisdiction to prevent their trial.

Similar incidents also happened in Talbot County where dissenters were imprisoned by the occupying military command. In Talbot County however, something very different occurred. Prosecuting attorney J.C.W. Powell learned that a Maryland politician, State Senator Henry Holiday Goldsborough, had embroiled himself in directing the Union troops on the arrest of Talbot civilians. Goldsborough was the leader of the Maryland Senate and a strong Lincoln ally. Attorney Powell was successful in having Talbot’s Grand Jury issue indictments against Goldsborough along with the associated Union officers responsible for the arrests.

The military officers were removed from Talbot’s legal jurisdiction, but Senator Goldsborough lived in Talbot County and could not avoid prosecution. Shortly before Goldsborough’s trial General Dix issued a written communication to him stating that he was sending the military officers subpoenaed for his trial but was also sending four Provost Marshals “well armed.” In this communication Gen. Dix left it to Goldsborough to authorize the Provost Marshals to arrest Judge Carmichael. In Dix’s after-action report to Secretary Seward, he noted that the Judge had been arrested in his courtroom for the maximum public impact per the stated desire of Seward. The imprisonment of Judge Carmichael and prosecuting attorney Powell had nothing to do with treason but was simply to protect a political ally of the President and to display the power of the federal government. The false report of “treason” was simply cover to make such a drastic measure publicly acceptable.

Some of those who read this will attempt to immediately defend President Lincoln’s actions. Human nature has not changed in 163 years and there are many who will blindly trust and defend their chosen political leader regardless of evidence. These events are our history which cannot be changed but which provide us with important insights and lessons that we should apply to the issues of our day.

For more on this important history to include the uncovering of the details regarding the imprisonment of the Maryland Legislature and other important Maryland leaders, please refer to my book “When Democracy Fell, The Subjugation of Maryland During the U.S. Civil War,” available on Amazon. (History of Maryland | On May 27, 1862, Maryland's Talbot County courthouse was surrounded by Union troops to support federal Provost Marshals in the arrest of Judge Richard.)

Perhaps even more famously is the fact that Lincoln sought to suspend the writ of habeas corpus by an executive order without an act of Congress as specified in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, and open defied Chief Justice Roger Taney’s decision that Lincoln had acted unlawfully in violation of the limitations imposed in Section 9 of Article I:

About three months later, Taney had his chance to address Lincoln’s vision of executive power in Ex Parte Merryman.

Article 1, Section 9, of the Constitution states that “the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” The Great Writ’s origins go back to the signing of the Magna Carta in England in 1215 and the writ compels the government to show cause to a judge for the arrest or detention of a person.

After the start of the Civil War, President Lincoln ordered General Winfield Scott to suspend habeas corpus near railroad lines that connected Philadelphia to Washington, amid fears of a rebellion in Maryland that would endanger Washington.

On May 25, 1861, federal troops arrested a Maryland planter, John Merryman, on suspicion that he was involved in a conspiracy as part of an armed secessionist group. Merryman was detained at Fort McHenry without a warrant. Merryman’s attorney petitioned the U.S. Circuit Court for Maryland, which Taney oversaw, for his client’s release.

On May 26, Taney issued a writ of habeas corpus and ordered General George Cadwalader, Fort McHenry’s commander, to appear in the circuit courtroom along with Merryman and to explain his reasons for detaining Merryman.

Cadwalader didn’t comply with the writ and instead sent a letter back to Taney on May 27 explaining that Lincoln had authorized military officers to suspend the writ when they felt there were public safety concerns. Taney then tried to notify Cadwalader that he was in contempt of court, but soldiers at Fort McHenry refused the notice.

On May 28, Taney issued an oral opinion, which was followed by a written opinion a few days later. He stated that the Constitution clearly intended for Congress, and not the President, to have to power to suspend the writ during emergencies.

“The clause in the Constitution which authorizes the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus is in the ninth section of the first article. This article is devoted to the Legislative Department of the United States, and has not the slightest reference to the Executive Department,” Taney argued. “I can see no ground whatever for supposing that the President in any emergency or in any state of things can authorize the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, or arrest a citizen except in aid of the judicial power,” Taney concluded.

However, Taney noted that he didn’t have the physical power to enforce the writ in this case because of the nature of the conflict at hand. “I have exercised all the power which the Constitution and laws confer on me, but that power has been resisted by a force too strong for me to overcome,” he said. But Taney did order that a copy of his opinion be sent directly to President Lincoln.

Lincoln didn’t respond directly or immediately to the Ex Parte Merryman decision. Instead, he waited until a July 4^th address to confront Taney at a special session of Congress.

“Soon after the first call for militia it was considered a duty to authorize the Commanding General in proper cases, according to his discretion, to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, or, in other words, to arrest and detain without resort to the ordinary processes and forms of law such individuals as he might deem dangerous to the public safety,” Lincoln said. “This authority has purposely been exercised but very sparingly.”

Lincoln then presented his famous response to Taney. “Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the official oath be broken if the Government should be overthrown when it was believed that disregarding the single law would tend to preserve it?”

The President also confronted Taney’s opinion that only Congress could suspend the writ.

“Now it is insisted that Congress, and not the Executive, is vested with this power; but the Constitution itself is silent as to which or who is to exercise the power; and as the provision was plainly made for a dangerous emergency, it can not be believed the framers of the instrument intended that in every case the danger should run its course until Congress could be called together, the very assembling of which might be prevented, as was intended in this case, by the rebellion,” Lincoln argued.

After the Merryman incident, Lincoln suspended the writ in other situations, and he received approval from Congress in March 1863 to suspend the writ for the duration of the conflict when “the public safety may require it.” (Lincoln and Taney’s great writ showdown.)

One more example will suffice to demonstrate that Donald John Trump, though acting with cartoonish outrage and use of personal invectives for which has become so well-noted, is carrying on a bad tradition of presidential imperialism exhibited by other presidents, including Jackson and Lincoln, and also by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he proposed in 1937 that Congress add one new seat to the Supreme Court of the United States of America for every justice over the age of seventy-five in order to create a situation where his plainly unconstitutional New Deal programs would no longer be declared as such by the Court:

On February 5, 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt shocked America by introducing a plan to expand the Supreme Court, to gain favorable votes. FDR’s war on the court was short-lived, and it was defeated by a crafty Chief Justice and Roosevelt’s party members.

President Roosevelt had enacted wide-ranging legislation along with congressional Democrats as part of his New Deal program, starting in 1933.

By 1937, Roosevelt had won a second term in office, but the makeup of a conservative-leaning Supreme Court hadn’t changed since he took office four years earlier. There were four Justices –nicknamed the “Four Horsemen”: ,” Justices George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, James McReynolds, and Willis Van Devanter—who were conservative enough that their votes against most New Deal plans were expected. A fifth justice with conservative leanings was the Chief Justice, Charles Evans Hughes, who also narrowly lost the 1916 presidential race to the Democratic incumbent, President Woodrow Wilson.

However, Hughes also had roots in the progressive wing of the Republican party. Another justice, Owen Roberts, was a Hoover appointee who also voted with the conservatives on some decisions including the significant Schechter Poultry v. United States case, which struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act.

Adding to the tension between the president and the Supreme Court were a series of decisions by the justices that halted key components of the New Deal. After his re-election, Roosevelt developed his plan to reform the court in secrecy, working with his attorney general, Homer Cummings, on a way to ensure the court would rule favorably about upcoming cases on Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act.

The plan was to pass a law—the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937—that would allow the President to appoint an additional justice for every sitting justice who was over 70 years of age, Roosevelt could add six of his own justices to the court. With two liberals already on the bench, that would put the odds in FDR’s favor.

While the idea may seem outlandish today, President Roosevelt must have felt the bill stood a good chance of success. The President used one of his famous “fireside chats” via radio on March 9, 1937 to make his case to the American people.

“This plan of mine is not attacking of the court; it seeks to restore the court to its rightful and historic place in our system of constitutional government and to have it resume its high task of building anew on the Constitution ‘a system of living law.’ The court itself can best undo what the court has done,” Roosevelt said. He also claimed more justices were needed to handle the Court’s caseload.

However, many Americans believed the high court was sacrosanct, and opposition to the plan steadily built inside Washington. It wasn’t assured that the proposed law would even make it out of committee for a vote on the Senate floor.

On March 10, Cummings testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “We want an independent judiciary, but we want a judiciary that will permit the country to move,” Cummings said. A week later, more testimony offered before the committee stuck a fork in the bill.

Senator Burton Wheeler read a letter from Chief Justice Hughes to the committee, which explained the need for an independent Supreme Court and debunked much of the logic behind the bill and Cummings’s testimony. An additional signer on the Hughes letter was the liberal justice, Louis Brandeis.

In the diaries of Harold Ickes, a key FDR adviser, the letter’s effect was duly noted. “This letter, without expressing itself as to the policy of the president’s plan, sought to prove in great detail that the court did not need any extra help to handle its work since it kept right up with its docket. It then went on to Congress the opinion that more judges would make for inefficiency and delay. It was good tactics,” Ickes said.

Within five weeks of the President’s announcement, the “court-packing plan,” as it came to be known, was heading toward a dead-end in the Senate. By June 1937, the Judiciary Committee had sent a report with a negative recommendation to the full Senate. “The bill is an invasion of judicial power such as has never before been attempted in this country. . . .  It is essential to the continuance of our constitutional democracy that the judiciary be completely independent of both the executive and legislative branches of the government,” the report read.

Its conclusion was even more direct: “It is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.”

In the meantime, changes were afoot that made sure the whole idea of a court-packing plan wasn’t coming back in the Roosevelt administration. The Roosevelt administration was on the winning side of three court decisions involving the minimum wage, Social Security, and the National Labor Relations Act. Some have argued this started when Justice Owen Roberts began voting with the more liberal justices to save the legislation, also known as “switch in time that saved nine. Other historians believe that Roberts had other legal reasonings for his decisions after his vote in the West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish case in 1937, or political motivations behind his later votes.

A key conservative justice, Willis Van Devanter, also decided to retire. And by July 1937, the Senate tabled the court-packing debate for good. Its chief lobbyist in the Senate, Majority Leader Joe Robinson, had died of a heart attack; Robinson had fought hard to ensure passage of the court-packing bill, and without his support the measure was effectively finished.

In the end, President Roosevelt outlasted seven of the nine justices who sat on the bench in 1937. (How FDR lost his brief war on the Supreme Court.)

Presidents may chafe under the collar and throw temper tantrums when they do not get their way, but the American Constitutional system was designed to create conflict and inefficiency to permit those in the minority on a issue to have a say, although not necessarily their way, and to permit each branch of the Federal government to check and balance each other.

Presidents make mistakes.

Courts make mistakes.

Congress makes mistakes.

Alas, the chaos that results from these conflicts is but one of the many consequences of secular democratic republic that admits of nothing higher than the text of its own constitution as the sole determinant in the making of public policy without any consideration of how the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law may be brought to bear in instances where the immutable laws of God and the eternal good of souls are involved.

This preface is thus a brief way of introducing readers to the constitutional complexities that exist in the United States of America and that no president can justly circumvent no matter how hard and long he bellows and screams.

Understanding the Basics of American National Government

Although we live in the midst of a very secularized and even paganized society that has adopted and glorified many of the hideous practices of the barbaric tribes of Europe before their Christianization in the First Millennium into the beginning of the Second Millennium (and of the barbaric tribes of the Americas, especially Latin America, prior to the miraculous conversion of the Aztecs, who worshiped the sun and ate the hearts of living human beings in a form of ritualistic “sacrifice”), the truth is that all human beings lived in the framework of religious faith, no matter how primitive or superstitious, prior to the era in which we live.

Indeed, even the pagans of ancient Greece and ancient Rome and of Egypt had highly developed forms of public pietas, that is, of public worship. Citizens were expected to do their religious duty to pay a public worship to the pagan “gods” in recognition of their being some force beyond the human being and beyond the created world that was responsible for the existence of all matter. In other words, these pagans believed that there had to be an Uncaused Cause responsible for the creation of the world and everything in it, including human beings.

Similarly, the barbaric tribes worshiped all manner of false idols (the sun, the moon, the stars, the sky, the trees, ancestors, etc.), “sacrificing” those who disobeyed the codes, which were handed down by oral tradition, that united them together in a common cult.

Pagans and barbarians, whether those of the past or those of the present today, relied on reason rather than Divine Revelation to develop a cult of public worship that bound them together and gave a raison d’etre (reason for being) to the civil state.

The pagans and the barbarians of the past, though, did not know about or have access to Divine Revelation. The pagans and barbarians of the present, though, reject Divine Revelation as being “superstitious” or “irrational” as they place their faith in a new caste of high priests and priestesses such as "founding fathers," political parties and the candidates who belong to them, political ideologies, economic systems, psychologists, social workers, educators, sports teams and the athletes who play for them and, among so many others, "entertainers".

Thus it is that to discuss the influence of supernatural faith on the development of political institutions in Western civilization is considered to be “irrelevant” to a study of American Federal Government. Such a belief, however, is simply erroneous as “things” today are not as they have always been. One who is serious about a true education must understand the origins, both remote and proximate, of the institutions in which we live and how they structure and operation are based upon—or deviate from—those origins.

Whether or not you accept it, understand it or even like it, the truth of the matter is that it is impossible to understand Western civilization and its institutions without coming to recognized the role played by supernatural faith in their shaping and as they grew organically over the course of time prior to the tumultuous events of the Sixteenth Century that began the process of tearing Christendom asunder, thus paving the way for the anti-Incarnational world of Modernity and the tyranny of dictatorships of one sort or another, including the dictatorship of the prevailing majority and of raw state power right here midst of the so-called “civilized” world, including the United States of America.

Revelation may be understood on a purely natural level as the gradual unfolding of one person to another over the course of time.

That is, one does not know everything about another upon first meeting him. Each person reveals himself to another over the course of time, making decisions as to the person’s trustworthiness and whether he or she wants to draw that person into a closer friendship. One learns about another by means of their gestures, their manner of speech, their manner of dress, their cleanliness (or lack thereof), the virtues they exhibit (or lack) and their common interests and/or areas of expertise. However, it is also the case that we can learn some things about others only if they choose to reveal them to us by drawing us into their confidence, and it is not unreasonable for the person who has been told something not generally known to put faith in the word of one they have gotten to know over the course of time.

Catholicism was the foundation of order in the Middle Ages, which is, roughly speaking, that period of time from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West at the beginning of the Fifth Century A.D. (the 400s) to the time of the rise of the break of Father Martin Luther, O.S.A. (Order of Saint Augustine) from the Catholic Church in 1517 and the rise of the so-called “Enlightenment” one hundred fifty years later. It was Catholic teaching on Divine Revelation concerning the Special Creation of man by God as recounted in the Book of Genesis and Adam and Eve’s subsequent frall from grace in the Garden of Eden that informed the people, whether the peasants, the nobility or the royalty, of the fact that human nature has been wounded, not totally corrupted, by Original Sin. The wounding of human nature causes God’s rational creature, human beings, to be inclined to the commission of sin and, worse yet, to celebrate their sins publicly and to seek to have them enshrined under the banner of the civil law.

Catholicism taught the people of the Middle Ages who had been converted from paganism (the Greeks and the Romans) and barbarism (the Angles, the Danes, the Jutes, the Saxons, the Normans, the Teutons, the Huns, the Lombards, the Franks, the Goths, the Visigoths, the Vikings,  the Slavs, the Magyars, the Celts and countless others during the First Millennium into beginning of the Second Millennium that Original Sin and their own Actual Sins were responsible for all of the problems of the world (war, poverty, disease, injustice, racial and/or ethnic bigotry, unhappiness, greed, lust, envy, hatred, blasphemy, heresy, etc.) without exception. As Plato himself had taught from reason alone, unaided by the light of the Divine Revelation, the world itself is affected by the state of the souls of human beings. Men whose Actual Sins (those sins committed after Baptism) went without being absolved by a true priest in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance (the confessional, see John 20:21-23) were instruments of disorder in their own lives and in the lives of those around them. In other words, Catholicism, a corrupted residue of which reached the founders of the United States of American through the filters of Protestantism and a myriad of “Enlightenment” writers (John Locke chief among them, of course), teaches that human beings are responsible for the problems of the world and that the only way to realize true social reform is for them to reform their own lives in cooperation with the Sanctifying and Actual Graces won for them by the shedding of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross.

Pope Leo XIII, writing in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, summarized the history of the Middle Ages very succinctly:

There was once a time when States were governed by the philosophy of the Gospel. Then it was that the power and divine virtue of Christian wisdom had diffused itself throughout the laws, institutions, and morals of the people, permeating all ranks and relations of civil society. Then, too, the religion instituted by Jesus Christ, established firmly in befitting dignity, flourished everywhere, by the favor of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates; and Church and State were happily united in concord and friendly interchange of good offices. The State, constituted in this wise, bore fruits important beyond all expectation, whose remembrance is still, and always will be, in renown, witnessed to as they are by countless proofs which can never be blotted out or ever obscured by any craft of any enemies. Christian Europe has subdued barbarous nations, and changed them from a savage to a civilized condition, from superstition to true worship. It victoriously rolled back the tide of Mohammedan conquest; retained the headship of civilization; stood forth in the front rank as the leader and teacher of all, in every branch of national culture; bestowed on the world the gift of true and many-sided liberty; and most wisely founded very numerous institutions for the solace of human suffering. And if we inquire how it was able to bring about so altered a condition of things, the answer is -- beyond all question, in large measure, through religion, under whose auspices so many great undertakings were set on foot, through whose aid they were brought to completion. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

Well, the passage of time—and the efforts of many allied forces—have blotted out the memory of the Middle Ages, which are referred to disparagingly by many as “Dark Ages” even though it was during the time of Christendom, that is, the Christ-centered world of Europe, that the modern university system developed after learning had been kept alive in the monasteries, especially in Ireland, following the barbaric invasions in Europe. Great university centers arose in Prague, Paris, Padua, Bologna, Oxford, Krakow and Cambridge, to name just a few. Hospitals, which were staffed by consecrated religious who worked without earthly pay, and other institutions of mercy were established to care, not to kill off, the poor, the unwanted, the diseased and the suffering,

There were, of course, wars and great periods of moral dissolution (meaning corruption) at times in the Middle Ages. Human nature remains wounded. Men must choose to cooperate with the graces sent them to reform their lives lest their fall prey to the temptation to believe that what matters is only their own power and privileges. It was during such periods that God raised up such men as the Cistercian abbot, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in the Twelfth Century, the 1100s, that is, and Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Dominic de Guzman and Saint Anthony of Padua (after whom do you think San Bernardino, California, San Francisco, California, The Dominican Republic and San Antonio, Texas, are named after?) to serve as true reformers who preached reform of the souls of human beings, not some kind of theological revolution designed to “liberate” “believers.” (Indeed, as the students in Normangee High School told me, the abbreviation of the Texas highway OSR stands for Old San Antonio Road. Long before the settlers from elsewhere in the United States arrived in Texas, the Franciscan missionaries had been here to evangelize the Indians.)

Why is this important?

Well, this is important as it was during the nine hundred thirty-four years that England was a Catholic nation (from the time of the missionary work of Saint Augustine of Canterbury in 600 AD to King Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church to marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn, whom he later had beheaded) that what became the mother country of the United States of America developed her political institutions.

Following the example of Charlemagne on the continent of Europe, King Alfred the Great of Wessex, the most powerful king in England in the Ninth Century, established a system of formal education for the children of the royal court, desiring to translate important works, such as Pope Saint Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Guide, from Latin into English. His administration of justice was as measured as that of Charlemagne before him and Saint Edward Confessor, who was King of England from 1042 to 1066, after him. It was during England’s period of a Catholic nation that the system of common law, which was made by judges who applied the precepts of the Divine Positive Law (those laws revealed positively by God, such as the Ten Commandments, and the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount) and Natural Law to the facts and circumstances of the particular cases before them for their adjudication. English Common Law is still cited by some American jurists to this day and is recognized in Federal law as well in those areas where the Congress has not repealed anything of it by passing a law contradicting a common law decision.

Additionally, of course, it was when England was a Catholic nation that the barons, nobles and bishops convinced King John I, the son of King Henry II, whose dispute with the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1079 caused him to mutter the words (“Will no one rid me of this mettlesome priest”) that resulted in the murder of Saint Thomas a Becket, a crime for which Henry II later did public penance, which he accepted with joy, to sign the Magna Carta in 1215 to place limits on a king’s power. King John accepted these restrictions, which he signed willingly to guarantee the rights of free Englishmen in perpetuity from arbitrary restriction by a monarch.

Here is an excerpt from the beginning of the Magna Carta:

KNOW THAT BEFORE GOD, for the health of our soul and those of our ancestors and heirs, to the honour of God, the exaltation of the holy Church, and the better ordering of our kingdom, at the advice of our reverend fathers Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, primate of all England, and cardinal of the holy Roman Church, Henry archbishop of Dublin, William bishop of London, Peter bishop of Winchester, Jocelin bishop of Bath and Glastonbury, Hugh bishop of Lincoln, Walter Bishop of Worcester, William bishop of Coventry, Benedict bishop of Rochester, Master Pandulf subdeacon and member of the papal household, Brother Aymeric master of the knighthood of the Temple in England, William Marshal earl of Pembroke, William earl of Salisbury, William earl of Warren, William earl of Arundel, Alan de Galloway constable of Scotland, Warin Fitz Gerald, Peter Fitz Herbert, Hubert de Burgh seneschal of Poitou, Hugh de Neville, Matthew Fitz Herbert, Thomas Basset, Alan Basset, Philip Daubeny, Robert de Roppeley, John Marshal, John Fitz Hugh, and other loyal subjects:

+ (1) FIRST, THAT WE HAVE GRANTED TO GOD, and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired. That we wish this so to be observed, appears from the fact that of our own free will, before the outbreak of the present dispute between us and our barons, we granted and confirmed by charter the freedom of the Church's elections - a right reckoned to be of the greatest necessity and importance to it - and caused this to be confirmed by Pope Innocent III. This freedom we shall observe ourselves, and desire to be observed in good faith by our heirs in perpetuity.

 TO ALL FREE MEN OF OUR KINGDOM we have also granted, for us and our heirs for ever, all the liberties written out below, to have and to keep for them and their heirs, of us. (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/magnacarta.asp.)

One can see plainly that the Magna Carta was a document inspired by the due submission of King John I to the Social Reign of Christ the King as it was exercised by the Catholic Church, whose bishops sought to restrict the monarch’s powers and to assure both the liberties of the Church and those of the king’s subjects while keeping in mind the spiritual and temporal good of souls of all. As King John wrote in the Magna Carta, Pope Innocent III, the very pope who had given his permission to Saint Francis of Assisi for the founding of the Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscans, and to Saint Dominic de Guzman for the founder of the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, confirmed the authority of the Magna Carta.

That is, an earthly king acknowledged that it was the right of a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter to confirm limits placed on the governing power of civil officials in order to assure the legitimate liberties of the people. Such continued to be the case until the aforementioned Augustinian monk from Germany, whose break from Rome ushered in a period of monarchical despotism that the founders of the United States of America associated with all monarchies rather than being the result of that break from Rome.

Significantly, the Magna Carta would lead to the beginnings of the Model Parliament eighty years later, that is, in 1295, and would contain passages that are found in the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America:

+ (39) No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

+ (40) To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.  (The Magna Carta.)

Here, for example, are the related provisions of the Constitution of the United States of America:

V - Provisons concerning prosecution

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.

VI - Right to a speedy trial, witnesses, etc.

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

VII - Right to a trial by jury

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

XIV - Citizen rights not to be abridged

Passed by Congress June 13, 1866. Ratified July 9, 1868

1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.  (See The Constitution of the United States of America .)

Although Thomas Dye’s Politics in America mentioned The Magna Carta in passing, it does not provide readers with any of the history that led up to it, leading one to think that it was just a legal document when it was but one of so many expressions of the era of Christendom of the Middle Ages wherein rulers either understood or were reminded by the authority of the Catholic Church that they had to answer to the King of Kings for how they treated their subjects. Most history books today either gloss over or deconstruct (that is, reinterpret as to render facts devoid of their actual meaning; there’s a whole of that going on in the world today, sad to say) the past in order to make it appear that the world today is somewhat like it was in the past. This is simply not so.

One cannot understand the Constitution of the United States of America unless one understands what preceded it, and it is from such an understanding that one can either praise it as an expression of its times or to criticize its framers for believing that theirs was an experiment in liberty that had never been attempted in any land before. It matters not that few people, including ninety-nine percent of Catholics themselves today, understand any of this and/or even want to hear about the past. However, one cannot understand how we arrived at the circumstances of our present day unless we understand what transpired in the past without any “filtering” of information deemed to be “unacceptable” by the thought-police of the modern era, including in the so-called “free” Western world.

Political ideologues capitalized on the divisions caused the Martin Luther’s, John Calvin’s, Ulrich Zwingli and Henry VIII’s respective breaks from Rome.

A writer of the Italian Renaissance, Niccolo Machiavelli provided the “philosophical muscle,” so to speak, that was used by political ideologues (those who subscribed to the allegedly “salvific” power of a political belief system, whether it be liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism, fascism, utilitarianism, statism, materialism, legal positivism, libertarianism, etc.) to do away with all reference to the supernatural in order to emphasize the merely natural aspects of human existence. By doing this, you see, the political ideologues sought to empower individual rulers with a “blank check” to rule as they believed that had to rule in order to acquire, retain and increase their own raw political power.

To this end, Machiavelli wrote two works in the late-Fifteenth Century that were instrumental in shaping the minds of political rulers after Martin Luther broke with the Catholic Church and thus made it possible for princes and kings and emperors to rule without what they saw as the sort of “interference” from a pope or a kingdom’s local bishops to observe the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. Those two works were as follows: and A Discourse on Livy.

The essence of Machiavelli’s teaching was to separate the practice of politics from all objective moral norms. Machiavelli believed that there was no need for a prince to agonize over the morality of particular decisions. All that such a prince needs to do is to determine what is expedient for his own ends. In other words, a prince may use whatever means he deems, including, lying, cheating and, if necessary, killing, to realize whatever end he has set for himself. This is known as “amorality,” the belief that human actions can be undertaken without regard to their inherent morality or lack thereof. “The ends justify the means.” If one has to cheat, cheat. If one has to lie, lie. If one has to kill, kill. This is the foundation of the policies of almost every country in the world today as those in public office seek to advance their own ends by using whatever means it takes to realize them. We see this with particular clarity in the conduct of election campaigns and in efforts by presidential administrations to cover-up crimes that “had” to be committed in order to preserve their “legitimacy” and “credibility” with the public.

No matter the influence of Machiavelli, however, it was John Locke who was the father of political ideology. Locke is the father of the political ideology of “liberalism,” which contends that social problems may be resolved by the creation of structures, sanctioned by the majority, and that such structures may be reformed or enlarged by subsequent majorities over the course of time. All political ideology is, as Russell Kirk noted in The Roots of American Order, inverted religion, an effort to replace Christianity as the foundation of social life by convincing mere creatures that they, by their own unaided powers, can make the world “better” without ever addressing the root causes of those problems.

John Locke wrote The Second Treatise on Civil Government, which established his understanding of democracy as being a form wherein the people voluntarily relinquished their claim to total liberty in order to enjoy the protection of their basic rights and liberties (life, liberty and property) by a government they create, elect and participate in.

Locke based his philosophy upon the following premises:

1. The human being lived originally in a “state of nature,” where there was to be found no law, no organized society and thus no order. In such a situation, the human being was incapable of realizing the protection of his basic rights of life, liberty and property.

2. As noted above, in the state of nature everyone was “free” to do as he pleased.

3. Such “freedom,” though, carried risks within the “state of nature” as some human beings used their freedom to violate the rights of others.

4. Lacking any organized means to deal with the risks that existed in the state of nature, Locke hypothesized, without specifying when this happening or how, that a majority of “reasonable” men gathered together to perfect the state of nature in which the human beings were at risk of losing their rights to life, liberty and property.

5. These “reasonable men” conclude that the state of nature was defective and that the human being had to be taken out of it in order to be governed by a government created by and with the consent of those to be governed.

6. The price of protecting basic rights and liberties would be the forfeiture of the claim to total liberty. That is, human beings must voluntarily relinquish (give up) their claim to “total liberty” in order to enjoy the protection of their rights to life, liberty and property by a government of their own creation.

7. Thus it is that Locke believed government was not part of the very nature of things, that is was an artificial “imposition” upon the human being that could, if left unchecked, serve as a threat to the human being.

8. The supposed “safeguard” in Locke’s construct would be the creation of a government by a “majority” of reasonable men, who would devise, whether in a formal (or written) manner or an informal (unwritten) manner a “social contract” to bind the community together in a set of rules to be administered by elected officials serving in government structures.

9. If, however, the problems sought to be ameliorated or resolved by the government created by the social contact continue or, worse yet, worsen, then another reasonably majority of men could arise to revised or expand existing structures and/or to create new ones to “fix” that which had gone unresolved.

This is the essence of liberalism, therefore, and its influence is vast on both the so-called “left”
 and “right” in the United States of America today. Lockeanism also influenced some, although not all, of the framers of the Constitution of the United States of America. Lockeanism convinces human beings, who are mere contingent beings, that is, beings who did not create themselves, and whose bodies are destined for the corruption of the grave until the General Judgment of the living and the dead on the Last Day. In other words, political ideology convinces men that they are “gods” who can decide for themselves how to “improve” or “perfect” a world brought into disorder caused by their own sins. Remember, even Plato and Cicero, pagans who did not believe in Divine Revelation, understood the connection between order in the soul and order in society.

The flaws of the John Locke’s ideology are as follows:

1. The “state of nature” never existed. There never existed a time when human beings lived in a moral vacuum, devoid of hierarchy and of any means of external governance over them. Again, even pagans understood this from the use of reason. Christians understand that God Himself, the Most Blessed Trinity, is the true Governor of men Who has ordained laws to govern the physical properties of the universe and Who has ordained laws to govern men in the moral choices they make. The “state of nature” is pure mythology.

2. All human problems, therefore, are the result of man’s fallen nature, something that many of the founders understood:

A principal difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution was this: the American revolutionaries in general held a biblical view of man and his bent toward sin, while the French revolutionaries in general attempted to substitute for the biblical understanding an open optimistic doctrine of human goodness advanced by the philosophes [the false philosophers] of the rationalistic Enlightenment. The American view led to the Constitution of 1787; the French view, to the Terror and to a new autocracy [Napoleon Bonaparte]. The American Constitution is a fundamental law deliberately meant to place checks upon will and appetite. The French innovations would endure no such checks upon popular impulses; they ended under a far more arbitrary domination. (Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, p. 29.)

3. Importantly, Locke confused liberty with license. Having the physical ability to perform an act does not mean that one has the moral right to commit it. Thus, one does not have the freedom morally to push his neighbor in front of an oncoming subway train. How can it be said, therefore, that one is giving up his “freedom” not to commit an act that is of its nature morally wrong.

4. Locke thus conclude erroneously that government is an artificial imposition upon human society that takes men out of the state of nature in order to protect their rights to life, liberty and property that he said were at risk in the state of nature. Government is not an artificial imposition upon human society. As noted in number two, supra, government and hierarchy are simply part of the nature of things.

5. Locke trusted naively in the infallible reasonableness of the majority. Locke could not conceive of a circumstance whereby a majority would be composed of anyone other than reasonable men. As we know, of course, the crowd is often wrong. The crowd on Good Friday, motivated by our sins having transcended time, cried out for Barabbas and called for the Crucifixion of their very Redeemer. The mere fact that a majority supports or opposes something at a given point in time means nothing if what is supported or opposed is wrong in and of its nature. Democracy is not about giving the “majority” whatever it wants. This is same as mobocracy.

6. Locked believed wrongly in the ability of mere structural reform to solve perfect the “state of nature,” that is, to “resolve” social problems once and for all. Such a belief, while held most sincerely by most people alive today, treats the symptoms of problems rather than the root cause of those problems. Without understanding that the root cause of social problems is fallen human nature—and hence remediable only by constant conversion to holiness on a daily basis), the human being becomes convinced that he can create THE solution to the problems of war, poverty, homelessness, economic injustice, racism, greed, environmental pollution, and the like. The fact that such problems remain, if not worsen, does nothing to convince Lockeans of the rightness of their position.

Similarly, there are those who believe that the mere expenditure of funds on social problems will result in the resolution of those problems. The failure of such programs to work (urban poverty remains high, teen unemployment rates, especially in urban areas, remains high, drug abuse is on the rise across all segments of society, many schools produce students who are functionally illiterate and are unable to speak in grammatically correct English, being ignorant, through no fault of their own, in basic facts of world and American history) does nothing to cause such ideologues to rethink their basic premises. The same is true of those who believe that the mere expenditure of money will produce a stronger defense of the nation (or those who think that the elimination of weapons by itself will produce peace). There were wars long before there were modern weapons.

The belief in structural reforms as the means to resolve social problems leads the human being to believe in self-redemption. This is the same thing as the heresy of Pelgianism, the belief that human beings can more or less “save” themselves by stirring up within the souls graces necessary to “do” whatever it is they set their minds to doing without any type of supernatural assistance.

7. Locke’s system leads to frustration. If one believes that structural reform in and of itself is the means to resolve social problems, then one is bound to lead a life of utter frustration. The person who believes that “others” are responsible for their problems are rootless and restless, constantly searching for “external” solutions to ease their sense of unhappiness (an unhappiness that originates interiorly within themselves). Similarly, a society seeking in good faith to deal with serious problems will find itself quite frustrated when the problems remain despite the “best” efforts to eradicate them. New solutions are therefore proposed as the “next step” to resolve problems that will only worsen over times. Karl Marx, for example, saw the failure of liberalism while living in London, England, and proposed what he thought was the ultimate solution: communism, which was to produce “peace and justice” by killing off the bourgeoisie (the capitalists) and redistributing their wealth so that a “classless” society could emerge wherein all no cause for envy, war or competition would exist.

Locke’s influence on modern thought is profound even though most of the men who framed the Constitution of the United States of American had made a break with some of Locke’s simple-minded majoritarian formulae for secular self-redemption. As a practical political matter, however, Locke’s ideas—and those of the French Revolution—became the basis of American politics, public-policy making and jurisprudence.  One commentator, K. T. McFarland, believes, contrary to what Dr. Kirk contended and what I, to be fair to the naturalists and rationalists who founded this country, believe to be case, that Locke did exercise a major influence on the founders:

Our Founding Fathers created a country modeled on the civil society envisioned by Scottish philosophers like David Hume and John Locke.  (http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/09/17/independence-for-scotland-it-my-heart-vs-my-head/)

Dr. McFarland’s point about Locke’s influence on the founders is arguable. However, the fact that she cited him in an article published on the Fox News website on Thursday, September 18, 2014, should show that I am not making any of this up. Ideas matter. True ideas and beliefs lead to good consequences. False ideas and beliefs lead to bad consequences. I report. You decide.

Consider, for example, the commitment of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who was President of the United States of America from March 4, 1913, to March 4, 1921 (although the spent the last eighteen months of his second term suffering the effects of a severe stroke that he had suffered while campaigning for the Treaty of Versailles in 1919), to liberalism as he rebuffed the pleas of Father Francis Clement Kelley, who met with him in the White House as a representative of the American bishops, to help the Catholics in Mexico who were being persecuted and killed by the anti-clerical revolutionaries who had been brought to power with the help of American financial and military assistance:

Wilson replied: 'I have no doubt but that the terrible things you mention have happened during the Mexican revolution. But terrible things happened also during the French revolution, perhaps more terrible things than have happened in Mexico. Nevertheless, out of that French revolution came the liberal ideas that have dominated in so many countries, including our own. I hope that out of the bloodletting in Mexico some such good yet may come.'

Having thus instructed his visitor as to the benefits which must perforce accrue to mankind out of the systematic robbery, murder, torture and rape of people holding a proscribed religious conviction, the professor of politics [Wilson] suggested that Father Kelley visit Secretary of State Williams Jennings Bryan, who expressed his deepest sympathy. Obviously, the Wilson administration was committed to supporting the revolutionaries. All efforts of Catholics to succor their coreligionists across the border were to prove fruitless, as they were to prove once again in 1924, when the fiercest persecution of all was begun by President Plutarco Calles. (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1970, p. 274.)

 

Bishop Kelley described Wilson's steadfast support for the Carranza regime and justified his refusal to assist Catholics being persecuted in Mexico:

Carranza was chosen by the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, to be the President of Mexico. When the Turks massacred the Armenians the Christian world shouted its protest. When the Russians murdered the Jews the shout was repeated. No people shouted louder against the massacres than the Americans and the English. About the horrors perpetrated against the Catholics of Mexico few voices were raised. President Wilson told an Indianapolis audience that he would allow the Mexicans to shed all the blood they wanted. He told me in his office in the White house that, as the inspiration of democracy had come out of the French Revolution, which had shed as much blood as Carranza and his men, perhaps something good would come out of the Mexican debacle. His words were offered in consolation. I thanked him and withdrew. (Bishop Francis Clement Kelley, Blood-Drenched Altars, published originally in 1935 by the Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1987, p. 237.)

John Locke is thus very important to understand as his ideology is the foundation of almost everything that transpires in electoral and public-policy decision-making, and he did exercised a very strong influence upon the mind of Thomas Jefferson prior to the writing of the Declaration of Independence.

There were a number of influences upon the minds of the founders of the United States of America. Although it is certainly true that there were remnants of Christianity that influenced many of them, it is also true, truer than the late Dr. Russell Kirk contended in The Roots of American Order, the principal influences upon the founders, who had, of course, received a classical education, were from the so-called “Enlightenment” authors, of which John Locke was very prominent.

II. The Institutions of Self-Rule Begin to Take Root in the Colonies

The settlement of the English colonies up and down the Atlantic seaboard of what became the United States of American began in 1607 with the arrival of colonists in Jamestown, Virginia, near what modern-day Williamsburg, Virginia, where a restored colonial village has been in operation since 1932. Unlike the case of the Spanish, French and Portuguese conquerors in the Americas, each of whom brought missionaries to evangelize the native populations and to serve their own sacramental needs as well (the missionaries were frequently in conflict with the civil authorities whenever the native peoples were being mistreated), those who settled in Jamestown came purely for commercial reasons. Indeed, the Dutch, who settled New Amsterdam, which became the Colony of New York for the first time in 1664 and then, after a fifteen year interregnum of Dutch rule once again between 1673 and 1688, permanently in 1688, did not even have a church until 1628 after settling there in 1609.

Mercantilism characterized the life the English colonists in Virginia and the Carolinas and the Dutch in New Amsterdam, which meant that the colonists shipped raw materials to the mother country to be manufactured into finished goods. The finished goods were then shipped back to the colonies for sale.

Other colonists, however, specifically the Pilgrims, who were a group of people followers of the theology of John Calvin desirous of a total break from the Anglican Church that had been stated by King Henry VIII when he broke from the Catholic Church in order to marry his mistress while his true wife was still living, and the Quakers, came for religious reasons. The Pilgrims founded the Plymouth Bay Colony in 1620, which merged with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was founded in 1630, in 1691.

Unlike the colonists in Virginia, who had started the first colonial legislature, the House of Burgesses in 1619, the Pilgrims came for specifically religious reasons. They wanted to base a government upon their Calvinist beliefs, and thus it is that they based what can be called the “first American constitution,” the Mayflower Compact, on those beliefs.

The specific beliefs of the Pilgrims, who believed what the Puritans did but did not want to remain part of the Anglican Church as it was still too Catholic in its structure and liturgical rites, are as follows:

1. Man is evil. This is a corruption of the teaching that had preceded Martin Luther and John Calvin, namely that Original Sin wounds human nature, not corrupts it totally. Human nature is inclined to the commission of evil, but is not itself evil. “Pure” followers of John Calvin reject this.

2. Man is predestined to Heaven or to Hell. Nothing that one could do during his life could the change of his eternal predestination. The “God” of the Pilgrims was thus arbitrary, consigning some people to Hell while saving others without any regard for the choices that they had made while living. This is a denial of human free will, which is the ability of human beings to choose between good and evil, something that even many of the pagan writers of antiquity understood and accepted.

3. The purpose of government, therefore, was to separate the saved from damned. Only the “elect,” the “saved,” could participate in the political and social life of the community. God alone, however, knows the subjective state of souls. While it is what is called a Spiritual Work of Mercy to instruct the ignorant and to admonish the sinner, God alone knows the subjective culpability of one who is making sinful choices in the objective order of things. To seek to identify the “elect” and the “damned” is thus to arrogate unto oneself what belongs to God alone when He renders the Particular Judgment on a soul at the time of death.

4. Governments had to be created by and with the consent of those to be governed. Predating John Locke by seventy years, the Pilgrims believed that civil governance is a creation of the governed rather than part of the nature of things.

5. The Pilgrims believed that it was possible to separate the saved from the damned on the basis of their material wealth or lack thereof. Those who were “saved” were thought to be the industrious and prosperous. Those who were “damned” were thought to be those who were poor and lacked the necessary “skills” to be wealthy. This belief, expressed as it was by those who claimed to be Christians, ignored the fact that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother chose to live in poverty and to toil at hard manual labor in such poverty as a carpenter until the death of His foster-father, Saint Joseph, when He was thirty years of age, at which time He commenced His Public Ministry.

Although the theological content of these beliefs, that are really little different than the Judaism of the Old Testament, are no longer accepted by most Americans (although some, especially those who belong to the Constitution Party, formerly known as the U.S, Taxpayers Party, share them entirely and use them to form the foundation of their political platform), the belief that material success is a sign of Divine election has become a fundamental part of American materialism. That is, this belief has become emptied of its theological dimensions over time for most people, expressing itself as the belief that one’s self-esteem and very identity is based, in whole or in part, on the degree to which he has been materially successful.  Almost the entirety of electoral politics in the United States today revolves around issues of economic prosperity: the Democratic Party claims to be able to realize such prosperity for everyone by policies of income redistribution, which is a euphemism for class warfare against the wealthy by means of confiscatory taxes, and the Republican Party claims to be able to realize such prosperity by lower taxes, better managed social-welfare programs and inducements to the private sector to increase wealth and thus employ more Americans.

In plain English, American politics revolves around the Money, the Money, the Money. Oh, have I mentioned “The Money”? In other words, all most people care about is their pocketbook, believing that economic well-being is the sole purpose of human existence and the only measure of success. Indeed, it was as early as 1846 that writer Orestes Brownson questioned whether this emphasis on materialism was to the benefit of the American republic (see the appendix to this review sheet for an excerpt of Brownson’s article on “National Greatness”).

Although the last colony to be established, Georgia, was not founded until 1732, the colonies that were established in the Seventeenth Century, that is, the 1600s, established institutions of limited self-government. Colonial governments were limited in their powers by the British Crown and by the fact that participation in those governments were limited for the most part to those who were white, propertied men over the age of twenty-five and who were of the official religion of the colony. It was, if you will, a form of aristocracy. Nevertheless, however, it was a start in the direction of American self-rule. This experiment in limited self-rule would evolve over the course of one hundred fifty-seven years, that is, from the time of the first meeting of the House of Burgesses in 1619 and the founding of the Plymouth Colony in 1620, to the time of the Second Continental Congress and the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The traditions of self-rule varied from colony to colony. In general, though, there was a colonial governor, who was appointed by the British Crown or appointed by the Parliament in the king’s name. There were colonial legislatures, which were elected by those eligible to vote. Members of a colonial governor’s council advised the governor on various matters of policy, serving also in a judicial capacity.

There were three types of colonies during the time of the evolution of limited self-rule between 1619 and 1776.

The first was a Royal Colony, which was governed directly by the British Crown.

The second was a Charter Colony, which was granted to the colonists under conditions acceptable to Parliament.

The third was the Proprietary Colony, which was granted to individuals, such as William Penn, for settlement.

The American colonies became thirteen in number with the addition of Georgia in 1732 and the merger of Plymouth with the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1690, the mergers of East Jesrey and West Jersey into New Jersey, which received permission from Great Britain for its own government in 1738 despite settlement there going back to Dutch times a century beforehand, and the division of the Carolina Colony into North and South Carolina in 1729.

Here is a list of the thirteen colonies and their date of establishment:

1. Virginia, 1607.

2. New York, 1626.

3. Massachusetts, 1630.

4. Maryland, 1633.

5. Rhode Island 1636.

6. Connecticut, 1636.

7. Rhode Island, 1638.

8. New Hampshire, 1638.

9-10. Carolina, 1653, which became North and South Carolina in 1729, although the history of this is very complex.

11. New Jersey, 1664, noting the brief history given above.

12. Pennsylvania, 1668,

13. Georgia, 1732.

As noted above, the Plymouth Colony existed from 1620 to 1791.

Thus it is that a deep history of limited self-rule took deep root in the English-speaking colonies up and down the East Coast of what became the United States of America.

This having been noted, however, not all was “peaches and cream” in the colonies as certain minorities, such as the enslaved Africans, and Catholics were disenfranchised. For a history of the persecution of Catholics in the thirteen colonies, a persecution that lasted, at least on a de facto basis (as a matter of fact of social life) throughout much of the Nineteenth Century and still exists today among the so-called “progressive”, see Dr. Marian Therese Horvat’s Let None Dare Call It Liberty.

Such persecution of Catholics was to be found also in British Canada. The Lord Governor of Nova Scotia, which was known as Acadia under French rule in New France, ordered the deportation of all Catholics in Nova Scotia in 1755 who would not abandon their Faith in order to swear allegiance to the Anglican Church. Entire families were separated from each other. Those deported faced force slavery, especially in Connecticut, when seeking refuge from the persecution. Many eventually settled in Louisiana, intermarrying with the indigenous people there. Thus was born the Cajuns in the Acadiana region of Louisiana (see http://www.boostdam.net/Canada/acadians2.htm.) Queen Elizabeth II got around to issuing an official apology for this massive exercise of social engineering in 2003.

The government of Great Britain left the colonists in what evolved into the thirteen colonies with a policy of what is described as Salutary or Benign Neglect. That is, the king and the members of Parliament were content to leave the colonists, whom they viewed with contempt as backwoodsmen and ruffians who were not equal in dignity to them, the supposedly “superior” and “civilized” Englishmen. The colonists were, at least for the most part, left alone as long as they obeyed the king’s laws, paid the king’s taxes and shipped raw materials to the mother country for manufacture (mercantilism, remember?) and sale back in the colonies.

This began to change during the 1750s and 1760s during the French and Indian Wars in North America between 1754 and 1763 and the Seven Years’ War in Europe between 1756 and 1763. Wars are expensive. Troops needed to paid, fed, quartered and transported. Arms had to be manufactured. Debts contracted to pay for the costs of wars had to be repaid. Thus it is that the Parliament began to impose a series of taxes upon the American colonies in the 1760s that would serve as a large part of the impetus in the direction of independence in 1776.

To be sure, it was as early as 1752 that Benjamin Franklin, then forty-eight years of age, proposed what became known as the Albany Plan for independence, which would have united the colonies as an independent nation that was under the British Crown. Even this, however, was unacceptable to the British. There could be no thought of granting the ruffians independence. The British liked the relationship just the way it had been since the early Seventeenth Century.

Here is a list of various events and of the taxes and measures that the British imposed on the colonists between 1763 and 1776:

1763

10 February Signing of the Treaty of Paris

Ending the Seven Year’s War, also known as the French and Indian War in North America.  France ceded all mainland North American territories, except New Orleans, in order to retain her Caribbean sugar islands. Britain gained all territory east of the Mississippi River; Spain kept territory west of the Mississippi, but exchanged East and West Florida for Cuba.

1763

7 October Proclamation of 1763

Wary of the cost of defending the colonies, George III prohibited all settlement west of the Appalachian mountains without guarantees of security from local Native American nations. The intervention in colonial affairs offended the thirteen colonies' claim to the exclusive right to govern lands to their west.

1764

5 April Sugar Act

The first attempt to finance the defence of the colonies by the British Government. In order to deter smuggling and to encourage the production of British rum, taxes on molasses were dropped; a levy was placed on foreign Madeira wine and colonial exports of iron, lumber and other goods had to pass first through Britain and British customs. The Act established a Vice-Admiralty Court in Halifax, Nova Scotia to hear smuggling cases without jury and with the presumption of guilt. These measures led to widespread protest.

1765

22 March Stamp Act

Seeking to defray some of the costs of garrisoning the colonies, Parliament required all legal documents, newspapers and pamphlets required to use watermarked, or 'stamped' paper on which a levy was placed.

1765

15 May Quartering Act

Colonial assemblies required to pay for supplies to British garrisons. The New York assembly argued that it could not be forced to comply.

1765

30 May Virginian Resolution

The Virginian assembly refused to comply with the Stamp Act.

1765

7-25 October Stamp Act Congress

Representatives from nine of the thirteen colonies declare the Stamp Act unconstitutional as it was a tax levied without their consent.

1766

18 March Declaratory Act

Parliament finalises the repeal of the Stamp Act, but declares that it has the right to tax colonies

1767

29 June Townshend Revenue Act (Townshend Duties)

Duties on tea, glass, lead, paper and paint to help pay for the administration of the colonies, named after Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. John Dickinson publishes Letter from a Philadelphian Farmer in protest. Colonial assemblies condemn taxation without representation.

1768

1 Oct British Troops arrive in Boston in response to political unrest.

1770

5 March Boston Massacre

Angered by the presence of troops and Britain's colonial policy, a crowd began harassing a group of soldiers guarding the customs house; a soldier was knocked down by a snowball and discharged his musket, sparking a volley into the crowd which kills five civilians.

1770

12 April Repeal of the Townshend Revenue Act

1772

10 June Burning of the Gaspee

The revenue schooner Gaspee ran aground near Providence, Rhode Island and was burnt by locals angered by the enforcement of trade legislation.

1773

July Publication of Thomas Hutchinson letters

In these letters, Hutchinson, the Massachusetts governor, advocated a 'great restraint of natural liberty', convincing many colonists of a planned British clamp-down on their freedoms.

1773

10 May Tea Act

In an effort to support the ailing East India Company, Parliament exempted its tea from import duties and allowed the Company to sell its tea directly to the colonies. Americans resented what they saw as an indirect tax subsidising a British company.

1773

16 December Boston Tea Party

Angered by the Tea Acts, American patriots disguised as Mohawk Indians dump £9,000 of East India Company tea into the Boston harbour.

1774

May to June   Intolerable Acts

Four measures which stripped Massachusetts of self-government and judicial independence following the Boston Tea Party. The colonies responded with a general boycott of British goods.

1774

September Continental Congress

Colonial delegates meet to organise opposition to the Intolerable Acts.

1775

19 April Battles of Lexington and Concord

First engagements of the Revolutionary War between British troops and the Minutemen, who had been warned of the attack by Paul Revere.

1775

16 June Continental Congress appoints George Washington commander-in-chief of Continental Army; issued $2 million bills of credit to fund the army.

1775

17 June Battle of Bunker Hill

The first major battle of the War of Independence. Sir William Howe dislodged William Prescott's forces overlooking Boston at a cost of 1054 British casualties to the Americans' 367.

1775

5 July Olive-Brach Petition

Congress endorses a proposal asking for recognition of American rights, the ending of the Intolerable Acts in exchange for a cease fire. George III rejected the proposal and on 23 August 1775 declared the colonies to be in open rebellion.

1776

9 January Thomas Paine's Common Sense published anonymously in Philadelphia

1776

2 May France provides covert aid to the Americans

1776

4 July Continental Congress Proclaims the Declaration of Independence (see American Revolution Timeline.)

Although this is a very good listing of the events that occurred and the measures that were imposed by the British between 1763 and 1776, there is one important omission: The Quebec Act of 1774. Although the Quebec Act concerned the religious liberties of Catholics in British Canada, its proclamation aroused anti-Catholic emotions among many of the leading colonists in the American colonies. Indeed, the Quebec Act was the principal factor that led to the establishment of the First Continental Congress and to the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress.

Perhaps after learning the lessons of the Grand Derangement of the Catholics in Nova Scotia nineteen years before, the British eventually decided to extend religious “toleration” to the Catholics of Quebec in the Quebec Act, which was approved by King George III on June 22, 1774. Being unwilling to see the denizens of the recently captured New France show any allegiance to the English colonists to their south, who had been complaining about excessive taxation and royal measures that were believed to curb legitimate human liberties, the British government wanted to secure the cooperation and allegiance of the Catholics in Quebec.

It will be noticed that the men noted for their devotion to “liberty” in the thirteen colonies of what became the United States of America did not believe that “liberty” extended to the Catholic refugees from Acadia, enslaving some and persecuting the rest. It was this hatred of Catholics that caused colonists to consider the Quebec Act as “intolerable” as it was a sign, at least to them, that the British were beginning to slacken in their resolve against “popery” when the truth of the matter was the act demonstrated British pragmatism in the face of a populace more numerous and prosperous than were the Acadians who were dispersed in Nova Scotia.

Robert Leckie described the flames of hatred that were fanned by anti-Catholic propagandists in the colonies in the immediate aftermath of the Quebec Act:This piece of legislation had not only confirmed the French in the free exercise of their religion and the practice of their native law, it had also granted the Quebec government those lands in the west which the English colonies claimed. Now, the colonists fancied themselves surrounded by French-speaking Catholics, the old enemy of former years, and their rage was so unbounded that on October 21, 1774, the [First] Continental Congress addressed a letter to the British people admonishing them for tolerating in America a religion which “has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world.”

One again, it was popular to quote Samuel Adams, who had said six years earlier [that is, in 1768]: “I did verily believe, as I do still, that much more is to be dreaded from the growth of popery in America, than from the Stamp Act or any other acts destructive of civil rights. . . .” Once again, the popular press picked up the old anti-Catholic cudgels, and one journal went so far as to predict: “We may live to see our churches converted into mass houses and our lands plundered by tythes for the support of the Popish clergy. The Inquisition may erect her standard in Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia may yet experience the carnage of St. Bartholomew’s Day.” Others, misrepresenting the truth of the Quebec Act, insisted that it actually established Romanism as an official religion, and warned: ‘If Gallic Papists have a right To worship their own way Then farewell to the liberties Of poor America.’

Ministers, of course, were in full voice once more, but so also were John Adams, apparently recovered from his momentary lapse into tolerance, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, the inevitable Samuel Adams, and none other than Washington’s protégé and confidante, Alexander Hamilton, who thundered: “If [Parliament] had any regard to the freedom and happiness of mankind they would not have done it. If they had been friends to the Protestant cause, they would never have provided such a nursery for its greatest enemy . . . They may as well establish Popery in New York and the other colonies as they did in Canada!”

More than the Stamp Act, perhaps more than any other act by Parliament or any British minister, the Quebec Act was a direct cause of the American Revolution. It so inflamed colonial hatred of the mother country that even that staunch and solid Protestant, King George III, was accused of being a Jesuit in disguise, and his statues, from which the rebels later were to melt so many serviceable bullets, were adored with mocking rosaries. Meanwhile, patriots such as Paul Revere did a brisk business in scurrilous engravings which depicted His Majesty and his Ministers clothed in the livery of the Pope of Rome. To the Catholics of colonial America–who actually represented no more than 1 per cent of the total population of three million persons–it appeared that it was time to pull tight the shutters again, and it was this furor of anti-Catholic sentiment that rose about the ears of Father John Carroll when he returned to his native Maryland in 1774. (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, Doubleday, 1970, pp. 45-47.)

Look at those names. John Adams. Samuel Adams. Alexander Hamilton. Paul Revere. These are not men to admire as they were bigots, and it was this bigotry that caused many to cry for independence from Great Britain with greater firmness than before. In need of support for independence from the leading Catholics of the colonies, including the Carroll family of Maryland, the founders adopted the same sort of pragmatic tone as the British two years later, hoping to coopt (that is, to undermine) “loyalty to Rome” with promises of a “liberty” was designed to convince Catholics to accept the “American way” of liberty, not Church teaching, as the means of judging matters of Faith and Morals, a strategy that worked brilliantly over the course of time. Alas, that is a topic for my articles and books. It is important though, to understand this as the movement for independence had many and varied causes and motivations.

The approximately four million people who lived in the American colonies in the 1770s were divided pretty equally concerning independence. One-third of them favored independence, calling themselves “The Patriots,” one-third opposed independence, calling themselves “Loyalists,” and one-third, mostly living on the Western frontier (the Appalachian mountain region, Ohio, Kentucky), were complete indifferent or apathetic about independence.

Historians have debated whether the conditions for a justified rebellion against the British Crown existed. This is a matter of legitimate debate on which there is no necessarily “right” or “wrong” answer. Passions ran high at the time. Debate about the matter can be intense at scholarly meetings even today.

One of those who opposed independence was a pistol-packing Anglican preacher, Jonathan Boucher, who argued against rebellion on the grounds that to do so would be to rebel against the civil order that God had in His Divine Providence seen fit to establish for the American colonists. Boucher provided a telling criticism of John Locke’s “philosophy” that is also very similar to the one found in this study.  

. . I entreat your indulgence, whilst, without too nicely scrutinizing the propriety of deducing from a text a doctrine which it clearly does not suggest, I once more adopt a plan already chalked out for me, and deliver to you what occurs to me as proper for a Christian audience to attend to on the subject of Liberty....

Obedience to government is every man's duty, because it is every man's interest; but it is particularly incumbent on Christians, because (in addition to its moral fitness) it is enjoined by the positive commands of God; and, therefore, when Christians are disobedient to human ordinances, they are also disobedient to God. If the form of government under which the good providence of God has been pleased to place us be mild and free, it is our duty to enjoy it with gratitude and with thankfulness and, in particular, to be careful not to abuse it by licentiousness. If it be less indulgent and less liberal than in reason it ought to be, still it is our duty not to disturb and destroy the peace of the community by becoming refractory and rebellious subjects and resisting the ordinances of God. However humiliating such acquiescence may seem to men of warm and eager minds, the wisdom of God in having made it our duty is manifest. For, as it is the natural temper and bias of the human mind to be impatient under restraint, it was wise and merciful in the blessed Author of our religion not to add any new impulse to the natural force of this prevailing propensity but, with the whole weight of his authority, altogether to discountenance every tendency to disobedience.

If it were necessary to vindicate the Scriptures for this their total unconcern about a principle which so many other writings seem to regard as the first of all human considerations, it might be observed that, avoiding the vague and declamatory manner of such writings, and avoiding also the useless and impracticable subtleties of metaphysical definitions, these Scriptures have better consulted the great general interests of mankind, by summarily recommending and enjoining a conscientious reverence for law whether human or divine. To respect the laws is to respect liberty in the only rational sense in which the term can be used, for liberty consists in a subserviency to law. "Where there is no law," says Mr. Locke, "there is no freedom." The mere man of nature (if such an one there ever was) has no freedom: all his lifetime he is subject to bondage. It is by being included within the pale of civil polity and government that he takes his rank in society as a free man.

Hence it follows that we are free, or otherwise, as we are governed by law, or by the mere arbitrary will, or wills, of any individual, or any number of individuals. And liberty is not the setting at nought and despising established laws -- much less the making our own wills the rule of our own actions, or the actions of others -- and not bearing (whilst yet we dictate to others) the being dictated to, even by the laws of the land; but it is the being governed by law and by law only. The Greeks described Eleutheria, or Liberty, as the daughter of Jupiter, the supreme fountain of power and law. And the Romans, in like manner, always drew her with the pretor's wand (the emblem of legal power and authority), as well as with the cap. Their idea, no doubt, was that liberty was the fair fruit of just authority and that it consisted in men's being subjected to law. The more carefully well-devised restraints of law are enacted, and the more rigorously they are executed in any country, the greater degree of civil liberty does that country enjoy. To pursue liberty, then, in a manner not warranted by law, whatever the pretense may be, is clearly to be hostile to liberty; and those persons who thus promise you liberty are themselves the servants of corruption.

"Civil liberty (says an excellent writer) is a severe and a restrained thing; implies, in the notion of it, authority, settled subordinations, subjection, and obedience; and is altogether as much hurt by too little of this kind, as by too much of it. And the love of liberty, when it is indeed the love of liberty, which carries us to withstand tyranny, will as much carry us to reverence authority, and to support it; for this most obvious reason, that one is as necessary to the being of liberty, as the other is destructive of it. And, therefore, the love of liberty which does not produce this effect, the love of liberty which is not a real principle of dutiful behavior toward authority, is as hypocritical as the religion which is not productive of a good life. Licentiousness is, in truth, such an excess of liberty as is of the same nature with tyranny. For, what is the difference betwixt them, but that one is lawless power exercised under pretense of authority, or by persons vested with it; the other, lawless power exercised under pretense of liberty, or without any pretense at all? A people, then, must always be less free in proportion as they are more licentious, licentiousness being not only different from liberty but directly contrary to it -- a direct breach upon it."

True liberty, then, is a liberty to do everything that is right, and the being restrained from doing anything that is wrong. So far from our having a right to do everything that we please, under a notion of liberty, liberty itself is limited and confined -- but limited and confined only by laws which are at the same time both its foundation and its support. It can, however, hardly be necessary to inform you that ideas and notions respecting liberty, very different from these, are daily suggested in the speeches and the writings of the times; and also that some opinions on the subject of government at large, which appear to me to be particularly loose and dangerous, are advanced in the sermon now under consideration; and that, therefore, you will acknowledge the propriety of my bestowing some farther notice on them both.

It is laid down in this sermon, as a settled maxim, that the end of government is "the common good of mankind." I am not sure that the position itself is indisputable; but, if it were, it would by no means follow that "this common good being matter of common feeling, government must therefore have been instituted by common consent." There is an appearance of logical accuracy and precision in this statement; but it is only an appearance. The position is vague and loose; and the assertion is made without an attempt to prove it. If by men's "common feelings" we are to understand that principle in the human mind called common sense, the assertion is either unmeaning and insignificant, or it is false. In no instance have mankind ever yet agreed as to what is, or is not, "the common good." A form or mode of government cannot be named, which these "common feelings" and "common consent," the sole arbiters, as it seems, of "common good," have not, at one time or another, set up and established, and again pulled down and reprobated. What one people in one age have concurred in establishing as the "common good," another in another age have voted to be mischievous and big with ruin. The premises, therefore, that "the common good is matter of common feeling," being false, the consequence drawn from it, viz., that government was instituted by "common consent," is of course equally false.

This popular notion, that government was originally formed by the consent or by a compact of the people, rests on, and is supported by, another similar notion, not less popular, nor better founded. This other notion is that the whole human race is born equal; and that no man is naturally inferior, or, in any respect, subjected to another; and that he can be made subject to another only by his own consent. The position is equally ill-founded and false both in its premises and conclusions. In hardly any sense that can be imagined is the position strictly true; but, as applied to the case under consideration, it is demonstrably not true. Man differs from man in everything that can be supposed to lead to supremacy and subjection, as one star differs from another star in glory. It was the purpose of the Creator that man should be social; but, without government, there can be no society; nor, without some relative inferiority and superiority, can there be any government. A musical instrument composed of chords, keys, or pipes, all perfectly equal in size and power, might as well be expected to produce harmony, as a society composed of members all perfectly equal to be productive of order and peace. If (according to the idea of the advocates of this chimerical scheme of equality) no man could rightfully be compelled to come in and be a member even of a government to be formed by a regular compact, but by his own individual consent, it clearly follows, from the same principles, that neither could he rightfully be made or compelled to submit to the ordinances of any government already formed, to which he has not individually or actually consented. On the principle of equality, neither his parents, nor even the vote of a majority of the society (however virtuously and honorably that vote might be obtained), can have any such authority over any man. Neither can it be maintained that acquiescence implies consent; because acquiescence may have been extorted from impotence or incapacity. Even an explicit consent can bind a man no longer than he chooses to be bound. The same principle of equality that exempts him from being governed without his own consent clearly entitles him to recall and resume that consent whenever he sees fit; and he alone has a right to judge when and for what reasons it may be resumed.

Any attempt, therefore, to introduce this fantastic system into practice would reduce the whole business of social life to the wearisome, confused, and useless task of mankind's first expressing, and then withdrawing, their consent to an endless succession of schemes of government. Governments, though always forming, would never be completely formed; for the majority today might be the minority tomorrow, and, of course, that which is now fixed might and would be soon unfixed. Mr. Locke indeed says that, "by consenting with others to make one body-politic under government, a man puts himself under an obligation to every one of that society to submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded by it." For the sake of the peace of society, it is undoubtedly reasonable and necessary that this should be the case; but, on the principles of the system now under consideration, before Mr. Locke or any of his followers can have authority to say that it actually is the case, it must be stated and proved that every individual man, on entering into the social compact, did first consent, and declare his consent, to be concluded and bound in all cases by the vote of the majority. In making such a declaration, he would certainly consult both his interest and his duty; but at the same time he would also completely relinquish the principle of equality, and eventually subject himself to the possibility of being governed by ignorant and corrupt tyrants. Mr. Locke himself afterward disproves his own position respecting this supposed obligation to submit to the "determination of the majority", when he argues that a right of resistance still exists in the governed; for, what is resistance but a recalling and resuming the consent heretofore supposed to have been given, and in fact refusing to submit to the "determination of the majority"? It does not clearly appear what Mr. Locke exactly meant by what he calls "the determination of the majority"; but the only rational and practical public manner of declaring "the determination of the majority" is by law: the laws, therefore, in all countries, even in those that are despotically governed, are to be regarded as the declared "determination of a majority'' of the members of that community; because, in such cases, even acquiescence only must be looked upon equivalent to a declaration. A right of resistance, therefore, for which Mr. Locke contends, is incompatible with the duty of submitting to the determination of "the majority," for which he also contends.

It is indeed impossible to carry into effect any government which, even by compact, might be framed with this reserved right of resistance. Accordingly there is no record that any such government ever was so formed. If there had, it must have carried the seeds of its decay in its very constitution. For, as those men who make a government (certain that they have the power) can have no hesitation to vote that they also have the right to unmake it, and as the people, in all circumstances, but more especially when trained to make and unmake governments, are at least as well disposed to do the latter as the former, it is morally impossible that there should be anything like permanency or stability in a government so formed. Such a system, therefore, can produce only perpetual dissensions and contests and bring back mankind to a supposed state of nature, arming every man's hand, like Ishmael's, against every man, and rendering the world an aceldama, or field of blood.

Such theories of government seem to give something like plausibility to the notions of those other modern theorists who regard all governments as invasions of the natural rights of men, usurpations, and tyranny. On this principle it would follow, and could not be denied, that government was indeed fundamentally, as our people are sedulously taught it still is, an evil. Yet it is to government that mankind owe their having, after their fall and corruption, been again reclaimed, from a state of barbarity and war, to the conveniency and the safety of the social state; and it is by means of government that society is still preserved, the weak protected from the strong, and the artless and innocent from the wrongs of proud oppressors. It was not without reason, then, that Mr. Locke asserted that a greater wrong cannot be done to prince and people than is done by "propagating wrong notions concerning government." (Jonathan Boucher On The Rebellion.)

This remains a very fine, prescient criticism of the whole foundation of modern civil government. Unfortunately for Mr. Boucher, however, he did not realize that his own church, the Anglican Church, was born in rebellion and bloodshed, thus creating the conditions and “traditions” that would lead to the triumph of “Enlightenment” authors such as John Locke and David Hume, et al. Boucher was undoubtedly correct in his assessment of his times and the inherent fallacies of the Lockean system as God does not need the “consent” of His creatures to govern them. Governance exists in the nature of things.

Ah, Jonathan Boucher’s defense of simple truths that exist in the nature of things fell upon deaf ears among those who desired independence. The late-Eighteenth Century was the time of “reason,” and it was based upon reason alone that the men of Philadelphia would attempt to balance the tension between liberty and order in a “new” way that made men into demigods and their governmental structures as the true “churches” outside of which there is no secular salvation.

Others, such as Parliamentarian Edmund Burke from Northern Ireland, who is seem as the father of “conservatism” (the political ideology that seeks to appear to “traditional values” on a secular or nondenominational basis to oppose the advances of liberalism), vigorously supported the cause for American independence in the British House of Commons. Burke was no radical revolutionary. He believed that the causes for a just rebellion had been met, believing, perhaps too naively, that the colonists who were advancing American independence would “conserve,” not jettison, the past.

Convinced that there was no remedy other than rebellion, the men of the Second Continental Congress decided to authorize a committee, headed by Thomas Jefferson, a rationalist who had translated the New Testament from the Greek Seputagint into English that included his removal of all of the miracles worked by Our Lord Jesus Christ (I am sorry, I cannot refer to Him in any other manner), including His Bodily Resurrection from the dead on Easter Sunday.

Jefferson was a disciple of John Locke, believing in the ideas of the “social contract” of the inherent right of revolution, two of the cornerstones of Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government. Jefferson was a pure libertarian, that is, one who believed that people should be free to do pretty much what they desired as long as others were not hurt in the process. He knew, of course, that most of the people of colonies were believing Protestants of one sort or another, thus crafting the Declaration of Independence, which, quite unlike what Dr. Russell Kirk contended (and his contention is a common one among scholars, to be sure), to appear pietistic while referring to God in terms of complete Judeo-Masonic rationalism (Creator, Nature’s God, Supreme Judge of the Universe). Jefferson’s use of vague, naturalistic terms to refer to God was very clever as he knew full well that those supporting the cause of independence would project their own particular denominational beliefs into his terminology. And Jefferson only made this concession to the prevailing religious sentiments of the day after his original draft of the declaration omitted any reference even to a “Creator.”

Jefferson, you see, believed that all religion is but mere superstition. Here are some examples from letters he wrote:

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Alexander von Humboldt, December, 1813.)

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them. (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Roger Weigthman, June 24, 1826, ten days before Jefferson's death.)

Mr. Jefferson failed to understand that it was in the monasteries of Saint Benedict and those in Ireland that kept learning alive during the barbaric invasions of the middle of the First Millennium. Thus it was that he used deliberately vague language in the Declaration of Independence after he realize that making no even passing reference to a deity would not be politically tenable.

The Declaration of Independence, therefore, is both a statement of American political theory as it had evolved from the time of the House of Burgesses in 1619 and the Mayflower Compact in 1620 and a listing of a “bill of particulars” (a listing of offenses and crimes) attributed to King George III, Parliament and the king’s ministers and military in the colonies. The Declaration of Independence is what Jefferson meant it to be, a rationalistic statement in favor of the “rights of man” without any reference to Divine Revelation.

Here is the theoretical part of the Declaration of Independence, which would be followed by a list of the crimes and offenses attributed to the government of the British Crown:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. (Declaration of Independence.)

The four principal tenets found in the text pasted just above are as follows:

1) We hold these truths to be self-evident. That is, truth of a proposition is true because it is true of its nature. This is called a “tautology” in Logic, which used to be a required core curriculum course in classical Liberal Arts programs up until around sixty to seventy years ago. Not so in today’s world of unbridled relativism. As discussed earlier in this study, truth is a phenomenon that exists in the nature of things and does not depend upon human acceptance for its binding force or validity. It is, of course, a far different matter to accept Jefferson’s listing of self-evident truths as being true. Some of the reasons why they may not be were provided in the passages from one of Jonathan Boucher’s sermons that was quoted earlier.

2) All men are created equal. Scholars still argue about the Jeffersonian concept of equality as mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. As Jonathan Boucher had noted several years before, however, men are not created with equal intelligence or equal abilities and they are not destined to share equally in the bounties of this passing world. Men have equal dignity in the eyes of God, to be sure, though, this is not the whole story as God’s love for His rational creature is inherently unequal. That is, God loves us the more we love Him by means of obeying His Commandments and persisting in states of grace. Although more can be written about what this means, suffice it to say for the moment that Jefferson’s contention was, as Boucher had indicated, contrary to the very nature of things.

Moreover, the existence of chattel slavery in the colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence makes, despite what Russell Kirk contended in The Roots of American Order, the assertion that “all men are created equal” little more than effective political rhetoric. Indeed, Jefferson mean to make a political point, namely, that the colonists in the “backwoods” of the American colonies were the political equals of the “civilized” British. That is the real point of this statement in the Declaration of Independence, although Jefferson did believe in an egalitarianism that was part of the “Enlightenment” authors who had influenced him so profoundly.

3) All men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Yes, rights inhere in the souls of human beings. With rights, however, come responsibilities.

4) That among these rights are the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Jefferson substituted the work “happiness” for Locke’s use of “property,” which had been derived from the Magna Carta, something that was discussed earlier in this brief review sheet (smile). Who defines “happiness”? Even Aristotle, writing from reason alone, concluded that happiness is that state of contentment from choosing the good in accordance with the truth. Jefferson’s use of the term is unclear, although he was clear about the inviolability of innocent human life, which may never be subjected to any direct, intentional attack, and the Natural Law right to private property.

5) That it is to secure these rights that just governments are instituted. Repeating points made before, the contention that governments are instituted rather than being part of the very nature of things is erroneous. However, it was the prevailing belief at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and it is the prevailing belief today. Governments exist to promote the common temporal and eternal good of human beings, something that, for example, Saint Louis IX and many others understood in the Middle Ages.

6) Just governments are founded upon the consent of the governed. Here is the influence of John Calvin upon the Pilgrims and the influence of John Locke, himself a Calvinist, upon the mind of Thomas Jefferson and the other signers of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson was arguing here that British colonial rule in America was unjust because the colonists had not given their consent to be governed by the British Crown, although it should be noted that such consent was implied in their submission of the colonial charters that created the colonies.

7) That men have a right to abolish a government if it fails to secure the aforementioned rights or acts in a positive manner to crush the exercise of them. This is the influence of John Locke’s social contract.

Jefferson then went on to provide a list of particular offenses that were attributed to the British Crown. There is no need to detail these offenses here. What should be noted, however, is that the founders did have natural political courage to put their names to a document that had no standing in British law and was by that token an act of high treason against the British Crown for which they could be hanged by the neck until dead. Jefferson took note of this at the end of the Declaration of Independence as he appealed to the “Supreme Judge of the Universe” for the rectitude of the signers’ intentions:

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And 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. ((Declaration of Independence.)

The Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 2, 1776, and promulgated on July 4, 1776, which is, of course, Independence Day in the United States of America.

Having declared their independence, however, those who had signed the Declaration of Independence had to secure the freedom that they claimed was owed to them. The British, after all, were not going to recognize what they considered to be an act of high treason as legally binding upon them. The colonists had to fight a war to secure their independence, and to this end they had to unite the former colonies into some type of limited national union, something that had not existed before. This goal was made exponentially more difficult by the fact that opposition to independence was strong in many states, especially the Loyalist stronghold of the Colony of New York.

There were only two forms of national government organization then known to exist. That is, there were only two ways by which a national or central government related to sub-national or sub-central governments. Those two forms were the Unitary Form of national government organization and the Confederal Form of national government organization. The founders would create the third form of national government organization, the Federal Form, by borrowing elements from both previously existing forms of national government organization during their deliberations at the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

The Unitary Form of Government may be defined as one in which there exists one level of government that possesses the totality of governing authority. Whatever political subdivisions that may exist are created by the central government to exercise only those powers given to it by the central government within a given set of boundaries. Sovereignty, which is defined as the source of governing authority, resides in the national or central government in the unitary system.

This system is analogous to a corporation, which establishes policies in a home office for all local affiliates. All restaurant franchises, for example, are licensed by a particular corporation to sell items it specifies to be sold within a parameter of pricing that is appropriate to the area in which the franchise is located. Olive Garden Restaurants, which are owned by Darden Restaurants, cannot sell items that are sold at Carrabba’s Italian Grill restaurants, which are owned by Bloomin’ Brands. Get the idea?

A Unitary Form of national government organization thus features a strong central government. It alone has the responsibility to manage everything for a particular nation or state. That is, the responsibility to provide for national defense, a sound currency, international trade and diplomacy and the responsibility to provide for the public health and safety needs of sub-central areas is to be found within the central government. As it is difficult for a central government to manage everything from the capital of a nation or a state, sub-central governments are created to handle certain responsibilities within a set of boundaries established for them by the central government.

This, you see, is what the American colonies were under the British Crown, mere subunits of a central government. And this is what counties, cities, towns, villages, borough and all other units of municipal government are within our fifty states. Eighty-five percent of the world’s nations have Unitary Forms of national government organization, among them being the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Egypt, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Iran, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, San Marino, the State of Vatican City, Andorra, The Republic of Korea, The Democratic Republic of Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, just to name a few.

As the founders had experienced what they believed to be the long arm of British rule in a unitary system, this was obviously not an option for them in 1776 and 1777 when they were deciding to craft a form of national government to unite the former colonies, whose only formal, legal allegiance was to the British Crown.

Thus it is that the founders chose the only other form of national government organization then known to exist, the Confederal Form. The Confederal Form of national government organization is one which there exists a loose coalition of states bound together by a weak central government, which is able to exercise only those powers expressly delegated to it by the state governments. In this system, therefore, the central government cannot act directly upon the people where they live in the states and localities as sovereignty resides in the state governments.

The Confederal Form of national government organization is the polar opposite of the Unitary Form of national government organization. The Unitary Form features a strong central government that creates subdivisions empowered only to exercise those powers given to it by the central government. In the Confederal Form, however, the central government is the creature of the state governments and is empowered to exercise only those powers are expressly delegated to it by them. Sovereignty resides in the center in the Unitary Form, residing in the periphery in the Confederal Form.

The Confederal Form of national government organization is thus composed of preexisting, autonomous (independent), unrelated units whose leaders perceive some advantage, usually that of mutual defense, to be derived from entering into a limited form of national union. The independent units would prefer to remain separate. Necessity, however, compels them to join together for the realization for the mutual good of all member states.

All sports leagues, whether scholastic, collegiate or professional, are associations of independent institutions or organizations that agree to join together into a league for a common schedule of play. A commissioner’s office is created by the member units. A sports commissioner can exercise only those powers explicitly given to him by the member institutions or organizations. This is what the fiercely independent owners of the National League (Boston Braves, New York Giants, Brooklyn Dodgers, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinnati Reds, Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals) and American League (Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, Philadelphia Athletics, Washington Senators, Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers, Chicago White Sox, St. Louis Browns) baseball teams did in 1921 in the aftermath of the infamous “Chicago Black Sox” scandal of 1919, which involved eight members of the Chicago White Sox throwing the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds after they had been paid off by professional gamblers. The owners of the sixteen teams contracted with United States District Court Judge for the Northern District of Illinois, Kennesaw Landis, on November 12, 1920, to serve as the sport’s first commissioner. Landis, a stern judge, demanded total authority to rule the game. He got it. However, he wouldn’t have had such powers unless the team owners had given it to him.

A confederation, therefore, is nothing more or nothing less than a loose association of independent organizations or states to accomplish a given objective or set of objectives, and it was this form that the founders chose to have to establish the “United States of America, In Congress Assembled” under the Articles of Confederation. The Articles were proposed on November 15, 1777, but did not go into effect until it was ratified on March 1, 1781, replacing the Second Continental Congress. The government under the Articles of Confederation lasted until the Constitution of the United States of America took effect on September 13, 1788. The period of history under the Articles of Confederation is known as the “Critical Period” as it was during its seven year life that  American independence, which had been secured in war and recognized by the British in the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783, came close to being lost.

The government under the Articles of Confederation was based on the tenets of the Old Republicanism, principles that were quintessentially Lockean. Those tenets were:

1. The government that governs the best, governs the least. The founders had a fear of strong central government, having lived under the might of the British Crown, As some were familiar with John Locke, there was a general belief that government was an artificial imposition upon human society and thus posed a threat to human liberty. The only way to keep government “safe” was to keep it weak and limited, attempting to find a balance between liberty and order by favoring what was believed to be liberty rather than order.

2. Liberty is best protected in the small states. As government was deemed to be a threat to human liberty of its nature, the prevailing belief in the Eighteenth Century was that the only safe government was that which was closest to the people. After all, without the means of mass communication and rapid transportation that we take for granted today, the only way to know what had happened in far off location was by word-of-mouth, usually delivered by a messenger who walked or rode a horse, or in pamphlets of one sort or another. It was thus easier to keep track of what a government did at the state or local level rather than vest too much power in a government whose capital was not close to the bulk of the population it governed.

3. Tyranny begins where annual elections end. That is, the confederal system, which is what governed the Confederate States of America between 1861 and 1865, is founded on a distrust of politics as the temptation to use political power for personal gain was so widespread that the only way to keep elected officials honest and accountable was for them to stand for election every year.

The beginning of the text of the Articles of Confederation makes it clear that the founders sought to create only a league of friendship, a partnership, if you will, and nothing more than that, a system in which the central government was the mere creature of the state governments and could only exercise those powers given to it specifically by those state governments:

Article I. The Stile of this Confederacy shall be "The United States of America."

Article II. Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.

Article III. The said States hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any other pretense whatever. (The Articles of Confederation.)

One can see plainly that the definition of the confederal system provided earlier is reflected in the very words of the Articles of Confederation that created the first government of the United States of America.

The government under the Articles of Confederation had the following features:

1) A unicameral (one house) Congress. Although states had multiple delegates, each state had only one vote to cast in the Congress. This reflected the confederal principle of the inherent equality of the member units.

2) It took a vote of nine states in Congress to pass a law/

3) All thirteen state legislatures had to ratify an amendment to the Articles of Confederation.

4) The national government had no authority to enforce laws directly upon the people. Whatever laws were passed by the Federal government under the Articles had to be enforced by the state governments, which could simply ignore such laws with complete impunity.

5) There was no national executive or national judiciary.

The government under the Articles of Confederation was thus weak by the deliberate design of its very text. Remember, the goal of the Articles was to preserve liberty by preventing the creation of a strong central government.

Ultimately, however, this government proved to be too weak to the task of realizing even the limited goals for which it had been created. Although the government under the Articles did accomplish a few things, including the passage of the Northwest Ordinances of 1787 that established the process of admitting new states to the Union that were incorporated later into Article IV of the Constitution of the United States of America, its inherent weakness and its utter inability to provide for any means of limited order led to rebellions within various states and to great disgruntlement among veterans of the War for Independence who had gone years without their back pay. The currency issued by the government under the Articles of Confederation was worthless.

The crisis was so pronounced by the mid-1780s that many of our leading founding fathers came to realize that something had to be done lest the independence that had been secured by the Treaty of Paris, which recognized the results of the decisive Battle of Yorktown fought between the British General Charles Cornwallis and American General George Washington on October 19, 1781, would be lost. The British themselves recognized that the new union was about to break apart, waiting for the opportunity to pick off the states one-by-one. John Adams, the American Ambassador to the Court of Saint James in Great Britain, wrote to his wife Abigail that the British looked upon the thirteen states as akin to thirteen individual fists, each with its own policies that could not be controlled by the government of the Articles in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The principal defects of the government under the Articles of Confederation were as follows:

1) The Congress under the Articles could not enforce the laws that it made.

2) The Congress under the Articles could not collect the taxes that it imposed.

3) The Congress under the Articles could not regulate interstate commerce.

4) There was no national executive to oversee the administration of the laws.

5) The currency issued by the government under the Articles of Confederation became worthless.

6) The Articles of Confederation, requiring unanimous ratification of any amendments to change its text, lacked the flexibility necessary to respond the growing crisis caused by the inherent weaknesses of its structures.

Something had to be done, and on January 21, 1786, the legislature of the Commonwealth of Virginia, prompted by the urgings of James Madison, called upon the states to send delegates to a meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, eight months later, that is, in September of 1786, to decide what to do about the crisis besetting the Union.

Only five states (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland) sent delegates to Annapolis for the meeting that took place between September 11, 1786, and September 14, 1786. The leaders of the convention were Alexander Hamilton, representing New York, and James Madison, representing Virginia. These two men, who would, along with John Jay, serve as the authors of series of eighty-five articles known as The Federalist, helped to draft a resolution that admitted something that would be unthinkable in today’s world of spin-doctoring and refusals to admit that one’s plans had failed to produce the desired results: they admitted that the Articles of Confederation had produced a government so full of defects as to make it a laughingstock in the world:

That there are important defects in the system of the Federal Government is acknowledged by the Acts of all those States, which have concurred in the present Meeting; That the defects, upon a closer examination, may be found greater and more numerous, than even these acts imply, is at least so far probable, from the embarrassments which characterize the present State of our national affairs, foreign and domestic, as may reasonably be supposed to merit a deliberate and candid discussion, in some mode, which will unite the Sentiments and Council's of all the States. In the choice of the mode, your Commissioners are of opinion, that a Convention of Deputies from the different States, for the special and sole purpose of entering into this investigation, and digesting a plan for supplying such defects as may be discovered to exist, will be entitled to a preference from considerations, which will occur, without being particularized.

Your Commissioners decline an enumeration of those national circumstances on which their opinion respecting the propriety of a future Convention, with more enlarged powers, is founded; as it would be an useless intrusion of facts and observations, most of which have been frequently the subject of public discussion, and none of which can have escaped the penetration of those to whom they would in this instance be addressed. They are however of a nature so serious, as, in the view of your Commissioners to render the situation of the United States delicate and critical, calling for an exertion of the united virtue and wisdom of all the members of the Confederacy.

Under this impression, Your Commissioners, with the most respectful deference, beg leave to suggest their unanimous conviction, that it may essentially tend to advance the interests of the union, if the States, by whom they have been respectively delegated, would themselves concur, and use their endeavours to procure the concurrence of the other States, in the appointment of Commissioners, to meet at Philadelphia on the second Monday in May next, to take into consideration the situation of the United States, to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union; and to report such an Act for that purpose to the United States in Congress assembled, as when agreed to, by them, and afterwards confirmed by the Legislatures of every State, will effectually provide for the same. (Annapolis Convention Resolution.)

It was on February 11, 1787, that the Congress under the Articles of Confederation called for a convention to take place in Philadelphia as desired by the delegates at the Annapolis Convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. Thus it is that the legal foundation of the Philadelphia Convention was in the Congressional resolution of February 11, 1787, and its work was to be limited to revising the Articles, a task that was determined early on during the proceedings of the Philadelphia Convention to be impossible.

Twelve states sent delegates to Philadelphia Convention, known since that time as the Constitutional Convention, with Rhode Island sending no delegates whatsoever. Although eighty-four delegates were appointed, only fifty-five showed up in Philadelphia in May of 1787.

Called into session on May 4, 1787, it was not until May 25, 1787, that a quorum (the minimum number for a parliamentary proceeding to have binding authority) was present, and it is this date that is commonly used to mark the actual beginnings of the proceedings. It was four days after, that is, on May 29, 1787, that the first plan for national government reorganization was introduced, the Virginia Plan, after it became clear that all thought of revising the Articles of Confederation had to be banished.

The goal of the convention was singular: to create a form of national government organization that would strengthen the central government so as to provide for the effective management of national problems that would not be a threat to personal liberty at the same time. In other words, to find a solution to the competing tensions between liberty and order that the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment had instructed them could be done by the use of reason and human ingenuity alone.

Edmund Randolph of Virginia introduced the Virginia Plan, although much of it had been written by James Madison, who served as the Secretary of the Convention (and it is from his notes that we know the details of the proceedings). George Washington served as the presiding officer of the Convention.

The Virginia Plan was one that would have created a strong central government more or less under a Unitary Form of national government organization. It essential features were as follows:

1) A bicameral (two-house) national legislature. The lower house would have been elected by the people in the states on the basis of population and wealth. That is, a populous and wealthy state would have received more representatives in Congress than smaller, less prosperous states. The members of the upper house would have been elected by the members of the lower house, serving for term long enough to guarantee their independence.

2) There would have been a national executive elected by the members of the national legislature for a term to be specified during the proceedings of the convention.

3) There would have been a national judiciary, headed by a supreme tribunal, chosen by the members of the national legislature.

4) National law would be the supreme law of the land that no state could contradict.

Here is the actual text of part of the Virginia Plan as introduced by Edmund Randolph:

1. Resolved that the Articles of Confederation ought to be so corrected & enlarged as to accomplish the objects proposed by their institution; namely, "common defence, security of liberty and general welfare."

2. Resd. therefore that the rights of suffrage in the National Legislature ought to be proportioned to the Quotas of contribution, or to the number of free inhabitants, as the one or the other rule may seem best in different cases.

3. Resd. that the National Legislature ought to consist of two branches.

4. Resd. that the members of the first branch of the National Legislature ought to be elected by the people of the several States every ----- for the term of -----; to be of the age of ----- years at least, to receive liberal stipends by with they may be compensated for the devotion of their time to [FN13] public service; to be ineligible to any office established by a particular State, or under the authority of the United States, except those peculiarly belonging to the functions of the first branch, during the term of service, and for the space of ----- after its expiration; to be incapable of reelection for the space of ----- after the expiration of their term of service, and to be subject to recall.

5. Resold. that the members of the second branch of the National Legislature ought to be elected by those of the first, out of a proper number of persons nominated by the individual Legislatures, to be of the age of ----- years at least; to hold their offices for a term sufficient to ensure their independency; [FN14] to receive liberal stipends, by which they may be compensated for the devotion of their time to [FN15] public service; and to be ineligible to any office established by a particular State, or under the authority of the United States, except those peculiarly belonging to the functions of the second branch, during the term of service, and for the space of ----- after the expiration thereof.

6. Resolved that each branch ought to possess the right of originating Acts; that the National Legislature ought to be impowered to enjoy the Legislative Rights vested in Congress by the Confederation & moreover to legislate in all cases to which the separate States are incompetent, or in which the harmony of the United States may be interrupted by the exercise of individual Legislation; to negative all laws passed by the several States, contravening in the opinion of the National Legislature the articles of Union; [FN16] and to call forth the force of the Union agst. any member of the Union failing to fulfill its duty under the articles thereof.

7. Resd. that a National Executive be instituted; to be chosen by the National Legislature for the term of ----- years, [FN17] to receive punctually at stated times, a fixed compensation for the services rendered, in which no increase or [FN18] diminution shall be made so as to affect the Magistracy, existing at the time of increase or diminution, and to be ineligible a second time; and that besides a general authority to execute the National laws, it ought to enjoy the Executive rights vested in Congress by the Confederation.

8. Resd. that the Executive and a convenient number of the National Judiciary, ought to compose a Council of revision with authority to examine every act of the National Legislature before it shall operate, & every act of a particular Legislature before a Negative thereon shall be final; and that the dissent of the said Council shall amount to a rejection, unless the Act of the National Legislature be again passed, or that of a particular Legislature be again negatived by ----- of the members of each branch.

9. Resd. that a National Judiciary be established to consist of one or more supreme tribunals, and of inferior tribunals to be chosen by the National Legislature, to hold their offices during good behaviour; and to receive punctually at stated times fixed compensation for their services, in which no increase or diminution shall be made so as to affect the persons actually in office at the time of such increase or diminution. that the jurisdiction of the inferior tribunals shall be to hear & determine in the first instance, and of the supreme tribunal to hear and determine in the dernier resort, all piracies & felonies on the high seas, captures from an enemy; cases in which foreigners or citizens of other States applying to such jurisdictions may be interested, or which respect the collection of the National revenue; impeachments of any National officers, and questions which may involve the national peace and harmony. (The Virginia Plan, as found in the Notes of James Madison.)

Angered by such a proposal, which was debated for several weeks, delegate William Paterson of New Jersey introduced the New Jersey (or Small States Plan) to serve as a counterpoint to the Virginia Plan. This plan was introduced on June 15, 1787.

The New Jersey Plan was a slight strengthening of the government that existed under the Articles of Confederation. Its features were as follows:

1) A unicameral Congress with every state having a single vote.

2) An executive elected by Congress who would be vested with real executive authority and who could appoint members to serve on the bench of the national judiciary.

3) The Federal government would have the power to enforce its laws upon the state governments by force if necessary.

4) A Supreme Court would have been created that would be given the power of judicial review, that is, the power to determine the constitutionality of legislation and the actions of an executive and other governmental officials.

5) The Federal government would have had the power to collect taxes.

The elements of compromise began to take shape over time. It was after an intense six weeks of negotiations during the hot, steamy summer in the City of Brotherly Love in 1787 that Roger Sherman, a delegate from Connecticut, introduced what became known two months later as the Connecticut Plan, which is also known as the Great Compromise. Although the final draft of the Constitution was approved by thirty-nine delegates on September 17, 1787, its basic outline had emerged by mid-July of 1787, admitting that various committees had to resolve such matters as the nature of the Federal executive and the judiciary.

The principal elements of the Connecticut Plan or Great Compromise, phrases that are synonymous with the Constitution itself, are as follows.

1) A bicameral legislation, consisting of a House of Representatives and a Senate.

2) The members of the House of Representatives were to be elected directly by the people in states based upon the population of the states and would serve a term of two years. For purposes of enumerating the population of the states in the decennial census for purposes of apportioning the states’ number of representatives, “other persons,” meaning slaves, were to be counted as “three-fifths persons,” a shameful political bargain designed to appease the southern and northern states at the same time.

3) The members of the Senate were to elected by state legislatures in their respective states, serving for a term of six years. Each state would have two senators. Thus was preserved features of both the Virginia Plan, a lower house based on population in the states, and an upper house based on equal representation to reflect the inherent equality of the states as members of the Union. The Constitution arranged it so that one-third of the Senate would be elected every two years by staggering the terms of those elected in 1788 into three classes: (a) two years; (b) four years; (c) six years. Those elected for two and four year terms would then face reelection for a full six year term. Thirty-three senators, for example, are up for election in 2014, which marks the one hundredth anniversary of the first direct popular elections of senators that was effected by the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913.

4) A President and a Vice President would be elected by an Electoral College. Every state would have a number of presidential electors equal to its number of representatives and senators in Congress. The lowest possible number for a state to have is three as every state is guaranteed at least one representative in the House of Representatives even if its population would not qualify it for representation if it was a part of another, more populous state. We will discuss the Electoral College in great detail sooner than you know.

5) A Supreme Court—and other, inferior courts that Congress shall from time to time establish—was to be created with justices appointed by the President and confirmed by a majority vote of the United States Senate.

The government under the Constitution of the United States of America was founded upon the following principles:

I. Federalism, which is that form of national government organization where there exists a strong coalition of states bound by a strong central government that can exercise a broad variety of powers given it by the people in a written constitution.

There are thus two levels of government, namely, a Federal government and state governments that are created by the people in different written constitutions, and it is the people who decide what powers are given to each level of government.

Some powers (War, Diplomacy, Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Immigration, Currency) are given exclusively to the Federal government and denied to the state governments. Other powers (taxing powers, law enforcement powers) may be exercised concurrently, although the Tenth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, is supposed  to guarantee that those powers that are not given to the Federal government or denied to the state governments to the states and the people who reside therein.

The people are sovereign in a Federal system as it is they who create both levels of government and determine what powers are given to each level. This is called the Division of Powers between a national government and state governments, which is different from Separation of Powers, which refers to the internal structure of a national or state government, that is, the separation of powers among legislative, executive and judicial branches.

Both levels of government in a Federal system may enforce its laws directly upon the people where they live in the states and localities without the authorization, consent or approval of the other level.

Unlike the Unitary and Confederal forms of national government organization, the Federal form divides power in a complex manner. It is meant to produce conflict and inefficiency so as to protect the rights of those who dissent from majority opinions on an issue from being steamrollered by those in the majority. Whether the system has worked as a matter of fact in operation over the course of time is an entirely different matter than derstanding what the founders intended the Federal system to do.

The framers of the Constitution of the United States of America thus created the first Federal system, which is in use in one form or another by a number of other countries, including Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, India, Australia, the Federal Republic of Germany, Belgium, Venzuela, Switzerland, Austria and, among others, Russia.

The Federal principle is institutionalized into the government created by the Constitution of the United States of America in the following ways:

1) Equal representation in the United States Senate.

2) Every state is guaranteed at least one representative in the House of Representatives.

3) Presidents are elected by the people in what has become fifty-one different state elections (with the District of Columbia possessing three electoral votes as a result of the Twenty-Third Amendment, which was ratified in 1961, even though it is not a state).

II. Bicameralism. The second major undergirding principle of the Constitution is Bicameralism. Each house of the Congress of the United States of America is given slightly different powers. For example, all legislation to raise revenue (tax legislation) must originate in the United States House of Representatives according to Section 7 of Article I of the Constitution. Senators have the power to ratify treaties and to confirm presidential nominees to the executive departments and to serve as diplomats and to serve on the Supreme Court and the other tribunals of the Federal judiciary.

Bicameralism as realized in the Congress of the United States of America institutionalizes clash and what is meant to be a slow, deliberative process, something explained by James Madison in The Federalist, Numbers Ten and Fifty-One, by the fact that members of the House and Senate are elected by different constituencies and serve for different terms of office.

Members of the House of Representatives represent parts of states, acknowledging that seven states (Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Vermont and Alaska), while members of the United States Senate represent entire states. This is bound to produce clash as, for instance, what is good for the Lower Rio Grande Valley might not be good for the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex or for the sprawling entity known as the City of Houston. What is good for energy producing states such as Texas, Louisiana and North Dakota might not be good for energy-consuming states such as New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine, to name just a few.

In other words, our system is designed to force members to debate each other both within each house and between the two houses of Congress. Does this work in fact? That is something that will be explored in the rest of the course. For the moment, however, it is important to know that Bicameralism produces clash on the basis of constituency representation and on the basis of the different terms of senators and representatives.

House members must face voters every two years, meaning that they have less room for making mistakes than senators, who face the people every six years (unless they are filling out an unexpired term of a senator who has died or resigned). Those whose reelection is closer in time than others might be more cautious than those who do not have to face the voters for another two, four or six years.

The founders sought, therefore, to create a system wherein reasonable, transient majorities would arise on issues that would nevertheless take account of and be sensitive to the views of those who disagreed with them.

As a report in 1970 of the Minority Members of the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate indicated with respect to the Electoral College:

Nothing could be clearer in the Framers’ thought than their rejection of a merely numerical concept of representative government. If the Constitution stands for nothing else, it stands for the idea that mere numbers have no capacity to make legitimate that which is otherwise illegitimate—whether those numbers be 51 or 90 percent of the whole. All the unique features of the Constitution are explicit departures from simple majoritarianism. This is true of the federal system, which, among other things, prevents the less populous States from being engulfed by the more populous States; this is true of bicameralism, which divides legislative responsibilities between House and Senate on grounds other than those of population; this is true of the separation of powers, whereby, among other things, great power is invested in a nonelective judiciary; and this is true of the electoral college, which incorporates the Federal principle and grants to each State, however small, a minimum weight of three electoral votes. (Minority View on the Direct Election of the President.)

You see, my fatigued students, I am not making anything up. Indeed, I have not even begun to scratch the surface of the depth of principles of what some call “the new republicanism” that were designed to replace those of the “old republicanism.” I just want you all to understand that the Constitution had specific purposes and intentions, keeping in mind that an examination of the merit of those purposes and intentions is an entirely different matter.

Speaking of fatigue, as it is closing in on 1:00 a.m. on Saturday, September 20, 2014, and that I have been at this work for most of the past twelve hours, I am going to have to save the rest of what I wanted to do on this review sheet until Sunday. A supplemental review sheet will be sent to cover Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances.

For the moment, however, I do want to cover the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America and then to simply list the subjects of the document’s seven original articles:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. (The Constitution of the United States of America.)

The framers of the Constitution sought to do six specific things with the Constitution:

1) To form the more perfect union. That is, the framers sought to strengthen a union that was weak under the Articles of Confederation.

2) To establish justice. Obviously, whether has done so or can do so is, of course, another matter.

3) To insure domestic tranquility. Such tranquility was lacking under the Articles of Confedration.

4) To provide for the common defense. The most important thing that a national government can do is to secure its borders and to defend the people.

5) To promote the general welfare. The framers meant that measures could be taken by Congress to provide for national emergencies. They did not envision or even desire the modern welfare state as it came into existence in the 1930s during the New Deal of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, although some would argue the Constitution, admitting of no authority above it other than the words of its own text, made the rise of statism inevitable.

6) To secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. This is said to be an implicit recognize of the fact that blessings come from God, Who is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, quite unlike the case of the Magna Carta. Whether it is that is up for debate. What the framers did mean to signify was that liberty had been at risk under the Articles of Confederation and that their own work was an effort to secure liberty with different governmental structures.

The founders premised all of this upon their belief in civic virtue, that is, that the people and those they elect would pursue virtue and maintain it over the course of the long-term. They created complex structures because they knew that many would not be virtuous. However, the whole Constitutional system is premised upon the belief that human beings could be virtuous by their own unaided powers. Orestes Brownson’s commentary of 1846 showed how erroneous this belief had been at the time of the framing of the Constitution fifty-nine years before.

The seven original articles of the Constitution and their subjects are:

I. Congress and the powers given to it and denied to the states.

II. The President and the executive branch. (Various parts of Article II have been changed by means of the Twelfth, Twentieth, Twenty-second and Twenty-fifth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America.

III. The Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, its powers and jurisdiction. Please note that the power of judicial review was not explicitly given to the Supreme Court as it had been in the New Jersey Plan.

IV. The process of admission of new states to the union, the guarantee that every state shall have a republican form of government and the guarantee that each state is to give “full faith and credit” to the public acts and judicial proceedings of every other state. The system of extradition is also established in Article IV.

V. The amending process. The Constitution may be amendment if two-thirds of both Houses of Congress, voting as separate bodies, approve a constitutional amendment, which becomes part of the Constitution if ratified by three-fourths of state legislatures or three-fourths of state ratifying conventions called for the specific purpose of debating an amendment, whichever Congress shall specify. It is also possible for two-thirds of the state legislatures to petition Congress to call for another constitutional convention, although this has never happened.

VI. The Supremacy Clause, the National Debt and no religious test may be applied to those serving in public office.

VII. The ratification of the Constitution. The Constitution was to become effective when it was ratified by nine state ratifying conventions. New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution on June 21, 1788. Although the Articles of Confederation had specified that there had to be unanimous ratification of amendments to its text, the Congress under really had no choice but to accept the Constitution when it had been approved by the Constitutional Convention, thereafter sending it to the states for ratification by those specially convened bodies.

The ratification campaign will be the subject of future audio and/or video presentation, followed by a discussion of political parties, interest groups, lobbying—and then the operation of each of the three branches of government.

I tell you what, however: I will have to provide you with an outline of those subjects in the third review sheet as I have, in essence, written out much of my lectures in part one and this current part.

It is time for me to get some sleep! Look for that supplemental review sheet on Sunday.

Well, I am back. Hey, I got five hours of sleep!

All right, here are the other three principles that undergird the Constitution of the United States of America.

III. Separation of Powers. The Constitution of the United States of America, borrowing from some of the ideas contained popularized by Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu, better known simply as Baron Montesquieu, in De L’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws). Although Montesquieu is responsible for the ideas that gave the founders the principles of separation of powers, he thought he was describing the British system, which has no such separate branches of government. Oh well, minor details.

Montesquieu is important, though, because the framers of the Constitution that the existence of separate branches of government that could check and balance each other made would provide yet another institutional safeguard to the rise of permanently established tyranny of the majority. This trust in the ability of institutional safeguards is a modified form of Lockeanism, but it is Lockeanism nevertheless.

System of Powers is a system wherein there exist three separate and distinct branches of governance—legislative, executive and judiciary—that are created by different articles of a written constitution.

 In such a system, therefore, none of the branches of a government create the other. Apart from each being created by different articles of a written constitution, each is authorized to exercise different powers.

The legislative branch makes laws and oversees an executive’s enforcement of them. The executive branch enforces laws and administers the daily operation of a government.

The judicial branch exists to hear cases that arise under the laws of a given jurisdiction and serves in many instances as a means of hearing appeals arising from cases in lower courts. In many cases, such as in that of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, a judiciary has the power of judicial review, although this is not explicitly contained in the provisions of the Constitution. The Supreme Court ruled in the case of Marbury v. Madison, February 24, 1803, that a provision of the Federal Judiciary Act of 1790 was unconstitutional by giving Congress the power to add to the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction as a court of first instance, something that could be done only by an amendment to the Constitution itself. However, this was not the first time that the Supreme Court had exercised judicial review as it had done so in the case of Hylton v. United States, March 8, 1796, when the court upheld Congress’s passage of a carriage tax. Marbury v. Madison was simply the first time that the Supreme Court had used the implied power of judicial review, which Alexander Hamilton discussed in The Federalist, Number 78, to strike down part of a law that had been passed by Congress.

The two elected branches are elected by different constituencies and serve for different terms of office, yet again producing conflict, which the founders desired as the means to safeguard against the abuse of the increased powers given to the government they had created in the Constitution. As noted earlier, presidents are elected on a state-by-state basis throughout the nation. All but seven of the four hundred thirty-eight members of the United States House of Representatives represent parts of states while senators represent entire states. Given the vast complexity of the demographic composition of the country, this difference in the basis of representation will lead, it was reasoned, to conflict and thus the sort of inefficiency and deliberative process necessary to safeguard liberty before the exercise of the powers granted, whether explicitly or implicitly, to the government of the United States of America.

Conflict is further institutionalized by means of Separation of Powers by the fact each of two elected branches of government is elected for different terms of office, giving varying degrees of flexibility, especially today when the attention span of most people is limited to about thirty-two seconds, if that, and do not pay any to—and have even less interest in—the activities of any type of government.

IV. Constitutionalism. The Constitution of the United States of America enshrines the principle of constitutionalism, that is, of a commitment to the words of a written document as the foundation of government authority, which derives its powers from the consent of the governed. This commitment to a written document is a continuation of the heritage of the Pilgrims and The Mayflower Compact, which was itself the result of the Pilgrims’ commitment to the Calvinist strain of Protestantism.

Unlike Great Britain which had—and stills continue to have as the United Kingdom—an unwritten constitution that is the product of various documents, such as the Magna Carta, the common law and laws passed by the Parliament, the framers believed that a written document, one that contained much more flexibility and adaptability than that possessed by the government under the Articles of Confederation, would provide the best and most enduring guide for a stable commonwealth. This is what they inserted the Implied Powers clause, also known as the Elastic Clause, into Subsection 18 of Section 8 of Article I of the Constitution, providing Congress with the means to exercise powers not specifically enumerated in the text of Article I but nevertheless related to the exercise of those powers to be deemed constitutionally permissible.

Unfortunately for the framers, however, their commitment to the written word alone as the basis of constitutional law meant that the words they chose to use, which do indeed have a certain and definite meaning, would be no more respected by those of generations to come than the words of Sacred Scripture are able to be interpreted by the individual “believer” without any Divinely-instituted to teach infallibly in the Name of Christ the King about what its true meaning. The words of a mere secular document, the Constitution, are as silly-putty in the hands of legal positivists (relativists) just as the words of the Bible are in the hands of theological relativists. Thus it is that what it is considered to be a strength of the Constitution is actually its ultimate downfall as its words are utterly defenseless against misinterpretation and misapplication.

V. The New Republicanism. The framers of the Constitution of the United States of America made a break with the Old Republicanism that undergirded the government under the Articles of Confederation, believing that it would be possible for a strong, effective government to provide for social order without being a threat to individual liberty. Whether they were correct in this belief is something to be examined at a later point. For the time being, however, suffice it say that the principles of the Old Republicanism were abandoned in favor of new system with a supposedly better, more elaborate means of providing for a balance between liberty and order. This contention proved to be at the heart of the debate that occurred during the Ratification Campaign following when the Congress under the Articles of Confederation sent the Constitution to the states to be ratified in accord with the terms of Article VII of the new document.

VI. Checks and Balances. There are numerous ways in which each branch of government check and balance the other. Here is just a partial listing of these ways:

A. Congress’s power to check the Executive Branch

1. Congress alone has the authority to pass legislation. Presidents cannot make laws.

2. Congress alone has the “power of the purse,” that is, the power to raise revenue and then to authorize the way in which it is spent.

3. The United States Senate has the power to confirm presidential appointees to the Cabinet, sub-Cabinet, diplomatic posts and to judgeships on Federal courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

4. The United States Senate has the power to ratify treaties that have been negotiated by a President of the United States of America in the name of the country. A super-majority, that is, a two-thirds majority of those present and voting, is necessary to ratify a treaty.

5. Committees of both Houses of Congress may conduct investigations into the activities of the executive branch. This is known as legislative oversight of the enforcement of the laws. Every presidential administration has been investigated by Congressional committees.

6. A majority of the membership of the United States House of Representatives may vote to impeach, that is, to accuse, a president, vice president, judges or other civil officers of treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors. An impeached officer is tried by the United States Senate. A two-thirds vote of the Senate membership is necessary for conviction and thus removal from office and permanent disqualification from holding any office of public trust in the government.

Two presidents have been impeached by the House and tried in the Senate. President Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868. He was spared removal by but a single vote, which was cast by Senator Edmund G. Ross of Kansas. President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton was impeached in 1998. His conviction failed by twelve votes.

7. Congress has the power to override a presidential veto. That is, a bill passed by Congress that is disapproved (the word veto is not found in the Constitution) by a president may be overridden by a two-thirds vote of both Houses, each voting individually in their own chamber. This is very difficult to do as only 110 of 1498 presidential vetoes, not including pocket vetoes, which we will discuss later, have been overridden. That is, less than ten percent of all presidential vetoes wind up being overridden. Yet it is a power of Congress to use against a president.

8. Congress has the sole power to declare war. Although presidents may ask for Congress to declare war, only Congress can issue such a declaration. The declared wars in the history of the United States of America have been the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War (1846), the Spanish-American War (1898), World War I (1917; two separate declarations were issued, one against Germany and the other against the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and World War II (1941; three separate declarations were issued, one against Japan, one against Germany and one against Italy; three other declarations—against Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania—were issued in 1942). The War of 1812 was declared without President James Madison making a request for it, which is completely within the power of Congress to do.

B. Congress’s Powers to Check the Judiciary

1. As noted before, the Senate confirms justices to the Supreme Court of the United States of America and the lower Federal courts.

2. Congress determines the number of seats on the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Court at present. They will be listed when we get into a discussion of the Federal court system.

3. Congress may suspend the term of the Supreme Court for up to one year. This has happened twice, in 1801 and 1865.

4. Congress determines the appellate jurisdiction of the Federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court.

5. Congress, of course, may propose legislation and/or Constitutional amendments to overturn decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Several Supreme Court decisions have been overturned by Constitutional amendments.

Among those decisions are Chisholm v. Georgia, February 18, 1793, which permitted a citizen of one state to sue another the government of another state. Congress wasted no time to propose an amendment to overturn this decision. The Eleventh Amendment, which forbade citizens of one state suing the government of another state, was ratified in 1794.

The decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, March 6. 1857, which ruled that persons of African descent, whether free or slave, were not and could not be citizens of the United States of America, thus disqualifying them from having standing to bring a lawsuit in any court, whether state or federal. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who was from Maryland (and, shamefully, a Catholic), ruled also that Congress had violated the Constitution when passing the Missouri Compromise in 1850 to ban slavery in western territories. It took three amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America (the Thirteenth, 1865, the Fourteenth, 1868, and the Fifteenth, 1870) to overturn this one decision. Still believe that the law is whatever the Supreme Court says it is?

The case of Pollock v. Farmers Loan and Trust Company, April 8, 1895, which held that Congress could not impose a direct income tax on individuals, was overturned by the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America in 1913.

The Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, which was ratified in 1964, forbade the imposition of a poll tax by the states (a tax to vote, in other words) in Federal elections. This prompted the Supreme Court of the United States of America to overturn a 1937 decision, Breedlove v. Suttles, December 6, 1937, which ruled that states had the constitutional authority to impose the poll tax (a tax on voting, which was imposed in southern states as a way of disenfranchising most African-Americans and anyone else who could not afford to pay the tax) in state elections. The case of Harper v. Commonwealth of Virginia Board of Election, March 24, 1966, ruled that state governments could not impose the poll tax in any elections, including state elections, basing this decision on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment

Got all of that? Wonderful. I am glad that you have mastered all of this thus far, although there is just a wee bit more to come.

Such as what?

Such as the ways in which a president can check Congress and the Judiciary.

C. Ways in which a President may check Congress and the Judiciary

1. The President may disapprove (veto) a bill passed by Congress. Even the threat of a presidential veto might be enough to discourage Congress from passing a particular piece of legislation (a bill), something that was discussed a bit earlier in this review sheet/study guide/miniature textbook.

2. The President must enforce the laws. Presidents take an oath of office that requires them, among other things, to “faithfully execute” the laws of the land. As the Executive Branch has grown both in terms of the scope of what it does and also in the number and size of the executive (Cabinet) departments, the president is responsible for overseeing or managing 2,700,000 civilian employees, only around 3,800 of whom are appointed by the president. Most of the executive branch is staffed by career civil servants. Nevertheless, though, the president is the one who is responsible for overseeing the management of the bureaucracy, and it is sometimes the case that presidents use discretion when issuing Executive Orders to enforce laws of Congress. It is very difficult for Congress to check the use of such Executive Orders, which seek to direct government agencies to follow certain procedures in the enforcement of the law.

3. Presidents alone represent the entire nation. This gives them a powerful “bully pulpit.” especially in today’s world of mass communication, to reach over the heads of the leaders of Congress whenever there is a dispute between the White House and Congress. Presidents can try to rally public support for their positions in order for the public to put pressure on members of Congress to act in accord his plan to reduce taxes in 1981.

President Ronald Wilson Reagan used this very successfully in his first term of office (January 20, 1981, to January 20, 1985).

President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton did this in late-November into December of 1995 as he accused Republicans of wanting to slash the Federal budget when they were proposing only to reduce the rate of increased spending, meaning that the budget would increase, not decrease. Clinton called a slower rate of increase in spending as a decrease when it was nothing of the sort. His argument won the day, and Republicans backed down during the government shutdown of November 14, 1995, to November 19, 1995, and then from December 19, 1995, to January 6, 1996.

4. Presidents may call Congress into extraordinary session during an adjournment, something that has been done during national emergencies and during times of conflict between a President and Congress.

5. Presidents may adjourn Congress if there is a dispute between the House of Representatives and the Senate concerning when to adjourn.

6. Presidents make appointments, by and with the consent of the United States Senate, to various independent regulatory agencies, which have been given jurisdiction over various aspects of economic and commercial activity in the United States of America. The commissioners of these agencies usually serve for terms for seven years and are independent of “official” presidential control, although presidents will, obviously, appoint only those individuals who agree with his own particular philosophy, if any, and policy goals. This gives a president the ability to set his economic agenda after he is out of office.

7. As the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States of America, the President can commit the troops of this country to undertake various missions in what are supposed to be extraordinary circumstances. The War Powers Act of 1970 sought to curb the power of presidents to do this, requiring him to seek approval of Congress within ninety days of committing troops to combat missions. Many constitutional scholars, however, believe that even this is unconstitutional as presidents need declarations of war for combat except in those instances of immediate threats to the national security of the country. However, presidents continue to commit troops without a declaration of war, making it very difficult, politically speaking, for Congress to oppose him.

8. As the Chief of State for the United States of America, the President alone represents the country in relations and in negotiations with the leaders of other countries. No Congressional leader has the authority to represent the government of the United States of America, although a president may ask a member of Congress to undertake a mission for him. In such an instance, you see, the representative or senator is representing the president, not acting on his or her own initiative.

9. Insofar as the Federal judiciary is concerned, the principal way in which a president may check the Supreme Court and the lower Federal courts is by nominating judges. Thus it is that a judicial appointee of a long dead president may be shaping constitutional interpretation for decades after the death of the man who appointed him. Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America William O. Douglas, who was appointed to the court by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on April 17, 1939, served until November 12, 1975, thirty years, seven months after the death of the nation’s longest-served president on April 12, 1945.

D. The Way in Which the Judicial Branch May Check the Other Two Branches

The Federal judiciary’s power of judicial review (previously discussed on this review sheet) has been used to invalidate presidential actions and legislation passed by Congress. This has frustrated many presidents, including President Franklin Roosevelt during his first term in office (March 4, 1933, to January 20, 1937) as many of his “New Deal” programs were struck down by the Court as unconstitutional. Roosevelt sought to place political pressure on the court to reverse itself, a strong-arm approach that, though unseemly, bore fruit over time in the case of the Jones-Laughlin Steel Company v. the National Labor Relations Board, April 12, 1937, ended the judicial negation of Roosevelt’s policies. The Supreme Court handed President Barack Hussein Obama a major victory in the combined cases of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al., June 28, 2012, but also has dealt him setbacks, something that occurred in the case of Noel Canning v. NLRB, No. 12-1115, June 26, 2014, deciding that the president could not make recess appointments when Congress had not legally adjourned.

            The Ratification Campaign

An intense debate arose after the Constitution was approved by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787. The Congress under the Articles of Confederation, after much debate, centering over the legal authority of the delegates to what was called the Philadelphia Convention to write a new document even though they had been authorized only to revise the Articles of Confederation, sent the proposed Constitution to the state legislature on September 28, 1787, requesting that each state constitute a state ratifying convention to consider the ratification of the Constitution as specified in Article VII of its text.

There were real, substantial philosophical differences between those who supported the Constitution, the Federalists, and those who opposed it, the Anti-Federalists. Although written by many different authors under a variety of pseudonyms (Cato, Brutus, etc.), the principal argument of the Anti-Federalists was there was no way to stop the growth of the Federal government under the proposed Constitution, that the rights of the states would be engulfed over the course of time by the encroachments of the Federal government. Some would say that the arguments made by the much-mocked Anti-Federalists have been proved to be very accurate, if not prophetic.

The argument in favor of ratification was advanced in The Federalist by a series of eighty-five articles under the pseudonym Publius that were published in several newspapers in the State of New York between October 25, 1787, and August 16, 1788. Time is insufficient to treat each of these important papers with the attention that it deserves.

Suffice it for our purposes at this point, however, to note that Numbers 10, 39 and 51, written by James Madison, dealt with the republican principle and the necessity, of Madison saw it, of producing inefficiency to avoid the tyranny of the majority, and that Alexander Hamilton, who wrote fifty-one of the articles, emphasized the necessity of strong, effective government and a vigorous presidency. It was also Hamilton who argued in The Federalist, Number 78, that the Supreme Court had an inherent power of judicial review, something that was not explicitly stated in the text of the Constitution itself. Every aspect of the Constitution, including Federalism (which is discussed in numbers 15 through and 20 and again in numbers 35-40, mentioned also in numerous other articles) and Separation of Powers, which was defended at length by Madison in Number 47, was discussed and defended.

As persuasive as arguments in The Federalist appeared to some, many delegates to the state ratifying conventions were not convinced that the Federal government under the proposed Constitution would not pose a threat to individual liberty. Thus it is that the delegates to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts state ratifying convention proposed in February of 1788 that a Bill of Rights be added to the Constitution by the first Congress after it had convened.

Some of the Federalists opposed this idea as they said that the individual states had their own state Bill of Rights. All well and good, those who wanted a Federal Bill of Rights said, except that states’ Bills of Rights only protected individuals within the states themselves from the actions of the state government, not the Federal government. The delegates from Massachusetts who supported a Federal Bill of Rights won the day when leading Federalists committed themselves to having the first Congress propose amendments to the Constitution to be ratified by the state legislatures, a subject that will be discussed when we review every single provision of the constitution in a series of lectures that I will be recording.

The ninth state, New Hampshire, ratified the Constitution on June 21, 1788.

The first presidential election was held on January 7, 1789, as those eligible to vote, white propertied-males over twenty-one, chose electors to cast two votes for president. The person who received the second highest number of votes for president became the vice president, something that changed with the Twelfth Amendment in 1804. We will discuss this later.

The new government took effect on March 4, 1789. The first president, George Washington, was sworn in at Federal Hall, which is still standing, in the City of New York, New York, the nation’s first provisional capital under the Constitution, on April 30, 1789.

This covers the subject matter prior to the first examination.

A final word before closing this review sheet/study guide/miniature textbook for this “chapter.”

It could be argued that the founders were reinventing the wheel with all of their Lockean structural reforms between 1776 and 1787. That is, their contempt for the Middle Ages was such that they could not believe that a highly developed system of justice that recognized both the rights of God and the governed had grown organically in many parts of Europe. The founders believed that they were embarking upon a “new science of politics.”

Although it would be inappropriate to address this here, a scholar of the Constitution who does not agree with me on a lot of matters wrote to me a few months ago to say, “I guess we are eyewitnesses to whether the Constitution could ever have endured the way the founders expected.” 

You have been given some fundamentals of the origin of the Constitution of the United States of America. For better or for worse, it is the system we have. Citizens ought to know this system as it affects their daily lives.

Putting this All in its Proper Supernatural Perspective

Quite specifically, you see, a nation that is not founded on right principles must degenerate into the barbarism of our present era, having no immutable teaching authority to guide it, choosing to be "guided" by the demigods of national founding fathers and/or by the shifting winds of majoritarian sentiment at any particular point in time. Contradiction and instability are bound to result, as we can see with great clarity today. It is very much beside the point to argue that the "founders" would have opposed this or that social evil. They premised the entire fabric of national life under the Constitution upon the false belief that men could sort out their differences by means of a cumbersome process of negotiation and debate in the national legislative process, believing that there was no single belief that could unite men and guide them in the pursuit of the common good as the supreme and eternal good each man was kept in mind. There is no way, therefore, for naturalists to use a naturalist Constitution to defend against various evils. Evil must win when man does not subordinate himself to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church and when men do not have belief in, access to or cooperation with Sanctifying Grace.

Here is a summary of the major principles that explain why naturalism is incapable of providing the framework for social order and must yield to the forces of barbarism over the course of time:

1) There are limits that exist in the nature of things beyond which men have no authority or right to transgress, whether acting individually or collectively in the institutions of civil governance.

2) There are limits that have been revealed positively by God Himself in his Divine Revelation, that bind all men in all circumstances at all times, binding even the institutions of civil governance.

3) A divinely-instituted hierarchy exists in man’s most basic natural unit of association: the family. The father is the head of the family and governs his wife and children in accord with the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law. Children do not have the authority to disobey the legitimate commands of their parents. Parents do not have the authority to issue illegitimate and/or unjust commands.

4) Our Lord Himself became Incarnate in Our Lady’s virginal and immaculate womb, subjecting Himself to the authority of His creatures, obeying his foster-father, Saint Joseph, as the head of the Holy Family, thus teaching us that all men everywhere must recognize an ultimate authority over them in their social relations, starting with the family.

5) Our Lord instituted the Catholic Church, founding it on the Rock of Peter, the Pope, to be the means by which His Deposit of Faith is safeguarded and transmitted until the end of time. The Church is the mater, mother, and magister, teacher, of all men in all nations at all times, whether or not men and nations recognize this to be the case.

6) The Pope and the bishops of the Church have the solemn obligation to proclaim nothing other than the fullness of the truths of the Faith for the good of the sanctification and salvation of men unto eternity and thus for whatever measure of common good in the temporal real, which the Church desires earnestly to promote, can be achieved in a world full of fallen men.

7) It is not possible for men to live virtuously as citizens of any country unless they first strive for sanctity as citizens of Heaven. That is, it is not possible for there to be order in any nation if men do not have belief in access to and cooperation with sanctifying grace, which equips them to accept the truths contained in the Deposit of Faith and to obey God’s commands with diligence in every aspect of their lives without exception.

8) The rulers of Christendom came to understand, although never perfectly and never without conflicts and inconsistencies, that the limits of the Divine positive law and the natural law obligated them to exercise the powers of civil governance with a view towards promoting man’s temporal good in this life so as to foster in him his return to God in the next life. In other words, rulers such as Saint Louis IX, King of France, knew that they would be judged by Our Lord at the moment of his Particular Judgment on the basis of how well they had fostered those conditions in their countries that made it more possible for their subjects to get to Heaven.

9) The rulers of Christendom accepted the truth that the Church had the right, which she used principally through her Indirect Power over civil rulers by proclaiming the truths of the Holy Faith, to interpose herself in the event that a civil ruler proposed to do something or had indeed done something that violated grievously the administration of justice and thus posed a grave threat to the good of souls.

10) The Social Kingship of Jesus Christ may be defined as the right of the Catholic Church to see to it that the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law are the basis of the actions of civil governance in all that pertains to the good of souls and that those who exercise civil power keep in mind man’s last end, the salvation of his immortal soul as a member of the Catholic Church. Civil leaders must, therefore, recognize the Catholic Church as the true Church founded by God Himself and having the right to reprimand and place interdicts upon those who issue edicts and ordinances contrary to God’s laws.

This is but a brief distillation of the points contained in the brilliant social encyclical letters of Popes Leo XIII, St. Pius X, and Pius XI, in particular, although Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX also contributed to their reiteration and explication. I have spent much time in the past twenty-five years or so illustrating these points with quotations from these encyclical letters, which contain immutably binding teachings that no Catholic may dissent from legitimately (as Pope Pius XI noted in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio in 1922).

The Modern State, including the United States of America, is founded on a specific and categorical rejection of each of these points. Consider the following:

1) Martin Luther himself said that a prince may be a Christian but that his religion should not influence how he governs, giving rise to the contemporary notion of “separation of Church and state,” condemned repeatedly by Popes in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.

2) Martin Luther planted the seeds of contemporary deconstructionism, which reduces all written documents to the illogical and frequently mutually contradictory private judgments of individual readers, by rejecting the Catholic Church as the repository and explicator of the Deposit of Faith, making the “private judgment” of individuals with regard to the Bible supreme. If mutually contradictory and inconsistent interpretations of the Bible can stand without correction from a supreme authority instituted by God, then it is an easy thing for all written documents, including a Constitution that makes no reference at all to the God-Man or His Holy Church, to become the plaything of whoever happens to have power over its interpretation

3) The sons of the so-called Enlightenment, influenced by the multifaceted and inter-related consequences of the errors of the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt, brought forth secular nations that contended the source of governing authority was the people. Ultimately, all references to “God” were in accord with the Freemasonic notion of a “supreme intelligence” without any recognition of the absolute necessity of belief in and acceptance of the Incarnation and of the Deposit of Faith as it has been given to Holy Mother Church for personal happiness and hence al social order.

4) The Founding Fathers of the United States of America did not believe that it was necessary to refer all things in civil life to Christ the King as He had revealed Himself through His true Church, believing that men would be able to pursue “civic virtue” by the use of their own devices and thus maintain social order in the midst of cultural and religious pluralism. This leads, as Pope Leo XIII noted of religious indifferentism, to the triumph of the lowest common denominator, that is, atheism.  

5) As the Constitution of the United States of America admits of no authority higher than its own words, it, like the words of Holy Writ are for a Protestant or to a Modernist, is utterly defenseless when the plain meanings of its words are distorted and used to advance ends that its framers would have never thought imaginable, no less approved in fact. The likes of Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro and Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton have no regard for the words of the Constitution or for the just laws passed by Congress, and Donald John Trump is plainly ignorant of some of the fact that there are seven articles in the Constitution and twenty-seven amendments to it since its ratification in 1788. We are governed by men who are contemptuous or law or wholly ignorant of it. Quite a state of affairs.

6) This is but the secular version of Antinomianism: the belief advanced by those who took the logic of Luther’s argument of being “saved by faith alone” to its inexorable conclusion that one could live a wanton life of sin and still be saved. Luther himself did not see where the logic of his rejection of Catholic doctrine would lead and fought against the Antinomians. In like manner, you see, the Constitutionalists and Federalists of today do not see that what is happening today in Federal courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, is the inexorable result of a Constitution that rejects Christ the King and the Catholic Church. These Constitutionalists and Federalists will fight time and time again like Sisyphus pushing the bolder up a hill. They will always lose because they cannot admit that the thing they admire, the Constitution, is the proximate problem that has resulted in all of the evils they are trying to fight.

A nation founded on false premises, no matter the "good intentions" of those whose intellects were misinformed by several centuries of naturalist lies and Protestant theological heresies and errors, is bound to degenerate more and more over time into a land of materialism and hedonism and relativism and positivism and utilitarianism and naturalism and paganism and atheism and environmentalism and feminism and barbarism. Many evils, including the daily carnage against the preborn, both by surgical and chemical means, continue to be committed in this country. American "popular culture" destroys souls and bodies both here and abroad. Full vent is given each day to a panoply of false ideas that are from Hell and confuse even believing Catholics no end as they try to find some "naturalist" hero or idea by which to win the "culture wars," oblivious to the fact that it is only Catholicism that can do so.

Widespread vote fraud must, you see, become even more widespread and universal. After all, Americans who are not concerned about the daily slaughter of the preborn have shown themselves all too willing to overlook such "minor" things as undeclared wars, unconstitutional executive orders and directives, unjust judicial decisions, a ceasless surrender of legitimate national sovereignty, and illegal actions that put into jeopardy the nation's national security interests. Why should vote fraud matter at all to people willing overlook crimes against God and man from which they, whether or not they realize it, must suffer as the state of the nation worses over time?

It was in his first encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, that Pope Pius XI described the true nature of modern political parties:

To these evils we must add the contests between political parties, many of which struggles do not originate in a real difference of opinion concerning the public good or in a laudable and disinterested search for what would best promote the common welfare, but in the desire for power and for the protection of some private interest which inevitably result in injury to the citizens as a whole. From this course there often arise robberies of what belongs rightly to the people, and even conspiracies against and attacks on the supreme authority of the state, as well as on its representatives. These political struggles also beget threats of popular action and, at times, eventuate in open rebellion and other disorders which are all the more deplorable and harmful since they come from a public to whom it has been given, in our modern democratic states, to participate in very large measure in public life and in the affairs of the government. Now, these different forms of government are not of themselves contrary to the principles of the Catholic Faith, which can easily be reconciled with any reasonable and just system of government. Such governments, however, are the most exposed to the danger of being overthrown by one faction or another. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

We must remember that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order, a point made by so many of our true popes in the past two hundred years, including Pope Pius XI in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio:

Because the Church is by divine institution the sole depository and interpreter of the ideals and teachings of Christ, she alone possesses in any complete and true sense the power effectively to combat that materialistic philosophy which has already done and, still threatens, such tremendous harm to the home and to the state. The Church alone can introduce into society and maintain therein the prestige of a true, sound spiritualism, the spiritualism of Christianity which both from the point of view of truth and of its practical value is quite superior to any exclusively philosophical theory. The Church is the teacher and an example of world good-will, for she is able to inculcate and develop in mankind the "true spirit of brotherly love" (St. Augustine, De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae, i, 30) and by raising the public estimation of the value and dignity of the individual's soul help thereby to lift us even unto God.

Finally, the Church is able to set both public and private life on the road to righteousness by demanding that everything and all men become obedient to God "Who beholdeth the heart," to His commands, to His laws, to His sanctions. If the teachings of the Church could only penetrate in some such manner as We have described the inner recesses of the consciences of mankind, be they rulers or be they subjects, all eventually would be so apprised of their personal and civic duties and their mutual responsibilities that in a short time "Christ would be all, and in all." (Colossians iii, 11)

Since the Church is the safe and sure guide to conscience, for to her safe-keeping alone there has been confided the doctrines and the promise of the assistance of Christ, she is able not only to bring about at the present hour a peace that is truly the peace of Christ, but can, better than any other agency which We know of, contribute greatly to the securing of the same peace for the future, to the making impossible of war in the future. For the Church teaches (she alone has been given by God the mandate and the right to teach with authority) that not only our acts as individuals but also as groups and as nations must conform to the eternal law of God. In fact, it is much more important that the acts of a nation follow God's law, since on the nation rests a much greater responsibility for the consequences of its acts than on the individual.

When, therefore, governments and nations follow in all their activities, whether they be national or international, the dictates of conscience grounded in the teachings, precepts, and example of Jesus Christ, and which are binding on each and every individual, then only can we have faith in one another's word and trust in the peaceful solution of the difficulties and controversies which may grow out of differences in point of view or from clash of interests. An attempt in this direction has already and is now being made; its results, however, are almost negligible and, especially so, as far as they can be said to affect those major questions which divide seriously and serve to arouse nations one against the other. No merely human institution of today can be as successful in devising a set of international laws which will be in harmony with world conditions as the Middle Ages were in the possession of that true League of Nations, Christianity. It cannot be denied that in the Middle Ages this law was often violated; still it always existed as an ideal, according to which one might judge the acts of nations, and a beacon light calling those who had lost their way back to the safe road.

There exists an institution able to safeguard the sanctity of the law of nations. This institution is a part of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations. She enjoys, too, the highest authority, the fullness of the teaching power of the Apostles. Such an institution is the Church of Christ. She alone is adapted to do this great work, for she is not only divinely commissioned to lead mankind, but moreover, because of her very make-up and the constitution which she possesses, by reason of her age-old traditions and her great prestige, which has not been lessened but has been greatly increased since the close of the War, cannot but succeed in such a venture where others assuredly will fail. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

This site exists to promote Catholic truth in order to help its few remaining readers to rise above the agitation. 

We must remember these words, inspired directly by the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, contained in Saint Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians:

Put you on the armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil. For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high place. Therefore take unto you the armour of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and to stand in all things perfect. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of justice, And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace:

In all things taking the shield of faith, wherewith you may be able to extinguish all the fiery darts of the most wicked one. And take unto you the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit (which is the word of God). By all prayer and supplication praying at all times in the spirit; and in the same watching with all instance and supplication for all the saints. (Ephesians 6: 11-18.)

Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary is a weapon and her Brown Scapular of Mount Carmel is our shield in this time when the forces of Antichrist in the worlds of Modernity and Modernism have rigged things against the Holy Faith and those who adhere to it despite their own sins.

The worst thing that can happen to us is the loss of our immortal souls for all eternity, not the transitory schemes of those whose ascent to power has been rigged by the devil himself to tempt us into throes of despair.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, pray for us.

Appendix

Orestes Brownson’s National Greatness, 1846

As of the individual, so of the nation. In like manner as justice and sanctity constitute the greatness of the individual, so do they constitute the greatness of the nation. "Justice exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people."  The great nation is the holy nation, rich in true  obedience, and carried away by a divine passion for God and all holy things.

Suppose your nation does increase in wealth, in luxury, in refinement; suppose it does fell the primeval forest and enlarge its borders, multiply its manufactures, extend its commerce, and make all climes pour their riches into its lap; what then?  Does it follow that such a nation is great, is glorious, and has reason to applaud herself for her achievements and to exult over the poor and simple? "Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord." Where is it written, Blessed is the nation whose God is Mammon, and whose worship is thrift?  Where are the nations who forgot the Lord, who put their trust in their ships, their traffic, their wealth, and luxuries?  Where is that ancient Tyre, "whose merchants were princes, and her traders the nobles of the earth"? Where are all the nations of the old world, once renowned for their extended commerce, the richness of their stuffs, and the variety of their manufactures?  They have passed away like the morning vapor, and a few solitary ruins alone remain to point the traveller to the seats of their world-renowned idolatry.

Taking the principles we have established, we can easily  answer the question, whether we are or are not a great people, whether the path we are pursuing leads to true nation al greatness, or whether it leads from it.

Are we as a people intent on gaining the end for which our Maker designed us? Are we remarkable for our humble observance of the precepts of the Gospel?

Are we diligent to yield that obedience to which is promised eternal life? 

Far, very far, from it. We are a proud, loud-boasting and vain-boasting people. Our god is mammon, and our righteousness is thrift. Is it not so? To what do we point as proofs of our greatness? Is it not to our industrial achievements, our railroads, canals, steamboats, commerce, manufactures, material wealth and splendor?  But where are our moral achievements, the monuments of our enlightened zeal for God, and humble devotion to his will?  Religion we have in name, in form, in many forms and many strange forms; but where is the deep, all-pervading, all-active conviction that this world is not our home, that it is but an inn in which we may lodge for a night, but in which we may not, must not, dwell? Alas! the dominant passion of our country is worldly wealth and worldly distinction. We see it in the general pursuits of the people; we hear it in the almost universal tone of conversation; and we see it distinctly in the general scramble for wealth, in our demoralizing political contentions, and the all-devouring greediness for place and plunder.

If we look at the great political questions which agitate the public mind, we shall perceive that they are all questions concerning wealth, the means of facilitating its acquisition, of making it pass, or preventing it from passing, from the few to the many, or from the many to the few. Such are your bank questions, your tariff questions, your land-distribution questions. If you go beyond these, they are questions of the honors and emoluments of office. Not a pert upstart among us who has made his maiden caucus speech, but regards himself as qualified for any office in the gift of the people, from that of village constable up to that of president of the United States, and feels that he suffers great wrong, and adds another striking example of neglected merit, if not rewarded for his disinterested and patriotic exertions by some snug place with a fat salary. Scarcely a man seems contented to remain in private life, to live in obscurity, unheeded by his countrymen, in all humility and fidelity laboring to discharge his duty to his God, and to win the prize of eternal glory. We love the praise of men more than the praise of God; the low and transitory goods of time more than the high and permanent goods of eternity.

If we are poor, we are discontented, we regard ourselves as most miserable, and rail against Providence, who permits inequalities to obtain among brethren. No one is contented with his lot in life. We are all ill-at-ease. We would all be what we are not,- and have what we have not. And yet, with admirable simplicity, we ask, Are we not a great people? Nearly all the action of the American people, collectively or individually, has reference solely to the affairs of, time. Government sinks with us into a joint-stock concern for the practice of thrift. It has no divine authority, no high and solemn moral mission. In education even, the same low and earthly view obtains. We educate for time. We seek to fit our children for getting on, as we call it, in the world, -to make them sharp, bold, enterprising and successful business men. We teach them, indeed, that knowledge is power,-but power to outstrip their fellows in the pursuit of worldly goods. We teach them, indeed, that sloth is a mortal sin,-but sloth in the affairs of time and sense, not sloth in regard to our spiritual duties. We teach them to respect public opinion, to strive to be respectable, to be honored among men; rarely, and almost always ineffectually, to respect the law of God, to see the honor of God, and to despise that of men. Hence, they grow up timid time-servers, trimmers, moral cowards, afraid to say their souls are their own, to avow their honest convictions, if their convictions chance to be unpopular, or to follow God in the faith and worship he has ordained, if not held in repute, or if embraced only by the poor, the simple, of whom the world makes no account. To make a sacrifice for Christ, to give up all, houses, lands, wife, and children, for God, that we may have treasure in heaven, strikes us as something wholly uncalled for, as folly, as madness, worthy only of the dark ages of monkish ignorance and barbarity. To a worldly end conspire all our education, science, literature, and art.

Whatever cannot be pressed into the service of man as a creature of time and sense is by the immense majority of us condemned as useless and mischievous.

That we measure all things by the standard of this life and this world is evinced by the judgments we pass on other nations. In judging others, we always judge ourselves. Tell us what nation you place highest in the scale of nations, and you tell us what are your own views of what constitutes true national greatness. We, as a people, very generally count highest in the scale of contemporary nations those in which the national energy displays itself most exclusively in an industrial direction, and which are most successful in multiplying wealth and luxury. Since the great events in the sixteenth century, which out of courtesy we must call the reformation, although it was any thing but a reformation, there has sprung up a new social order, not known in the middle ages, and not yet universally adopted in Catholic countries. The whole tendency of this order is in an industrial direction. It places this world before the other, time before eternity, the body before the soul, the praise of men before the praise of God. It esteems the riches of this world more than the riches of divine grace, and bids us strive to live, not in the order of grace, but in the order of nature. Under this order the great aim is to be rich, independent, well off in time; to be distinguished, held in high repute one by another. We reverse the maxim of the Gospel, and say, Be not anxious for the soul, take no need to the worship of God, nor to obedience to his laws; but seek first to get on well in this world, look to the main chance, get rich, honestly, of course, if you can, but get rich, be distinguished, and then the kingdom of God and his justice will be added unto you unto you;--or if not, it will be no great matter. (Orestes Brownson, The Brownson Quarterly, 1846.)