The Government our American Founders Warned Us About

In one sense, Republicans and Democrats are nearly the same. While they may have different philosophies that motivate their actions, the results are usually identical: An impenetrable bureaucracy that’s expensive to run and difficult to control. Sadly, it’s a trend that neither side seems interested in changing. Maybe they think we won’t notice. And maybe they’re right.

I think it might be time to revise the traditional left/right political spectrum we use to describe American politics. We may need a new way to define the current political landscape, perhaps focusing less on ideology and more on the existing scene we’re now facing. It might even be time to view the nature of government with the same perspective as the American Founders.

The framers of the U.S Constitution were well aware of the historic trend of government. They knew that ruling entities that endured over time evolved towards greater power, gradually increasing control over their nation’s citizens. The Constitution was designed in part to remedy this.

The Founder’s vision of a limited government was a remarkable innovation for its time that was meant to maintain the rights of the individual citizen, and preserve the power of the individual states. Their concept had little to do with left versus right, or liberal versus conservative. Rather, they were largely motivated by the creation of a republic that would not descend into a state of tyranny—a fate that history seemed to show was in the end, inevitable.

I’m proposing a new method of evaluating politics that will measure our government according to the power they have over their citizens. I’m hoping that it will be an effective way to get a simple representation of our politicians and the policies they support. I think it can also serve as a gauge to judge legislative proposals in a way that frames every argument into its basic essentials: size and complexity—the two things that make our government expensive to run and difficult to control.

The left end of the spectrum represents 100 percent government—the domain of dictators, despots, and totalitarian regimes. The right end represents a 100 percent stateless society where you find anarchists*, sovereign citizens, and anti-government groups. The midpoint represents a theoretical equilibrium where the state and the citizen are equally balanced. You’ll find that Americans lean towards one end or the other, depending on their views on the role of government in society.

* A brief sidebar on “anarchism:” The term is often misused, misapplied and misunderstood by politicians and the media. Nowhere is this more evident than in the labeling of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, WTO protesters and various anti-globalization groups. Far from being anarchists, these types of activists are simply anti-capitalists who support government intervention to oppose the private sector.

Keep in mind that this political gauge is a gradient scale. There’s no exact point on this number line that represents any singular ideology or philosophy. The end points and the zero midpoint are absolute, and in the real world unobtainable. Between those points are a range of generic political tendencies that might indicate how much government one would be willing to support or tolerate.

The totalitarian-stateless scale of government is meant to be a measuring device that can be applied without regard to political ideologies, parties or factions. While such factors shouldn’t be necessarily ignored, this spectrum is meant to establish a more basic political inclination: Should government be weighted in favor of the state or towards the citizen? And to what degree? Is there an ideal balance between the two?

From here on out, and until further notice, I have only one simple question. And it’s multiple choice, so any politician should be able to handle it: Is the size of the Federal Government: (a) too large; (b) not large enough; (c) pretty much the right size. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the most important discussion we should be having right now. And it’s a question to which we should demand an answer from every politician.

When government is allowed to grow unchecked, (sort of like now) it eventually becomes too expensive to support and too complex to run (sort of like now). Never mind the abuse and injustice it brings to its citizens (sort of like now), it’s patently unsustainable. This should be beyond dispute.

Our choices are simple: We either rein in the power of Washington, or we go broke and careen out of control. The American Founders would certainly have understood this. On the other hand, our elected officials tend to be slow learners. But I hope they can manage to get up to speed, sooner rather than later.

"I’d have a hard time working in Alwaleed bin-Talal, much less John Jay into any conversation with anyone I know. One purpose of my article is to suggest a way to simplify the rhetoric."

Not sure comparing the range of political labels simplifies as much as dilutes the issue. That bin-Talal funded the Mosque at which the Tsarnaeve brothers were radicalized, or funded the Muslim Brotherhood supporters of the Saudis who executed the 9/11 bombing, or offered Rudy Giuliani ten million dollars to assuage the pain caused by his bad boys might make it more real. What the Saudis have done so skillfully, using money, since Harvard, with its largest branch of Harvard Divinity School now the “Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Islamic Study”, didn't dream of turning down the money, either for Obama’s admission, twenty million dollars, or for the Islamic Studies program ten years later, just because the Koran teaches the killing of the “People of the book”, - all Christians and Jews. Money talks, and the Saudis have lots of it as long as Obama helps keep us dependent upon imports from the Middle East.

I see no way that Obama’s affiliation with such a dominating influence, one that has pledged the destruction of Constitutional freedoms in the US, and the destruction of Israel, while Obama sends our arms, trainers, and even our troops to help the Muslim Brotherhood achieve the objectives so clearly stated by Obama’s best friends, Erdogan of Turkey, and Obama’s Muslim Brotherhood Prime Minister of Egypt. Morsi stated in Arabic that the US and Israel are his greatest enemies, while happily taking aid from Obama, Brennan, Clinton, Kerry, Hegel, ...., hundreds of Abrams tanks and thirty F16 fighters, munitions and Manpads, along with millions of dollars to sustain the foundering economy as the Muslim Brotherhood murders Coptic Christians and anyone else resisting Islam (Erdogan explained that there is no “fundamentalist Islam, just Islam!).

The truth is hard to sell in this country. Our government is our enemy, and that was John Jay's greatest concern for the form of government our founders were creating. A nation based upon trust could be compromised by foreigners bent upon overwhelming our legislative and judiciary branches by stealthily infiltrating government, just as the KGB did beginning shortly after the Bolshevik revolution. (See Diana West's new book, American Betrayal for that remarkable and largely untold history).

Every act Obama takes can be explained by attributing it to his conditioning by both his Communist and Muslim forbears. He is hardly unique. Percy Sutton was old friends with Don Warden, who converted to Wahhabi Islam about the time Malcolm X, Percy's client, did, in the black power days when Don was helping found the Black Panthers. Those times shaped young attorney Warden's career as he has worked for the Saudi family for over forty years, as Khalid al Mansour, recruiting and managing Muslim Brotherhood jihadis in Madrases and prisons all over the world, and managing young Barry's higher education. Vernon Jarrett came to know al Mansour/Warden during those tumultuous years, and wrote articles praising the Saudi support for U.S. minorities managed by al Mansour. Vernon Jarrett was one of Frank Marshall Davis's oldest friends, preceding their becoming communists in Chicago.

If you don't explain Obama’s origins you don't explain his allegiances. Traditional U.S. party politics cannot explain why he does things, things that are causing more pain to the private sector union workers, and more pain to blue collar workers he claims to represent than to the big bankers he is helping. Obama is promoting Sharia, perhaps because promoting is what he is best at, and not because he craves the life of an Imam - hardly consistent with golf courses and vacations in St. Moritz, not that there aren't Saudi family members living like Obama. Obama’s cousin is one of the most active leaders in the Muslim Brotherhood's campaign to extend the Caliphate throughout Northern Africa.

Our Constitution required that our president be born to parents whose sole allegiance was to our nation/constitution. Sole allegiance is part of our naturalization oath, so our president had to be born to citizens, or, before 1868, to parents naturalized by the states to which they immigrated, or be natural born themselves, the only citizen defined by the Constitution before the 14th Amendment. Most American citizens are natural born, though many native born Americans such as American Indians, were not made citizens because their allegiance was to their tribes. That isn't hard to understand, and Obama is the poster boy for why it remains meaningful.

Obama has set out to make our Constitution irrelevant, and has done quite a good job, with help from both parties, since McCain too was ineligible, as was Calero, the Green Party nominee in the 2008 election. The propaganda war based upon Alinsky’s wise principles has been very effective, but libraries still hold original documents, which, until they are burned, support the truth and original intent of our framers and founders, along with over twenty five supreme court cases confirming the never doubted, until now, understanding of our framers of who are natural born citizens. Talking about vague party preferences, supported loosely by polls, and with election validity long a myth, what we have left are our Constitutional foundations. Those are the issues the informed media should be explaining - those who still dare. What concerned John Jay most was allegiance. It was the key to the author of the 14th Amendments rewording of the definition of who were natural born citizens, a definition of which he reminded Congress in 1866 as he explained the wisdom of passing the 14th Amendment. Bingham said:

I find no fault with the introductory clause [S 61 Bill], which is simply declaratory of what is written in the Constitution, that every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen….

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