We the People Government of the United States...

When the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention was concluded in 1787, a woman anxious to know what the secret negotiations had produced asked Benjamin Franklin "Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" "A republic,” Franklin answered, “if you can keep it."

The leading lights who had labored to produce the magnificent U.S. Constitution were deeply suspicious of government and its ability to misuse its power in mischievous ways. So they wove together an intricate system of checks and balances to prevent federalism, the uniting of the former colonies with a central government, in a way that would prevent that central government from gaining too much power, enabling it to force its will upon the states and its people.

Almost a century later in 1850, the French anti-government philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon would write: "To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.”

The Founders and the states had similar misgivings about throwing off one yoke – that of George III’s interference in their lives – and putting on another, which an empowered central government could be. Thus, there was no chance that the ratifying conventions of several states would approve the new constitution without a Bill of Rights that prevented misinterpretation or usurpation of powers never intended to be granted to the federal government. The preamble of the original ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, known then as the Bill of Rights, therefore includes:

THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.

The Second Amendment plainly says “… the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” It does not say “the people are hereby granted the right to bear arms.” This and the other amendments are clearly a prohibition on federal government interference. Unimpeachably obvious is the fact that each amendment was meant to protect a pre-existing right.

The Fourth Amendment does not grant the right to be secure in our persons, houses, papers and effects from unreasonable searches and seizures. It protects a pre-existing right by expressly declaring that “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated …”

These Bill of Rights amendments were not mere suggestions. Rights came first then government came to protect those rights. It’s not the other way round.

Just in case future generations might misunderstand even this plain language, including the Nine Nazgûl who comprise the Supreme Court, the Ninth Amendment essentially says rights not specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights are also protected – in other words, “If we left anything out, don’t interpret it as a loophole.” And the Tenth Amendment tightens the noose even more: “The powers not delegated to the United States [i.e. the federal government] by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Thanks to the anfractuous arguments of slick-tongued lawyers, judicial activism, and the imperious overreach of Congress and White House most of these rights and the Constitution itself have been violated, abused, watered down, or flatly ignored since their original conception.

While Woodrow Wilson considered the Constitution as a quaint work in progress, the alphabet organizations of the New Deal and FDR’s attempts to regulate the economy and redistribute wealth was the first full frontal assault on the Constitution. The New Deal was so incompetent an idea that many economists today believe it prolonged the depression by years.

Lacking the crisis of a depression or war, Bill Clinton had to content himself with the Constitutional affronts of Janet Reno, Clinton’s third choice for Attorney General after his first and second choices were revealed to have illegal immigrants as servants. Reno once told a group of federal law enforcement officers “You are part of a government that has given its people more freedom … than any other government in the history of the world.” This great protector of the Constitution obviously didn’t understand it. Within her second-rate mind was a third-rate mind always struggling to get out. The Ruby Ridge killings, the incineration of 76 Branch Davidians, and the Elián Gonzalez affair showed us what happens when stupidity and power are combined in one person.

More recently were the usurpations of George Bush’s bailouts followed by Barack Obama’s constitutional travesties, the crowning one being his tendentious take-over of healthcare whose hinge is an unconstitutional mandate – whether or not it can be successfully argued as such before a court given to cheeky interpretations of the Commerce Clause. Just as the Founders feared that a strong central government would do, Obama and his obsequious congressional sycophants ignored the will of the people, and in some cases their own principles, to pass this unpopular law.

So it came as no shock to me that a Pew Research poll this week showed trust of government has sunk to 22%. Only 18% of independents – the people who decide election outcomes -- trust government. Half of them believe the government presents a "major threat" to "personal rights and freedoms," 37% are “highly dissatisfied” with government, and two-thirds are leaning toward the Republicans. – not good news for a president who is trying to transform America, unless he can get it transformed before next January when the new Congress is sworn in.

Obama’s disregard for the Constitution should not surprise anyone. Back in 2001, when he was still in training wheels as a second-term Illinois state senator, he was interviewed for the Odyssey program on Chicago Public Radio, during which he said:

“But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in the society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court [of the ‘60s], it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution …”

Before assuming the office of president, Obama, like all public officials, was required to take an oath promising to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” His understanding of Constitution (which he once taught at the University of Chicago) and – more importantly – his other-worldly contrast with how our Founding Fathers understood the document is chilling.

Further in his interview Obama said: “… generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you. It says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf …”

Compare Obama’s statement with one made by James Madison, one of the participants in the Constitutional Convention whose extensive notes tell us what was discussed in those secret meetings:

“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 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.

The Progressives, Liberals, the Left, or whatever sobriquet you wish to use to describe this political trope, view the Constitution with the same antiquated disdain with which their progenitor, Woodrow Wilson, held it – an historical document with no place in the “modern” world. E.J. Dionne, the Left’s chief spokesman today and a Washington Post editorialist, who increasingly gives editorialists a bad name, recently wrote in his column that “federal meddling in matters reserved to the states under the 10th Amendment reveal how far into the past some people want to push the nation.” How passé of us!

If the Obamaphiles win the court challenges over the individual mandate, the Left (of which I’m obviously not) will have a hunting license with which to defend any federal infringement of individual liberty in the name of regulating (there’s that Commerce Clause again) a modern national economy. Our rights as individuals will no longer be protected by the Constitution. They will, as Janet Reno’s benighted declaration revealed, become the sufferance of the federal government, free to be revised by whichever political faction is in power. The people of the United States will become an abstraction that politicians must tolerate every two years in order to be reelected, and Obama’s transformation might as well replace the opening line of the Constitution – “We the People of the United States” – with “We the Government of the United States.”

If Obama’s transformation is fulfilled, then as Vice President Biden whispered to the President at the healthcare bill signing (and 300 million other Americans unaware that his mike was open) “this is a big f---ing deal.”