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America’s Great Divide

Two completely different philosophies of government are dividing the U.S. population. More serious than any mere difference over a single issue, the chasm represents wholly divergent views on the rights of individuals and the powers of federal, state and local authorities.

Since the dawn of the American Republic, there has been a fairly consistent understanding of what government is supposed to do. Washington handles foreign relations, protects the nation from enemies abroad, settles disputes between the states, protects the liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights (and later amendments), administers federal courts, patrols the borders, delivers the mail, opens up new frontiers and provides major interstate transportation infrastructure. States and localities are tasked with protecting residents from crime, maintaining sanitary and safety conditions, providing local transportation, educating the young, and providing a legal system to peacefully settling local disputes.

There have been relatively moderate additions to those duties. Programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid gave the government more direct interaction with individuals. States and cities provided financial and other assistance to those in need. But the guiding principles of the ninth and tenth Amendments within the Bill of Rights remained intact:

Ninth Amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

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

In the view of progressives, however, the 9th and 10th Amendment limitations on government’s rights and duties are anachronisms to be largely ignored, as are the separation of powers and the distinction between the federal government’s role and that of more local jurisdictions.

Progressives choose to de-emphasize traditional duties and limitations on government, and replace them with different responsibilities. They advocate reduced funding for defense on the national level and crime fighting on the local level and shifting those dollars to what have been called “nanny state” priorities.

Some of those new priorities have been the subject of ridicule. While mayor of NYC, Michael Bloomberg cut the size of the police department, and advocated cutting the size of the fire department. He focused on regulating what size soda could be purchased, and the salt intake of his constituents.

Others have created extraordinary controversy. The use of the Common Core curriculum to enhance federal oversight of education and politicize curriculum has been contentious. Federal interference into what was once a local responsibility extends even to what food items may be placed on school menus.

The most controversial, of course, was the enactment of Obamacare. While its progressive advocates likened it to programs such as social security, its opponents noted that its lengthy list of bureaucratic interactions with the patient-physician relationship render it an extraordinary and inappropriate increase in federal power.

Paul Joseph Warson, writing for Infowars in 2012   stated that “The nanny state is no longer just on steroids, it has turned into the Incredible Hulk as collectivism, pernicious bureaucracy, regulation, mass surveillance and outright tyranny runs wild across the country.”

He provided a number of examples. Among them:

– Parents across the country are being arrested for letting their children play outside.

–a man was found guilty and sentenced to spend 30 days in jail for collecting rainwater in three “illegal reservoirs” despite the fact that they are on his property.
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– Last year, a Michigan resident faced jail time for the crime of growing a “vegetable garden in front yard space.”

– Americans are being harassed by utility workers who are trespassing on private property and forcibly trying to install “smart” energy meters which spy on homeowners.

– Cities are passing ordinances that makes recycling compulsory

– The TSA has expanded its grope-down checkpoints beyond the airports to highways, political events and even school prom nights.

– The TSA is kicking Americans off flights for having a “bad attitude” and refusing to obey bizarre orders quickly enough.

– A teenager was recently visited by FBI special agents who grilled him over the content of a political You Tube video.

– The EPA is using spy drones to monitor farms as police use Predator drones to hunt down Americans for the crime of allowing cows to wander onto their land.

– Students in schools across the country are being indoctrinated to accept their treatment as prisoners on parole by being forced to wear RFID tracking chips.

– Veterans across the country are being declared “mentally defective” on a whim by the state and having their firearms seized.

– The federal government is officially backing Al-Qaeda fighters in Syria while declaring conservative Americans to be extremists and terrorists if they are “reverent of individual liberty.”

The dramatic increase in the size of existing programs is also indicative of the shift in governmental emphasis from basic services to a social-welfare nanny state. The Fiscal Times has noted that “everyone is aware of SNAP (food stamps), the mother of all food handouts, where over 47.8 million people participate at an annual cost of $81 billion. But awareness of the sprawling array of other government food programs is another eye opener. WIC, for example, the Women, Infants and Children Food and Nutrition Service, started small in 1968 to help poor and undernourished mothers-to-be. It now covers 53 percent of all infants in America at an annual cost of $8.8 billion, and involves 90 state agencies, 1,836 bureaus and 9,000 clinics. This now staggering project is a gateway to many other government-funded entitlement programs, including SNAP. There are, of course, lots of rules and the catalogue of approved foods is mind-boggling. Under WIC, mothers to be can’t buy white potatoes (insufficiently nutritious), imported cheeses or cheese spreads and only 9 types of domestic cheeses are approved. Canned beans are fine, but not if they include pork or frankfurters. Moms may buy a gallon of milk, but only in gallon containers, not two half-gallons.

“The spread of free school lunches—and now free breakfasts– is another story. In 1969, some 2.9 million youngsters received free lunches daily. By 2012, there were 18.7 million free lunches, 68.2 percent of all school lunches. What about free food during summer? No problem thanks to the Seamless Summer Option. Now ALL children can eat free in communities where 50 percent of all children are eligible for free or reduced-cost meals—that’s about two-thirds of all schools with lunch programs. In large part, the 50 percent of lunches that go to apparently ineligible youngsters are given to avoid stigmatizing the eligible.”

The list of individual examples could go on and on. But the key point is the significant growth in the powers of government in untraditional and unconstitutional areas, and the neglect of more appropriate responsibilities.  All this has occurred without any attempt to truly involve the American people in any meaningful discussion or debate.

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Obama’s Jurisdictional Confusion

The Obama Administration is displaying a deeply disturbing, fundamental lack of comprehension concerning the role of the federal government, and the dominion of its various agencies. The problem is reflected in issues both foreign and domestic, and is profoundly changing the relationship between Washington, the states, and individual American citizens.

The White House response to the recent beheading of an American journalist, as well as the 9/11/12 attack on the U.S. facility in Benghazi is illustrative of this deep confusion.  Each of these actions were military in nature, the former performed under the aegis of an adversarial armed force, the latter by organized terrorists using the weapons and tactics of war.

Rather than allow the appropriate organization, The Department of Defense, to timely respond, the Justice Department was absurdly given jurisdiction.  This is an irrational move for two key reasons. First, enemy military organizations are not vulnerable to nor concerned with American jurisprudence. Second, DOJ simply doesn’t have the capability to bring a foreign military to heel. Indeed, as has been amply demonstrated, even the heroic arrest or elimination by Special Forces of individual culpable leaders, Osama bin Laden being a prime example, does nothing substantive to reduce the threat.  Bin Laden is dead, but Islamic extremism is stronger than ever. Removing major figures has only strengthened the resolve of the movement, which now controls more territory than ever, a direct consequence of the Obama Administration’s decision to prematurely remove U.S. forces from Iraq and its announcement of a departure date from Afghanistan.

Domestically, the Department of Justice has failed to prosecute the tidal wave of illegal aliens flooding through America’s southern border, but has not hesitated to move against state and local officials seeking to do this vital task that the White House has abandoned.

It’s bewilderment over what it is supposed to do—and what it has no jurisdiction over– can also be seen in the events that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri. The proper course of action in the wake of the shooting of a black robbery suspect by a white police officer was to have the Missouri state legal system investigate and take appropriate action. No evidence of a civil rights violation was established before Attorney General Eric Holder became involved, sending numerous FBI agents to the area and travelling there himself. Since a civil rights violation had not been established, DOJ lacked jurisdiction and its presence was inappropriate.

In contrast, The Department of Justice has repeatedly refrained from investigating fairly obvious actions which affected Americans’ fundamental rights, including acts of voter intimidation, the harassment of journalists, and the abuse of the Internal Revenue Service involving partisan political attacks. It has also consistently interfered with states seeking to insure that their voter registration rolls are accurate.

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Washington’s overreach has created a regulatory climate that is Kafkaesque.

In his 2013 testimony before the Congressional Committee on over-criminalization, John G. Malcolm of the Heritage Foundation Stated: “… buried within the 51 titles of the United States Code and the far more voluminous Code of Federal Regulations, there are approximately 4,500 statutes and another 300,000 (or more) implementing regulations with potential criminal penalties for violations.  There are so many criminal laws and regulations, in fact, that nobody really knows how many there are, with scores more being created every year.  And that’s just federal offenses.”

It is clear that the Constitution never envisioned this vast and direct role for the federal government. The Bill of Rights’ Tenth Amendment clearly states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

This combination of confused jurisdiction between individual federal agencies, combined with Washington’s constitutionally inappropriate overreach into the jurisdiction of the states, reflects a government badly at odds with both common sense and its own founding principles.

 

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Ignoring the Constitution

Recently, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat, said that every organization in the nation should ignore federal immigration law until President Obama’s immigration reform program is enacted. That worrisome statement by an elected official encapsulates the growing disdain for the law and the Constitution itself by those on the political left.

It’s a question so basic that it seems odd that it has to be asked at all: shouldn’t the Constitution and other laws be followed by our elected officials?

Over the past five years, the basic document governing the United States, acknowledged worldwide as the greatest political achievement of humanity, has been increasingly ignored.  The President says he can’t wait for the mandated legislative role of Congress, and will use Executive Orders instead of the legislative process mandated by the Constitution. “I have a pen and a phone and I intend to use them,” he has proclaimed.

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It’s not just Washington that has forgotten the Bill of Rights.  Numerous municipalities completely violate the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms with impunity.  Many also effectively nullify federal law by proclaiming themselves “sanctuary cities” where immigration laws will not be enforced.

Once the process of ignoring the Constitution and other laws is begun,  the rise of an oppressive government that rejects all the rights of its citizenship will soon follow.