Herein follows a blog post that I never wanted to write. A lot of people who follow me are also big Trump supporters. I most humbly beg your forgiveness but I have some questions.
Yes. Yes. Yes. I know there are going to be some people who object to this post. What I'm asking here is that you please consider what I'm saying and decide accordingly. If you support Donald Trump, I have to emphatically say that this is not personal; I'm not here to bash your guy or take him down. It's about the Constitution and it is very important.
There are some things of importance in recent election cycles that I think the American People have lost track of. I consider it my duty as a sworn defender of the Constitution to point some of them out.
The Constitution defines the maximum limits of the federal government's power. That is most of what it is. The elected representatives, president, and Supreme Court, are supposed to keep the government operating within those powers specifically named within it. It is in their very job description and part of their oaths. In order to qualify for that job they should have to show reasonable experience and talent for or concern for doing so. By constitutional limits the current federal government should be maybe one hundredth of the size and power that it currently is. The federal government, as the Constitution was originally written, had almost no constitutional power to interfere in the lives of any individual. They couldn’t even directly tax the People or their businesses.
The Tenth Amendment unequivocally states that the federal government can't take any powers that are not specifically named within the Constitution. By that standard I also operate under the belief that a lot of Amendments are unconstitutional because they were illegally enacted. For the government to expand their powers in such a way is a violation of your rights as an American citizen.
There is nothing in the Constitution that gives the federal government any authority or power to do anything about anybody's healthcare; for example. Nothing. Zero. Nada. Zip. If the supreme law of the land were to be understood and followed, it would quickly be realized that it is none of the federal government's authority, responsibility, or business, to decide how you should be taken care of or how you should take care of yourself. This very rarely spoken of concept is called, "individual freedom." I would suggest that the American People take some time to get reacquainted with it.
There are so many things the federal government is doing, that they have no authority for, it just boggles my mind. Even more mind boggling is the simple fact that the American People have come to passively accept it as the status quo. It's like the Constitution's limits on federal power don't even exist anymore. And by any practical measure that is exactly the way it is for both Demoncraps and Republicans.
I have mentioned frequently enough before that I hold no hope for the Demoncrap Party to even vaguely uphold the Constitution. Of the two viable political parties currently operating there is only some slight hope of even the Republicans attempting to restore the Constitution.
Thus we come to the basis of my objections to Donald Trump as president. It also happens to be the basis of my objections to anybody within the Demoncrap Party.
Take a moment and imagine this. You could have the greatest and wisest king of them all, with power absolute, who knows everything and does everything exactly right and through his wisdom and power everybody could be free and happy. Everything would be perfect...for a while. This is the problem with a president who rules as a king. The president will someday not be the president and his successor will take over and act as the king, with the same absolute powers.
This is why I'm a big fan of George Washington. Okay, I know that his record was not perfect. There are some things, which from the perspective of the cushy seat of my reclining chair, that I can say he could have done better. However we live in a reality where people are still people and all of them have flaws.
The thing I admire most about President Washington is that three times he was in a position of being able to gain absolute control of this country. Three times he turned it down so that he could go back to his farming. He clearly, as demonstrated by his actions, understood the problems of any person, even himself, holding too much power. So he, partly through his own example and partly through government action, took steps he thought would prevent anybody else from getting that kind of power any time soon.
There are three things I’m thinking about here: 1) It takes a giant man to hold a lot of power and wield it with wisdom and restraint. 2) It takes a bigger one to walk away from that kind of power without the slightest temptation of using it for personal gain. 3) It takes a person of great foresight and understanding of human nature to make certain any power which can be abused is dispersed so that nobody else can use it.
Many people have made arguments that Donald Trump might be number one. I won't argue that point here. He's been quite a success and there is no denying that. However, I can find no evidence of number two or three within him. Quite the contrary, I find a lot of proof that he might be the opposite.
As mentioned before, it is the job of the president by oath, to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution." The more detailed explanation of his job is outlined in Article Two of that founding document. A quick index of how someone would do in that capacity might be, rather crudely, decided simply by the number of times he or she mentions it. If a guy talks about the Constitution a lot it is obvious that it means something to him. Based on that he might also be expressing his understanding and desire to see it upheld.
When the 2016 nomination was down to two remaining candidates I went to their websites and surveyed them, counting the number of times they mentioned the Constitution. Fortunately for this article I had preserved the text of my observations. These sites may still exist somewhere; I’ll leave that to the more curious researchers out there.
From President Trump's website there were five mentions of the Constitution in his "Positions." Two of them were under the category of Second Amendment Rights. Three of them were under Immigration Reform. Total mentions of the Constitution; five.
From Cruz's website under a heading titled "Issues" there was an entire section dedicated to "Restore the Constitution," inside of which were nine mentions of the Constitution. One mention was in the section regarding the 2nd Amendment. Two were under "Religious Liberty." Two were under "Life Marriage and Family." Total; fourteen.
But this was just a simple survey of the number of times for the occurrence of the word. It did not suppose that all mentions of the word would be in a context that would comply with the Constitution. It also did not take into consideration that any other things mentioned on the pages have anything to do with the Constitution.
Moving past the history of their respective 2016 web sites, which I gave for comparison, we have four years behind us a Trump presidency where the numbers of times I’ve heard him even say the word “Constitution” was disappointingly miniscule. Rightly or wrongly it is my own observation that people talk a lot about things they really care about and barely mention things which are of only a passing interest.
Certainly the Demoncraps and other leftists have their issues with him. Certainly Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. But I’m not talking about the things the left has dreamed up out of their delusional minds as reasons to oppose him. I’m talking about the standard of his ability to live up to his oath to the Constitution.
His stance on the 2nd Amendment is also problematic. As president he, by executive order, banned bump stocks. The ATF estimated that 520,000 people owned bump stocks before the executive order. The owners of these stocks were given 90 days to turn them in or destroy them, without compensation, hitting at both the Second and Fifth Amendments. While a lot of people seem to think he did more good than bad, setting political rhetoric aside, as the guy in charge over the ATF his numbers of investigations and convictions were actually more severe than Obama’s. I encourage you to check out the Tenth Amendment Center’s article on this.
While I could write hundreds of thousands of words on all of the things he did that were constitutionally suspect, none of them would even come close to the magnitude of his allowing the government to spend our money. Obama was rightly criticized for running up the national debt by almost nine trillion dollars in eight years. Yet president Trump ran up the national debt by slightly more than Obama in only four years. In the wake of all of this profligate spending one of his last acts as president was to sign a Covid relief bill sending ten million dollars to Pakistan for gender studies. That’s just one small example of a bill that no Constitution loving president should ever let past his desk without receiving the big red “VETO!!!” stamp.
He always very vocally objected to spending bills like this. He always said he’d never sign another one like it. Then he almost always signed the next one while very vocally objecting to it. One may be tempted to make the excuse that it is not his fault because Congress writes up the spending bills. Yet he still signed them.
And this; “Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”—12/4/22
His record just goes on and on like this. Questions, questions and more questions. All of mine leaning right up against his understanding that he’s supposed to follow the Constitution.
If you accept the position that the Constitution does not matter or does not specifically limit the power of a president or the federal government, most of what he says sounds great from a lot of different perspectives. Which is why a lot of people support him. I might even be persuaded to the idea that some of it makes sense from our current position from a businessman’s perspective. But really, if “the highest law in the land doesn't matter that much” is the consideration, the people, realizing it or not, are trying to elect a monarch because they are expecting the president will do what they want him to.
The problem with the federal government is that they have too much power that they are not supposed to have and are using it to our detriment. Now we have Trump, who if elected again is going to use the power that he's not supposed to have, again, because that’s what he did before, to our supposed benefit.
The job of the president is not supposed to be to use existing federal power to anybody's benefit or detriment. The president is specifically, by his oath, supposed to keep the federal government operating within Constitutional limits, so that there is no power there to be used for anybody's benefit or detriment in the first place.
Donald Trump has never shown any sign that he understands the limits that the federal government is supposed to have; nor has he ever shown any sign that he will bring the federal government back within the powers it is supposed to be limited to under the Constitution. Thus he, as well as the rest of them, are operating on the false premise that the federal government can pretty much do whatever they want, in spite of constitutional limitations, as long as they think they can justify it.
A lot of things were demonstrably better in his first term. Hell, I have a half rotten potato in my cupboard that would make a better president than Biden. The problem is that if President Trump is reelected, baring assassination or natural death, he will be gone in four years. Trump’s successors will then inherit whatever power the People allowed Trump to use. And as demonstrated by the results of the end of his first term segueing into Biden’s presidency the results can be catastrophic. The government will still be oppressively giant, too powerful and corrupt.
That's the same kind of problem as with a monarchy. There have been great and benevolent kings throughout history under which the countries and people have flourished and prospered. No matter who the great and compassionate king is now, his successors will sooner or later really suck. And they will suck with the same absolute power as their predecessors. And when the monarch is elected and called, "Mr. President," the results can be pretty much expected to be the same.
There is such a thing as tomorrow.
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