The House Votes to Ignore the Bill of Rights

As a constitutionalist I’m always looking for issues in the arena of public debate that adequately explain why we shouldn’t have the federal government involved in almost anything to do with our personal lives. As a person who leans libertarian, and as a person with common sense, I think it is a very bad idea to have every aspect of our lives ruled according to the dictates of some politically vested, unknowing, uncaring, disconnected tyrants in the federal government. The United States was created with the idea that people hundreds or thousands of miles away should never be able to step on our freedom.

When I was growing up in the seventies (yes, I’m that old) my father used to have a saying that he would use every time someone in the family was annoyed about something. Given that he was living with six children in a small house, fortunately with a big yard, normal sibling conflicts used to happen quite a bit. “Don’t make a federal case out of it!” he used to say to us. It wasn’t just my father’s saying but he was closest to me, so his is the first that came to mind. Whether it was a conflict between my parents, siblings or some students at school or some local political issue, that sentence, “Don’t make a federal case out of it,” would pop up on the lips of those involved on a fairly regular basis.

I think, aside from the fact that the sentence was used to show someone was making mountains out of mole hills, in general it was considered to be wise advice. Years ago I wrote an article for this blog explaining in a series of observable axioms the general behavior of government. In this article “The Axioms of Government” there are a number of these observations that come to mind. Most of them apply to the issue I wish to explore here however one of them, Number Eight specifically, rises to the top. “8. The more things are put under governmental control, the more potential control they exert against the freedom and rights of the People.”

What’s the event that triggered this line of thinking? One way to think of the issue is to say transgender women—biological males pretending to be women—shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women’s sports. The way a constitutional conservative thinks of the issue is to say that 219 Republicans in the House of Representatives vote to ignore the Bill of Rights.

“Don’t make a federal issue out of it!”

For some reason my experience in the Navy comes to mind with an amusing anecdote. It used to be popular for some reason for my shipmates to pick on the guy from Ohio. In the spirit of this, one of the guys once pointed out to me that “Ohio is the only state in the country that doesn’t have a law saying not to screw your sister. Why is that Ashton?” To which I replied, “You mean you need a law to tell you that it’s not okay for you to screw your sister? I would think that to only be common sense.”

The military has a rule that you should always handle whatever problems occur at the lowest possible place on the chain of command. Division officers and commanding officers get rather cranky when they become burdened with things that should have been able to be handled within your shop. The edicts they issue as a response to these kinds of situations usually are not what anybody involved with the situation really wanted and often seriously miss the point of the original problem which drew the undue attention in the first place. This situation is not unique to the military either. Business executives become just as cranky. My experience is that every single time an officer or business executive makes some very uncomfortable and ridiculous edict it is the result of them being cranky about something that should have been handled long before it got to them.

The same thing happens with government.

The question that should spring to mind to a constitutionalist, or any person valuing freedom, is “Should we handle this problem locally or should we rely on the more forceful and potentially irrational edicts of the federal government under the loving enforcement of nice men with guns?”

The idea of the lowest point on the chain of command is embodied within the Constitution itself as the Tenth Amendment. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This means that not only should the States and People handle these issues themselves but the federal government has absolutely no authority to handle them.

Does this mean that I think biological males pretending to be female should be allowed to compete against women in women’s sports.

To understand this I have to explain what I think insanity is. A lot of people say it is insane to do the same thing over and over while expecting different results. It is true that this could be described as insanity but it’s not entirely accurate. I think insanity would be better described as being unable to distinguish differences between things that are different.

If someone thinks a polar bear is a cute and fuzzy loveable creature that is endangered and needs protection and support, then jumps over the fence at the zoo to give said polar bear a hug, you would think this person crazy, right? This really happened a few years ago by the way. This person couldn’t distinguish the difference between a vicious carnivore and the cartoons of cute, fuzzy, endangered bears on the cartoons she’d been watching.

This could be something as obvious as a person who can’t tell the difference between a car and a tomato, thus tries to drive a tomato to work and slices up his car to serve on a BLT to his guests but it isn’t usually that obvious.

It’s a fun game to play. Look at all of the insane things people are doing and spot all of the things they think of as the same thing which are in fact different. The Demoncrap party practically runs on exploiting them. How about a person who can’t tell the difference between right now when they have freedom and a time in US history when people like them were slaves? How about people who can’t tell the difference between white people and people who are real racists? How about people who can’t tell the difference between fascism and people who simply disagree with them?

Well, what if you are confronted by a person who can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman? That’s insane. Right? For the vast and overwhelming majority of us, far into the 99th percentile range, you can pull out your pants and look down. Go ahead. Do it right now. I’ll wait….

You see a penis? You’re a man. You see a vagina? You’re a woman. That’s sanity. It’s a basic recognition between what is and what isn’t. The best part of it is that you didn’t have to petition Congress to be able to tell. You didn’t have to go to a biologist. You didn’t have to ask your friends, commanding officer, local government official or anybody else to make this determination.

It’s really not very confusing…unless…you’re bat-crap crazy.

Should men and women compete against each other in sports? That answer is best left to the men and women who choose to compete against each other. Do they want to? That’s up to them. Not me. Not you. Not Congress.

However, when a man chooses to compete against women, while pretending and claiming to be a woman, or unable to tell the difference between himself and a woman, in other words while he is insane, and the people putting on the event support this over the objections of the real women he’s competing against, that’s a problem. That’s an overt and obvious endorsement of insanity or cheating.

Were I one of the women I’d refuse to compete against him. Just let him swim or run down the field all by himself. The thing I wouldn’t do, as per my father’s advice, is to make a federal issue out of it. The federal government is going to respond in the same way that any authority taking on the burden of something that shouldn’t have anything to do with them would. They are going to make an edict, based on their own insanities, and use the force of government, backed by the power of nice men with guns, to decide for us all what we should or shouldn’t be compelled to do against our will.

This is not new. Any human society has people who think that they know what is best for all of us and they, by their nature, gravitate toward trying to be in control of us. The United States has been running this way since the Fourteenth Amendment because the “privileges or immunities” clause makes everything a potential federal issue. When something happens that a large number of people object to, there is a tendency to look toward someone who seems large enough to resolve the situation. This is not the way to freedom. It is the way to have a small group of people at the top who dictate to us what all of the rest of us can and cannot do, as well as what we have to do, even when we don't want to. And the chance that they will actually resolve the issue in a way that you want, or in a way that leads to more freedom, is a bad bet.

This is just a variant of making the biggest bully agree with you. Yes, he should in this case. However force is force and authority once granted is usually extremely difficult to get back, except through the progressive use of even more force, usually resulting in social upheaval, rebellion or war.

Yes, that the Democraps rise to this level of the endorsement of an obvious form of insanity is both reprehensible and astounding. That they do this in supposed support of their twisted ideas of women’s rights is an abomination to a civilized and sane society. However it is important to realize that every social issue the federal government gets involved in is a violation of the Tenth Amendment. When that social issue gets to a level that requires federal intervention on an issue that should be resolved by simply pulling out your pants and seeing what is there for what it is, is an example of something that has gone way past common sense or sanity.

I remember when being a constitutional conservative meant being both Republican and for keeping the government out of our lives. Apparently this is no longer true. If authority is granted to make a law like this, sooner or later it will be used to do the opposite. Maybe to resolve this issue they could even come up with a “Department of Gender Identification,” which would work directly under the authority of the President of the United States, to accurately decide what gender a person really is, with the end result of determining who they can compete against. Don’t laugh. They are already far more than half of the way there with Title 9, which in itself is a violation of the Tenth Amendment, for issues which should have been resolved at more local levels. Rule number two of my Axioms of Government article is that “The government will never limit its own power.”

In the mean time while the Republicans debate and try to make laws regulating who can compete in women's sports the Bill of Rights circles the drain. And it is their own involvement in issues the federal government has no business in that endangers it.

The American People are caught between the arguments that "the federal government should do this because it's our way" or "the federal government should do that because it's their way." What happened to the argument that the federal government shouldn't do anything about these kinds of issues at all? That these kinds of decisions are properly for the People, in freedom, to decide for themselves? Or at the most that the States should decide for themselves? Just don't make a federal case out of everything.

Should there be prohibitions against bat-crap crazy and sometimes surgically mutilated men pretending to be women, competing in women’s sports? Especially within our schools? Absofreakinglutely! Every State and locality within the States should do this for themselves. If they don’t do it the real women within these competitions should just refuse to participate. But this should never be an issue for the federal government.

Is this a lot to ask? For them to give up their shot at the glory of competitive sports? Sure it is. But what’s the alternative here? Be beaten on the field by a man? Or beat the man as a woman by standing on the sidelines and letting him, on the field alone, make a fool of himself?

As important as this is to you, and I don’t at all fail to sympathize with your position, there are larger ramifications. If you don’t take a stand as a real woman or for real women, at your own level and right now, then pretty soon you’ll have admirals in the United States Navy pretending to be women. You’ll have men winning awards for being the bravest and best of women everywhere. You’ll have men being given awards by officials in the federal government for being better women than people who are actually women. You’ll have a president of the United States dictating that you have to allow men pretending to be women in your public restrooms. You’ll have drag queens making a mockery of you and reading stories or twerking in front of your children.

So, boys and girls, it is time to ask yourselves, do you really need a federal law to tell if you are a boy or a girl? Or maybe we should all act like real men and women and simply not make a federal issue about it. If we rely on the federal government to “resolve” these kinds of issues the way we want, we are running the risk of them sooner or later “resolving” the issues in ways that we don’t want.

At the least we should all realize, regardless of what the issue is, every time Congress votes on a social issue, regardless of the party or politics of the situation, they are in fact voting to ignore the Bill of Rights.

The Attitude of a Constitutionalist: Part 2, Keep it Simple

Right after I posted last week’s article “The Attitude of a Constitutionalist” I realized that there was something I had planned on mentioning but didn’t. I had just simply forgotten it. I decided not to just tack it on at the end of the last article because as the week passed I thought of more things I wanted to say on the subject.

The rules of life are very simple.

That’s a basic philosophic truth. Even when someone seems to be living a very complicated life, if they understand it well enough to easily manage it then to them it seems simple. To a person who is less competent at handling life, looking at someone who is more capable of handling things looks somewhat complicated but the rule remains.

This comes into effect mostly when you are trying to solve a problem. Problems by their very nature seem very complicated. That’s how they remain as problems. Did you ever have a problem that seemed very complicated? Well that’s the problem that hangs around for a while. It’s the simple problems that don’t last very long. You just look at it and say, “Oh, well, all I have to do is this and it’s fixed.”

Problems by their nature are beginning to be resolved when they begin to simplify.

In the world of politics there are a lot of people making a lot of problems. These are called issues. You can dive in to the world of issues, issues, issues and how they interrelate to each other. You can look at all of the different people these issues would or would not affect and how it would or wouldn’t affect them. You can look at those people and try to predict how they would vote according to those issues. Then you can form a political party to try to handle those issues by the use of the government.

Liberals have their groups of issues. Conservatives have theirs as well.

Liberals say, “We need the government to make the people do this, and this, and this, and this.” Conservatives say, “We need the government to make the people do that, and that, and that, and that.”

Political Science is the study of how to win over the other guy using “this, and this, and this, and this” or “that, and that, and that, and that.” It does not try to solve problems. It does not try to evaluate whether this or that is right or wrong.

When you look at the issues and try to sort through them in order to figure out who and what you are going to vote for, as well as who and what you are going to vote against, you are engaging in the subject of Political Science. From there you become either a Republican or Demoncrap. Political Science is very complicated. Take the number of politicians, multiply them by the number of issues, multiply that by the number of positions any given politician could have on the issue, multiply that by the number of positions any other politician considered to be the opposition could have on the same issue, multiply that by the number of groups of people they could be speaking to in order to gain their support and how they spin the rhetoric (this is called “lying”) in order to make it the most palatable for the audience to accept, then multiply that by the chance of the political party winning or losing based on those issues, and finally multiply that by the different understandings of the people with regards to what the government is and is not supposed to do for them. That’s how many combinations of just the major possibilities you have to sort through in order to find out if any given candidate is worthy of your support.

It’s no surprise that politics seems insane.

I used to be into all of that. I was a Republican. If you are a Republican do you ever get the sense that there are a number of them in the party who are not really working for you? I’ve gotten so tired of pulling the knives of Republicans out of my back, as well as them being able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on so many critical issues, that I can no longer support them. My major leaning is still towards the Republicans because some of them do tend to support what I want but, well, let’s just say that trust has been very certainly lost. Bush signing McCain/Feingold’s “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act” saying that it had some constitutional issues but he thought it was a good bill was the straw that nearly broke the camel’s back. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ ruling on Obamacare was the thirty-two ton pile of bricks that turned the camel into a bloody smear on the pavement.

Such games can be fun for a while but at some point I got tired of trying to keep track of which lies from the lips of which politicians I was supposed to be supporting in order to maintain my lock step with the ever shifting sands of the Republican Party. One may ask why I don’t make the same criticism of the Demoncraps. The answer is that the Demoncrap Party has not risen to the level of criticism. They are too far beneath me to even comment on. One should try to place their efforts where there is some chance of success and ignore the rest.

So at the point in my life where my blood pressure started to become a concern, I decided that following the day to day political issues as they are in the United States was too much of a threat to my life. Too complicated. Complications are not the way to solve problems. Simplicity is.

These days I have only one issue. Is this given politician going to follow the Constitution? If so, I support him. If not, I don’t support him. It is their oath. It is the law. The government needs to follow the law.

I can tell in almost an instant what and who I’m going to support. Since I’ve made this change, when it comes to politics I’m an awful lot more relaxed about it. It’s just too easy. I never support someone because he is a Republican and Republicans are better than Demoncraps.

I don’t care if the party the politician is in is going to win or lose. Winning or losing is not the problem. Right or wrong is the problem.

That’s the difference between Political Science and Political Philosophy.

You might say to me that “If our side doesn’t win then the Constitution loses because the Demoncraps are so much worse! We have to win elections before we have any hope of restoring our country.”

This is a person who has lost his way.

If I have to compromise my principles; that the government should follow the law, that a person in political office has to be good for their oaths, that the Constitution has to be followed in order to restore our country to its rightful prosperity, in order to elect someone who is going to ignore the forgoing principles so that the other side doesn’t win, then I’ve already lost everything of value to me. Personal integrity means something.

Right and wrong come above win or lose. That’s the philosophic point that shreds politics. You cannot support “win” at the cost of “right” without losing. Or in other words, if you have to support “wrong” in order to “win” then sooner or later you will lose. This is what RINOs and other liberals are counting on.

They want you to compromise your values. They want you to compromise on the Constitution out of fear that supporting the constitutional candidate would cause you to lose.

If it is right to support the Constitution, if it is right for the government to follow the law, if it is right for politicians to follow their oaths to the Constitution with honor, then you will sooner or later lose by supporting anybody who isn’t fully behind the Constitution one hundred percent.

You cannot win in the long term by supporting “wrong” for any reason. Even the lesser of two wrongs.

Does it seem to you like the country keeps wandering further and further into the insanity that is liberalism? Here’s the difference. Liberals never, ever, for any reason, compromise their values. They make you compromise yours through the fear of losing. Or the fear of them being able to castigate you in the public arena of ideas as being too radical.

There is another aspect to this that is less obvious. If you vote for a candidate because he seems conservative, based on what he says about all of those other issues, and he’s certainly better than the other guy, but he isn’t a constitutionalist, how are you going to get him to do what you want him to do? In not following the Constitution he’s already violated his oath and the supreme law of the land. Why would he remain consistent with being conservative? His position is to say and do whatever he thinks he needs to do in order to get elected. He’s not going to be consistent except in compromising whatever he has to in order to stay in office. The simple fact is that most American People don’t know or understand the Constitution. They want what they want and they think their guy is the way to get the government to give it to them.

Political life is a lot easier to me. I want only one thing from the federal government. I only want any political candidate to say one thing while running for office. That one thing is for them to follow the Constitution. The guy who talks about following it often is the guy I think should win.

The guy who talks about every other thing under the sun but that, no matter how much he seems to love the country, is the guy who I think should lose. If he talks too much about how he’s the guy to handle all of the domestic issues he’s a flimflam artist and should be kept as far from public office as possible. He’s going to get in there and do whatever the hell he wants. From there it’s a crap shoot as to whether it will be conservative or not.

As issues I support the freedom of speech because it’s both right and part of the Constitution. I support firearms ownership because it’s both right and part of the Constitution. I support the People’s rights to protect and educate their children as they see fit because it is both right and part of the Constitution. I support the People’s rights to make their own health care decisions without government interference because it is both right and part of the Constitution. I support the People’s right to decide for themselves what to do with their own earnings because it is both right and part of the Constitution. I support the People’s rights to decide for themselves what they can do with their property because it is both right and part of the Constitution.

I support individual freedom because it is both right and part of the Constitution.

While the Constitution is not perfect—and we can talk about that some other time—the Constitution is almost entirely libertarian from the federal point of view. It’s a minimal impact on the freedom of the People while still having a country.

So why not just simplify it, sum it all up, and support the Constitution? All of the issues TRUE conservatives care about are included. Here’s a hint for you; when a politician tells you about how he’s going to fix everything and make things great but does not include the Constitution as part of it, he’s in it for the power.

It’s not up to the federal government to fix everything and make our lives great. It’s up to the federal government to only do what is necessary to handle international relations and national security, maintain a border and keep the government out of our way so that we can exercise the freedom to make our own lives great.

No single person can make America great or save the country from the insanity and evils of liberalism without the Constitution. This is not about leadership. It’s about getting the government out of the way so that no single person other than us as individuals can flourish and prosper. That’s how we restore our country. That’s how we make ourselves great.

And make no mistake about it, most of the problems this country is facing right now is because the  People don't know the Constitution well enough to force the politicians to follow it.