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Posts Tagged ‘U.S. Constitution’
Yes … foreigners that come to the U.S. have freedom of speech under the U.S. Constitution.
Posted by M. C. on June 16, 2025
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: foreigners, freedom of speech, U.S. Constitution | Leave a Comment »
Republicans, Foreign Policy, and Federalism – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on March 4, 2023
Congressional Republicans are horrible on such key issues as foreign policy and federalism. They share equal blame with the Democrats for the destruction of the Republic.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/03/laurence-m-vance/republicans-foreign-policy-and-federalism/
Although the Republicans regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the November midterm election, they were the opposition party for the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency. But just what did the Republicans oppose?
I have every so often for the past fifteen years referred to a tool I use to judge Republicans in Congress. I am referring to “The Freedom Index: A Congressional Scorecard Based on the U.S. Constitution.”
The Freedom Index “rates congressmen based on their adherence to constitutional principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, national sovereignty, and a traditional foreign policy of avoiding foreign entanglements.” It is published by The New American magazine, where I am a contributing columnist.
The new edition of the Freedom Index is the last for the 117th Congress, and looks at ten key measures. Scores are derived by dividing a congressman’s constitutional votes by the total number of votes cast and multiplying by 100. So, the higher the score the better.
This edition tracks congressional votes in the Senate on semiconductor incentives, foreign aid, declaration of war, expanding NATO, targeting parents as domestic terrorists, the Inflation Reduction Act, hydrofluorocarbons reduction, terminating Covid-19 national emergency, marriage, and the omnibus 2023 spending bill.
It tracks votes in the House on the U.S. military in Syria, abortion access, expanding NATO, semiconductor incentives, assault weapons ban, the Inflation Reduction Act, electoral count procedures, federal police grants, marriage, and the omnibus 2023 spending bill.
The average Republican Senate score was a pathetic 60 percent. The average Republican House score was 71 percent. A brief look at some of the things Republicans voted on shows us that the Republicans did not oppose much of anything when it comes to an interventionist U.S. foreign policy and an assault on federalism.
During the consideration of a veterans healthcare bill, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) offered an amendment to prohibit the distribution of foreign-aid funds, other than to Israel, for 10 years. Only 7 Republicans voted in favor of it.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: federalism, Foreign Policy, Freedom Index, Republicans, U.S. Constitution | Leave a Comment »
Rescuing the Republic
Posted by M. C. on October 11, 2022
There are no such stories to be told about Biden because there is no longer anything funny to be said about him. Meanwhile, the ongoing challenge is to get him to stop talking at all, so painfully disjointed from reality has his speech become. In fact, it is more than just painful to watch. It is downright frightening,
By Regis Martin
Crisis Magazine
On hearing the news that Calvin Coolidge had just died, the humorist Dorothy Parker, whose wit could be pitiless, asked in mock surprise, “How could they tell?” Old Silent Cal, 30th President of the United States—the Sphinx of the Potomac, Washington insiders called him—had passed on. And nobody noticed.
Remind you of anyone today? The current occupant of the White House perhaps? Who may well be dead, too, but how can we tell? How can anyone tell? Leaving aside his handlers, media shills and sycophants who’ve been frantically propping him up for years, most of us simply can’t be sure. But those in the know are certainly aware of the hollow shell they’ve kept on life support since before the election of 2020—going all the way back to the Biden basement where this whole charade began.
How completely unlike Calvin Coolidge, who, for all that he didn’t do during the years he spent running the country, managed nevertheless to do it brilliantly. In fact, he was such a blooming genius at it that Walter Lippmann, who rejected most of his politics, was so impressed by his “active inactivity” that he could see at once how it perfectly suited “the mood of the country.”
It really wasn’t, you see, so much a matter of what he did or didn’t do as who he was that did it. Alfred E. Smith, an admiring member of the opposition who very nearly became president himself, said of Coolidge that what distinguished him was “character more than heroic achievement. His great task was to restore the dignity and prestige of the Presidency when it had reached the lowest ebb in our history…in a time of extravagance and waste.”
Character. It is what enables a man to stand tall in the saddle, to make choices that are the result of a life long-habituated to the practice of virtue. It is what gives voters confidence in the leaders we elect, knowing that, as Plato put it, here is someone who actually does not covet the job we’ve given him. Allow only those who disdain the exercise, Plato taught, to lord it over the rest of us. When getting and keeping power becomes the consuming passion, it’s time for voters to pull the plug, lest the office holder be tempted to tyrannize over others.
How we’ve come to miss that quality among the moral pygmies who govern us now, their lust for full control of our lives having turned them into addicts. Not since Coolidge, it seems, the quality of whose character impressed even his political opponents, have we moved so far from Sphinx to Jinx. Which pretty much describes the arc of our nation’s current decline and fall. And we’ll not need the resources of an Edward Gibbon to tell the tale.
Just check out any Presidential Q&A to get a full and proper sense of the disaster we’ve got on our hands—Biden’s latest lapse being the deceased congresswoman whose name he repeatedly called out from the podium. “Jackie, you here? Where’s Jackie?” Biden asked as he haplessly scanned the crowd for signs of Rep. Jackie Walorski, who had perished more than a month ago in a car crash. “She must not be here,” he concluded forlornly.
This is pure bathos, for which there are no comparisons to be found this side of Monty Python. And for this we’re not permitted even to consider invoking Article Twenty-Four of the U.S. Constitution, which provides for emergency removal of a president when circumstances indicate he’s incapacitated? Or is it only Donald Trump we’re allowed to accuse of being off his rocker?
If the unfolding lunacy we see day after day coming out of Washington doesn’t lead to a red wave in November, then the whole country has gone crackers. We might as well all be pod people sleepwalking our way into the dustbin of history. Because we haven’t got a future as a country. In fact, we won’t even have a country, or at least not one any of us would care to recognize as our own. Is it possible that we’re all brain-dead? That we’ve fallen into a black hole, only we don’t yet know it? Who will tell us?
One of the funniest stories told about Coolidge comes from a White House supper in which an intrepid young lady sought to engage him in conversation, announcing that she could tease out at least three words. “You lose,” he told her without looking up from his plate.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Calvin Coolidge, Jackie Walorski, U.S. Constitution | Leave a Comment »
I Didn’t Join the Military to Fight for Taiwan
Posted by M. C. on September 22, 2022
When I joined the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, and later the Idaho Army National Guard, I signed up to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution and our Bill of Rights—not Taipei.
by Dan McKnight
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/i-didnt-join-the-military-to-fight-for-taiwan/
Are you ready to go to war to “protect” a place, thousands of miles away from our nation, which we have no treaty alliance with and no overriding national interest?
I’m not talking about Ukraine, even though we continue to pump that country full of billions of dollars in weapons and supplies in a proxy war against Russia.
I’m talking about Taiwan, located off the coast of China in the Pacific Ocean.
Joe Biden just promised to defend it with the full military might of the United States.
When I joined the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, and later the Idaho Army National Guard, I signed up to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution and our Bill of Rights—not Taipei.
Here’s the story.
After the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949, and Chairman Mao consolidated the rule of the Communist Party in Beijing, a small collection of anti-communists flew the coop and established themselves on the island of Formosa, about 100 miles from the mainland.
That’s where they’ve been ever since, developing from a military dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy with two major parties. One wants closer integration with Beijing, the other wants full independence.
Both Taipei and Beijing claim to be the legitimate government of all of China.
In the 1970s, our government normalized relations with the Chinese mainland, and de-recognized the “Republic of China” in Taiwan, severing diplomatic relations and abrogating a defense pact.
For over 40 years since then our foreign policy has been guided by “strategic ambiguity.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Bill of Rights, Military, Taiwan, U.S. Constitution, Ukraine | Leave a Comment »
Government Unhinged: No Constitutional Restraints, Just Executive Orders!
Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2021
In just 9 days, President Biden has signed a record 40 executive orders, actions and directives. This is a far cry from the schoolbook instructions on “How a bill becomes a law.” Is this what “our democracy” has come to mean? The stroke of a pen? Where’s the U.S. Constitution?
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: executive orders, Government Unhinged, President Biden, U.S. Constitution | 2 Comments »
10th Amendment – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on April 21, 2020
Yet almost every Governor have done precisely this, i.e., they have
restricted, regulated and prohibited activities that the Constitution
itself says they have no right to restrict, regulate, or prohibit. Even
worse (from a legal perspective) they have done so mostly by edict and
not by legislation and none to my knowledge have even had to go to court
to attempt to provide any “rational basis” for their actions. That,
dear reader, is the complete abandonment of the rule of law.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/04/dom-armentano/10th-amendment/
Some liberal and conservative commentators have argued that the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does give the States (and the people) certain “powers” or rights not granted to the Federal Government. This argument is being used currently to defend the so-called “rights” of the States to decide when and whether to allow the resumption of normal business and societal relations in the state.
But is this an accurate reading of the 10th Amendment and of the argument from “states rights’? Hardly. It is true that the 10th Amendment does say that powers NOT granted under the Constitution to the Feds are, in fact, reserved to the States and to the People. BUT it also says, and this is a huge BUT, these so-called “powers” CANNOT include activities expressly “prohibited by it (the Constitution) to the States..” In short, the States cannot regulate or prohibit activities that are explicitly protected by the Constitution as “rights”, namely activities such as (Amendment 1) “the free exercise of religion” and the “right of the people…to assemble…” And no State, of course, (Article 1, Section 10) “can pass any Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts…”
In short, the States don’t have–and have never had–the legitimate power to regulate or prohibit religious freedom or freedom of assembly or “impair” the obligation of contracts.” Yet almost every Governor have done precisely this, i.e., they have restricted, regulated and prohibited activities that the Constitution itself says they have no right to restrict, regulate, or prohibit. Even worse (from a legal perspective) they have done so mostly by edict and not by legislation and none to my knowledge have even had to go to court to attempt to provide any “rational basis” for their actions. That, dear reader, is the complete abandonment of the rule of law.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: 10th Amendment, freedom of assembly, obligation of contracts, religious freedom, U.S. Constitution | Leave a Comment »
A More or Less Perfect Union – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on February 12, 2020
There’s a discussion about how some of our Bill of Rights guarantees mean absolutely nothing today, namely the 9th and 10th Amendments, which reaffirm personal liberty by specifically limiting the federal government to its “enumerated powers.”
The most important audience for “A More or Less Perfect Union” is high school and college students. For it is they who stand a good chance of losing the liberties that made our nation the greatest and freest on earth.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/02/walter-e-williams/a-more-or-less-perfect-union/
“A More or Less Perfect Union” is a three-part series, produced by Free to Choose Network, that will air on various PBS stations across the nation starting in February. The documentary is a personal exploration of the U.S. Constitution by Justice Douglas Ginsburg, who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals D.C. Circuit and is now a senior justice on the court. Ginsburg explores the U.S. Constitution and features interviews with and gains the perspectives from constitutional experts of all political views — liberal, conservative and libertarian. He examines the key issues of liberty in the U.S. both from a historical and contemporary perspective. Among those issues are freedom of the press and religion, slavery and civil rights, the Second Amendment, separation of powers and the number of ways that the Constitution’s framers sought to limit the power of the federal government.
The first episode is titled “A Constitution in Writing.” It examines the contentious atmosphere that arose among the delegates in that hot, humid Philadelphia summer of 1787. State delegates were sent to Philadelphia to work out the problems of the Articles of Confederation, which served as the first Constitution of the 13 original states. This part of the documentary examines some of the efforts to deal with the problems of the Articles of Confederation while maintaining its guiding principle to preserve the independence and sovereignty of the states. It also examines the compromises and struggles that led to the document we know as the U.S. Constitution. Some of the framers, particularly the Anti-Federalists, led by Patrick Henry, saw the Constitution as defective and demanded amendments be added that contained specific guarantees of personal freedoms and rights and clear limitations on the federal government’s power. They swore that they would never ratify the Constitution unless it contained a Bill of Rights.
The second episode is titled “A Constitution for All.” One major emphasis of this episode is the examination of the Supreme Court decisions that undermined racial justice both for slaves and later ex-slaves for a century after the Civil War. Several constitutional scholars discuss how the courts and states ignored and weakened the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, known collectively as the Civil War Amendments, which were designed to ensure equality for recently emancipated slaves. There is also discussion of Bill of Rights guarantees to people accused of a crime. There is more exploration into the Bill of Rights guarantees of free speech, religious freedom and the notion that “due process of law” be part of any proceeding that denies a citizen “life, liberty or property.” This forced the government to compensate citizens when it takes private property for public use.
Episode three, “Our Constitution at Risk,” examines the many ways that our Constitution is under assault today. It points out that the framers would be shocked by how all three branches of government have grown as a result of what we the people demand from our elected representatives. There’s a discussion about how some of our Bill of Rights guarantees mean absolutely nothing today, namely the 9th and 10th Amendments, which reaffirm personal liberty by specifically limiting the federal government to its “enumerated powers.”
“A More or Less Perfect Union” is not just a bunch of academics and constitutional experts preaching. It features interviews with everyday Americans weighing in with their visions on the rule of law, the branches of government and the debate over originalism. There’s a companion book titled “Voices of Our Republic,” edited by Ginsburg. It is a collection of thoughts about the Constitution from judges, journalists, and academics. It includes the thoughts of Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Neil Gorsuch and Sandra Day O’Connor, publisher Arthur Sulzberger, professor Alan Dershowitz, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and historians Joseph Ellis and Ron Chernow, along with Jack Nicklaus, Gene Simmons and many others.
The most important audience for “A More or Less Perfect Union” is high school and college students. For it is they who stand a good chance of losing the liberties that made our nation the greatest and freest on earth.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: A More or Less Perfect Union, Articles of Confederation, Free to Choose Network, U.S. Constitution | Leave a Comment »
We’re All To Blame – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on September 13, 2017
Today’s Americans have little appreciation for how their values reflect a contempt for those of our Founding Fathers.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/09/walter-e-williams/were-all-to-blame/
The largest threat to our prosperity is government spending that far exceeds the authority enumerated in Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.
Where do you think Congress gets the resources for such spending? It’s not the tooth fairy or Santa Claus. The only way Congress can give one American a dollar is to use threats, intimidation and coercion to confiscate that dollar from another American. Congress forcibly uses one American to serve the purposes of another American. We might ask ourselves: What standard of morality justifies the forcible use of one American to serve the purposes of another American? By the way, the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another is a fairly good working definition of slavery… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: general welfare clause, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, U.S. Constitution | Leave a Comment »
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