Government without Consent Lacks Legitimacy
American Thinker.com
J.B. Shurk
America is the story of freedom. It was settled by those determined to rid themselves of Old World shackles and build something entirely new. Its people rejected servitude to a foreign king across the ocean. It fought a bloody civil war as testament to its founding principles that liberty and equality under the law are human rights irrespective of race. It became home to waves of new immigrants through the centuries who crossed great distances and risked tremendous perils — all to flee the tyrannies behind them and reach America's shores. Because no other nation has ever been birthed into existence by first recognizing that its legitimacy comes directly from the consent of the governed, America has remained a magnet for people all over the world who dream of being free.
When cultural saboteurs attempt to rewrite America's history as one replete with racism, murder, and hate, what they really desire is to brainwash Americans into forgetting who they are and why they fight. The U.S. government, like all governments filled with imperfect souls prone to corruption and ambition, will use the strengths and passions of the American people to fight all kinds of battles that have more to do with D.C.'s welfare than the country's. Politicians will say, "We're fighting for democracy," or "against terrorism," or so that "we don't have to fight them over here." Rarely, however, will you hear those politicians use freedom as a call to arms, even though America was forged and invigorated by an indomitable spirit yearning to be free.
Why? Why would those in positions of power forsake freedom as a rallying cry when no other word better signifies who Americans are, what they have done, and what they will do in the future? The answer is that the American government has become no different than the English one it overthrew — intoxicated by its own power to such a degree that it has deluded itself into believing that control over those it purports to govern is its by right. In turn, individual freedom and the voluntary consent of the governed that only freedom can maintain have been abandoned, so that a cumbersome government bureaucracy may rise, beholden to none.
If federal officials and corporate media pundits attempted to rally Americans into foreign battles under a banner of freedom, Americans would be reminded that the same people and institutions sending them into harm's way have cheaply squandered their own birthright. A government that long ago abandoned any obligation to seek consent from those it claims to control cannot afford to remind Americans that they were once masters of their own fates. Doing so would risk inciting the passions of the people and turning those now quietly enslaved against their bureaucratic enslavers. Is it any wonder, then, that the Department of Justice defines anyone who dissents from official government policy as "extreme"? Diversity of opinion cannot be tolerated within any system predicated on public obedience for its survival.
The events of our day pick up speed. There is both an awakening among the American people that they have long been deceived about the health of their freedom and an increased urgency among America's permanent ruling class that a new Iron Curtain of control must drop before that awakening turns into outright resistance. When government authorities choose control as the source of their power, then totalitarianism is the inevitable result. Neither freedom nor consent can survive in such a system. The present task for the American government, then, is to lull the public back to a state of narcoleptic dependency, divert their attention with mass propaganda, intimidate them into apathetic compliance, and ratchet up displays of force.
Consider just how far D.C.'s bureaucratic tyrants have gone to undermine the American system:
A nation born from such deep mistrust of government that its Founders went out of their way to design a constitutional structure forbidding the exercise of any powers not explicitly enumerated now endures a Judicial Branch that rewrites law according to its subjective feelings, a Legislative Branch that has delegated much of its authority to an unaccountable administrative State, and an Executive Branch that too often rules by imperial decree.
A nation born from such a deep commitment to the inviolability of God-given rights that its Founders reiterated some of those inalienable rights in the first ten amendments to the Constitution as glaring admonitions to any future governments (lacking the cognitive abilities to read and comprehend the plain language of the Constitution's original text) now endures a federal bureaucracy that works to censor Americans' free speech, interfere with the exercise of their religious faith, deny their right to self-defense, conduct warrantless searches of their private communications, and impudently infringe every other liberty explicitly guaranteed to Americans by the Bill of Rights.
A nation born from such an antagonism to centralized authority that its Founders created a federal republic recognizing most powers as exclusively retained by the respective states or directly by the American people now endures an ever-expanding federal Leviathan insisting that the states and people bend to the collective will of not only the vast collection of bureaucratic busybodies running D.C., but also the international institutions that have usurped America's national sovereignty and now assert direct jurisdiction over the American people.
America's constitutional system has been turned inside-out and upside-down. At no time did the American people provide their consent to these radical changes. At no time did the American people relinquish their inherent prerogative to determine for themselves when their government has acted beyond its delegated powers. At no time did the American people lose inalienable rights that cannot be vitiated through government decree. At no time did Americans lose constitutional protections whose meanings cannot simply be rewritten to suit the interests of the State. At no time did the American people reject their historical calling to be free. When the federal government, whose existence continues only to the extent that it abides by the terms of its contractual framework, instead betrays the plainly written language of its own legal genesis, then it forfeits constitutional legitimacy. "Because we said so" is not a golden ticket providing D.C. with infallible authority.
The government in D.C. is in the empire business, obsessed with projecting power across the globe. The American people, however, are in the republic business, rightly concerned with preserving their rights and liberties here at home. What has happened in America is what has happened throughout history when nations with republican virtue gallop down the path of empire: civic promises once held sacred are betrayed. Without any vote or consultation with the American people, D.C. transformed a limited and sharply defined central government into an amorphous blob beyond ordinary citizens' control. Like an obese beast whose innumerable folds long ago spilled over its constitutional belt, the same charter once meant to constrain it has been hidden beneath gluttonous excess. That must change.
There is nothing "extreme" about citizens and state governments refusing to respect the authority of the federal government until it begins to act within the limits of the Constitution. There is nothing "extreme" about citizens and state governments choosing to enforce their own borders when federal authorities actively encourage foreign invasion. There is nothing "extreme" about citizens and state governments working to create viable precious metal-based workarounds to a federal tax-and-spend system that has already crushed Americans' wealth by empowering private banks to print paper money and will further erode private property through the imposition of central bank digital currencies. There is nothing "extreme" about defending speech from State censorship.
Federal bureaucrats have become a threat to the Bill of Rights. They have rejected the binding terms of the Constitution. They increasingly lack legitimacy.
Image: JSMed via Pixabay, Pixabay License.
Original Article: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/government_without_consent_lacks_legitimacy.html