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Sunday, July 25, 2010
Life and liberty
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, currently charged with the demanding task of using the office of Speaker of the House to betray the people, was asked by a reporter to cite the Constitutional authority for a far-reaching bill, to which she answered, "Are you serious? Are you serious?", either as if struck by the curious irrelevance of the concept, or as if she were being challenged for a victory speech in which she assured her supporters of the bill's compatibility with the Constitution's mission regarding life and liberty, a proposition so dubious that followup questions all but asked themselves.
The incident demonstrated once again that there are those in government who believe life and liberty are unequal and negotiable, that they are assignable, that formerly equal guarantees can be preferentially distributed in service of a value system. It is here, with this notion of a latter day nobility, that the legitimacy of the central government ends.
Recent regimes have imposed a value system that largely places the citizenry outside the protection of the Constitution. By doing so they have placed themselves above the law, and those who are above the law have no confidence in their own protections under the law, rightly, for they have demonstrated its malleability by their own success.
Their successes are tactical, not fundamental. To the extent that Constitutional guarantees of life and liberty are reduced for the citizenry, so too are they reduced for their representatives, when they are diminished for one, that is the extent to which they are diminished for the other, for in these things the security of the citizenry is the measure security itself.
Clever opportunists within government may betray the people for a while, and their successes may invite the appearance of victories and approval, but the advantages they have gained cannot support themselves, true prices cannot be known until credit balances debits, and the debits are large and growing, although here we speak of legitimacy and illegitimacy and the disparity is substantial, perhaps to the point of disaster.
Life and liberty are the blue chips of our individual and national life, legitimately in play only when our existence is threatened. They're too large a coin to be anteed in service of any lesser agenda. The price for losing is life and liberty itself. And it isn't the dealer who pays.
Comments
Remus,
You are of course correct. This has been especially in evidence during the last decade by not only the attempted criminalization of political opposition but by the wielding of the police powers of government at various levels by random road blocks, and the seizure of legal firearms from law abiding citizens in the wake of so called “disasters” such as hurricanes and abnormal snowfalls. Our society’s thin veneer of “constitutional protections” continues to erode at an accelerating rate.In some respects it is unfortunate that many of us will not survive to witness the current crop of Pelosiesque tyrants being paraded through the streets in donkey carts to their rendezvous with the guillotine.
Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ on 07/25/2010 at 05:18 PM
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