“In the Supreme Court We Trust?”

Attention all school superintendents, principals, teachers, students and parents: The Pledge of Allegiance has been changed. Effective immediately, please use the following text until further notice:

“I pledge allegiance to the Supreme Court of the United States, and to the Republic which it controls, one nation, under nobody in particular, with liberty and justice for all (or at least for all who can get five Justices to buy their argument).”

This issue has been kicking around the federal courts for decades, fueled primarily by ACLU cases challenging all types of references to “God” in public places and forums. It came to a head last week when a federal court ordered Chief Judge Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court to remove from its building a monument containing the Ten Commandments and quotes from other documents including the Declaration of Independence. Chief Judge Moore asked the Circuit Court and then the Supreme Court to stay that order on an emergency basis. Both refused. Then the other eight judges of his court decided to remove the monument pending appeal – and Chief Judge Moore vowed to continue the case in the Supreme Court.

The various representatives of these anti-“God” cases have claimed on TV and in print that this is a matter of “respecting the First Amendment.” But for 156 years of its existence, the First Amendment was no barrier whatsoever to public mentions of belief in God. Only in 1947, when the Supreme Court announced the doctrine of “separation of church and state” did the First Amendment magically forbid such references.

And, where did that phrase come from? It was borrowed from a private letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists – and as many commentators have noted, the Court used the phrase out of context from Jefferson's letter which was highly favorable to organized religion. The phrase was grafted into the Constitution by a majority of the Supreme Court, over the detailed and vigorous objection of Dissenters who believed that the Constitution means what it says.

Over the decades the Supreme Court and various lower federal courts have issued various decisions barring prayers before high school games, barring the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, and even barring a “moment of silence” at the beginning of the school day. But equally important are decisions the federal courts have NOT made. They have refused to order legislatures to stop having prayers to begin their business days. They have refused to order the Department of the Treasury to stop putting “In God We Trust” on our money. The have refused to order the federal government to stop having chaplains in the military.

The differences between the orders issued by the federal courts and orders refused, demonstrate that the Supreme Court does not really mean what it says. The logic of its prior cases would lead to an end to prayers in Congress and in state legislatures, an end to the national motto, and an end to chaplains. But the Court knows full well that any such orders would be overwhelmingly ignored by Congress on behalf of the people. The practices would not stop; the Court would simply be embarrassed.

But there are more embarrassments for the Court than that. The central figure in the frieze on the back of the Court's white marble building on Third Street in D.C. is a statue of Moses holding the Ten Commandments. He is flanked by Confucius and Solon, two other great “law-givers.”

Inside the Court's chambers is a relief of a bearded man in a robe, holding two tablets with Hebrew inscriptions. Anyone who did not just fall off the turnip truck knows that is a reference to the Ten Commandments. Also, every meeting of the Court begins with the Clerk announcing, “Oyez, oyez, oyez. God save this honorable Court and the United States of America.” There is not the slightest hint that the Court is about to remove Moses from the outside and inside of its building, or instruct its Clerk to change what he says when the Court is about to take the bench.

In short, exactly as the carved marble of the Court's building suggests, and Chief Judge Moore said in his public remarks last week, the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Ten Commandments are the foundation of British law, American law, and of most legal systems throughout the Western World. To deny this is to deny both history and law. But this court denial is applied only in Alabama, not in D.C.

So what are the possible solutions to this problem, which continues to spread state by state and school district by school district? The best solution is in the hands of the Supreme Court itself. It should take the Alabama case. It should decide that its recent prior cases are historically dishonest and legally wrong, and reverse the lot of them. It should start fresh on the basis that the First Amendment forbids government favoritism between one religion and another, but it both permits and protects various forms of recognition that the United States was and is a God-fearing nation.

Should the Court do that? Absolutely. Will it do so? Almost certainly not. So we turn to the second solution.

Under Article III of the Constitution, Congress has authority over the jurisdiction of the federal courts. It has in the past used laws to restrict the power of those courts, most recently (at the backstage behest of Senate Minority Leader Daschle) with respect to fire fighting on federal lands in South Dakota, and South Dakota only. Restrictions have been made before; they can be made again.

With nothing but a law, not a constitutional amendment, Congress can tell the Supreme Court and lower courts to take their hands off all cases concerning the text of the Declaration of Independence (four references to God), of the Constitution (one reference), of the Pledge of Allegiance (one reference), of the National Anthem (the motto, “In God We Trust,” first appeared in its fourth stanza). And for good measure Congress can exempt all historical documents more than three centuries old. That would cover the Mayflower Compact, the Magna Carta, and the Ten Commandments, among many others.

What is going on here has to do not with God, but with jurisprudence. How should judges and Justices approach any case? All of them take an oath to respect and defend the Constitution. But that document in Article V gives the power to amend the Constitution solely to the people, acting through their representatives in Congress and in the states. When courts undertake for themselves to rewrite the Constitution, they are acting contrary to their oath. In an old-fashioned phrase the Framers often employed, they are “usurping power” that does not belong to their branch of government.

Why should Congress act to stop this judicial usurpation? For the same reason that parents should act immediately when they discover their children playing with matches. The solution is not to leave the matches in the children's hands but try to persuade them to be more responsible. It is to take away the matches.

The “God” cases are only one of several areas in which the Supreme Court has arrogated to a minimum of five of its Justices, a power that rightfully belongs only to two-thirds of Congress followed by three-fourths of the states. The Supreme Court has been playing with constitutional matches for seventy years and burning down the Constitution a room at a time. Since the Justices are unlikely to change their behavior any time soon, it is the obligation of Congress on behalf of the people to correct their behavior by taking away their matches.

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.” The nation does not consistently live up to that definition, any more than each of us always lives by the Ten Commandments. But it is important to have higher standards in this world.

Anyway, that's what I think, as a citizen and a lawyer. And that's what the Framers thought, who were also citizens and in many instances, lawyers as well. They were not perfect either, but they were excellent leaders who put present day leaders to shame, as a group, and would roundly condemn the recent actions of the Supreme Court.

John Armor is an author and civil rights attorney. His next book is on Thomas Paine, a Founding Father who is often (but falsely) described as an atheist.

The Republican Century

A Speech to the Leadership Institute

San Diego, California

I want to thank you for your invitation to join you this afternoon, and to especially thank you for your support of the Leadership Institute. I did not realize the true extent of the Institute's work, and Morton Blackwell's influence, until my staff learned that I would be addressing you today. It turns out that more than half of them are graduates of the Leadership Institute's training programs. I should have suspected as much. My senior consultant has a copy of Morton's Ten Mistakes of Losing Candidates and Ten Mistakes of Winning Candidates framed over his desk. He also has a copy of the Ten Commandments, so I suppose you could say that Morton is leading Moses in my office by a score of 20 commandments to ten.
I must also warn you that Morton is a very controversial figure among California conservatives these days, after he seduced Lou and Jane Barnett to join him in Washington. But after a great deal of discussion, we've decided to be grown-ups about this and forgive him, provided he returns the Barnett's safely to California when he's done with them, in roughly the same condition as when he stole them.

I have chosen a pretentious title for my remarks today: "The Republican Century" republican in the Jeffersonian sense. But I believe I can make a very good case that this indeed is how historians will remember the 21st Century, if we fulfill our responsibilities now.

As Shakespeare's Brutus said:

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.

I submit to you that these words apply in every detail to the work and opportunity that lies before us today.

I think the 20th Century will be remembered as one of history's great ironies. Mankind took unimagined, quantum leaps in our understanding of science and technology. And yet, we took a giant step backward in our understanding of our political institutions.

The Enlightenment produced the recognition, brilliantly reflected and refined by the American Founders, that our governing institutions had to work in harmony with our human nature. We rejected the rigid command and control structures of authoritarianism for the decentralized, individualistic structures of the free market and limited, self-contained governing institutions.

But at the beginning of the 20th Century, we began to make dramatic leaps in our scientific understanding, and I think this led to a hubris that transformed political thought. To the Marxists and so-called Progressives at the turn of the last century, everything that had come before was antiquated and quaint, but obviously wholly inadequate and irrelevant to the modern world. Because Jefferson and Madison and Franklin and Adams had never seen an electric light bulb or flown on an aircraft, therefore they had no clue what a modern government should look like. So Locke and Bastiat and Smith and Rousseau gave way to Marx and Nietzsche and Hegel.

Thoreau's observation on behalf of the American Founders, That government is best which governs least, was replaced with Walter Lippman's reply, That government is best which provides the most. Government would "scientifically manage" our problems, according to Woodrow Wilson and those who followed in his footsteps.

I remember debating Lucy Killea, on San Diego radio about six years ago. At the time, she was a state senator who got her start as an assistant to Eleanor Roosevelt. The subject was the revision of California's constitution. I was explaining the containment mechanisms in the federal constitution. "Oh, the Constitution," she said with disdain. "That is an antiquated document designed for an agrarian society dominated by white men."

And so, we threw away the learning of the Enlightenment, and began to repeat precisely the same mistakes we had made in medieval Europe and Imperial Rome.

The fundamental political issue of the 20th Century was, "How do we centralize government? How do we command and control economies? How do we regulate commerce" And the answers to those questions didn't work any better in the 20th Century with all of its advanced technology than they worked in the Dark Ages. Indeed, as Churchill pointed out, that "authoritarian ideology was made more sinister and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science".

But in the last decade or two, as we have picked through the wreckage that this retrograde ideology has caused, we now hear a completely different question: "How do we decentralize government? How do we deregulate commerce? How do we restore free markets?" These are the questions of the 21st Century, and our role at this junction in history is every bit as momentous as the role of those at the American founding.

If history tells us anything, it is that meaningful change does not come gradually. Long periods of stasis and decline give way to sudden climacterics, where things change, for good or ill, very rapidly. All experience hath shown that mankind are disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by altering the forms (of government) to which they have become accustomed.

We are creatures of habit. It is our nature to resist change. It is our nature to avoid confrontation and upheaval as long as we possibly can, because it is uncomfortable. So the pressures gradually build in a society until the necessity for change overcomes our natural resistance to it. And in that moment, the world can change very quickly. And I believe we are on the thresh hold of such change. Let me tell you why.

First, because we are entering the terminal stage of a bureaucratic state. From the beginning of recorded history, governments follow a very predictable course. Bureaucracies are established for simple purposes. They grow beyond those purposes, eventually subsuming every obstacle in their path. They reach a terminal stage when they become abusive of the population, rapacious for funds, intolerant of independent religious practice, and mired in the most intricate regulation.

And when a civilization reaches that terminal stage, history shows us only three ways in which that condition is resolved.

The early civilizations simply collapsed under the weight of these bureaucracies. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC, 320,000 Roman citizens where on some form of public relief. Writing in 1776, Edward Gibbon surveyed the wreckage left by the gigantic military and civil bureaucracy and remarked, "No human civilization, without soon exhausting itself, can maintain above a hundredth part of itself in arms or idleness." People had neither the intellectual empowerment to circulate ideas nor the political empowerment to act on those ideas. The civilizations simply collapsed.

The second way to resolve this terminal stage of a bureaucratic state is revolution. The introduction of the printing press led to intellectual empowerment, but without political empowerment the only recourse was to arms. While Edward Gibbon was publishing in London, the American colonists were publishing a list of indictments of their sovereign, among them: "He has erected a multitude of new laws and sent hither swarms of officials to harass our people and eat out their substance."

We kicked that bureaucracy out of this country at Yorktown in 1781. What do you suppose happened to it? It went right on passing taxes and trade restrictions in its own country. Also in 1776, Adam Smith was publishing the Wealth of Nations in Edinburgh. It was a scholarly but bitter denunciation of the same policies imposed by the same bureaucracy in England. But something was changing in Britain. As Democratic institutions took root, people now had both the intellectual empowerment of the press and the political empowerment of the polls, and we begin to observe the third manner in which the terminal stage of a bureaucratic state is resolved: sudden, radical downsizings of the bureaucracy. In 1846, the British finally had a belly full of it, the Parliamentary majority suddenly shifted, and in one day's legislative business, 18,000 of the trade restrictions were repealed.

And I believe we are beginning to see that pressure building in our own country. In the 1950's the political scientist VO Key, Jr. observed a pattern in American politics that he called the "realigning presidential elections". He noticed that the governing agenda of the nation and the political coalitions formed on both sides around that agenda remained very stable for a period of about 40 years. But then, at regular intervals, in a relatively brief period of time, a previously uninvolved portion of the population became active, usually around a charismatic leader and a new governing agenda, and the political landscape changed permanently. In 1824-28 came the rise of the Jacksonian Democrats as western territorial voters suddenly energized. In 1856-1860 came the fall of the Whigs and the rise of the Republicans over free-soil. In 1896-1900, Republican hegemony was established as a reaction and rejection of William Jennings Bryan's populism. Finally from 1928-32 came the rise of democratic socialism under Franklin Roosevelt. This is where Key's theory leaves off (he was writing in the 1950's), but just to carry his theory farther, you come to 1968 to 1972, when Kevin Phillips published his 1969 work, "the emerging Republican majority." Phillips noted a realignment taking shape as the Democratic Party lost its stranglehold over blue-collar voters in the northeast and its traditional solid base in the South.

And if you fast-forward another 40 years, you reach this decade. And the signs of realignment are all around us. Young people, though entirely disengaged, are perhaps the most libertarian generation we have spawned since the American Revolution. And why shouldn't they be? Government is now taking more than half of everything they earn; more from their earnings than it has ever taken in its history. Their freedom of thought is under constant attack from the time they enter grade school. They are the victims of the biggest intergenerational transfer of wealth in the history of the world. And they know it. Only a fourth of them expect ever to see a dime from social security, for example. Go ahead and ask them if government is their "friend."

If it is true that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, this generation is a generation that has been mugged by big government. Politically, it is entirely disengaged, but its dissatisfaction is huge. We saw the first stirring of this generation in 1980, 84, and 88, when young voters became the strongest voting block for Ronald Reagan and for George Bush Sr., before Bush became, in Arthur Laffer's words, "the Anti-Reagan". And look at the generation behind them. They might be totally disengaged and rather hedonistic, but the vast majority is highly resentful of the intrusions by government upon their liberties and property. Indeed, in 1998, when neither party was willing to return a multi-billion dollar surplus to taxpayers in Minnesota, Jesse "The Body" Ventura appeared out of nowhere, and not exactly on a liberal platform. His political slogan was "Retaliate in '98," the central issue was return of the surplus to the people who earned it. He packed a gun and believed others should have the same right of self-defense. When accosted by a single mother on the steps of the state capitol, who demanded "what are you going to do for me," his reply was "With all due respect, why is it that your bad life choices are my responsibility?" Young people galvanized, energized, and voted in droves.

And I believe the salvation of our freedom, if it is to be saved, rests with this young generation. Our generation must provide the Benjamin Franklins and the George Wythes that make possible the next generation's Thomas Jeffersons.

The tools that await this generation are greater than any we have known before. If it was the printing press that made possible the age of revolution, well, what a puny thing it is next to the power of the Internet. The price of knowledge plummets, the cost of communication collapses, and now the political views of the American Founders, so distasteful to the 20th Century ruling class, are once again accessible on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Mailing lists, once very expensive to maintain and use are now giving way to effortless and costless e-mail.

What are the two elements of political mobilization? Knowledge and communication. And the acquisition of those two elements is easier than at any time in our history. Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill both complained about the political elite of their times dominating the media by which public debate was conducted. That complaint is harder and harder to make today with the explosion of telecommunications.

And rarely has the case for freedom been easier to make than it is today. At the beginning of the last century, there was some novelty to the philosophy of the Left. Today, it is increasingly viewed for what it is: a retrograde, authoritarian ideology that is a very real and very practical threat to our freedom, our prosperity and our pursuit of happiness.

In many ways, California pioneered this ideology, first as one of the hotbeds of so-called progressivism, and as the first of the ultimate manifestation of this ideology, radical environmentalism, or what can be more accurately described as "new age authoritarianism."

California public policy today is founded on several tenets that are antithetical to the philosophy of freedom. One of the most damaging is that there is no limit to decisions made in a democracy; that the majority has the right to extend or withdraw inalienable natural rights at whim; and that you have an absolute right to dictate how I may enjoy the fruit of my own labor. With the outset of the Jerry Brown administration in 1974, this notion became integral to the new powers of government.

It was in that year that it became the policy of this state to actively discourage the construction of new power plants. At the same time, we stopped building dams; we stopped building roads; we actively discouraged and obstructed the construction of houses. This was the ultimate folly of government "scientifically managing" our problems.

Now let me tell you what is the practical effect of this policy. After 27 years discouraging the construction of power plants, the day finally arrived when we ran out of power. It is that simple. The California Independent System Operator; the agency responsible for maintaining the electrical grid, warns that the state will be 6,000 megawatts short of electricity this summer. That means six million homes without power during the hottest hours of the hottest days of the year. The Chicago blackout in the heat wave of 1995 killed 700 people. We are talking not about one city and one blackout; we are talking about a summer of blackouts in an entire state.

The Left is already mobilizing to use the crisis as a pretext for seizing power plants and nationalizing the delivery of power. And they have, at the moment, a very sizable following. But their solutions are predicated entirely on an ideology that is devoid from reality. They predicate their entire policy on the fervent belief that the crisis is the result of capitalists gouging the proletariat. We view it as the inexorable working of the laws of supply and demand. Their solution , seizing power plants , doesn't work. It doesn't add an inch to the transmission lines or a watt to our capacity. So even if they prevail in the immediate future, they will fail miserably within the next few years.

And when that rotting, rusting, corroded framework of ideological claptrap comes crashing down around Californians over the next few years, I believe the opportunity for political change will be awesome.

But in order to accomplish that change, we need young leaders who are steeped in knowledge and skilled in communications.

We are, I believe, on the eve of a political climacteric of a magnitude that occurs maybe once in five generations: the opportunity, as Tom Paine said, "To make the world over again."

You, the supporters of the Leadership Institute have already trained many of the leaders who will save this country. But many more need to be trained. Rush Limbaugh last week offered the opinion that the Reagan Revolution faltered because we assumed we had won the ideological battle and didn't need to keep educating the people. With the Leadership Institute now firmly in place and its legacy of knowledgeable, eloquent, and committed leaders now secure, and thriving, and growing, that mistake will not be made again.

In 1780, with the tide of the revolution turning, John Adams took a moment to write a few thoughts about the future. A lesser man would have rested on his laurels , but political revolutions are not made of lesser men. He realized that his generation's duty was to secure American liberty for future generations to come. And he wrote to Abigail:

"The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."

I believe that wheel has come full circle and once again, a generation is called upon to proclaim liberty throughout all the land, and unto all the inhabitants thereof. The study of politics must now consume all of us if we are to rise to the opportunity and the responsibility history and providence have thrust upon us when they placed us at this moment in time.

I will attribute this piece later tonight or tomorrow. We surely need leaders who believe like this in our day and age. If given an opportunity I would gladly vote for and support with my time, talent and treasure, someone who thinks this way.
Wouldn't you ?

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