Monday, April 19, 2010

Constituting America, Lesson One: The Declaration Of Independence



Last week we told you of a wonderful plan actress and activist Janine Turner has for helping America get back on the path our founders set for us. As Janine declared: "It’s time for a 180 America!"

What Turner has done is found a group: Constituting America. While this will be an ongoing project, one her groups first goals is to educate Americans in their history and their God given rights. Rights that are protected by our Constitution.

Protected from what,
you ask? Protected from an overreaching government, of course!

What Janine is proposing is a daily reading, a daily affirmation, if you will, for 90 days. Over the course of the next 90 days (91 for our readers) you will be reading the United States Constitution, and it’s companion documents,
The Federalist Papers. We plan to encourage all of our readers to follow along, either with us, or by going to Constituting America directly for your daily reading assignment.



The Constitution is one of the most elegant and important contracts ever written. Our Constitution is a contract between the people, and our government, where WE allow THEM certain powers to do the business of government, on our behalf, and the government promises not to infringe on our God given rights, or the rights of the several states.

The Federalist Papers are a series of 85 articles or essays advocating the ratification of the United States Constitution. Seventy-seven of the essays were published serially in The Independent Journal and The New York Packet between October 1787 and August 1788. A compilation of these and eight others, called The Federalist; or, The New Constitution, was published in two volumes in 1788 by J. and A. McLean.

The Federalist remains a primary source for interpretation of the Constitution, as the essays outline a lucid and compelling version of the philosophy and motivation of the proposed system of government. The series' correct title is The Federalist; the title The Federalist Papers did not emerge until the twentieth century.

The authors of
The Federalist wanted both to influence the vote in favor of ratification and to shape future interpretations of the Constitution. According to historian Richard B. Morris, they are an "incomparable exposition of the Constitution, a classic in political science unsurpassed in both breadth and depth by the product of any later American writer."

In other words,
The Federalist served as a sales brochure, if you will, for the Constitution, and now serves as a window into the minds of our founders. The Federalist is meant to help us understand the Constitution and keep us from losing our way.

Sadly, over the last century, we
have lost our way. Our rights, and the rights of the several states, have been slowly stolen from us by an ever increasing, always expanding government. A government no longer filled with servants of the people. Instead we are ruled by tyrants whose only purpose is to go to Washington to enrich themselves, and their cronies, and build power bases to keep themselves there.

"
We, The People" no longer seem to matter. Instead of our government working for us, we find ourselves, through excessive regulation and taxes, working only to support the Big Government-Union-Industrial Complex. The rights of the individual and the sovereign states are no longer respected.

Starting on Tuesday, April 20, you can follow along with us here, or at Constituting America, as we take a journey through history and re-learn about our God given liberties and freedoms.

With the tyrannical government we now have in power, and all of the
Intolerable Acts that Barack Obama and his corrupt Congress, have forced upon us, I thought it important to start with our founding document, the Declaration of Independence.

Please read along with me and reflect on the power of the statements these men put to parchment:


The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

(Adopted by Congress on July 4, 1776)



When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

--Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here.

We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.

We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton



It’s not hard to read some of the grievances of our forefathers and find parallels between King George and the Obama regime. Much like King George, the Obama regime is guilty of many
Intolerable Acts.

I am always struck by the sobriety of the
Declaration and even the acknowledgment that long established governments should not be abolished for frivolous causes.

This strikes me as quite ironic as it is the tyrannical Obama regime which seeks to abolish the republican form of government we have lived quite successfully under for over two centuries, as a Constitutional Representative Republic, and replace it with a completely different form of communist rule that quite resembles the form of tyranny the Colonies were under when ruled by King George!

Instead of seeking to abolish our government "
We, The People" seek to defend our Constitution and restore our government and our way of life to the way it was meant to be lived, with liberty and freedom.

It is the Patriotic American people who are standing up against a despot, a usurper, and his cronies as we defend our government against their
Intolerable Acts.

Tomorrow, we start reading the Constitution.


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