Jun 5, 2017 | Constitution, Healthcare, Immigration, Liberty Articles
By Harold Pease, Ph. D
Please understand! I am deeply offended when called either conservative or liberal. These are traps for the ignorant who wish to reduce my years of serious contemplation to a word so that a part of my readers can praise me (“Well done! “ “You are one of us!”). And the other part can dismiss me by a single word—even hate me. This is war, every bit as much as it was for the Founding Fathers and I will not be dismissed. There are Loyalist or Tories in our day just as there were in theirs and I stand to call them out, whether Democrats or Republicans.
My views are the Founders collective view. I draw from the same fountain of natural law as they did and appeal to the same “father of lights to illuminate my understanding” (Ben Franklin’s words at the Constitutional Convention), as they did. I am my own thinker.
I have been a college professor for many years and students sit in front of me just waiting to tag me with some label that did not then exist in the same way and dismiss me or marginalize me so that they do not have to think. As long as they are not successful they are teachable and have to deal with the inconsistencies of both ideologies—liberal and conservative. I have friends in both camps and sooner or latter they say to me, somewhat surprised, “I thought you were one of us.”
I, like George Washington, dislike political parties. Today both major parties undermine the Constitution and collective ignorance, reinforced by numbers, is more dangerous than individual ignorance. Neither uses the Constitution as first consideration in governing.
I publicly challenged the Republican Party for leading us into the Iraq Wars against Saddam Hussein because the evidence for doing so (9 11, weapons of mass destruction, preemption-–the concept that they would do something to us eventually) did not exist and had to be constantly changed to justify our presence. I did not oppose the war in Afghanistan because the evidence was there for 9 11 but I do now because we have no clear definable win objectives and lack the will to unleash everything we have to win. It is another Vietnam quagmire.
It was the George W. Bush administration that gave us the Patriot Act, which allowed the government to define terrorists as her own people and severely damaged the Bill of Rights. Republicans looked the other way as the National Security Agency (NSA) gave itself authority to gather and store in Bluffdale, Utah every electronic message of her own people. While the government looks within for the enemy, it fails to secure our borders, until now, from Middle Eastern intruders from countries with a known intent to harm us. With respect to national health care, something they unanimously opposed, and which has no constitutional basis, they now look more like Democrats who at least were not hypocritical in their desire to take-over a third of the economy. “Obamacare-light” is still Obamacare.
Democrats have taken spending to an unacceptable level and seem intent to risk collapsing the entire economy in doing so. With each crisis they help create, their remedy is always more government as they hamstring businesses that create our jobs with numberless rules and regulations.
Their model is not the Founders or the Constitution but socialist countries in Europe some of whom tax their people over 50% of their income and have far less freedom. A worshipful press has never properly explained Obama’s past connection with revolutionary Bill Ayer, Founder of the militant Whether Underground, which bombed government buildings in the seventies. While China, Cuba, and even Canada are showing clear signs of backing off socialism we seemed “hell bent” to rush into it under either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.
Moreover, instead of investigating the Clinton Foundation or Clinton Classified Emails Scandals, that jeopardized national security of which there exists extensive documentation, far more than on Nixon’s Watergate, they push Russian influence in the Donald Trump election for which real documentation is non-existent. Amazing!
So what do I embrace? I usually drop a tear or two when the National Anthem is played. I am touched by George Washington who loved his country enough to risk his life in a doubtful cause failing to win a single battle the first year against England, the most powerful nation on earth, and refused pay from the government for his services as a general or as president. I love knowing that Founders and presidents acknowledge the hand of God in crisis and shamelessly went to him for help. I love the stories of servicemen who put their lives on the line to save a buddy. I have undying respect for those who served their country with the primary intent of saving freedom—even if they did not understand the motives of the politicians who sent them. I love people who stand for traditional values of honesty, integrity and morality and did not justify President Clinton’s numerous White House affairs.
So what am I? Only a typical American that wants to return to our base and thinks more people embrace this description than either party ideology. So please just call me a patriotic American. That is a title that I wear with honor.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He has taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. To read more of his weekly articles, please visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
Feb 27, 2017 | Constitution, Healthcare, Liberty Articles
By Harold Pease, Ph. D
Republicans are criticized for not having a plan ready to replace the failed ObamaCare as most of the 2016 Republican Party presidential contenders had promised its demise if elected. The House of Representatives made over 60 attempts to repeal The Affordable Care Act since its passage in 2010. So why has this not happened with Republicans now in control of the Legislative and Executive branch’s of government?
Many Republicans like their new found power over a seventh of the economy and are reluctant to give it up. They propose allowing insurers to sell across state lines, forming high-risk pools for people with pre-existing conditions, creating a tax credit to help people afford coverage, and “beefing up” health saving accounts. The basic difference between Republicans and Democrats is simply, “We can do it better.” Notice their use of controlling adjectives: allowing, forming, creating, and “beefing up.” Healthcare would remain nationalized.
Missed entirely is that the Constitution allows only the option of repeal. Anything more would require a new amendment to the Constitution transferring a new power, healthcare, from the states where it resided, to the federal government as per Article V. All power was distributed in 1787. Any rearrangement of that distribution requires a new amendment to the Constitution.
Many do not know that we live under two political systems: one primarily national in function, the other primarily domestic. Thomas Jefferson expressed it best when he said: The states are not subordinate to the national government but rather the two are coordinate departments of one single and integral whole…. The one is domestic the other the foreign branch of the same government.” Its called federalism—the two share power and are equal. Neither was to be subservient to the other and each was to have separate duties.
So it is with federal and state governments as Jefferson suggested. The Founders, however, were aware of the nature of all governments to grow. George Washington said it best: “Government is like fire, a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” So one builds a fireplace before one brings fire into his home for warmth so that it does not burn down his home. That fireplace is the Constitution, in particular Article I, Section VIII.
Simply, government grows. To harness this tendency both partners in government were given lists of duties: the federal government Article I, Section VIII. Everything it did was to be clearly linked to an enumerated grant of power. Healthcare cannot be linked to an existing enumerated grant of power. The States, who created the Federal Government, retained unto themselves all other powers as per Amendments 9 and 10 of the Constitution. “James Madison wrote: “The powers delegated…to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite.” That the federal government took this power unto themselves in 2010 is not constitutional authority to continue the confiscation.
The advantages of federalism are enormous. States become laboratories of experimentation. States have the tendency to look at sister states for models and to borrow this from New Jersey and that from Oregon and yet something else from Alabama in refining their own programs. These places of experimentation work to everyone’s advantage. This process refines legislation and when enough states think it better handled at the federal level they, in a new constitutional amendment, can pass it to the federal partner. Citizens of a state not happy with experimental regulation can move to one of the 49 other states less controlling.
Had our “power crazed” federal partner refrained from their natural inclination to take over healthcare we could have gone through this experimental process designed by our Founding Fathers and been able to identify the weaknesses or strengths while they were still geographically isolated. Only three states had tried state healthcare: Oregon, Massachusetts, and Hawaii. That was clearly not enough to identify the “pitfalls” in the area. The federal partner took a half-baked idea and made it mandatory on the whole nation, thus it failed.
The Founders did not dare leave the vague phrase “general welfare” to future federal power grabbers. To prevent the interpretation that it meant “everything” they added clauses 2-9. Listed are 14 powers, five dealing with borrowing money, regulating its value, and counterfeiting. The other nine included naturalization, bankruptcies, establishing post offices, protecting inventors and authors, establishing “tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court” and “regulating commerce with foreign nations and among the several states.” healthcare, or anything remotely like unto it, is not listed.
Who decided the division of powers—the states? And they kept that right to decide in Article V of the Constitution. They forfeited only specific named powers that they could not reasonably do as states, as for example, a common currency. Why would they give any more power? They had just rejected the flow of power from the Colonies to Parliament and the resultant avalanche of rules descending from them in return. After all, the cause of the American Revolution was excessive government. There intent was to handcuff the federal government so that such could never happen again, not give it free reign.
Constitutionalists must insist that Republicans and Democrats restrict themselves to the Constitution. Repeal, don’t replace, ObamaCare or get a new amendment to it. Don’t damage the Constitution further by ignorance of it.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He has taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. To read more of his weekly articles, please visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
Nov 20, 2016 | Economy, Healthcare, Liberty Articles, Take Action
By Dr. Harold Pease
It is said that the casualties of this presidential election in order were the toppling of the Bush dynasty, the Clinton dynasty, and the nullification of the Obama legacy. At the top, however, is a rejection of socialism. No two presidential candidates have been more socialistic than Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, and half of America voted for socialism. Keeping Obamacare and instituting “free college” would have made it very difficult to argue that we had not become a socialist country. This is despite the harsh lessons of our socialist beginnings.
This Thanksgiving Day we think of the Pilgrims enjoying abundant food, but this was not their real reality. Few will mention the starving times the first year in 1620 when half died of starvation. Harvests were not bountiful in that year and the next two. Plymouth was beset by laziness and thievery. William Bradford, the governor of the colony, in his History of Plymouth Plantation reported that “much was stolen both by night and day” to alleviate the prevailing condition of hunger. The mythical “feast” of the first Thanksgiving did fill their bellies briefly, he reported, and they were grateful, but abundance was anything but common. Why did this happen? Because they had fallen victim to the socialistic philosophy of “share the wealth.” This dis-incentivized the productive base of society.
Then suddenly, as though night changed to day, the crop of 1623 was bounteous, and those thereafter as well, and it had nothing to do with the weather. Bradford wrote, “Instead of famine now God gave them plenty and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God.” He concluded later, “any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day.”
One variable alone made the difference and ended the three-year famine. They abandoned the notion of government (or corporation) owning the means of production and distribution in favor of the individual having property and being responsible to take care of himself. Before, no one benefited by working because he received the same compensation as those who did not. After the change everyone kept the benefits of his labor. Those who chose not to work basically chose also to be poor and the government (corporation) no longer confiscated from those who produced to give to those who did not. No government food stamps here.
Ironically all this could have been avoided had Plymouth consulted history and communicated with their neighboring colony, some distance south of them, who had previously been down the same trail. Jamestown too was first a socialist society where each produced according to his ability and received according to his need, which, of course, affected supply. One cannot divide what does not exist. Our textbooks tell us that only one of twelve survived the first two years for precisely the same reason, starvation. The problem, as noted by Tom Bethel in his work The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity through the Ages, was identified by an unnamed participant as “want of providence, industrie and government, and not the barenness and defect of the Countrie.”
Captain John Smith is credited with having saved the floundering colony by his “no workie, no eatie” government program (once again, the Virginia Company was the government) and was hated for it. Addicted to the promise of getting something for nothing, even if it is always less than promised, the receiving part of the population will always oppose their not getting their “fair share.” Sound familiar? Captain Smith was eventually carted off to England in chains as fast as the parasitic population could do so. Once again, why? Philip A. Bruce in his Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, p. 121 called it agricultural socialism. “The settlers did not have even a modified interest in the soil…. Everything produced by them went into the store, in which they had no proprietorship.” When settlers finally were allowed to own their own property, and keep what they produced, things changed over night.
Colony Secretary Ralph Hamor wrote of incoming prosperity, beginning in 1614, after ownership of land was allowed. “When our people were fed out of the common store, and labored jointly together, glad was he [who] could slip from his labor, or slumber over his tasks he cared not how, nay, the most honest among them would hardly take so much true pains in a week, as now for themselves they will do in a day, neither cared they for the increase, presuming that however the harvest prospered, the general store must maintain them, so that we reaped not so much corn from the labors of thirty as now three or four do provide for themselves.”
This Thanksgiving let us be grateful for the prosperity that we have—even the poorest among us. Jamestown and Plymouth set us upon a course that recognized that prosperity requires incentive to flourish and that the profit motive stimulates industry. We are so grateful that, having recognized the poison of “the share the wealth” philosophy, they purged it from their midst and proceeded to make America the most prosperous country on earth.
We remain mostly a socialist country but the plunge deeper has been avoided for now and we have a chance to set a new course distancing ourselves more fully from it, as did they. Will we be so smart? Let us share this message at the table as we feast upon turkey and pumpkin pie this Thanksgiving Day so that our children will know how prosperity is really produced.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He has taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. To read more of his weekly articles, please visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
Jun 22, 2016 | Constitution, Healthcare, Liberty Articles, Take Action
By Dr. Harold Pease
With elections signs all around it might be well to be reminded that it is unrealistic to expect national candidates to follow the Constitution when we did not insist that they did so in state, county and city offices. After all, many simply move up to higher office. Some may even view the Constitution as irrelevant at these levels.
Several years ago in California at a public debate for county supervisor the public was invited to offer questions in writing. I did so and watched the monitor of the debate, with a puzzled look on his face sideline my question in preference to others. I presumed it was because it had something to do with the Constitution, which, unfortunately, is considered by many an irrelevant topic at the city, county, or even state level. You are supposed to ask what “goodies” from taxpayer funding are you going to give me and is it more than your opponent?
So what does the Constitution have to do with local or state issues? Everything!! First, it is the only document that every single elected public servant swears to uphold. So the Founders must have thought it relevant at every level.
Second, candidates at lower levels successfully rise to higher levels because of the name recognition obtained at lower levels and eventually become members of the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, often without ever having read the Constitution they are specifically under oath to protect. When I worked as a legislative assistant in the U.S. Senate some years ago, I was certain at least 50% had never read it at any level of government. Today I would be surprised if those who had read it exceeded 10%. But no one asks candidates, even while campaigning at the highest levels, when they last read it.
So again, why does this matter? Historically, the two enemies of freedom are: 1) it is the nature of all governments to pull decision making power upward to the seat of government and, 2) the more apathetic and indifferent the population becomes the greater the tendency of the people to push decision making power upwards to the seat of government. When these two forces work together it always leads to the central government eventually having most of the power. The Constitution is full of “handcuffs” to keep decision-making power from getting to the top thus maximizing it with the individual. The Founders overriding philosophy of government, if it could be penned into one sentence, was, “never elevate to a higher level that which can be resolved at a lesser level.”
Even a casual look at the Constitution reveals the separation of powers on the federal level into three distinct branches the legislative, executive, and judicial—each with a specific list. For Congress it was a list of the four types of law they could make (Art. I, Sec. 8), for the president it was the types of executive functions he could execute (Art. II, Sec. 2-3), and for the Supreme Court the types of cases it could adjudicate (Art. III, Sec. 2). The lists exist to both restrict them and to prohibit the concentration of power into one branch. The only type of federal government authorized by the Founders was decidedly a limited one. States, counties, and cities have all the powers not listed, as per Amendment 10.
When these limitations are not understood and protected at lower levels of government, the federal government is constantly tempted to steal authority from the states or counties as per its confiscating environmental, health, and education issues, which are constitutionally 100% non federal government issues. States, counties, and cities should use the Tenth Amendment to tell the federal government to “butt out.” “You have no constitutional authority.” When Congress passed, and the President signed into law, the National Defense Authorization Act, December 31, 2012, both states and counties should have written Congress and the President. “You do not have the right to void Amendments 4, 5, 6, and 8, of The Bill of Rights and the Writ of Habeas Corpus for our citizens. The military shall not arrest any of our citizens.”
It comes to this. Sixty years ago it may not have made much difference if a county supervisor/commissioner, or city councilman, swore allegiance to a Constitution that he had not fully studied, or worse, even read. The federal government had not yet absorbed his area of jurisdiction. Now it has! There is hardly an area where the federal government does not have its tentacles embedded, from school lunches to cross gender bathrooms. Over thirty years ago a city councilman complained to me that a third of what he voted on was already mandated because sometime in the past the council had accepted the “free money” which now obligated him. School districts are notorious for having done the same thing.
City, county, and state leaders, you are our buffer from the federal government taking from you your areas of jurisdiction. They have done so for many years because you were complacent in it, or ignorant of the Constitution. Consequently you have lost a large portion of our liberty. Today your understanding of the document must be known BEFORE we place you in power.
This election let us find leaders with Constitutional fire in their bellies to undo the precedents that their predecessors created. All issues on the city and county level are directly or indirectly constitutional issues. We now expect leaders to know, and abide by, the document that they swear to uphold.
Jun 6, 2016 | Constitution, Healthcare, Liberty Articles, Take Action
By Harold Pease, Ph. D
States should not sue the federal Government to obtain rights they already have under the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution because doing so undermines—potentially to oblivion—that Amendment. It reads: “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.”
The proper constitutional state response to the Obama directive of May 12, 2016, allowing transgender students in public schools to use bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their chosen gender identity, should be to ignore it and forward a letter to the president reminding him that transgender bathrooms, or anything like unto them, are nowhere listed in the enumerated powers of the Constitution Article I, Section, 8 and have not been added by way of amendment.
States using the 10th Amendment should also encourage other states to do the same thing. If the eleven states presently suing the federal government for abuse of power instead took this course, the president would back off—proportionally, more so, as states refusing compliance on constitutional grounds, enlarged. This approach not only does not allow the federal government to weaken the 10th Amendment, but frees the state from costly litigation and the schools from costly implementation. Resolvement is also immediate. Progression through the lower courts to the Supreme Court takes years for resolvement, which is not likely to happen in the Obama Administration. While we wait the administrative objective is, in effect, fait accompli.
The choice to litigate rather than use the 10th Amendment not only implies that the federal government might have some measure of jurisdiction but allows a federal branch of that government sole power to decide. Rare has been the modern Supreme Court decision that limits federal power or protects the separation of power between the federal government and state government. Consider recent decisions on national health care, also not an enumerated power and therefore 100% a state power. State protection of state sovereignty becomes impossible should the Court rule against suing states. States will have neutralized themselves.
Those advocating the litigation process have forgotten the role of federalism in our republic—that two governments, one primarily for foreign affairs, the other for domestic affairs, each coequal, were established in the Constitution. This was the first separation of powers—those not specifically given by the states to the Federal Government belonged to the states. It supersedes the second division of power that of the creation of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches in the Constitution, which then divides the power left to the federal government. The Founders viewed the enumeration of responsibilities in the three branches they created as sufficient.
Fortunately the states, fearing a future over-reaching federal government, insisted on an amendment in the Bill of Rights restating what was then the obvious, before they would ratifying the Constitution. This, in order to protect more fully the separation that had been established—their right to be coequal—thus the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson explained it best when he said, “The states are not subordinate to the national government but rather the two are coordinate departments of one single and integral whole…. The one is domestic the other the foreign branch of the same government.”
The Supreme Court serves a very important role as the umpire in keeping the division of power between the three branches separate but cannot nullify or adjudicate to oblivion the first separation of power, that between the two coequal governments. If a power is not enumerated in the Constitution, having been given to the federal government by consent of the states, in a process outlined in Article V, it belongs to the state and no decision of the Supreme Court can change this. Keep in mind that judicial review, now the peg post to hang most Supreme Court decisions, was not effectively established until Marbury vs. Madison in 1803, thirteen years after the Constitution went into effect and long after the establishment of State authority to nullify federal over-reach.
Perhaps Alexander Hamilton said it best when he wrote that every act outside of enumerated authority is contrary to the Constitution and thus is void. Hamilton continues, “There is no position which depends on clearer principles, than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this, would be to affirm … that men acting by virtue of powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid” (The Federalist, No. 78, p. 467).
Again, States should not sue the federal government over transgender bathrooms or anything else to obtain rights they already have under the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution. What they need instead are governors and legislatures with a better understanding of the document and “fire in their bellies” to protect the Constitution they have sworn by oath to preserve. The federal directive for transgender bathrooms is the most outrageous abuse of the enumeration clause of the Constitution ever and therefore the most likely abuse to gain public support for state nullification. It is passed time to use the Tenth. Have we governors that will do it?
May 23, 2016 | Constitution, Healthcare, Liberty Articles
By Harold Pease, Ph. D
A federal judge just ruled that Congress never appropriated the funding for the cost-sharing reductions in Obamacare. Judge Rosemary Collyer, citing Article I, Section 7, Clause 1, “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives…” reminding the President that “Congress is the only source for such an appropriation, and no public money can be spent without one.”
Apparently, President Barack Obama realizing that his program to fund those unable to afford healthcare unless subsidized by the taxpayer, like food stamps, had not been appropriated by the House of Representatives, as required by the Constitution, defiantly looked for ways to do it anyway. That body denied his request that they do so in their fiscal 2014 budget. Rather than accept the fact that this is the only body that can approve expenditures constitutionally, the President began to pour billions into it, in effect raising revenue. Since the inception of nationalized healthcare the House had voted more than 70 times for its repeal so subsidizing what they considered a failed program was not going to happen. When, through executive orders Obama funded it anyway, House Speaker John Boehner filed a lawsuit challenging the executive branch’s ability to alter legislation once approved by Congress.
The judge’s ruling to stop further reimbursements to insurance companies who reduced health insurance for those thought to be unable to pay in exchange for the government’s promise to pay the difference out of tax funds, is delayed while the case is appealed to the D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Affected are approximately 57% of the people who signed up (estimated 5 million) for coverage through the federal exchange web page. Without the subsidies healthcare costs will rise substantially, although the taxpayer should get a break.
There are few parts of the Constitution more clear than, “All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” This means that any law, which extracts money from the backs of the American worker, can only originate from the House.
So why should you care if the president defies this small part of the Constitution? For thousands of years, until the Constitution, governments taxed their citizens whenever and whatever they wished. The people had no say. If the Egyptian Pharaoh wanted bricks without straw from the Israelites, for instance, so be it. Rulers lived lavishly off the wealth extracted from their poor subjects with little or no mercy toward them—lavish physical structures and frivolous wars of conquest were too often the norm. The Founders wisely took this power from the rich and gave it to the poor themselves by requiring that the poor, then the majority, had to consent to any taxation over them. The power to tax is the only constitutional power exclusively given to the masses. The House of Representatives was the only branch of government designed to actually represent them as it is based upon population. The Senate was to represent the states, the people only indirectly.
As far as I know the United States is the only country in world history that had this protection from their government placing its tax base with the masses that pay the taxes. It is a priceless freedom. If we are over-taxed in the United States we have chosen to be and one body alone is responsible—The House of Representatives. And, if over-taxed, a correction by the masses can follow quickly as all members of this body come up for reelection on the same date—every two years.
No tax can constitutionally originate with the President or the Supreme Court, not even the Senate, although it can modify as on other bills once originated by the House. The House is also in charge of spending—even defunding something previously funded. The power of the purse (both taxing and spending) is one of the most important powers of the Constitution. We must not let this freedom dwindle or allow the line between the two legislative branches to be blurred into oblivion.
Addressing this subject James Madison, the father of the Constitution, observed, “This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.” The U.S. Constitution mandates that “the House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of government.” This power alone he added, “can overcome all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government. They, in a word, hold the purse… (The Federalist 58).”
This may seem like a small thing but the people really do not want to surrender their freedom from excessive taxation, which, prior to this constitutional clause did not exist. No president should take this power unto himself by obligating the House through his defiant spending in opposition to existing law prohibiting such. Losing this is serious because, once gone, it is unlikely to be retrieved. Thank God Judge Rosemary Collyer understood this. Hopefully the D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals will as well when appealed to by the President.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He has taught history and political science from this perspective for over 25 years at Taft College.
