Can People Govern Themselves? United States Experiment in Self Government Keeps Question Alive

[From article]
It has been said by some, and not entirely without reason, that the American experiment in self-governance is failing. Is it? Are we incapable of the virtues required of sovereign citizens?
The founding principle of American civics is that "we the people" govern ourselves. As self-governing citizens, we ensure that the government does not rule over us, but rather that it act under us. It is neither our parent nor our provider, but our subordinate. We call the shots. The government follows our orders. Our representatives represent us – not themselves, not their donors.
Has all that become a pipe dream?
[. . .]



Socialism is on the rise, and its roots are sinking ever deeper into the social fabric. Education, entertainment, and even religious institutions are indoctrinating our fellow citizens. There is no reasoning with socialists, because when you try to speak, they shout you down, and that in itself is the harbinger of tyranny.
As matters now stand, we are not governing ourselves. We are being ruled by a distant and largely unaccountable officialdom that operates mostly out of our view. This system is supported by a bloc of voters who are appallingly ignorant of basic civics. People who cannot raise their own children are allowed to vote, and the people for whom they vote tax you to pay for their children.
[. . .]
First, it is necessary to restore citizenship to its constitutional roots. Birthright citizenship was never the bedrock of civic entitlement, but only one of several considerations.
[. . .]
I would make at least one critical requirement for anyone to be a voter. That requirement would be that every voter must pass the same test that foreign applicants for citizenship must pass. Presently, most voters would fail that test, many of them miserably.
Citizenship founded upon basic knowledge of the Constitution would be a good start. The rest might then, hopefully, take care of itself.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/04/can_we_really_govern_ourselves.html

April 17, 2016
Can we really govern ourselves?
By Robert Arvay

Separation Of Powers Abused By White House

[From article]
One virtue possessed by all bad presidents, whether they’re evil, venal, lazy, or incompetent, is that they always reveal the weakness of the political system at the time of their tenure. In this, Obama is no different than any other bozo that has inhabited the White House.
Separation of powers is the one element that distinguishes the United States from previous democratic systems. (And before people hurt themselves in their rush to point out that “the U.S. is a republic and not a democracy” -- a “republic” is any governmental system that’s not a monarchy. Nazi Germany and the USSR were “republics.” The U.S. is a republic utilizing a system of representative democracy.)
[. . .]
Montesquieu’s understand of history informed him that concentration of power leads inevitably to despotism -- no matter how solidly a democratic system was founded, eventually an Augustus or a Lorenzo would show up, concentrate all power in his own person and eventually undermine senate or council. From that point on, whatever it might call itself, the state was a simple autocracy. There was never a way back, and the usual sequel was degeneration and collapse.
Montesquieu’s solution was separation of powers:
[. . .]
Though often criticized -- largely by progressives who knew what had to be done and wanted what amounted to a temporary dictatorship to do it -- separation of powers has been a great success. At no point, even during the Civil War, has the United States ever been in danger of the deterioration into autocracy that plagued previous republics. But as the Obama administration has clearly revealed, separation of powers has been crippled for the better part of a century through the metastasis of the executive branch.
[. . .]
The explosion of agencies under the New Deal, each of which was touted as necessary for the salvation of the country and most of which accomplished absolutely nothing, introduced a factor unforeseen by the Founders: concentration of power in the executive through organizational hyperdevelopment. All those agencies are under direct presidential control, and subject to his orders with no effective oversight from the other branches.
[. . .]
To keep a neverending story short, this is how, eighty years later, we’ve attained our current state of a government overburdened with agencies that solve nothing while constantly spinning off sub-organizations.
This has badly skewed the balance of powers toward the executive, something that Obama has been quick to seize on in his effort at permanent transformation of the American system.
No president has more abused the power of the executive. Obama was raised in Indonesia during key formative years, a nation that in the 1960s was run as a strict military autocracy. At the time that Obama was attending school there, the state’s founder Achmed Sukarno had just been overthrown by Gen. Mohammed Suharto. Accompanying this transfer of power had been a nationwide purge that murdered at least 100,000.
[. . .]
In the privacy of his head, Obama is not a president at all -- he’s a pemimpin, the Indonesian term for führer. (This can also be seen in his constant vacations, golf rounds, etc.
[. . .]
One of the major techniques he learned is rule by decree -- to give orders without any effort at gaining consensus. How does he get away with it? In large part because he controls the agencies. Obama has discovered that the bloated hypertrophy of the bureaucracy has effectively put him beyond the reach of our system’s constitutional safeguards.
His decrees range from the idiotic to the grotesque -- his order to the EPA to shut down the coal industry, the repurposing of NASA as a Muslim PR effort, the post-legislative changes to ObamaCare
[. . .]
It’s long been understood that agencies such as the EPA, the Department of Education, and the Department of Energy are useless. It’s now clear that they are a threat to the commonwealth.
[. . .]
The Democrats [. . .] create these structures, these methods of short-circuiting the political process, and are shocked -- shocked -- when somebody else takes advantage of them.
[. . .]
The real problem here is that the progressives -- and possibly a much larger segment of the country -- have simply forgotten how the American system is supposed to work. And that may well be the most lethal aspect of all.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/obama_versus_the_separation_of_powers.html

December 7, 2015
Obama Versus the Separation of Powers
By J.R. Dunn

Supreme Court And Power Hungry Lawyers Usurp Power

[From article]
In a supermarket checkout line, a copy of Time magazine bore the headline "The Supreme Court: Decisions That Changed America."
That headline tells us that the U.S. is no longer a representative republic.
As Lincoln pointed out, under the Constitution, the American government is "of the people, for the people, and by the people." That's why all laws are supposed to come from the people's elected representatives. If laws don't come from the Congress, the government is no longer of the people, but over the people.
If Americans want America changed, they have agreed, through the Constitution, that the process requires that the changes be done by their elected representatives. If Americans wish to change that process and give up their rights, they can amend the Constitution, as defined in the Constitution.
[. . .]



What Time is celebrating is precisely the unconstitutional experiment in judicial tyranny that Americans have been living under for more than 60 years.
The people's representatives have never passed a law legalizing abortion for any reason through all nine months of pregnancy, nor have they passed a law that legalized gay marriage. If they had, then there would be laws, not Supreme Court rulings, that "changed America" on these issues.
Similarly, the legalization of pornography – and the resulting exploitation of people as objects to be used rather than as people to be loved – and the transformation of the "justice" system from one that seeks to punish the guilty and free the innocent into one that cares only if minute procedural rules are followed, even if that means the guilty are freed to prey on the innocent, were not accomplished through the will of the people. They were accomplished by rich, mostly white, mostly male Supreme Court judges.
[. . .]
But if history has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that in time, forces not to the liking of modern liberals will hold the reins of the Supreme Court. Hence, transferring power to the judiciary and away from the people will eventually hurt all Americans, no matter their political persuasion.
Liberals may not care, however, since they know that conservative judges will not abuse power the way liberal judges do, just as they don't care that the Obama presidency is far more imperial than Nixon's was. Sadly, far too many modern liberals are quite comfortable with justifying the means by the ends.
[. . .]
Ask them if they really want to live in a semi-monarchy where lawyers have the final say in defining what America is.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/time_magazine_declares_america_no_longer_a_republic.html

December 8, 2015
Time Magazine Declares: America No Longer a Republic
By Tom Trinko

White House Rejects Cicero's Belief in Integrity and Law

[From article]
Cicero believed that the Roman Senate should be composed of men who were "virtuous and wise -- in other words the 'best men' of the Republic." Cicero was a proponent of natural law and it was these natural laws that would secure "men's individual rights” so many years later as the Founders established a new nation. Consequently, the Constitution " bound both individuals and their representatives in government to a moral code which did not permit either to take the earnings of another without his consent. Under this code, individuals could not band together and do, through government's coercive power, that which was not lawful between individuals."

Natural law is "the ultimate source of Constitutional Law." Consequently, the Founders "did not establish the Constitution for the purpose of granting rights. Rather, they established this government of laws (not a government of men) in order to secure each person's Creator­-endowed rights to life, liberty, and property."
[. . .]
We now know that Obama recently met with men who call for the destruction of the United States. In fact, there is no pretense anymore as Obama maintains that one of his duties is to protect and defend Islam while serving in the White House. In fact, he has stated that he "considers it part of [his] responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”
[. . .]
All the elements underlying the American political system were thus rejected by Muslims before the USA had even been created. One has to wonder why this barely registers with this President of the United States.
[. . .]
And we, the people, are still waiting for Congress to take firm action that is not only legal but very warranted as Obama continues to break the law regarding Obamacare and immigration. Moreover, it is becoming clearer that Obama will secure the economic defeat of the United States (a jihadist promise come true) as our debt spirals completely out of control. Obama tightens the noose around business owners with intimidation and regulations. The national debt now stands at $18 trillion.
[. . .]
Instead, Obama casts aspersions on Christians and Jews. He is a pathological liar intent only on maintaining power and control. Be it his stance on gay marriage or his outright prevarications about Obamacare, his is a forked tongue. Clearly his disingenuousness and callous disregard are constantly evident in his ongoing doublespeak.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/02/cicero_and_obama.html

February 18, 2015
Cicero and Obama
By Eileen F. Toplansky

Radical Proposal, Citizens Should Know Governmental Process

[From article]
When people from other parts of the world become US citizens, they have to pass a test that includes questions about how our system of government works. Why shouldn’t native-born Americans have to know the same?
Many Americans grew up with civics classes. But today, civics instruction has largely been abandoned — former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor calls this “the quiet crisis in education.”
[. . .]
The questions involve basic knowledge of how the US government works. For example, students would be asked to name America’s economic system or to identify one of the three branches of government.
This last is apparently more difficult than it might appear: A recent survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania found that 35 percent of the 1,416 adults questioned couldn’t do it. (You can try the test yourself at civicseducationinitiative.com/take-the-test/).

http://nypost.com/2015/01/02/our-civic-duty/

Our civic duty
By New York Post Editorial Board
January 2, 2015 | 7:11pm

Young Americans Lack Civic Engagement, Knowldege of Governmental System

[From article]
Of all I read about July 4 on that celebratory day, by far the most important and not otherwise mentioned anywhere else was an article titled "Celebrating History We Don't Remember" by Ashley Bateman of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia, which startlingly appeared in the New York Post that very day.
Its essence -- which surprised even me, who has been reporting on this frightening failure of American public education for years:
"Last administered in 2010, the last national civics assessment showed that less than half of eighth-graders understood the purpose of the Bill of Rights and only 10 percent displayed age-appropriate knowledge of our government's system of checks and balances" -- that's the constitutional separation of powers which bars any one of our three branches of government from reigning over the other two, as President Obama has kept doing most voraciously.
[. . .]
An especially knowledgeable source of information on the actual effective teaching of civics in our public schools is CIRCLE: The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, located at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/hentoff070914.php3#.U-stG90--yM

Jewish World Review

July 9, 2014 / 11 Tammuz, 5774
Dangers to U.S. liberties we missed on July 4
By Nat Hentoff

Changing Patterns Of Governance

[From article]
From the tribal leader comes the monarch, whose reign gives way to an aristocracy that produces a middle class that creates a republic, the degenerative form of which is that pure democracy of which John Adams wrote:
"Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide." Then comes the strong man again.
[. . .]
Eurocrats bewail what is happening, but, inhibited by secularist ideology, fail to understand it.
They believe in economism, rule by scholarly global elites, and recoil at the resurgence of nationalism and populism. They do no understand people of the heart because they do not understand human nature.
People don't enlist, endure, fight and die for cerebral constructs.
[. . .]
Last week, Alabama Congressman "Mo" Brooks said there is a "war on whites" in America, being led by Obama, noting that under civil right laws the only group one may discriminate against is white males.
[. . .]

Dana Milbank concedes that, by 2043, white Americans will be less than half of the U.S. population. They were near 90 percent in 1960.

http://buchanan.org/blog/owns-future-6850

Who Owns the Future?
By Patrick J. Buchanan

Enabling Voter Fraud

http://biggovernment.com/jwales/2010/08/01/electoral-college-attack-leads-to-voter-fraud/

Electoral College Attack Leads to Voter Fraud
by Josie Wales
BigGovernment.com
August 1, 2010