Celebrate the Declaration, and remember what it has meant to the United States and the rest of the world.
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From Townhall Magazine's July feature, "How to Celebrate the Fourth of July," by Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College:
Two hundred thirty-six years ago this Fourth of July, 57 men signed the
document that created the American republic. They represented a people
of about 3 million grouped in a series of 13 colonies along the eastern
seaboard of the United States. They were all wanted men, sought by the
commander of the British forces in North America for sedition and
treason. He had behind him the resources of the greatest military power
on earth. They had behind them the bare beginnings of a government,
hardly anything of an army, but something mighty in the way of an idea.
This nation had therefore a desperate beginning. Who but the boldest
could believe that the signers of the Declaration of Independence were
laying the foundation of the greatest constitutional republic in
history? Now that republic has spread across the continent, and its
influence reaches around the world. Its population has increased a
hundredfold. Its Constitution has provided government to a free people
constantly growing in size and territory, each new state joining the
union as an equal, its citizens never subjects, its people ever free.
There is no story close to it in the history of man.
Statesmen and thinkers have attributed the strength and goodness of the
nation to the principles in the Declaration. Many others have denied
this. Statesmen and thinkers have proclaimed the Constitution a just and
beautiful implementation of the principles of the Declaration. Many
others have denied this. These denials are more common in times of
crisis in our country. They are very common now.
It is a sign of our time that the sitting chief executive of our
country eschews the permanent meaning of the Declaration and the idea of
fixity in the Constitution. In the “Audacity of Hope,” Barack Obama
writes: “Implicit in [the Constitution’s] structure, in the very idea of
ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility
of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency
that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course.
…”
Obama has stuck to this theme during his presidency. This May at
Barnard College, he proclaimed the great virtue of the Constitution to
be its openness to change: “It allowed for protests, movements, and the
assimilation of new ideas that would repeatedly, decade after decade,
change the world—a constant forward movement that continues to this
day.” There is neither form nor firmness. All is fluid, according to
Obama, and this liberates us to do whatever we will.
America has gone very far down the trail that Obama is blazing. Right
now, the expenditures of all government—state, local and federal—exceed
40 percent of the gross domestic product. If trends
continue,
the public sector will soon grow larger than the private sector, and
then the government will have more resources than those it governs.
Moreover, it governs increasingly without authority from the branches
that are elected by the people. The new Dodd- Frank finance law creates
something called a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This agency
does not get its budget from Congress. Rather, its money comes from a
guaranteed percentage of the budget of the Federal Reserve, which gets
its money from its operations as a bank. Congress is even specifically
forbidden in the law to hold hearings into the budget of the new CPFB.
And it has wide examining power over every form of consumer finance in
the nation. In unfettered scope of authority, and in near perfect
separation from popular control, it is different from anything before it
in America.
Because we have come so far from the founding institutions, it is
worthwhile to remind ourselves what they are. This anniversary of the
Declaration of Independence provides a splendid occasion, because both
the principles of the nation and its institutions are summarized
beautifully in its 1,300 words. Let us then read it for a moment.
Notice first of all how remarkable it is that the document should begin
universally. The authors were obviously mindful of the fact they were
wanted men. They conclude the Declaration with a solemn promise, made to
each other in the mood of soldiers facing battle: “In support of this
Declaration we mutually pledge
to each other our lives, our
fortunes, and our sacred honor” (emphasis added). The particularity of
this commitment, each man speaking for himself in promise to the others
in the room, is what one might expect of legislation passed on the eve
of a war, legislation that is itself a written act of treason.
If these men were in a situation urgent unto death, how can we account
for the abstract and universal nature of the beginning of the
Declaration? It begins with an “absolute truth” (to use the president’s
term) expressed in words that have rung around the world: “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 …” (emphasis added).
Notice that this quotation refers to no particular time, but to any
time in the course of human events. Notice that it refers not to the
American people, but to “one people,” meaning any people. It is a very
absolute and universal way of talking. It issues immediately a
proclamation of truth: “We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights.”
Just as the Founders did, so may anyone look for his rights under these
“laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Anyone whose rights are denied
will feel their weight. The Jew rounded up by the Nazis, the black slave
held in Mississippi in 1840, may both look to this document as the
charter by which he can advance. Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, was
aware of this and wrote that indeed, “I tremble for my country when I
reflect that God is just.” These principles place every man and woman
deprived of their rights in the same place that the Founders occupied on
July 4, 1776: they may appeal to an absolute truth, written in the
nature of man and in the nature of things, against any power that will
offend their rights. Perhaps they cannot find the strength to overcome
their oppression. Never mind: their cause is still the just one. They
will see, and even in moments of clarity their oppressors will see, that
the great self-evident truth that all men are created equal means
nothing more nor less than that all men are men. It means nothing less
than that no one may rightly govern another except by his consent. It
means that the purpose of government is to “secure these rights”: “life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
These are the principles of the United States. The fact that they were
announced at the onset of its revolution, and the fact that the
revolution proceeded in their name, seals them in the blood and the
history of this land.
The Declaration is not only about principles; it also describes
institutions, the kind of institutions best adapted to protect the
rights of a people. These institutions are expressed in the middle
section of the document, the section in which the specific crimes and
injustices of the king of England are described. The three broad
constitutional principles that he violated form the backbone of the
later Constitution of the United States. The first step in understanding
that Constitution is not to learn its details, although they are
relatively few. The first step is to understand the grand arrangements
of government necessary to constitutional rule.
The first of these three principles is representation. The king is said
to have interfered with the representatives of the people in their
attempt to pass laws “most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”
The Declaration recognizes that human beings are made to live under
law, and they have a right for those laws to be passed by people who
represent them. This right is not to be interfered with by any force.
Any force doing so interferes with the consent of the governed and
cannot rightfully claim obedience. Violation of the representative
principle is, by itself, cause for revolution.
The second of these principles is separation of powers. At the outset
of the American Revolution, the king and his governors were the
executive branch. By interfering with the legislature, the king violated
not only the right of the people to representative government but also
the necessity for separation of powers. He violated this necessity also
by making “judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their
offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.” God is named
four times in the Declaration, once as each of the three branches of
government, and once as a founder. The lesson is simple: God may well be
the maker of the laws of nature and of nature’s God, and He may well be
at the same time the Supreme Judge of the world, and He may also be
Divine Providence. But no man or small group of men may rightly combine
in their own hands all the powers of government. That is for God alone.
Finally, the Declaration calls for a limited government. The king was
taxing America’s forefathers without their consent, and he was using the
money, among other things, to pay for a hired army to oppress them. He
sent many officials to make sure that his will was followed on all
occasions, whatever the commoners may wish. The Declaration charges him
with erecting “a multitude of new offices, and [sending] hither swarms
of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” In other
words, the king offended against the principle of limited government. He
was building a structure too strong for the people to manage.
The modern bureaucratic state reproduces many of the features that led
to the writing of the Declaration of Independence and that gave shape to
the Constitution of the United States, which follows these three basic
principles in its entire structure. Go before the bureaucracy and see
that it is arranged both to make and enforce its own rules, and if one
objects he must appear first before a judge who is employed by that same
bureaucracy. And now a bureaucracy has been created that operates on a
budget outside the control of the Congress.
This Fourth of July, we might well remind ourselves of the beauty, the
greatness and the long serviceability of our constitutional institutions
and of the principles from which they flow. This Fourth of July is a
great time to recall these things, because the Declaration gives the
Constitution its cause and also its basic form and function. We
Americans may choose to discard this legacy and give up our birthright.
Let us at least know what we are doing.
Celebrate the Declaration, and also remember its meaning. It is what a citizen does on the Fourth of July.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/elisabethmeinecke/2012/07/04/how_to_celebrate_the_fourth_of_july
*The posts made in this blog are of our opinion only*
Without Prejudice UCC 1-207
