On Wednesday’s Mark Levin Show: No longer are we the Republic established by the Constitution. There is a dangerous lawlessness in this country and lack of ability of a Congress to check it. The only solution is Article V and what we can do at a State level.Here's an abbreviated version to review from Chapter 1: The Liberty Amendments:
The nation has entered an age of post-constitutional soft tyranny. ...And it's the second process in which Levin has devoted an entire book revealing this very real possibility and duty:
Social engineering and central planning are imposed without end...
Today, Congress operates not as the Framers intended, but in the shadows, where it dreams up its most notorious and oppressive laws...
Congress also, and often, delegates unconstitutionally lawmaking power to a gigantic yet ever-growing administrative state that, in turn, unleashes on society myriad regulations and rules...
Not to be outdone, the current occupant of the Oval Office sees his primary duty as "fundamentally transforming the United States of America." ... The metamorphosis of the executive branch into an immense institution exercising a conglomeration of powers, including lawmaking and decreeing, is clearly without constitutional origin, a quaint notion mostly derided these days.
Having delegated broad lawmaking power to executive branch departments and agencies of its own creation, contravening the separation-of-powers doctrine, Congress now watches as the president inflates the congressional delegations even further and proclaims repeatedly the authority to rule by executive fiat in defiance of, or over the top of, the same Congress that sanctioned a domineering executive branch in the first place. Notwithstanding Congress's delinquency, but because of it, an unquenched President Obama, in a hurry to expedite a societal makeover, has repeatedly admonished Congress that "[i]f [it] won't act soon to protect future generations, I will!" -- that is, if Congress will not genuflect to his demands, and pass laws to his liking, he will act on his own.
And the president has made good on his refrain. On a growing list of matters, he has, in fact, displayed an impressive aptitude for imperial rule. ...
Today this is glorified and glamorized as compassionate progressivism. The Framers called it despotism. ...
The third branch of the federal triarchy, the judiciary, is no better. Among the biggest myths is that the men and women of the judiciary, operating under monklike conditions, would dutifully and faithfully focus their undivided mental faculties toward preserving the Constitution. ...
It turns out that justices are also God's children; and being of this world, their makeup consists of actual flesh and blood. They are no more noble or virtuous than the rest of us, and in some cases less so, as they suffer from the usual human imperfections and frailties. And the Court's history proves it. ...
What was to be a relatively innocuous federal government, operating from a defined enumeration of specific grants of power, has become an ever-present and unaccountable force. It is the nation's largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor. Moreover, with aggrandized police powers, what it does not control directly it bans or mandates by regulation. ...
The illimitable regulatory activity, with which the federal government torments, harasses, and coerces the individual's private and economic behavior, is the progeny of a colossal federal edifice with inexhaustible energy for societal manipulation and change. In order to satisfy its gluttonous appetite for programmatic schemes, the federal government not only hurriedly digest the Treasury's annual revenue, funded with confiscatory taxes on a diminishing number of productive citizens, but desserts on the wealth not yet created by generations not yet born with unconstrained indebtedness. And what havoc has this wrought. ...
There is not enough money on the planet to make good on the federal government's financial obligations. Hence, the Federal Reserve Board has swung into action with multiple versions of "quantitative easing," which is nothing more than the federal government monetizing its own debt -- or buying its own debt -- with a combination of borrowing, issuing itself credit, and printing money amounting to trillions of dollars. Of course, this has the eventual effect of devaluing the currency, fueling significant inflation or deflation, and destabilizing the economy at some future point.
But like the laws of physics, there is no escaping the laws of economics. As these fiscal and monetary malpractices escalate, for there is no end in sight, the federal government will turn increasingly reckless and demanding, taking an even harder line against the individual's accumulation of wealth and retention of private property. ...
What, then, is the answer? ...
It is asking too much of today's governing masterminds and their fanatical adherents to reform the product of their own fatuity -- that is, the continuing disassembly of the Constitution and society. After all, despite one credible source after another, both within and outside the federal government, ringing alarm bells about the nation's hazardous track -- describing it as unsustainable, desperate, and immoral -- they are blinded to reason, experience, and knowledge by their political DNA and ideological invincibility and therefore are intransigent to effective ameliorative steps. They long ago renounced by word and action their adherence to the Constitution's confinements since the Statists' utopia and the Framers' Constitution cannot coexist.
However, it is not asking too much of "a great people [to] turn a calm and scrutinizing eye upon itself: and rally to their own salvation. It is time to return to self-government, where the people are sovereign and not subjects and can reclaim some control over their future rather than accept as inevitable a dismal fate. Unlike the radicalism of the governing masterminds, who self-servingly oversee a century-old, perpetual counterrevolution against the American dawn, the people must have as their goal the reestablishment of the founding principles and the restoration of constitutional republicanism, thereby nurturing the individual and preserving the civil society. This requires, first, an acknowledgment of the federal government's unmooring from its constitutional foundation; second, an acceptance that the condition is urgent and, if untreated, will ultimately be the death knell of the American Republic; third, the wisdom to rebalance the government in a way that is without novelty and true to the Framers' original purpose; and, fourth, the courage to confront -- intellectually and politically -- the Statists' stubborn grip on power.
There is a path forward but it requires an enlightened look back at our founding. And what we find is that the Framers rightly insisted on preserving the prominent governing role of the state legislatures as a crucial mechanism to containing the power of the proposed new federal government. In fact, other than the limited, specified powers granted to the federal government, the states retained for themselves plenary governing authority. ...
Unlike the modern Statist, who defies, ignores, or rewrites the Constitution for the purpose of evasion, I propose that we, the people, take a closer look at the Constitution for our preservation. The Constitution itself provides the means for restoring self-government and averting societal catastrophe (or, in the case of societal collapse, resurrecting the civil society) in Article V.
As opposed to a Federal Leviathan (all three branches) that's ransacked the Constitution?! Why else would the Framers 'craft, adopt, and endorse the language?'Article V: The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress...Importantly, in neither case does the Article V amendment process provide for a constitutional convention. It provides for two methods of amending the Constitution. The first method, where two-thirds of Congress passes a proposed amendment and then forwards it to the state legislatures for possible ratification by three-fourths of the states, has occurred on twenty-seven occasions. The second method, involving the direct application of tow-thirds of the state legislatures for a Convention for proposing Amendments, which would thereafter also require a three-fourths ratification vote by the states, has been tried in the past but without success. Today it sits dormant.
The fact is that Article V expressly grants state legislatures significant authority to rebalance the constitutional structure for the purpose of restoring our founding principles should the federal government shed its limitations, abandon its original purpose, and grow too powerful, as many delegates in Philadelphia and the state conventions had worried it might. ...
I was originally skeptical of amending the Constitution by the state convention process. I fretted it could turn into a runaway caucus. As an ardent defender of the Constitution who revers the brilliance of the Framers, I assumed this would play disastrously into the hands of the Statists. However, today I am a confident and enthusiastic advocate for the process. The text of Article V makes clear that there is a serious check in place. Whether the product of Congress or a convention, a proposed amendment has no effect at all unless "ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States or by Conventions in three fourths thereof...." This should extinguish anxiety that the state convention process could hijack the Constitution.
With a historic wave of Republicans swept into state legislatures across the nation last week, it's high time the People who elected them DEMAND corrective recourse!
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