CommentsCORRUPTION WATCH-The right wingers who proclaim love for the Constitution’s inalienable right of liberty habitually violate its basic premise – the rejection of Group Rights.
They falsely proclaim that America is a Christian nation. They dwell on their freedom to be bigoted against other groups of people. The right wing wants to assign people to groups based on race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identification, then vilely discriminate against them based upon that group identification.
The left wing likewise is enthralled with Group Rights. The Dems are certain that they can gather together enough people and assign them to enough groups to out-vote the White Group Righters.
The Founding Fathers gave us a republic in order to protect us from evils of Group Rights.
Will Democracy Destroy the Republic?
Although people often call America a democracy, it is actually a Republic. More exactly, we are a Federated Democratic Republic. Because “Republic” is the noun and the words “Federated” and “Democratic” are its adjectives, they only modify the type of Republic. The men who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were well educated, especially in political philosophy from the Greek triad of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle through John Locke. Also, they knew the evils of certain prior arrangements: e.g. the combination of Church and State, which resulted in the accumulation of excessive power and internecine warfare based on Group Rights.
The Declaration Rejected A Democracy for our Government
Although the Declaration did not create a new government, it foreshadowed the institutions which a new government should establish.
First and foremost, the Founding Fathers rejected any notion of Group Rights. The Declaration was unequivocal that each human being had certain inalienable rights. Due to British peerage, Jefferson included the emphatic word, “equal,” in the Declaration. We all need to memorize the key words which set us free:
“. . . 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.”
We also all need to memorize the keys words which define a legitimate government:
“That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men…”
Under the political philosophy on which the nation is based, the government’s legitimacy rests upon its securing the individual inalienable rights. That is an unequivocal rejection of group rights.
Why A Republic Was Selected
After we saw that a confederation of states was unable to secure inalienable rights, we drew up a new constitution. The Convention’s proposed constitution was unacceptable to a sufficient number of people to gain ratification. It failed to protect individual inalienable rights. Thus, the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, were added. People realized that individual inalienable rights required explicit protection and it was too risky to leave inalienable rights to the Constitution’s implication that the government had limited powers.
A Democracy Easily Subverts Inalienable Rights
The Founding Fathers understood that a democracy would not protect inalienable rights. The majority would simply trample to death the rights of a minority, who would eventually revolt, as the colonists had rebelled against the crown.
A Republic Protects Inalienable Rights
A Republic, however, is based upon the rule of law, generally based in a constitution, and the elected leaders and the public may not override the inalienable rights set forth in the constitution.
Certain Institutions are Required to Have a Republic
The nation needs to separate the legislature which makes the laws from the executive who administers the laws. A republic also needs an independent judiciary to adjudicate whether the laws of Congress and the actions of the President are consistent with the Constitution. Although a republic three independent branches of government which are supposed to balance power, each one is vulnerable to the entropy of corruption.
Power Tends to Corrupt
Although it took another century for Lord Acton to enunciate it in its most eloquent form, “Power tends to destroy and absolute power destroys absolutely” (1887). While most realize that the U.S. Constitution addressed corrupting nature of power through various checks and balances with the three branches of government being the most obvious. Also, the compromise which resulted in a bicameral legislature where the House was based on population which gave more power to populous states and the Senate which had two senators per state to protect the less populated states.
And, the third most famous protection of inalienable rights was the Bill of Rights and later the 14th Amendment applied the Constitutional protections to the States.
The constitutional safeguards against power should not be denigrated nor should we overlook how they have also been unable to protect us from the power of avaricious men seeking to impose their will upon everyone else.
Our Original Sin Is Our Greatest Threat
We need to identify our core original sin: group rights. The Declaration was drafted to de-legitimize the concept of any group rights. Jefferson knew that inalienable rights lay the foundation to end all forms of group rights such as British peerage. He also knew it would lead to the demise of the most pernicious form of group rights, slavery. On the other hand, Jefferson and the other founding fathers also realized that protecting inalienable rights from slavery was different from protecting inalienable rights from groups, e.g. religious intolerance.
The two clauses in the First Amendment which separate religion from government could not be applied to slavery. Similar clauses would forever allow slavery to exist, which would doom the northern states’ ratification of the new Constitution. Abolition likewise would be a death knell to ratification. Thus, the Constitution did not address the issue and used the phrase “three-fifths of all others” for “slaves.”
Today’s Group Rights Will Destroy the Nation
As Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers and later Abraham Lincoln knew, group rights, be they White Supremacy or Minority Superiority, will destroy the nation. A polyglot of peoples cannot live in a house divided in half. Makes no mistake, the GOP and the Dems are dividing the nation into basically two parts: Whites vs Everyone else.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
