The government we didn’t want

Many Americans have begun to wonder if the “will of the people” has
much influence on what the government is doing. They sense that America
is becoming a nation whose centerpiece is not the people, but the state.
There is a lingering fear that the government “of the people, by the
people, and for the people” has perished from the earth, and that
America has become a nation “of the government, by the government, and
for the government.”

Consistently, a majority of Americans vote for change, but nothing
changes. The people want term limits, but can’t have them. They want a
balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, but it is denied. They
want school choice, but it is withheld. They want prayer in school, but
to no avail. They want relief from open borders and open families, but
none is forthcoming. They want an end to the most fascist institution in
America, the IRS, but its budget is increased every year.

The majority of people did not want NAFTA and GATT or the World Trade
Organization, but got them, anyway. They did not want American troops
sent to Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia or Kosovo, but they were sent,
nevertheless.

All in all, a vast majority of Americans want an increasingly
officious and arrogant government out of their lives, their businesses,
and their pocketbooks.

Paradoxically, despite the widespread malaise and discontent, there
is precious little insight into the extent to which Americans have
embraced state socialism. This vacuum of awareness has consequences, the
primary one being that only in retrospect, when it is too late to
resist, will it be understood that freedoms have been irretrievably
forfeited, and the Constitution irreversibly abandoned.

The late Ayn Rand in an article written in 1966 described this
insidious process with prophetic accuracy: “The goal of the ‘liberals’
— as it emerges from the record of the past decades — was to smuggle
this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific
measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never
permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting
their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus,
statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot — by a
long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a
fait accompli. (The goal of the ‘conservative’ was only to retard that
process.)”

How strange that a Constitution carefully crafted to protect the
people from the excesses of government has become an instrument for the
theft of power from the people and for the imposition of heathen
ideology upon them.

How did it happen that the Constitution was interpreted to mean that
the government has the authority to arrange abortions for 14-year-old
girls without notifying parents? What mangled interpretations of the
Constitution led high-placed judges to decide that the people of various
states, by their vote, do not have a constitutional right to put an end
to that heinous form of infanticide known as the partial-birth abortion,
do not have the right to deny homosexuals preferential treatment under
the law, and do not have the right to withhold the benefits of
citizenship from illegal immigrants?

When and by whom was it decided that the government has the right to
hand out condoms to children without the consent of parents? When did
the American people agree to that? By what vote, by what law? How soon
before some fanciful Supreme Court Justice has a judicial epiphany, and
finds the precious right to sodomy, heretofore unnoticed, lurking in the
bowels of the Constitution?

The Constitution was a delegation of power and authority from the
people to the government. To the extent that the Constitution is a
contract between the people who own the power and the government to whom
they delegated some of it, the contract has been comprehensively
violated.

Judge Lino Graglia, who teaches law at the University of Texas,
advised us that “the thing to know to fully understand contemporary
constitutional law is that, almost without exception, the effect of
rulings of unconstitutionality over the past four decades has been to
enact the policy preferences of the cultural elite on the far left of
the American political spectrum.” Judge Robert Bork, in his book
“Slouching Toward Gomorrah,” condemns the Roe v. Wade decision and
“dozens of other decisions in which the Court, without authority in the
Constitution or any law, has forced Americans to adopt the Court’s view
of morality rather than their own.”

Who among those asking to become president has a vision for restoring
America as a great and moral nation, the envy of the world, and a beacon
of hope for oppressed people everywhere?