Free Republic's Roots

What is our mission? Free Republic is dedicated to reversing the trend of unconstitutional government expansion and is advocating a complete restoration of our constitutional republic. Listed below are some of the issues we feel strongly about...

A return to a strictly Constitutional form of federal government will automatically repeal and abolish all unconstitutional federal involvement in states issues such as: crime, health, education, welfare and the environment...This will also require that social programs such as Social Security, welfare and Medicare be repealed. ~~ Jim Robinson, March 1999

In our continuing fight for freedom, for America and our constitution and against totalitarianism, socialism, tyranny, terrorism, etc., Free Republic stands firmly on the side of right, i.e., the conservative side...We oppose all forms of liberalism, socialism... Posted on 03/22/2004 6:22:17 PM PST by Jim Robinson

The excerpts above were taken from existing or former webpages posted by Jim Robinson. Having been a member of FreeRepublic before the 1996 election, the mission statement once included the impeachment of Bill Clinton as one of FreeRepublic's goals, a goal the House Managers credited FreeRepublic with achieving. Now, after ten years of false starts and misfires, the second and third goals as stated in FreeRepublic's Mission Statement above, ²reversing the trend of unconstitutional government expansion and ³complete restoration of our constitutional republic, are finally within reach. Over the next several weeks, various Freepers will be posting the thinking and the mechanics behind this effort.

Those of you who have been Freepers long enough know that FreeRepublic played a pivotal role in generating the momentum and emotion that led to a successful vote in the House to Impeach then President Bill Clinton. Reversing the trend of unconstitutional government expansion and bringing about the complete restoration of our constitutional republic could depend on how effective Freepers and FreeRepublic prove to be in generating the kind of momentum and emotion that FreeRepublic produced during impeachment.

Jim Robinson and the members of FreeRepublic are owed an immense debt of gratitude by Freedom loving Americans. You are all Patriots in the true sense of the word. We thank you; we Salute you. And now we ask for your help in undertaking the most important part of FreeRepublic's acknowledged mission.

If you don't believe or cannot accept the idea that this plan can and will work, the burden of proof is on you to either improve it or put forward a replacement that is better. FreeRepublic has a long overdue mission to complete. In spite of some readily apparent Republican and conservative gains, it can be argued that we are not measurably closer to the objective than when FreeRepublic was founded. Those who would take issue with this claim should stop and consider that the unconstitutional entitlements are poised to grow exponentially over the next two decades. Get out your ping lists, start reviewing your address books and email lists, and start thinking about the people with whom you want to share this series as it unfolds or with whom you want to share it after it is complete and you are convinced.

And for the support of this mission, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, We, as members of We the people pledge to the members of FreeRepublic and mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Freeping has a long proud heritage, and surprisingly contains the names of a few famous Democrats. Power and politics are corrupting influences. Perhaps the corrupting influences of power explain the earlier conversion of the Democratic Party to the Dark Side and more recently the reluctance of Republicans to return to our Constitutional roots.

We believe that there has to be a way to shift both of our major political parties back toward the Constitution. Some of us believe that we have found a way to take our country back peacefully through our normal political process. The New Media provides the means. We hope you will join us in this effort.

We ask that you give us the benefit of the doubt and the opportunity to present our plan in its entirety to every member or lurker of this forum. We ask that you use your ping lists to keep the threads of this series of articles alive and to make every Freeper or lurker aware of them.

Along the way, or at the conclusion of the series, please feel free to offer your thoughts on improving it. After everyone has had an opportunity to improve this plan to the greatest possible extent, then will be the time for you to put forth alternative plans that you believe offer greater chances for success. The comments of some "Freepers Past" along with a few comments from those on the Dark Side follow:

James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, 1792:
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

Benjamin Franklin:
"When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."

Thomas Jefferson:
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." "The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."

Congressman Davy Crockett and an Alamo hero, 1830 in the House of Representatives:
"Mr. Speaker, I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, as any man in this House. But we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to so appropriate a dollar of the public money."

Franklin Pierce 1854:
"[I must question] the constitutionality and propriety of the Federal Government assuming to enter into a novel and vast field of legislation, namely, that of providing for the care and support of all those … who by any form of calamity become fit objects of public philanthropy ... I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. To do so would, in my judgment, be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive of the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded."

Grover Cleveland 1887:
"I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit."

Governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt 1930:
"As a matter of fact and law, the governing rights of the States are all of those which have not been surrendered to the National Government by the Constitution or its amendments. Wisely or unwisely, people know that under the Eighteenth Amendment Congress has been given the right to legislate on this particular subject (prohibition), but this is not the case in the matter of a great number of other vital problems of government, such as the conduct of public utilities, of banks, of insurance, of business, of agriculture, of education, of social welfare and of a dozen other important features. In these, Washington must not be encouraged to interfere."

Mark Twain:
"The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivalry of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise."

Frederick Bastiat:
"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder." "The state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else."

Frederick von Hayek, 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics:
"When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself."

Lenin:
"While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State."

Nikita Khrushchev:
"We can't expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism."

Will You Take The Pledge?

If our pledge sounds familiar, it should. Fifty-six men took a similar oath that proved to be, shall we say, revolutionary. Our pledge is not about starting a revolution or any form of a shooting war. It's about reclaiming our unalienable rights and our freedoms from a government that has unconstitutionally usurped them. We believe this can be done peacefully through our normal political and legal processes augmented by the use of the new media. We believe we can show you how this can be done, and in turn we believe that you can use the power of the internet and talk-radio to show others.

Free Republic's stated mission is to reverse the trend of unconstitutional government expansion and to effect a complete restoration of our constitutional republic. Our pledge does not mean that we are pledging our support to any specific plan or effort aimed at either reversing the trend of unconstitutional government expansion or any specific plan designed to achieve a complete restoration of our constitutional republic. And it specifically does not mean that we are pledging our support nor are we asking you to pledge your support for the plan that we are in process of presenting in this forum.

We are inviting anyone who believes the trend of unconstitutional government expansion should be reversed to take the pledge. We are inviting anyone who would like to see a complete restoration of our constitutional republic to take the pledge. We hope that anyone who takes the pledge will accept our challenge. Whether you take the pledge or not, we asking you to give us the benefit of the doubt, the same benefit asked of every American juror. Please read the articles in our series and share your thoughts about them with us. Once you have seen the plan in its entirety and given us a chance to clarify any questions or clear up any misconceptions that we might have created, we hope that you will get behind this effort and give it a chance to achieve the Free Republic mission.

The Pledge

In establishing the Constitution and Republican government, it only took roughly 30 percent of Americans knowing America could be the greatest country in the world. It is today, and can be, executing conservative principles as found in the Constitution. Freepers are representative of that 30 percent of Americans that established one of the greatest experiments of all time. They founded a Republic-through perilous efforts-with God's infinite wisdom. Today, we are led by men like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and many others. We are also represented by women such as Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham and many others.

These men and women fight liberalism, echoing the voices of conservative Americans, who, in their frustration, shout, "We will take liberalism no longer!" These men and women are conservative Americans. They are, in every sense of the word, liberators of government subsidies. They are liberators from ignorance in liberalism. They are, at their very core, the best America has to offer. They inspire, create and drive the greatest country in the world. They have overcome the most arduous of obstacles and proclaimed their love for America, impeaching liberalism with impunity. They work in offices, on computers, in construction sights, in law office, and some even work in government. These conservative Americans, these Freepers, are educators of optimism and Republican government.

Freepers, teach us as taught in the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That 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; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."

Now is the time to end liberalism's iron grip on government. It is time to end their iron grip on education. It is time to end their iron grip on a judicial system that has run amock. And it is time propagate the further restoration of Republic government as once sought by our Founding Fathers.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.