Legislation by Bureaucrats Creates Lawless Government
There are rules in life. The first set is taught to each of us by parents and caregivers during the early years of life. Usually unwritten, these directives take the form of lessons and admonitions that are applied in a variety of ways with or without punishments.
During school years, edicts are often found on signs or posters hung on doors and walls. School authorities decide how these rules are administered. Sanctions and punishments may not be uniformly applied, as authorities are governed by school system rules and personal biases. These directives are an intermediate step, a preparation for the rules of adulthood.
As young adults, we encounter “lawyer rules”. When one signs an apartment lease or a car loan, we are presented with a document created by a lawyer called a contract. The contract outlines the parameters of the deal, what each party must do, what each party must not do, and the consequences for failing to comply. Testing the boundaries of a contract is a common part of a young person’s learning experience. The lesson is usually financially painful.
Once again, the lawyer rules of young life are merely training ground for Government Rules that should be considered “lawyer rules” on steroids.
Our Constitution, the original compilation of government rules, was written by a group of very wise men who had just triumphed over the army of a tyrannical monarch. They were afraid of recreating a too powerful central authority like the one they had just defeated. Nevertheless, our constitution’s framers recognized that the newly independent states needed a legal entity to administer rules and perform tasks efficiently that applied to the whole. The result was a thoughtfully designed contract that delegated a specific list of tasks to the central government while protecting the rights and freedoms of the states and their individual citizens.
Contracts are made up of words, and words have meaning. Textualists believe that our Constitution must be read, understood, and adhered to according to the actual definitions of the document’s words. A dictionary from 1790 might be necessary for that task. Invoking “intent of the framers” is speculative and is often used to contradict the written words for a political agenda or other malicious purposes.
Article I of our Constitution states: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives”. Where do these words allow a President or an appointed Judge to create law?
Where does the phrase “shall not be infringed.” allow unelected federal bureaucrats to limit the Second Amendment rights of individuals?
In America today, the states and their citizens are victims of deliberate abuse of federal government authority by all three branches of the government and their bureaucratic accomplices. This deliberate overreach violates the principles of limited government demanded by the Constitution.
We are being ruled by a lawless federal government that has ignored and obliterated the basic philosophy on which our country was founded. The result is a direct attack on private property, individual freedom, and the Natural Law Rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights. The Constitution is being illegally amended through legislative, bureaucratic, and judicial actions.
Our founders spoke out against the same outrages in the Declaration of Independence prior to our War of Independence:
. . . 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 . . .
Should we not learn a lesson from our history? Our future as a nation of free individuals is at stake.
Resist Tyranny and Trust in Freedom.
Dr. Dan’s guest on Freedom Forum Radio this weekend is frequent guest Bob Levy, inventor, attorney, and former Chairman of the Cato Institute. The topic will be the constitutional requirements for lawmaking by the branches and agencies of the federal government and the consequences of disobeying constitution law.
Levy joined Cato as a senior fellow in constitutional studies in 1997 after 25 years in business. In 1966, he founded CDA Investment Technologies, a major provider of investment information and software and served as CEO until 1991.
Levy then attended George Mason School of Law, where he was chief articles editor of the law review and class valedictorian. Levy received his JD in 1994. The next two years he clerked for Judge Royce C. Lamberth on the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., and for Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. From 1997 until 2004 Levy was an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University.
Levy’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, National Review, and many other publications. Levy has also discussed public policy on national radio and TV programs, including ABC’s Nightline, Fox’s The O’Reilly Factor, PBS’s Newshour, and NBC’s Today Show.
He is the author of The Dirty Dozen: How 12 Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom.
Levy served as co-counsel in District of Columbia v. Heller, the successful Supreme Court challenge to Washington, D.C.’s, gun ban.
Levy recently began airing a series of discussions on various aspects of constitutional law on YouTube. If you’re interested in controversies surrounding our federalist system, please watch his 25-minute YouTube video, “Who Rules: The States or the Feds?.”
Episode one of this four-part show begins this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, November 2-3, on WJRB 95.1 FM and streamed live over the Internet.
Episode 2: Saturday – Sunday November 9-10
Episode 3: Saturday – Sunday November 16-17
Episode 4: Saturday – Sunday November 23-24
Air times are:
Saturday 8:00 AM and 9:30 AM
Sunday 2:30 PM and 7:00 PM
All programs are available by podcast after the show airs time here.
