Centralism Trumps “Checks and Balances”

by Al Benson

Well, we’ve just had an election and it looks to most people like the good guys won for a change. However, voters need to be discerning enough to realize that not all those who appear to be good guys (Republicans) really are. Some of them are no better than the Democratic socialists, the only difference being the party label. Remember that the first two Republican candidates for president in this country, John C. Fremont and Abraham Lincoln, were both socialists in their worldviews even if they may not have officially belonged to any socialist ” Party.” You can check out the backgrounds of both of these individuals in the book Lincoln’s Marxists.

Now that we have a Republican majority in both houses Comrade Obama has stated that he will just take “executive action” in regard to making illegal immigrants part of the national culture. Will the checks and balances that are supposed to operate with our current Constitution be enough to stop him. Will Congress do what it should do or will Obama just continue to get away with his lawlessness? Most of us know the answer and it’s not pretty. Congress will fume and fuss and make great pontifications about who should do what and that will be it.

The checks and balances that one branch of government is supposed to employ under the Constitution to check the usurpations of another branch will amount to nothing. It’s all, as one Christian pastor once said–“meaningless drivel.” Always has been.

Interestingly, one of the most insightful of the Anti-Federalists in the beginning was Robert Yates, a judge from New York who was also a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. At some point Judge Yates withdrew because he felt the convention was exceeding the instructions it had been given. Yates later wrote as “Brutus” about the debates over the Constitution. Given that he had expertise as a judge he claimed that the Supreme Court was destined to become a source of almost unlimited federal over-reaching, and his insight in this area has proven correct.

As “Brutus,” he observed that the Supreme Court, as envisioned under the Constitution, would end up becoming a source of growing abuse because they were beyond the control of both legislatures and ordinary citizens and they were in no way subject to being “corrected by any power above them.” Who is there out there that will correct them regarding their farcial ruling that Obamacare is constitutional? Where are the checks and balances in this situation? If any are present they are hidden under the political rug, never to be seen. Yates thought that the power the Court would command would be so irresistible that the judiciary would use it to make law. Gee, when has that ever happened? (Let us count the times).

That being the case, the Court could then proceed to interpret the Constitution according to the “spirit” of the law rather than the letter of the law. Looking at some of the “decisions” the Court has handed down in our lifetime, can anyone seriously doubt the concerns that Robert Yates had? In fact, if anything, his concerns could have been labeled as optimistic, because in his day, he could have had no possible concept of just how far the Court would go in promoting the agendas of radical, activist judges who would shamelessly promote their version of what they wished the Constitution had really said.

I can recall author and columnist, the late Joseph Sobran, writing on this subject years ago when he noted that the Court had found many “enumerated penumbras” in the Constitution that justified abortion, the murder of unborn babies. Many folks will ask “what’s a penumbra?” Good question. For want of being able to explain it legally, I will note that it is nothing more than the judicial version of “seeing through a glass darkly.” The lawyers see “rights” there that are never spelled out anywhere, except in their own minds. So there are no real checks and balances in play regarding the Supreme Court. It is truly a law unto itself.

Back in 2008, Dr. Clyde Wilson wrote an article called Nathaniel Macon and The Way Things Should Be in which he dealt with the career of Nathaniel Macon, the man that Macon, Georgia was named after. Macon and others in his family were quite discerning. He served with North Carolina troops in the War for Independence. Dr. Wilson noted of him that: “He was offered but refused a commission and he refused also the bounty that was paid for enlisting…In the next few years he was offered a place in the North Carolina delegation to the Continental Congress which he declined. It is noteworthy that his brother, John, voted against ratification of the new U.S. Constitution in both conventions of the sovereign people of North Carolina to consider that question; and that our State did not ratify until the first ten amendments, especially the 9th and 10th, were in place to limit the federal government.” And he commented on the new government, saying “As soon as the U.S. government went into operation, Hamilton and his Yankee friends, claiming that they were acting in behalf of ‘good government’ began to turn the government into a centralized power and a money-making machine for themselves by banks, tariffs, government bonds, and other paper swindles that would be paid for out of the pockets of the farmers who produced the tangible wealth of the country. To oppose this Macon accepted election to the U.S. House of Representatives for the Second Congress.” However, Dr. Wilson noted that “By the end of his life Macon had realized that the cause of republicanism was lost at the federal level, and also that the North was determined to exploit and rule the South. South Carolina tried in 1832 to use ‘nullification,’ state interposition, to force the federal government back within the limits of the Constitution. After he read Andrew Jackson’s proclamation against South Carolina, Macon told his friends that it was too late for nullification. The Constitution was dead. The only recourse was secession–…” These folks had it figured out by the 1830s that the Constitution was not going to work because no one was staying within the sphere of authority that was delegated to them. The checks and balances that were supposed to keep everyone where they belonged were just not being practiced. Each branch of the new government was doing what it wanted to do with no resistance from the other branches save a little breast-beating. It was only to get worse during the Lincoln administration, and worse yet during the “reconstruction” period, when Congress basically just did whatever they wanted. Johnson vetoed their indiscretions but they overrode that while the Supreme Court did little. Now we have a president (a would-be dictator for life if he could get away with it) who doesn’t even bother to consult Congress anymore. He just issues “executive orders” and rules like a Muslim potentate, so where are the checks and balances?

It’s all rhetoric, folks, that’s all it is. We have been lied to by so many for so long about so much, we wouldn’t recognize the truth if we saw it floating amongst all the political swill out there.

Three years ago, Mike Crane of Morganton, Georgia did a series in six parts called What Is States Rights? which you can still find on the Internet. Check out the website for the Southern Party of Georgia and read his comments. If that one is gone you can still find these articles on the League of the South website, probably in their archive. He observed: “In the very early days of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the delegates, the framers of the Constitution, made a deliberate and conscious decision to discontinue a federated form of government and to replace it…let me emphasize…REPLACE IT…with a national form of government in their deliberations. Let me emphasize what this means for the concept of States Rights…By the votes of May 30, 1787 the framers of the Constitution began debating the ultimate elimination of States Rights.”

There’s a lot more to all this and I would encourage everyone to check out Mike’s articles and see what he has to say. You can bet the farm that you will never get this material from what passes for history books today.