Which United States Constitution?

The choice between the Madisonian Constitution or the Wilsonian “living constitution” is stark and pressing indeed.

by Phillip Keuhlen for American Greatness

The choice between the Madisonian Constitution or the Wilsonian “living constitution” is stark and pressing indeed.

Fifty years ago my United States Naval Academy Class accepted its individual commissions. Each officer swore an oath of indefinite duration to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; to bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and to well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which they entered. It is an interesting formulation, for it requires one’s allegiance to, and defense of, our founding document and by extension the principles it embodies. 

For virtually all of us there was clarity about what was meant by the Constitution of the United States. Even in the unlikely event that a midshipman had arrived at the Academy unschooled in civics, one did not graduate without passing course H303, U.S. Government and Constitutional Development. Prospective officers understood the Constitution of the United States to be one of the organic laws of the United States, the Madisonian instrument designed by the Constitutional Convention, ratified in 1789, and adapted in the Bill of Rights and succeeding amendments, to protect the principles of the American founding stated in the first of the organic laws, the 1776 Declaration of Independence. 

One cannot help but wonder which United States Constitution today’s generation of serving officers intends to support and defend when they swear and live their oaths of office. For, make no mistake, while the Madisonian Constitution, as amended, and the Declaration of Independence are still the written laws of the land, the United States is administered today by an entirely different constitutional regime, underpinned by a radically different set of principles. Each officer must face the moral and ethical questions of which to support and defend, and what that defense may entail.

The first principles of the American founding are concisely stated in the Declaration of Independence, the first official act of our Congress and the fountainhead of American law. 

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” (emphasis added)

The political philosophy of natural law and natural rights championed in the Declaration was enshrined by the Congress as our nation’s statement of first principles. In the U.S. Code Congress has placed it at the beginning, under the heading “The Organic Laws of the United States of America,” ahead of the Constitution. James Madison, the father of the Constitution, said that it was “the fundamental act of union,” the first lawful document by which we illuminate the constitutional principles of Americans.

But, what do the words mean? The founders stated that our rights were individual rights; that they were shared in common by all mankind; that they were conferred by God, not by a state; and that they were ours by right, not rationed by government as a means to its ends. They proclaimed these values incontrovertible, requiring no defense. They declared that the legitimate function of government was to secure the natural rights of individual citizens, and that the power of governments to secure those natural rights derived only from the consent of the people.

The Constitutional Convention labored to craft a document that could be passed out of convention and be ratified by the states. The result was a Constitution founded upon natural law, designed to defend the natural rights of citizens, and equipped with safeguards intended to preserve the union, minimize abuse of power, and assure justice for all. The principle features designed to protect the Republic and constitutional governance included:

• Separation of powers between the legislative (enact law), executive (enforce law), and judicial (interpret law) branches of government;
• Multiple provisions to protect minorities, as individuals, classes or as States, from the tyranny of a majority by features such as due process, a bicameral legislature, and an Electoral College; 
• Formal processes for amending the Constitution; 
• Formal processes for electing the president; and 
• Reservation of powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, to the states or the people respectively.

The founders’ political philosophy of natural law stands in stark contrast to the contemporaneous philosophy of utilitarianism espoused by Jeremy Bentham. Bentham found the motivating principle for society in the shorthand phrase, “The greatest good for the greatest number.” This view, rejected by the founders, embraced the state as the arbiter of a “common good;” found right and wrong to be relative, defined in terms of the effect on the “common good;” believed that the “common good,” and hence government by the state that defined it, was preeminent over individuals. In utilitarianism, personal liberty exists only to the extent it is bestowed by governments, granted in the context and support of the state defined “common good.” 

There is a profound, irreconcilable, difference between the first principles of American values stated in the Declaration of Independence and the beliefs of Bentham and his philosophical heirs such as John Stuart Mill, Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm. Those political philosophers provide the philosophical underpinning of contemporary utilitarian-based Progressive movements. For over a century, the proponents of Progressivism have unceasingly advanced a vision and values directly opposed to those the country was founded on. They have mounted sustained legislative, judicial, and executive programs that have incrementally subverted the United States Constitution. They have supplanted it with a regime of governance that compromises essential elements of Madisonian constitutional governance, effectively replacing it with an antithetical political philosophy. And like the proverbial frog cooked in the pan of water brought slowly to boiling, many are totally unaware of this changed constitutional environment.

The seminal political architect of changes that have been impressed into American constitutional governance over the past century was President Woodrow Wilson. Under the cover of the national emergency of World War I, Wilson initiated two radical transformations to Madisonian constitutional governance of limited powers. 

• The first, his doctrine of a “living constitution” circumvents provisions of the constitution by constituting the Supreme Court functionally as a permanently sitting constitutional convention, usurping the power to make law reserved to the elected Congress and inventing new law and constitutional provisions by judicial action, contrary to the Madisonian Constitution’s separation of powers. 

• Wilson’s “administrative state” is an even more profound transformation of constitutional governance. Eliminating the separation of powers entirely, it empowers unelected, unaccountable bureaucratic agencies to reign sovereign over the people, able to make rules with the force of law, enforce them, and adjudicate breeches of them, often absent the due process guaranteed by Madisonian governance.

Wilson’s transformations were founded on the Hegelian concept of a state that is sovereign over the people. The Hegelian state functions to define the interests of the community and delimits individual liberty to conform to this revealed state interest. Wilson and his successors have substituted the state as the source and arbiter of citizen’s rights, eliminating the Madisonian construct of the state as the servant of the people, governing with their consent in defense of their inalienable rights bestowed from the Creator’s fountainhead.

Wilson’s Progressive successors have consolidated and extended the transformation of constitutional governance that he initiated. Under cover of another national emergency, the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt radically extended the definition of interstate commerce in Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution. Initially rebuffed by the Supreme Court in his attempt to usurp powers reserved to the states, Roosevelt threatened legislation to pack the Supreme Court with supporters. Thus threatened, the court acceded to Roosevelt’s vast expansion of the extraconstitutional regulatory state. This further overturned constitutional protections such as the separation of powers, the presumption of innocence, and standing for judicial review. 

Today, the Progressive effort to subvert and functionally replace the Madisonian Constitution and the rights that underpin it continues apace, with current events replete with examples. 

• Faced with a thin majority of Supreme Court Justices who profess a nominally Madisonian view of the Constitution and jurisprudence, and who are the sole bulwark against elective tyranny, today’s Progressives once again propose to pack the Supreme Court to further consolidate their power.
• Several state legislatures have attacked the Constitution by enacting statutes to enable direct election of the president via the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. This perversion intends to circumvent several constitutional provisions. These include those for the election of the president; for amendment of the Constitution; and for interstate compacts. At its core it would disenfranchise many voters by requiring state electors to cast votes based on the voting in other states, rather than in their own.
• Progressives have attacked freedom of speech both directly and indirectly under cover of anti-extremism and fantastic allegations of insurrection with political indoctrination, cancel culture, speech codes, and deplatforming. 
• Prominent Progressives have attacked freedom of religion, perverting the Constitution’s intended protection of religious expression. They express open hostility to religion, designed to suppress religious expression and to attack qualification for public office on the basis of professed religious belief. They have initiated numerous government actions to coerce individuals and religious organizations to take actions contrary to their faith.

So which United States Constitution does the current generation of serving officers support and defend? The formally adopted Madisonian Constitution and its Lockean vision of liberty underpinned in natural law, inalienable rights, and legitimacy based upon the consent of the governed; or the Wilsonian constitutional regime and its Benthamite/Hegelian underpinning in a statist defined “common good” of contingent rights and liberties? 

Will they embrace and fight for the defining values and rights conferred by natural law as enshrined in our founding documents, or abdicate the legacy our forefathers fought and died for and accede to the elective statist tyranny, moral relativism, and legal positivism (judge-made law) of the descendants of Bentham?

Make no mistake; the choice between these visions is the critical issue of our American age. Each officer, whether in our individual actions as citizens in civic affairs—or in organizational leadership to our communities, businesses, or government agencies—faces profound moral and ethical decisions in this regard. We will define our place in history, and bequeath our greatest gift or curse to our posterity, in the choice we make between them. A significant portion of our body politic unabashedly attacks the vision and values America was founded on, embracing a diametrically opposed vision and set of values, while others simply sleepwalk through it all, content to go along to get along. 

From the earliest days of the American experiment, preeminent American leaders have understood how fragile it is. Franklin, asked about the form of the new government after the Constitutional Convention replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Washington warned in his farewell address about the risk of losing shared common vision and values to factionalism. Lincoln, above all, understood and emphasized that preserving America and its common founding vision and values required covenantal rededication by each succeeding generation. 

The United States of America has been engaged in a struggle over the choice between our formally adopted Madisonian Constitution and the competing, incrementally advanced Wilsonian constitutional regime for over a century. Taking inspiration from Patrick Henry’s speech before the Virginia Convention at St. John’s Church in Richmond on March 23, 1775, we argue that those who believe in America’s founding values but deny this reality have eyes, but see not; have ears but hear not. Hearkening back to a time of youth perhaps, they cry for a return to civility and restraint in public discourse, crying “Peace, peace!”—but there can be no peace between these alternatives. 

We are potentially at a tipping point in the history of our Constitution and constitutional governance. Those who crusade for Wilsonian governance and its rejection of America’s founding values are today ascendant in government institutions and much of public culture. They already display the inclination to suppress opposition by such means as are available to them, including political indoctrination and broad proscription/punishment of “political speech” in the Armed Forces. Those who take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America face choices in the execution of that responsibility. 

What does it mean to support the Constitution? Is their obligation passive or active? Does military service alone fulfill the obligation to support and defend the Constitution? Is there an obligation to speak up publicly, either inside or outside the military organization to support the Constitution? Is such speech a “political” or “extremist” activity or is it a core element of carrying out their oath of office? All are fair questions, yet all must be preceded by officers first consciously answering for themselves, “Which Constitution of the United States am I defending?” The choice between the Madisonian Constitution that remains the law of the land or the Wilsonian “living constitution” that subverts its intent, denies its underpinning values, and is increasingly the basis of current governance is stark and pressing indeed.

X22, Christian Patriot News, and more-Oct 24

 

Evening. Here's tonight's news.

The Farce of American Despotism

The Soviets had the gulag, we have “cancel culture” in our universities and a brittle obsession with race and weirdo sexuality everywhere.

by Roger Kimball for American Greatness

Reflecting on Joe Biden’s disastrous “town hall” with Anderson Cooper on Thursday, The Spectator’s Dominic Green asks a question that has to weigh heavily on the mind of every American adult: “Is it more worrisome that Joe Biden might not be in charge, or that he actually is in charge?” I have long argued that allowing Biden to appear in public is a form of elder abuse, and I have speculated that he really is not in control of his actions but is manipulated, puppet-like, by a shadowy cadre of unnamed string-pullers I have called “The Committee.”

I do not have any proof that such is the case. I infer the existence and machinations of The Committee from Biden’s ostentatious incompetence and apparent senility. Has any president in the history of the Republic overseen such a destructive litany of failures so early in his tenure? Observers around the world caught their breath in August as our botched exit from Afghanistan went from appalling to something much worse and more deadly. What will be its defining image? The desperate Afghans clinging to and then falling from the landing gear of a transport plane as it took off from the Kabul airport? Or will it be the images of the slaughter perpetrated by a suicide (that is, a homicide) bomber outside the airport, an incident that killed some 170 people include more than a dozen U.S. military personnel?

Or maybe it will be the image of the drone strike launched in retaliation for that slaughter, a strike that was supposed to have targeted an ISIS-K operative but in fact killed zero terrorists and instead blew to bits 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children. The United States initially said they had obliterated an ISIS-K operative along with the collateral damage, but eventually they had to admit that, nope, they got no bad guys, just 10 innocent Afghans. 

General Mark “White Rage” Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, initially called the attack a “righteous strike,” but then walked that back to describe it as a “heart-wrenching” “horrible tragedy of war.” Meanwhile, Joe Biden himself called the evacuation from Afghanistan an “extraordinary success.” 

I wonder what the hundreds of Americans stranded in Afghanistan think about that? The administration initially said that everyone who wanted to get out could get out, then it acknowledged that a handful of Americans were left behind, then “about a hundred.” That number has just been adjusted up to more than 400. I wonder, too, what the families of those murdered by the Taliban, and then hanged from construction cranes as “examples” to the populace, think of that judgment? Something similar, I suspect, to what the husband and children of Negar Masoomi, the pregnant policewoman who allegedly was murdered in front of them by Taliban agents in September, think. 

But whether Joe is calling the shots or is merely the Howdy Doody mannequin manipulated by others, it is clear for all to see that the United States, as Green puts it, is “heading nowhere good.” And the volume keeps getting turned up on the awfulness. 

Everyone has minuted the disaster at our southern border, where thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens are pouring into the country, only to be packed off and resettled in a town near you. It was horrible a couple of months ago. Now it is a screaming catastrophe, as another huge caravan of migrants is wending its way through Mexico towards America. Just so, inflation had spiked over the summer, but now it is out of control, the worst in decades, a situation compounded by a crippled supply chain as hundreds of cargo ships loiter off the coasts of California and New York, unable to make port or be unloaded. 

Meanwhile Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary is off on paternity leave with his hubby and their adopted child. Santa is predicted to be leaving the North Pole a little light this holiday season, since many of the gifts people ordered will be delayed. And it’s a good thing his sleigh is powered by reindeer, since gas is going to be awfully dear by Christmas. At some spots in California, it is already north of $8 a gallon. 

Last week, the Chinese took the world, including our so-called “intelligence” services, by surprise when it tested a nuclear capable hypersonic rocket. The news of that broke right around the time that the State Department issued a tweet proudly announcing “International Pronouns Day.” “Today on International Pronouns Day,” it read, “we share why many people list pronouns on their email and social media profiles.”

Noting that until recently, the United States set “the global standard in political imagery,” Green argues that that day has passed. “The US no longer defines that global standard,” he writes. 

The Chinese are the masters of political performance these days, whether it’s allegorical nationalist ballets at sporting events or the other nationalist ballet, the synchronized ovation in the Great Hall of the People. Yet our politicians feel they have to keep up with the old American standard. The result, as it was for the Soviets, is farce. We are now beating ourselves at our own game.

Indeed. And one result of that farce is that the mummers’ play of political correctness increasingly substitutes for serious politics, even as the ideology of wokeness replaces genuine enlightenment. “Twenty-first century America,” Green rightly comments,” is a shadow of its former self, so its politics have become a shadow play of propaganda.” 

Marx famously adapted Hegel’s observations about history repeating itself, noting Hegel forgot to add that it does so first as tragedy, then as farce. That is the mode of American despotism at the moment. The Soviets had the gulag, we have “cancel culture” in our universities and a brittle obsession with race and weirdo sexuality everywhere. Are we supposed to be proud or alarmed that Rachel Levine, (né Richard) is the first “transgender” Assistant Secretary of Health and four-star admiral? Tocqueville saw the essentials of our peculiar servitude in his brilliant analysis of “democratic despotism.” Naturally, though, he missed some of the more farcical aspects for who, in 1830, could have predicted “International Pronouns Day” or phenomena like Rachel Levine? 

Montesquieu put his finger on our situation when, in Considerations of the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, he noted that “in a free state in which sovereignty has just been usurped, whatever can establish the unlimited authority of one man is called good order, and whatever can maintain the honest liberty of the subjects is called commotion, dissension, or bad government.” Montesquieu was talking about the moment when the Roman republic gave way to the autocracy of Augustus. Mutatis mutandis, what he says applies equally to our situation in which sovereignty has been usurped and concentrated in the hand of a tiny oligarchy that mouths clichés about “our democracy” the better to subvert it.

California Drove Truckers Out of Business.

California Drove Truckers Out of Business. Now Store Shelves Are Empty

Democrat regulations are holding the entire economy hostage.

Daniel Greenfield for Front Page Magazine

After a long cross-country flight, I made it out of LAX and into an Uber. I wasn’t in the mood to talk, but the driver was. And hearing that I was a journalist, he wanted to tell me a story. I’ve heard a lot of stories over the years, but this may have been the most important one I let go.

He hadn’t always been driving an Uber at 11:30 at night. Not all that long ago he used to have his own business with 7 trucks before he was bankrupted by California’s insane regulations.

I listened, but didn’t pay enough attention. The impact of California’s Democrat legislative supermajority on truckers was just another data point alongside what was happening to freelancers of all kinds and a lot of small businesses. Stories like this were everywhere and there was little interest in them even in conservative circles outside the tarnished golden state.

Back then we still lived in a world where you could walk into a thousand stores with fully stocked shelves. People ordered from Amazon and expected its burgeoning last mile delivery service to make products magically appear overnight. Just in time inventory systems were more efficient and any day now products would be delivered by self-driving cars or aerial drones.

2020 and 2021 have given this Big Tech fantasy world and the rest of us a good kicking.

The massive supply chain mess that’s leaving stores empty and orders unfulfilled doesn’t have a single point of failure, but dozens of them. China’s energy shortages, the overhyped predictive powers of Big Data, the fragility of the global economy, fuel costs, and welfare state worker shortages are all players. But California’s truck bans are a key link in the great failure chain.

While I was riding home that night, California trucking companies were going bankrupt at a rapid rate. Few outside the industry were paying attention or understood what that might mean.

2019 was described as a “bloodbath” for the trucking industry with 640 trucking companies across the country filing for bankruptcy in just the first half of the year. Thousands of truck drivers were left unemployed. Many went into the expanding last mile delivery business, some as contractors for Amazon. But California truckers and businesses had their own special woes.

Two years ago, Governor Newsom signed the Democrat supermajority's Assembly Bill 5 into law. While AB5 was billed as a crackdown on Uber and Lyft, forcing the companies to treat l freelance contractors as employees, the gig economy companies pushed Proposition 22 so that they were the only ones exempt from the law. (A Democrat judge has since illegally blocked the approved ballot measure while falsely claiming that it was unconstitutional.)

AB5 however was less about Uber than it was about outlawing freelance employees in order to force them into unions. The union power grab inconvenienced Uber and Lyft, but crushed freelance workers in a variety of fields including journalism. One of the fields was trucking.

Over the summer, the California Trucking Association actually went to the Supreme Court to fight AB5 and allow owners and operators to use independent contractors. The CTA listed 70,000 owner operators. In the years since AB5, Ubers have become scarcer and more expensive, which is what the law was actually designed to do, but the consequences to the trucking industry have been far worse albeit invisible to most people until now. While truckers are still protected from AB5, many in the industry are not willing to bet their future on SCOTUS.

AB5 was not only the assault on the trucking industry by California Democrats who were aggressively trying to unionize the industry and to impose environmental regulations on it.

Last year, the California Air Resources Board issued a press release boasting that it had taken a "bold step to reduce truck pollution". The bold step required switching to electric trucks.

"We are showing the world that we can move goods, grow our economy and finally dump dirty diesel," Jared Blumenfeld, California’s Secretary for Environmental Protection, sneered.

Jared and California certainly showed the world something.

While the ultimate truck ban was scheduled for 2045, an initial phase-in of 5% to 9% begins in 2024. Last year, California's DMV began refusing to register thousands of trucks with an estimated 100,000 trucks under threat. With "green" trucks costing $70,000 more, this was a non-starter for already troubled independent owner-operators and even larger companies.

That was part of the plan.

California Democrats and their environmentalist special interests had set out to crush the state’s ports and trucking industry. Had everything gone as planned, this would have been a slow and gradual process. Costs would have crept up and deliveries would have fallen off without an immediate catastrophic impact. But then the pandemic and its consequences arrived.

Business at California’s ports dropped during the pandemic. The loss of traffic convinced trucking companies and owner operators who were already battered by AB5 and the green truck ban that it was better to just downsize or pull out entirely. And when port activity rebounded, there was a huge hole in the delivery infrastructure that backed up the entire system.

Biden called for ports to operate around the clock, but that’s not going to magically bring back thousands of trucks or truckers. California Democrats still haven’t changed their regulations and without that, there’s no incentive or even legal structure that would allow trucks to operate.

The resulting disaster is likely to accelerate the ongoing shift of shipping from California ports. Democrats imposed their green shakedown not only on truckers, but on shipping. With companies moving to Texas, Houston was already becoming a more appealing alternative. It’s now at capacity as everyone is looking for alternatives to the California economic disaster area.

But much of our imports and exports still depend on the California bottleneck that begins with Communist China and ends in Communist California. The red-to-red pipeline has savaged our economy and wrecked imports and exports. Newsom’s survival and the Dem legislative supermajority which passes more extreme leftist regulations every session means that things will only get worse. A radical party that actively seeks to dismantle the economy is in power in Sacramento and its regulations have the ability to hold our entire economy hostage.

What happens in California unfortunately doesn’t stay there unless it’s waiting on a ship.

New Immigration Numbers Prove Biden Border Crisis Is Worst In History

Tristan Justice reproting for The Federalist

New data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) show the severity of the Biden border crisis reaching a new milestone with more than 1.73 million arrests made in the 2021 fiscal year, the highest ever recorded. More than 1.1 million were single adults.

“I’ve been there before,” President Joe Biden said of the southwest border in a CNN town hall Thursday when pressed whether he’d plan a visit. “I guess I should go down.”

Biden however, hasn’t been to the border in more than a decade. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki could only point to a “drive through” on the 2008 campaign trail.

The escalating crisis of overwhelming migration has led Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott take matters into his own hands. On Wednesday, the Center for Immigration Studies reported Abbott gave some 3,000 Texas National Guard troops the authority to arrest illegal immigrants for the first time ever under “Operation Lone Star.” Guard members were granted arrest powers this week after completion of “40 hours of traditional police training in the use of deadly force.”

“Nobody’s ever really used the guard before in this capacity,” said Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw in an interview with CIS. “We’re going to use them to actually secure the border. The governor, the legislature, and the citizens of Texas have made it very clear; they want the border secure. It is good for our federal partner as well. The federal government should be thanking the state of Texas, and it’ll make the rest of the country safer as we increase the level of security.”

The National Guard will be focused on hot-spot areas such as Del Rio to minimized the surge of migration in the absence of federal leadership. Neither women, unaccompanied children, or entire family units will be subject to state arrest.

Condolezza Rice on The View Discussing CRT:We Don't Need To Make 7-Year-Olds Feel Bad About Their Race

 

Condoleezza Rice On CRT: We Don't Need To Make 7-Year-Olds Feel Bad About Their Race

 

Posted By Tim Hains
On Date October 21, 2021

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared on Wednesday’s episode of "The View," where one topic that came up was teaching "Critical Race Theory" in schools.

"I’m not certain 7-year-olds need to learn it," she said.

"The way we’re talking about race is that it either seems so big that somehow white people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past," Rice said.

"I don’t think that’s very productive or Black people feel disempowered by race. I would like Black kids to be completely empowered to know they are beautiful in their Blackness, but in order to do that, I don’t have to make white kids feel bad for being white. So, somehow this is a conversation that has gone in the wrong direction."

"In order for Black kids — who quite frankly, for a long time the way they were portrayed, the way their history was portrayed, [were as] second-class citizenship, but I don’t have to make white children feel bad about being white in order to overcome the fact that Black children were treated badly," she said.

"I grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama. I couldn’t go to a movie theater or to a restaurant with my parents," Rice explained. "I went to segregated schools until we moved to Denver. My parents never thought I was going to grow up in a world without prejudice but they also told me, ‘that’s somebody else’s problem, not yours. You’re going to overcome it, and you are going to be anything you want to be.’ And that’s the message that I think we ought to be sending to kids."

"People are being taught the true history," Rice said. "It goes back to how we teach the history. We teach the good and we teach the bad of history. But what we don’t do is make 7- and 10-year-olds feel that they are somehow bad people because of the color of their skin. We’ve been through that and we don’t need to do that again.

Do you think CRT is just a history lesson?

Why The Biden Administration Wants To Track Your Bank Accounts

Why The Biden Administration Wants To Track Your Bank Accounts

The idea that people — and governments — should mind their own business is older than the American republic. But Democrats aren't backing off.

Kyle Sammin for The Federalist

It hardly strikes any of us as news that the government does not care about our privacy. But recent efforts by the Biden administration to put millions of Americans under the gaze of financial regulators take that disdain for ordinary citizens to a new level.

The Biden administration has proposed to require banks to provide the IRS with data on accounts with total yearly deposits or withdrawals of more than $600. That is to say: if more than six hundred bucks moves in or out of your account in a year in total, the IRS would know about it. This was too much even for Democrats, so now the proposed figure has been increased to $10,000.

When we talk about the right to privacy in America, it’s usually code for abortion. That makes little sense to anyone who hasn’t studied the twisted line of cases that activist judges used to cram infanticide into the Constitution. It also makes it hard to discuss without getting tangled up in culture war fights that really have nothing to do with the right in question.

Real privacy, though, the idea that Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren famously characterized in their 1890 article in the Harvard Law Review as a subset of “the right to be let alone,” is something Americans care as much about as any other people. The idea of anyone tracking our thoughts, our words, our finances, or our actions infringes on something that might not be spelled out in constitutional text but is nonetheless deeply felt by most people as a natural right.

The idea that people — and governments — should mind their own business is older than the American republic. But privacy, as a concept, is hard to define. Brandeis and Warren tried, but rights as such are slippery, even for two of the era’s leading legal minds.

Part of the problem, too, is that when our Founding Fathers appended a Bill of Rights to the Constitution, it focused the national mind on the idea that our rights were the things listed in that law. This led to two errors: believing that only those enumerated rights were protected, and believing that people only needed to protect their rights from the government.

Pester the Little Guy, Instead of the Big Ones

Transactions involving $10,000 in cash are already supposed to be reported to the government in a currency transaction report (CTR). That is a pretty serious privacy violation that most people don’t care about because, really, how often do you have $10,000 in cash at one time? But the answer may surprise you: millions of CTRs are filed every year, including 16 million of them in 2019.

That number is nothing compared to how many people will be caught up in government databases if the new law Biden has proposed comes into effect. Not only does it expand the $10,000 figure to non-cash transfers, it applies to the yearly total, not just a single transaction. The requirement would also apply to peer-to-peer services like Cash App and Venmo.

The current plan excludes transfers related to wages or benefits, but this is a nonsense position: the IRS already tracks wages and benefits payments, so excluding them from this mandate is meaningless. Enforcement would require hiring thousands of new IRS agents, but most of the burden is placed on banks and credit unions, who will inevitably pass on the cost to consumers. Ultimately, you will have less privacy and you will pay for the effort.

The Biden administration would have us believe this is all part of a plan to catch wealthy tax cheats, and at some level it probably is. But the idea that this will only impact the rich is a bald-faced lie. Jeff Bezos is not being paid in cash, but millions of waiters, bartenders, and handymen are. Most of them may pay their taxes as required, but if the bank account doesn’t look the way the IRS thinks it should, they will have to turn their lives upside-down to prove their innocence.

The whole idea shows that the people running our government do not even spare a thought for the average citizen’s privacy when imposing more burdens on us and the financial institutions we use. The entire nature of the income tax works against privacy, with the government demanding to know where your money comes from and what you do with it in order to assess taxes and grant deductions.

The Eye of Sauron Turns on Bank Accounts

Earlier generations of Americans would have been appalled at this intrusion on our private lives. They lived in a world where the government was funded by tariffs and excises, things which require less precise knowledge of an individual’s habits. The government knew how much whiskey was being distilled and how much sugar was being imported, but they had no idea who the final consumers of these goods were. Everyone agreed: that was none of their business.

The privacy intrusion of the income tax started gradually and eventually became commonplace. Income taxes initially applied to people making $4,000 — the modern-day equivalent of about $125,000 a year. Most people were not affected, so they ignored the privacy implications. Now, all of our wages are intensely monitored, and even that is not enough for the Biden administration. They want to know it all.

Will this information be misused? Yes. The only question is how. When people began to discuss a law of privacy in Warren and Brandeis’ time, the ways in which that right is violated today could scarcely be imagined. Technological advances that have improved life in so many ways also hold the key to increased government surveillance. The Treasury Department of 1921 could never effectively monitor every American’s bank account — but the 2021 version can.

The government has long encouraged people to open bank accounts, and for good reason: they are a safe way to hold funds and ultimately save money over check-cashing places and other non-bank ways of transferring money. But making banks into state informants will force people in the other direction. Any Americans wishing to preserve what little financial privacy remains to them will use cash more, or possibly move assets into cryptocurrency.

Hopefully Congress will put a stop to this attempt at financial panopticon. Meanwhile, businesses that care about privacy should make cash and crypto options easier for customers. If the government is determined to monitor our every move, we must make ourselves impossible to monitor.

WH Tries to Spin as Biden Loses More Support Than Anyone in the Office Since WWII

Nick Arama reporting for RedState

It’s always something to see the White House spin on any given topic — it so deviates from the truth and reality, sometimes stunningly so, with what they would have you believe or accept.

But they have a lot to try to argue away with the recent job approval polls on Joe Biden.

It’s not just one poll, but he’s been cratering now since August in all kinds of polls, across all groupings and categories of concerns. The latest Gallup poll has him with the biggest drop in approval of any one in the office since World War II. In that poll, his approval ratings in his first nine months have nosedived by 11 percent, as independents throw him over and just 42 percent of Americans think he’s doing a good job.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had a truly novel take on why Joe Biden’s approval ratings are so incredibly low, and it shows what disdain the White House has for the opinion of the American people.

From Fox News:

“A lot of people in this room work for organizations that have done polls and there’s a lot of underlying data in them. And sometime it differs,” Psaki said.

“I would just go back to what our view is, is that we’re still going through a hard time in this country,” she continued. “And people are tired of fighting the pandemic, they’re tired of the impact on their lives.”

Sorry, Americans, you’re just upset with Joe because you’re tired. Translation: you don’t know any better; it’s really not Joe’s fault.

But Americans — some of you — it’s your fault other Americans are upset with Joe.

“Some of them are sick and tired of people who won’t get vaccinated, who they feel are impacting their ability to live life in a normal way,” Psaki said. “Some people are still fearful for loved ones.”

“And we all thought it would be over at this point in time,” Psaki added.

First of all, Americans are certainly capable of assessing Joe Biden’s failings on a number of subjects — including the border, Afghanistan, and the economy — all of which they have given him poor marks on. They don’t need the White House telling them what to think.

If Psaki wants to talk about the pandemic, Joe Biden campaigned on that, saying he had a plan to stop it, “I’m not going to shut down the country. I’m not going to shut down the economy. I’m going to shut down the virus.”

Yet, here we still are. Where’s that magical plan? In his back pocket somewhere? Is he still trying to find it?

Psaki wants to blame the pandemic for the low numbers? Okay, let’s go with that lie for a moment. Who’s the guy in charge who said he had a plan? Didn’t she just dig a bigger hole for Biden with her answer?

But she also is attacking Americans with this response, continuing the White House effort to demonize people who don’t get vaccinated. Here’s another clue for Psaki — while that might play with the extreme left on Twitter, most people don’t like that, and it further blows up the fiction Joe Biden pushed about being a “unifier.”

The problem for the White House is Biden’s actions over the past few months have revealed him for the empty incompetent person he has always been. Now, just a lot more people know it.

 

Article by Micah Meadowcraft in The American Conservative

Facebook and the Law

The platform facilitates illegal immigration and human smuggling because its mission is above mere nations. 

 

In the early chapters of his letter to the Romans, St. Paul describes how humanity stands condemned before God’s law, guilty of falling short of the justice we were made for. Both the law that is written on our hearts, often called the natural law, and the law of revelation, given unto Moses, show a standard of being fully human that, the apostle reminds his readers, only Jesus Christ has fulfilled. And so God became man so that man might become God, as the Athanasian formula puts it, because man was always supposed to be Godlike but, fallen in sin, is not. The law, then, assumes our imperfection, and points us to our perfection. Lutheran theologians summarize this as the law’s threefold role of curb, mirror, and guide. 

Conservatives, Christians or not, likely recognize this tripartite function even in the state’s positive law. It assumes man is fallen, too. Our laws curb disorder by condemning crime. They act as a mirror of our culture, a portrait of our vices and priorities and aspirations. And in being so, even our secular laws guide us to becoming a certain kind of human being. Of course, the law in the fullest sense extends beyond the legal code, into the realm of mores and norms and traditions, from sexual taboos to rules about when to wear white, in which we live and move and have our social being. To be fully the citizen of any country is to conform oneself to its laws—these unwritten ones, written on the heart by sentiment and habit, perhaps more than the ever expanding legislative pile. 

What does any of this have to do with Facebook? 

In a letter dated June 28, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich wrote to Mark Zuckerberg inquiring about Facebook’s policies concerning posts connected to human trafficking, human smuggling, and illegal entry to the United States. Brnovich noted that the Arizona attorney general’s office had attempted to post an advertisement for anti-human trafficking resources to the social media platform earlier this year, but that Facebook “denied these submissions and prevented our office from posting them.” Meanwhile, the attorney general said, in the midst of dramatically increased numbers of crossings and apprehensions at the border, posts promoting human smuggling services and illegal immigration remained on the platform. Thus, Brnovich wrote, he was seeking further information related to various aspects of Facebook’s enforcement regime for posts that promote illegal activity.

In the company’s response, dated July 30, Facebook Vice President for State Public Policy William Castleberry detailed the largely algorithmic processes the company has in place for its content moderation decisions, as well as its human support, noting “our policies prohibit the use of our services for illegal purposes,” including “content that offers to provide or facilitate human smuggling, which includes advertising a human smuggling service.” Castleberry did admit, however, that 

We do allow people to share information about how to enter a country illegally or request information about how to be smuggled. After consultation with human rights experts, we developed this policy to ensure we were prohibiting content relating to the business of human smuggling but not interfering with people’s ability to exercise their right to seek asylum, which is recognized in international law.

Well then. 

After receiving Facebook’s reply, Arizona Attorney General Brnovich sent a letter to Merrick Garland, the U.S. attorney general, and the Justice Department expressing his concern that Facebook, as confessed by itself, is aiding the violation of American law. In the October 14 dated letter Brnovich wrote, “our office requests that your Department investigate Facebook’s facilitation of human smuggling at Arizona’s southern border and stop its active encouragement and facilitation of illegal entry.” He went on to note, “Facebook’s policy of allowing posts promoting human smuggling and illegal entry into the United States to regularly reach its billions of users seriously undermines the rule of law.”

Whose law? Facebook would say its policy, and its algorithm, reflects a higher law, the international law of universal human rights. We have here an illustration of the limits of law and its capacity to rule. We also have here an illustration of the limits of algorithms, which are a kind of law, too, a law based on other laws, a policy of policies. But at some point, a human being makes a choice, a decision, is responsible, whether or not we hold them as such. That is why Brnovich wrote to Zuckerberg, and why he wrote to Garland: He believes someone is in charge and should be treated as such; he knows that federal law, like Arizona law, only has force if it is enforced. He understands it is supposed to be a curb, among other things, and wants to see it do its job, keeping order, preventing disorder. 

Zuckerberg and Garland, however, whatever they would personally say, participate in an ideology that would reduce the law to only guide. Indeed, Castleberry’s response on behalf of Facebook, with its specific appeal to international law, gives the whole game away. International law, more than any other kind, cannot do more than pair aspiration and naked force. States have all the accumulated marks of history to fill in the gaps between particular laws, an organic inheritance that creates the framework for something like authority, the ordered and harmonious direction of wills with shared object and measure. The international community is too large for that, too diverse in experience and capacity to ever truly share a frame of reference, a law of the heart. But the liberal establishment is committed to rejecting the law as curb or mirror—for what can that mirror show except the benighted past—in its quest to guide humanity to a bright future where borders and nations mean nothing, and significance can be found in life as one of Facebook’s 3 billion units of production and consumption. 

Why? They, and everyone else who would subject existing political states to the dreams of a global game of Sims, do not really believe that humanity is dangerous or endangered; the only danger now is climate change, the only imperfection is to deny our perfectibility, and that sin cannot be tolerated. And from this comes both the pharisaism and antinomianism of our supposed betters, for if humanity is unfallen, if it need only experience its universal rights to flourish into the fullness of itself, then how evil it is for anyone to hinder that effort with divisions between nations, with laws that constrain, or set standards, or show the human being to be a creature quick to violence and civilization a fragile thing. Law as curb, law as mirror, becomes now, in our therapeutic language, stigma—God gave Moses the Ten Stigmas and we have been suffering ever since. 

Those who treasure the rule of law, who are grateful to live in the United States and not somewhere else, must remember that the law is upheld by individuals and broken by individuals, that it is persons who are responsible and that justice demands persons be held to account. Arizona’s Brnovich knows this, and public servants like him. But those who wish to uphold the law must also remember that with it comes the opportunity for mercy and for grace. Zuckerberg and Castleberry, with their appeal to asylum for illegal immigrants, think they are partisans of the way of mercy, but they forget there is no grace without sin. Shall we sin that grace may abound? May it never be. 

 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/facebook-and-the-law/

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