By Stewart Rhodes, Founder of Oath Keepers

OathKeepers.org

September 17, was the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution in 1787, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. According to the notes of Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Convention, it was on the last day of deliberation that a lady asked Benjamin Franklin “well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” to which Franklin replied, “a republic, if you can keep it.”

Can we keep it? That has always been a central question. But another very good question is whether we still have a Republic to attempt to keep, or have we already lost it? Or more exactly, has it already been stolen right from beneath our noses?

Do We Still Have a Republic To Keep?

Thomas Jefferson, in his Autobiography of 1821, described the federal judiciary as:

[T]he corps of sappers and miners, steadily working to undermine the independent rights of the States and to consolidate all power in the hands of that government in which they have so important a freehold estate.

Truer words were never spoken, and that description also fits perfectly the political, academic, corporate, and banking elites of both major parties who have joined the judiciary in the steady, relentless undermining, consolidation of power, and theft of the very sweat of our brows that began before the ink was barely dry.

As for the banking elites, Jefferson had this to say:

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

We are now very near that point, with our currency on the verge of being completely devalued and what is left of our wealth sucked out of us, and our children already born into monstrous debt as indentured servants of the government supremacist elites – both Democrats and Republicans – who lord over us with increasingly brazen disdain and treat us like so many heads of cattle, as Angelo Codevilla so clearly spelled out in his recent essay, America’s Ruling Class – and the Perils of Revolution (http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/print). Codevilla’s essay is highly recommended reading, by the way.

What is left of our Republic? What is left of our Constitution? Not much.

A National Government of Unlimited, Un-enumerated, Undivided Powers

The Founders gave us a dual sovereignty republic. That means states as much sovereign within their sphere as the national government is within its sphere, and a national government of limited, enumerated, and divided powers, where “[t]he 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.”

In Federalist 45, James Madison (widely considered the ‘father of the Constitution”) promised the American people that:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

Does that sound like what we are living under today? Hardly. The design of the Founders’ has been turned on its head. With the aid of complicit judges – that “corps of sappers and miners” – who willfully misinterpret the Commerce Clause to grant Congress the power to regulate literally anything, we now have ruling elites who will admit of no restraints on national power. In Justice Thomas’ dissent in Gonzales vs. Raich (http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-1454.ZD1.html), he stated the obvious:

Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything-and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers … By holding that Congress may regulate activity that is neither interstate nor commerce under the Interstate Commerce Clause, the Court abandons any attempt to enforce the Constitution’s limits on federal power. (emphasis added).

Because the Raich case involved medical marijuana, conservatives, including Justice Scalia, joined the liberals on the Court in championing a gross expansion of Congress’ power to regulate commerce, which is now practically unlimited. Much like the Parliament the founding generation rebelled against, Congress now claims a power to legislate over us in all cases whatsoever, down to the minutest details of our daily lives. Just ask Speaker Pelosi or any other Congress-critter where in the Constitution Congress is delegated the power to regulate all that it does. The answer will be “are you serious?” because, based on the Supreme Court’s rewriting of the Commerce Clause, they presume that all power not expressly and specifically prohibited by the Constitution is granted to the national government. In other words, the exact opposite of what our Tenth Amendment actually says and the exact opposite of what Madison promised would be the balance of power between the national government and the states.

The claimed power of the federal government now obviously extends “to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” And the Tenth Amendment may as well be re-written to read “all powers not expressly prohibited to the United States by the Constitution, nor expressly reserved to the states or to the people, are delegated by it to the United States.”

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