Getting Started …

Many of you reading this blog already know or have guessed that I reside in Idaho, a great, beautiful, rich, forward thinking, lovely state.  Many of us here, like you who are reading this, are desperately, maybe even courageously, seeking some way to save what we consider to be our faltering republic.  Our searches of the past nearly two years have revealed the characteristics of human freedom, of how our forefathers gained the first foothold of the quest for human freedom and how through their intelligence and prescience they attempted to, through the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States of America, and tribulations of foreign diplomacy and even war, attempted to convey the gift of that human freedom to us.

We have identified the enemy within … it is the creeping Progressive Socialism advocated by those who subscribed to the tenants of the Fabian Socialists.  The enemies of our great Constitution have been there from the beginning but only began to have effect in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and scored their greatest coup in 1913 when they were able to institute the Federal Reserve System, and add the 16th and 17th Amendments to the Constitution.  Since that time, their greatest victories have been to pervert the Supreme Court of the United States by packing it with enough justices who would become willing expediters of the philosophy of “the living document” … the idea that the Constitution is obsolete and that it is the duty of an enlightened judiciary to modernize it.  This has been manifested in their “modern” interpretations of the “commerce clause”, “general welfare clause”, the 14th Amendment and a myriad of other decisions.  The situation has degenerated to the point that many in Congress, maybe a majority of it, are oblivious to the reasons for a federal government.  All my life, that is, until the election of 2008, it would have been unthinkable to even suggest that a mainstream politician was a socialist, let alone a communist.  Now, many in this country believe that people in high office are socialists and perhaps communists.  Additionally, the word trillion used in conjunction with governmental spending was seldom alluded to and almost never considered to be a possibility so far as the federal budget was concerned.  Since the “Change” voted for in 2008, many in government not only admit to being socialists, they proudly admire communists.  Trillion dollar budgets are passé.

The enemies of the Constitution of our forefathers and therefore of individual freedom are on a roll.  They are either knowingly, if philosophically aware, or unknowingly, if they are dupes for the aware, trying to subvert human freedom for their perceived new millennia, a new world (socialistic) order, which is in fact a new tyranny by committee, the communist’s “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Our grandfathers were duped by the duplicitous Progressives of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries into believing that their agenda was for freedom and the advancement of the American way, when, in fact, we can now see that their aim was to destroy the republic.

We now know what has happened to our father’s way of life, and why.  We can now begin to act to remedy the damage.  The political protection of individual freedom envisioned by our founders was an ingenious fabric of checks and balances instituted to control the collective action of necessary government.  The Founders recognized that freedom consisted of two things, the God given right of man to do as he pleased without giving injury to others and the right of man to be secure in the fruits of his labors, his property.  To this end the forefathers crafted a republic, representative government, wherein the individual represented himself at the local level where he himself understood the issues and elected from among his peers an exemplar to represent the views of his community to the State.   This democratically elected state representative made it, in turn, his business to study and understand the issues of the state government as pertained to his local community and to pick from his peers at that level the persons best suited to represent the interests of the State at the national level in the US Senate.  This procedure for protecting first personal property, secondly community property and finally State property interests coupled with the democratically elected Congressman is the essence of the American republic.  But the system is sophisticated.  In order to bind the States together in a Union it is obvious that the small or minority interests must be given weight enough to check the power of the majority.  Very populous states were to have no more say in the protection of the property of the people, the physical states, than were the small states; each state had two senators.  Each state would, after a democratic polling in that state, cast votes indicating their state’s choice, through the Electoral College, for the President in proportion to its representation in the Congress … once again giving added weight to the decision of the minority, the small states.  The system worked wonderfully well … but slowly, conservatively and deliberately.

Those who wanted America to be player on the world stage, who rejected the advice of George Washington about “foreign entanglements,” were frustrated.  A way had to be found for the federal government to exert more influence.  The power of the President had to be enhanced, conservative US Senators had to be minimized … marginalised … and the federal government had to have more money.  The demagogues of the early twentieth century railed against the Constitutional system, the most enfranchising system ever designed, convincing our forefathers to abandon the great plan.  The Pandora’s box of direct popular election, unlimited taxation and unfettered borrowing of money was opened with the adoption of the 16th and 17th Amendments and the adoption of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.  The Furies were released and within 4 years, America was involved in its first foreign European war.  Since then the American people have been subjected to ever more federal control of their lives (that is …  people from New York telling Idahoans how to run their state; and vice versa), to ever more foreign entanglements, to ever more spending and to crushing debt.

In our blog, we have talked about this extensively.  The most obvious way to set things right is for the states, remembering that the United States of America is a child of the States, to once again band together and to mend the damage by re-instituting the republic of our Founders.  To this end, we here in Idaho introduced the following memorial into the Legislature in the past session and present it here for your perusal and comment.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

HOUSE JOINT MEMORIAL No.

BY REPRESENTATIVE JOHN DOE

A JOINT MEMORIAL

TO THE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND TO THE CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION OF THE STATE OF IDAHO IN THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES AND TO LEGISLATURES AND THE SECRETARY OF STATE OF THE SEVERAL STATES.

We, your Memorialists, the House of Representatives and the Senate of the State of Idaho assembled in the First Regular Session of the Sixty-First Idaho Legislature, do hereby respectfully represent that:

WHEREAS, the Founders of our great nation, in convention assembled, in 1787 founded our Federal Republic with a document which has been described and characterized as a political system of genius because of its checks and balances and because of its democratically elected local representatives; and

WHEREAS, the most intractable problem for that August body, in the summer of 1787, was to how to reconcile the apportionment of Congress so that the principles of individual freedom could be balanced with the territorial interests of the sovereign States with their divergent citizenries; and

WHEREAS, that such problem was resolved by apportioning two Senators, elected by their state legislatures, to each State for representation in the United States Senate and apportioning membership in the House of Representatives by population, provided that each State was represented in the House by at least one Representative; and

WHEREAS, that such decision can be characterized as the compromise that saved the Constitutional Convention from disbanding and is the rock of the republic upon which the Federal Union was built; and

WHEREAS, the Founders recognized the President as the representative and protector of the laws for the citizenry of the entire Nation; the House of Representatives as the representative and protector of the People and the Senate as the representative and protector of the States; and

WHEREAS, the system that the Founders formulated worked exceedingly well for 124 years, by presenting the Congress with exemplary Senators who had been nominated by their several state legislatures; and

WHEREAS, since the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the principles of democratic-republicanism envisioned by the Founders, especially James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, a system of representative government springing from the individual voter at the local level, has been destroyed; and

WHEREAS, since the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, providing for the direct election of senators, the continuity of the system of checks and balances instituted by the Founders, namely the check on the House of Representatives by the guardians of the States, the Senators, has been demolished by the institution of two popularly elected bodies of Congress; and

WHEREAS, since the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, providing for the direct popular election of members of the Senate, the political process envisioned by our Founders has been further negated by bypassing the collective wisdom of state legislators in choosing the most able, competent, deserving and knowledgeable citizens of their states to be the Senators to represent their States in the national Congress; and

WHEREAS, since the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, by the process of direct popular election, the common man has been disenfranchised in the sense that he no longer has the political conduit through the state legislature envisioned by the Founders to the United States Senate; and

WHEREAS, since the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the governments of the Several States have no direct representative to the Federal government to protect their particular interests, a shortcoming which has resulted in the total disregard of the Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution by the Congress, enabling numerous tyrannies, including, among other things, the imposition of unfunded mandates and the threat of withheld dedicated funds owed the States by either the unresponsive Congress or the arrogant bureaucracy; and

WHEREAS, since the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the Senators are no longer adequately constrained to consult their State Legislatures as to the implications of the appointment of Supreme Court Justices or the consequences of the adoption of international treaties that might compromise the integrity of the Constitution of the United States of America or as to the consequences of those actions upon the citizens of their States; and

WHEREAS, since the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the Legislatures of the Several States no longer have any effective way to directly instruct their Senators as to the will of their State as to proposed Constitutional amendments or to the mitigation of unpopular actions by the United States Supreme Court; and

WHEREAS, since the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the electoral process for choosing a United States Senator has devolved into a chaos of pettifoggery, populism, bribery, cronyism, demagoguery, outside influences and outside money that unfairly favors the rich or connected in attaining the seat; and

WHEREAS, since the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, a Senator no longer is responsible to his State, nor to the populace that elected him, but, for the most part, to the contributors and special interests that promoted him to his office; and

WHEREAS, since the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the heart and soul of local political life, that place where the true voice of America resides, in the enfranchised individual, has been continually eroded because the partnership between the voter and the local representative, coupled with and enhanced by the local representative’s connection to the legislatively elected United States Senator has been severed; and

WHEREAS, since the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the wall of checks and balances that protects the individual voter from the tyranny of an overreaching Federal government has been seriously breached and has devolved into a system wherein the individual voter no longer has any direct method to attempt to moderate the effects of that overreaching upon his freedom:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the members of the First Regular Session of the Sixty-First Idaho Legislature, the House of Representatives and the Senate concurring therein, that the Idaho Legislature hereby applies to the Congress to present to the Several States for ratification, a Constitutional Amendment rescinding and repealing the Seventeenth Amendment of the United States Constitution;

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, the danger to the Republic and its citizens being grave, and time to act being short and of the essence, upon the failure of the Congress to act in a timely manner, that the Legislatures of the Several States send delegations to a meeting of the Several States, to convene in Boise, Idaho on September 17, 2011, a day that commemorates the founding of the United States Constitution, for the purpose of considering how to expedite the rescission of the Seventeenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and for the purpose of addressing such other matters of Constitutional importance as the members of those delegations shall find timely and prudent.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, the Chief Clerk of the House of Representatives be, and she is hereby authorized and directed to forward a copy of this Memorial to the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives of Congress, and the congressional delegation representing the State of Idaho in the Congress of the United States and to the Secretaries of State of the Several States and to the clerk of each legislative body of each of the Several States of the United States.

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Needless to say, the Idaho Legislature didn’t know how to handle the idea of the direct election of US Senators and this memorial was not adopted … but many members who have never thought about the issue before are now thinking about it.  It will be re-introduced in the next session and we expect serious consideration.  Additionally, people from other states that might be interested are now aware of the effort.  Nothing is easy and the battle has just been joined.  If you are interested, you can help.