By Dr. Harold Pease

This week commemorates Constitution day and week and as such it is well to remind our governments and elected officials, all of who have sworn under oath to abide by it, to reread and follow it. It is also well for our citizenry to do the same so that we can identify those who would take away our liberty and without regard to political party remove these dangerous people from their places of power.

Look around!! Our president spies on us through the NSA in complete disregard of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution and uses the IRS to intimidate and harass his political opposition, most notably conservative, religious and Tea Party groups. Moreover, he upends existing law as in 2012 when by executive order he refused to continue enforcing the deportation of a class of illegal emigrants. Or, in healthcare, some get a year to implement while others do not and Congress gets exempted. Today he no longer attempts to justify his numerous executive orders to any constitutional base and taken together his branch, including his over thirty unconstitutionally appointed czars, make far more rules on us than does our elected Congress. But he does want to take this nation into a totally unconstitutional war with Syria.

Look around!! Congress seems inept at best, unable or unwilling to investigate and bring to justice those in the government who deliberately allowed some 2,000 guns to go to the Mexican drug cartels who used these in some of the murders of over 70,000 Mexicans including our own border patrol Agent Brian Terry. They have shown themselves to be unwilling or unable to thoroughly investigate the four deaths of Americans in Benghazi, a scandal now a year old. Unwilling or unable to investigate, stop, and punish IRS agents using their positions to silence political opposition. Unwilling or unable to investigate, stop and punish NSA spying and storing indefinitely all electronic information on all Americans. Why? Because most who sit in Congress are party lap dogs justifying or condemning whatever on party lines instead of the Constitution.

As the President absorbs more and more of Congress’ law making powers, making Congress more irrelevant each day, they pretend all is well. While not guarding their own powers from an encroaching executive branch, they trample the rights of the states where all power not listed in the Constitution belongs. They have mocked the 10th Amendment and have been complacent in the demise of the first, second, fourth, fifth, sixth and ninth amendments as well. Indeed our liberties would have been better protected by the Boy Scouts of America who, in fact, may understand freedom better than they. There are a few members of Congress who do put the Constitution in front of party and career such as Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Ted Cruz but they are far too few.

Look around!!!! The Supreme Court no longer uses the Constitution, as understood by the Founding Fathers when written, as important. Past practice has replaced original intent and natural law as first consideration. Even international law has come to have more value then original intent in their rendered decisions. Even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, advised Egypt to not modal their new constitution after ours because ours was too dated. The Court makes new law, a constitutional function of Congress alone, by ruling on an issue in such a way as to give it new meaning, thus new law. It is called judicial legislation. The laws of the land have been changed by dozens of such rulings the last fifty years.

Healthcare comes to mind. Congress never passed it as a tax and the political party passing it, and their President, Barack Obama, emphatically resisted any description of it as such. Nevertheless Justice John Roberts ruled it to be a tax, then argued that Congress can tax, therefore it was constitutional. The Court omitted the fact that the word health (or anything remotely similar) is nowhere in the Constitution and is therefore entirely a state issue, as per Amendment 10, until an Amendment to the Constitution ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures moved health to the limited list in the Constitution. Healthcare by any previous combination of justices would have been 100 percent unconstitutional with or without the tax issue.

When the Supreme Court no longer protects the Constitution it falls upon the states to do so defending the 10th Amendment and using the Doctrine of Nullification (understood and endorsed by the Founders) and previously used in 1798, 1832, and 1852. But it is so poorly understood today that few can defend it, nevertheless it was and is the final check on an over reaching federal government.

When reading the Constitution this happy Constitution Day or Week, 226 years since its origin, please pay special attention to the list provided to each of these branches of the federal government. The concept of a list is so vital to our interpretation of the Constitution. If they were to do as they pleased no list would be needed.