An End to Everything

by Susan Snelling

A balance of powers in the American government was something that deeply concerned the Founding Fathers.  Tyranny was to be guarded against and the Framers of the Constitution took meticulous care to ensure that safeguards were in place to limit that possibility through checks and balances with the three branches of the federal government.  In their 1748 work, “On the Spirit of the Laws,” and who James Madison quoted in The Federalist No. 47, Charles de Secondat and Baron de Montesque wrote: There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates.

Secondat and Montesque stated that Political Liberty as they called it, only existed when there was no abuse of power and that those with power are prone to abuse it; they will take their authority as far as they can.  Virtue is essential for the success of republicanism but as Secondat and Montesque believed, virtue has the need of limits.  The answer to abuse of power in the American government is a check to that power to limit the other branches of government.

In “On the Spirit of the Laws,” the authors present a very poignant truth that is essential to a free people, and that is no two or all three branches of the government can be united in the same person.  A president who is united to the legislature sets up the stage for tyranny and the same is true if he or she is united with the judicial branch.  The three branches are to check and balance each other.

The branches are separate from each other in order to preserve liberty.  Secondat and Montesque give as an example:  if the judiciary branch were united with the executive branch, the judge might behave with “violence and oppression.”  They even go so far as to say if the same man or body were united in such a manner that, “There would be an end to everything,”

There are two parts to the legislative (House and Senate) to check each other.  They have what James Madison says is “the mutual privilege of rejecting.”  The legislative is checked or restrained by the executive branch and the legislative checks the executive, and then you have the judiciary regarding the Constitutionality of executive or legislative actions.  Secondat and Montesque state: These three powers should naturally form a state of repose or inaction.  But as there is a necessity for movement in the course of human affairs, they are forced to move, but still in concert.

Without the three branches of government checking each other, because of the tendency of those with power to abuse it and exercise their authority to the fullest extent as they can take it, the Framers devised the American government to prevent despotism or tyranny.  In the Federalist No, 47, James Madison writes: No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

What do we have today?  To quote Madison, we have “the very definition of tyranny.”  We have the unconstitutional Fourth Branch of government, the bureaucratic or administrative state.  A long time ago, Congress gave much of its powers to the bureaucracies (federal agencies) where unelected officials make rules and regulations that carry the force of law, a power that is reserved only for the legislative branch.  Another action of Congress is that it often lets the courts make decisions for them.  This leads to judicial activism and judicial tyranny.  This is one branch giving its Constitutional powers to another branch.  How dangerous then is it for Congress to give its power to an unconstitutional branch of government, the Fourth Branch.

As far as the bureaucratic or administrative state, one can look at the different departments or agencies and see which ones bypass Congress and legislate through regulations, or have their own police or law enforcement, or take on the role of the judiciary.  Some engage in one, two, or all of the three branches’ powers.  This is unconstitutional and dangerous to our liberty. It removes from the people their representation.  Consent of the governed is violated.

For a current example of unelected officials who are only supposed to be advisors to the president but carry a great deal of authority, one needs to look no further than the situation with the pandemic.  Unelected people at the helms of the CDC, NIH, and other departments that deal with public health, make decisions that influence weak and corrupt politicians to comply with their recommendations.  Much of the media, joined at the hip with the progressive postmodern ideology of some politicians and bureaucrats, fail to do their job and willfully promote false information, heavy-handed edicts, and more division and corruption.

What we have as a result is medical tyranny.  This corruption has destroyed peoples’ lives and livelihoods, divided Americans in a most violent and egregious manner, and yes, even killed people through the suppression of life-saving medicine for political reasons.  Opposing views are silenced and vilified.  To show what a slippery slope this is, recently, the head of the CDC declared gun violence “a serious public health threat” and reports they will implement interventions as they have with the pandemic and other health crises.  Do you see where this is heading and how dangerous it is?  Unelected bureaucrats inserting themselves into the lives of Americans and providing the progressives with an avenue to go after the Second Amendment.

The catastrophe from unelected people combined with like-minded corrupt politicians at the federal and state level is destructive to a free America.  Because the entire premise of a Fourth Branch is unconstitutional, the Constitution means nothing to the players.  Our inalienable rights are trampled on, as much as the perpetrators can get by with.  Joe Biden said, “It’s not about freedom, it’s not about individual choice.”  Oh, yes, it is Mr. Biden!

The Fourth Branch has been operating for a long time but with increasing power in recent decades.  A return to the balance of powers, the legislative, executive, and judiciary is the only way to get our freedom back.  And from within that brilliantly designed framework, we can work on holding accountable the wrongdoers and elect to office those who are deserving and use their enumerated powers in the Constitution as the Framers intended.  It is long past time to neuter the bureaucrats and their agencies from usurping congressional powers.

We need a revival in Congress, for the brave and Constitutional based members along with the support and encouragement of their constituents to finally resurrect that branch as it was intended.  And for them, along with a good Constitutionally strong president. to guide and ease the branches back into their original design.  This requires good, moral leaders in those branches. It requires moral people to avoid “an end to everything.”

PRESERVATION OF LIBERTY

by Rich Farm

Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Abraham Lincoln

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty. Thomas Jefferson

This command I entrust to you, Timothy, my son, in accordance with the prophecies previously made concerning you, that by them you fight the good fight, 19 keeping faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and suffered shipwreck in regard to their faith. 1 Timothy 1:18-19

I took my youngest daughter trail riding the other day.  We live in the coulee region of Wisconsin, and it can be pretty hilly.  Some of the trail is flat, yet some is quite hilly, and you have some sections that were even extremely narrow with a dangerous drop-off.  There are some things we have to take into consideration to enjoy ourselves and be safe. First, we need to have confidence in those that are leading and guiding us, confidence in our equipment, and even in our own ability and history.  If we lack confidence in any of those areas there is a chance we either won’t enjoy ourselves or something more serious could happen that could cause harm or injury to ourselves or others.

I believe there are parallels between where we are at as a nation and our desire for liberty.  We need to understand that when traversing strange lands of our current events it is important to stay on the trail that was forged by those who have gone before us.  Their way becomes a point of trust because it has worked in the past, therefore we can trust it today.

We are in a fight for what our nation stands for and what some in this country and the globe want to become of America.  I think in order to preserve liberty we should understand what liberty is and why we need to fight for it.  This begins by having a true understanding of our history.  We need to remain true to our roots and why we became a nation.  We need to continue to remind ourselves of why our founders and the millions of others through the life of this country fought and died for our freedoms.  The only way to do this is according to Thomas Jefferson is to educate and inform the masses.

Now here is the problem, our education system has been high-jacked by the godless communist agenda.  Noah Webster was one of our founders and his view was “education is useless without the bible”.  He also said a system of education that limits instruction to arts and sciences while dismissing religion that forms character in the people is essentially defective.  He also said that when we give our vote to a person of known immorality, he not only sacrifices his own interest but that of his neighbor and ultimately betrays the interest of his own country.

The problem we have today is the absence of God within our education system.  Many have bought into the separation of church and state myth.  Which basically purports that religion has no place in the public square.  Here is the problem with that view, it is not possible to keep religion out.  Simply put, one’s worldview has some form of religion in it one way or another.  Even if you claim to be an atheist and don’t believe in a god, you have just made a theologically absolute statement and therefore have made a religious claim.

Now with the absence of God we have given our education system over to the doctrine of relativism, which quite simply put says you can create your own truth, there are no absolutes. However, again this is self-refuting.  To claim there is no absolute truth is in itself an absolute and disproves the very idea of relativism.  Relativism also violates the law of non-contradiction, which means you cannot have two conflicting truths be true at the same time.  One has to be wrong.

Liberty is not the freedom to do whatever you want to do.  It is the ability to govern oneself for one’s own well-being without violating another’s ability to do the same.  Here lies the problem with our society today.  How can one govern oneself if our rule and standards have the ability to be fluid and ever-changing based on how we feel for that day?

John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  So, in order to effectively do away with the Constitution you must first remove morality, hence the push for relativism/humanism within the educational system.  If we value the blood that has been shed for the freedoms this nation provides to us, it is incumbent on us to preserve said freedoms by reviving what our founding fathers’ beliefs in this nation were.  It is time to take back our education system.  A revived education system will give way to a revived media, a revived arts and entertainment, and revived government.

The preservation of liberty is dependent on this.  Until we understand that absolutes and morality are the only way our Constitution will survive, we will continue to live under leaders who are ever-shifting.  If there is anything we can learn in this season we are living in right now is that things are ever-changing, goalposts are ever moving to fit a certain narrative.

If we don’t have absolutes as a foundation then what will happen when the next leader comes in?  Will they not then attempt to conform their rules and leadership to “their” way of viewing truth?  Daniel Webster said, “Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint;” self-governance.  Biblical truth and morality provide us with that “wholesome restraint.”  Only then can liberty thrive and our Constitution survives.