The Death of the Republic

There are those who claim that we have witnessed the death of the American Republic. I am not one of them, but I can sympathize with their pessimism. I realize that the Republic is in serious danger; she lies comatose, the victim of the inept bungling of the political elite and the apathy of the electorate. There is hope of her recovery, though the medicine will be stern stuff. So long as the Constitution remains, even nominally, the law of the land, we the people can restore her to her former glory.

I believe we are now, in the words of the Roman historian Livy, in those "last days when we could tolerate neither our vices nor their remedies." Our vices are manifold and complex; their remedies simple, but demanding and uncomfortable. We have substituted license for liberty. We have placed individual welfare above the common good. Illegal and ill-advised wars of imperialism have distracted us from our domestic woes. Men and women of action who would act against our degeneration have, with the best of intentions, devoted their energies in the prosecution of these wars. We as a people have swallowed hook, line and sinker, the idea promulgated by colonialist hawks that we must sacrifice our God given rights in order to achieve security. We have placed our financial well-being in the hands of a cabal of bankers intent only on their own well-being with the result that our economy has grown stagnant as it struggles under the weight of a staggering government debt, a large chunk of which is owned by China, a commercial adversary. China has demonstrated a perfect willingness to use that debt as leverage to apply diplomatic pressure on these United States as demonstrated by the recent Chen Guangcheng incident.

You ask, what is the remedy to these ills? I'll tell you. Return to Constitutional government. As painful as it may be, it must be done. The chief executive must not hesitate to enthusiastically employ the veto in defense of the rights of the people and the several States. There is no excuse for legislation like the National Defense Appropriation Act to become law when it contains provisions revoking the rights of citizens to a air and speedy trial. The Congress must use the power of the purse to restrain the executive branch from employing the armed forces as a tool of imperialism. The judicial branch must end legislating from the bench and return to its role as the protector of the Constitution. We are now in very real danger of sliding into an age of empire which will lead to the death, not only of our rights, but of our existence as a polity.

Above all, we must resist the growing clamor from those who call for call for a Constitutional Convention to "fix" our problems. I will make a bold prediction here. That is that, if not during the current election cycle, then some time during the first year his term, the occupant of the Oval Office, regardless of the party in power there will begin to agitate for a Constitutional Convention in order to amend and "update" our Constitution. The Constitution as it now exists is our salvation as a nation, not the author of our woes. The Constitution has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried. There is no methodology for Congress to limit the authority of such a convention. Remember that the convention which produced our current document in 1787 was called into being only for the purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation. We got lucky with that one, but I'd not be willing to bet we'd win again. A rewrite of the basic laws would be the death of the Republic for certain. We would in all likelihood end up with an overly powerful executive branch ruling via "administrative law", rather than through a representative body. We'd end up with a technocracy ot bureaucrats akin to the European Union, rather than a federated republic of states.

With that in mind, I ask you to redouble your efforts on behalf of our Party and its candidates. Let's not allow the further erosion of the rights endowed in us by our Creator. I ask your time, your talent and your treasure in our effort to save this Republic.

AMDG