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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."

[ 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. ]

O.K. Cool.. Remember we have now the best government money can buy.. The federal government LOOKS like the American people.. It does.. The federal government is not "the perp" and politicians are not the "perpetrators".. Attacking the federal government directly is attacking the symptom not the disease..

The vectors of the disease are Academia and the MsM and MsP and minimally Hollywood.. Threatening the vectors can slow the spread of the disease.. The body politic will then heal itself.. as ALL bodies do.. Doctors heal nothing..

All attempts to heal the federal government will fail.. because of that.. As the people are slimed by the vectors mentioned, the government merely responds.. in kind.. Thats WHY the democrats control the vectors absolutely and the republicans are paper tigers.. ANY attempt to change the federal, state, and local governments will fail specifically because they are a symptom of the disease.. The microbes that cause the disease is/are hidden.. but not to eyes looking for the disease mechanism and not the symptoms..

Suggest a re-think..