Tag: the constitution

Public School Slaps ‘Does Not Endorse’ Stickers on US Constitution, Declaration of Independence

Only in today’s education climate could a public school district accidentally label the Constitution and Declaration of Independence as materials it “does not endorse.”

Yet that is exactly what happened in Anchorage, Alaska, earlier this month.

Anchorage Daily News reported that the Anchorage School District placed non-endorsement stickers on booklets containing the founding documents.

A parent posted a photo of the label on Nov. 3. The sticker read, “The Anchorage School District does not endorse these materials or the viewpoint expressed in them.”

The picture spread quickly across social media. Too many parents to count were rightly outraged that such a warning appeared on the most essential texts in American civic life.

District representative MJ Thim said the label was placed on the booklets erroneously.

Thim explained that the stickers are normally used for flyers and posters from outside organizations.

“This was our mistake,” he wrote in an email.

Thim said the stickers were used because that is standard practice for items that are not official district publications.

He said the district will review its procedures to make sure this does not happen again.

Thim also emphasized that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are taught in every school. He said these documents “reflect the values we want every student to understand.”

Parents, however, found the incident troubling.

Karen Waldron, who posted the image on Facebook, said she was “honestly stunned.” She noted that these are not controversial documents, but the very foundation of our government.

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Leftists Admit They Can’t Win Without Rewriting The Constitution

Seldom does a headline simultaneously proclaim impotency and promise utter destruction, but The New York Times managed it: “Abolish the Senate. End the Electoral College. Pack the Court.”

To be fair, this was not an opinion piece per se but a partial transcript of an episode of Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast, where Douthat interviewed Osita Nwanevu, a contributing editor at The New Republic, a columnist at The Guardian, and a research fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. The occasion was Nwanevu’s first book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.

Nwanevu’s book is free of original argumentation. His example of why the Senate is “anti-democratic” is that California, a state that could be “one of the 40 largest countries in the world,” only has two senators, which gives a state like Wyoming “about 60, or more than 60, times the representation than people in California.”

And don’t try to say California’s 52-member delegation in the House of Representatives — the largest in the House by far — evens things out: “The Senate shapes the judiciary, it shapes the executive branch, and obviously, it’s a veto point for the passage of even ordinary legislation.” Thus, Nwanevu argues, “we have a fundamental piece of our system that flouts basic democratic principles.”

Never mind that the House originates all monied bills, or that all impeachments must originate in the House, or that House and Senate must both pass a bill before it sees the president’s desk.

His ideas for “saving democracy” are just as moldy. Create new states (his nominees, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., are the usual suspects). Stuff the Supreme Court. Have a national, popular vote for president. The same ideas the left has been repeating for years now. Nwanevu is just the latest parrot to sing the same song for the choir.

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The Unelected Magistrate Judges Undermining Trump And Rule Of Law Are Completely Unconstitutional

As the legal wrangling continues over a magistrate judge’s decision to release accused human trafficker Kilmar Abrego Garcia from federal custody, it’s worth taking a closer look not just at the role of Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes in this case, but at the broader system of magistrate judges across the country. Contrary to widespread perception, reinforced by misleading media coverage, these judges wield extraordinary power despite having no constitutional standing under Article III.

Garcia is an illegal immigrant from El Salvador who was deported there. Democrats and their media allies turned his case into a political flashpoint. Garcia was ultimately returned to the United States, where he was promptly arrested on two federal counts related to human smuggling.

One aspect of his case has gone largely unnoticed: Magistrate Judge Holmes’ authority to make critical decisions in a case with national political implications.

Despite being referred to as a “federal judge” by corporate media outlets such as The New York Times, Holmes is not an Article III judge under the U.S. Constitution, which requires that federal judges be nominated by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and granted life tenure. Holmes meets none of these conditions. She was appointed by other judges, not elected officials, and she serves a renewable term, not a lifetime post.

Yet she holds immense power to approve arrests, authorize surveillance, and issue rulings that can shape lives, sway political outcomes, and alter the course of national events.

Her role in the Garcia case is just the latest reminder of how much judicial authority has been delegated to unelected magistrates operating outside the constitutional framework and how little scrutiny that quiet power grab has received.

Another example is Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who authorized the brazenly political FBI raid on President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022. He, too, sits outside the Constitution’s judicial framework, yet signed off on what may have been the most consequential search warrant in modern American history. And he did so with the full legal authority of a real judge, despite never having been through the vetting, scrutiny, or constitutional process required of one.

The American people are told they live under a government of checks and balances, where power is diffused and public officials are held accountable through a transparent process. The rise of magistrate judges represents a dangerous end-run around that system. These bureaucrats now wield a level of authority that the Framers never envisioned.

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The Constitution Won’t Save US From Trump’s War Idiocy

On June 21, US president Donald Trump ordered airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. You may have heard. As I write this, we’re in the “boasting about how splendid it all is” phase of Trump’s cyclical foreign policy approach.

Phase One: Pretend to be “anti-war” and feverishly “negotiating” to avoid escalation of this or that long-term conflict.

Phase Two:  Escalate.

Phase Three: Brag about what a genius he is.

Phase Four: Backtrack and maybe whine a little when it blows up in his face – or, rather, in the faces of the troops he puts in harm’s way.

It remains to be seen whether we’ll get the usual Phase Four (a la the ignominious but long overdue US surrender in Afghanistan after his “surge,” the Iranian strikes on US bases in Iraq after his operation to murder Iranian general  Qasem Soleimani, etc.), or whether he’ll really screw the pooch and set the Middle East on fire this time when the Iranians retaliate.

In the meantime, let’s talk about the US Constitution.

This morning, I received an email from Defending Rights and Dissent, a pro-Constitution organization with a history stretching back to the era of McCarthyism.  Subject line: “Trump shreds the Constitution. Bombs Iran. TAKE ACTION.”

DRAD wants you to write “your” US Representative and US Senators, urging them to support a “War Powers Resolution” requiring Trump to stand down, on the clear and irrefutable constitutional claim that only Congress has the authority to declare war and that Trump’s actions are therefore illegal.

Okay, yeah, I did that.

But realistically, Congress isn’t any more likely to reassert its power over US war-making this time around than it did with Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and numerous other belligerent actions/involvements.

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General Welfare Clause: The Truth They Never Teach

“It would be ABSURD to say … Congress may do what they please.”

That was James Madison, obliterating the modern lie that the general Welfare Clause is a blank check for almost unlimited power.

But that’s exactly how it’s treated and used today.

The general Welfare clause had a clear, limited meaning when the Constitution was ratified – and both Madison and Jefferson warned exactly what would happen if it got twisted into something more.

Spoiler alert: They weren’t just right. They were prophetic.

WHAT THE CONSTITUTION ACTUALLY SAYS

“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”
-Article I, Section 8, Clause 1

Legal scholar Rob Natelson has explained just how badly this clause has been twisted from its original meaning.

“The General Welfare Clause is one of the two principal constitutional pillars supporting the modern federal welfare state – the other being the Commerce Clause.”

Today, politicians and judges treat this clause as permission to spend money on virtually anything – as long as they claim it’s for the “general welfare.”

But that interpretation is flat-out wrong – and Natelson made that clear.

“The General Welfare Clause is said to include an implied spending power used to justify federal spending programs and the regulatory conditions attached to them.” 

In fact, that’s why many now refer to it as something else entirely.

“For that reason, the General Welfare Clause sometimes is called the Spending Clause.”

But the clause wasn’t written to authorize everything – it was written to limit Congress. To block favoritism. To keep spending within constitutional bounds.

“The General Welfare Clause is more than a mere ‘non-grant’ of spending power.”

Then he dropped the hammer.

“It was intended to be a sweeping denial of power – specifically, it was intended to impose on Congress a standard of impartiality borrowed from the law of trusts, thereby limiting the legislature’s capacity to ‘play favorites’ with federal tax money.”

A STRICT RESTRAINT ON POWER

In 1831, James Madison made it clear that the general Welfare clause wasn’t a blank check – it was a limit.

“With respect to the words ‘General welfare’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them.”

In other words, the clause doesn’t authorize taxing for whatever Congress wants – only for purposes tied directly to the enumerated powers.

Madison followed with a direct warning – about what would happen if “general Welfare” were twisted into a broad, open-ended power.

“To take them in a literal and unlimited sense, would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character, which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its Creators.”

Thomas Jefferson agreed. The general Welfare clause granted no independent power – it was tied to the powers delegated in the Constitution.

“our tenet ever was … that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated”

Jefferson ripped apart the claim that the clause gave Congress broad power for anything it wanted.

“As it was never meant they should provide for that welfare but by the exercise of the enumerated powers” 

That meant no power for anything outside the Constitution’s list.

“so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action: consequently that the specification of powers is a limitation of the purposes for which they may raise money”

That was the bottom line: specific powers = specific limits.

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The United States Of Tyranny: America Is Becoming A Constitution-Free Zone

“If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”—James Madison

It’s no joke: America is becoming a Constitution-free zone.

Little by little, our rights are being whittled down in the name of national security.

Where do you draw the line?

How much tyranny will Americans tolerate in the name of national security?

At what point does this slippery slope of power grabs lead to dictatorship?

Will we let border police trample on the rights of everyone they encounter, including legal residents and citizens? Turn a blind eye when men, women and children are forcibly detained by gangs of plainclothes agents and made to disappear? Will we accept a national ID card that enables the government to target individuals and groups it deems undesirable? Will we tolerate AI-powered surveillance cameras and drones that track us more effectively than they protect us? Will we censor ourselves, fearing that any expression of dissent will mark us as anti-government?

Will we abandon the constitutional principles our founders fought for? This is the bargain the police state demands of us.

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When Judges Violate the Constitution

Leftist judges want to turn President Donald Trump into a president in name only.

Look at all the ways that individual judges have hamstrung the Trump administration. A district court judge recently blocked President Trump’s executive order removing transgender individuals from the military. Another judge ordered the Trump administration to send two men who are pretending to be women into a women’s prison. One federal judge ordered the administration to restore government webpages that promote the left’s transgender narrative.

A different district court judge stopped the Trump administration from disbanding the wasteful USAID. Secretary of State Marco Rubio appointed Jeremy Lewin to a high-level position in USAID. The judge later ruled that Lewin wasn’t allowed to serve in that role.

Last weekend, another federal judge blocked the Trump administration from deporting illegal immigrant gang members. He even unsuccessfully attempted to force them to turn around flights that were already in the air. These examples are only the tip of the judicial overreach iceberg.

Now, all presidential administrations face lawsuits, but what’s happening here is well beyond historical norms. In his four years in office, former President Joe Biden’s administration received 14 federal injunctions. In less than two months, judges have already hit the Trump administration with more than that.

These rulings are an affront to the Constitution. Article II gives “executive power” to the president, who is also “Commander in Chief” of the military. Yet, according to some federal judges, the judiciary is in charge of the executive branch’s military policy, hiring, spending decisions and deportation flights. The Trump administration can’t even take down a website.

Contrast that judicial activism with what Alexander Hamilton laid out in Federalist 78.

“The judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power,” he wrote. And “it can never attack with success either of the other two.”

But, Hamilton warned, while “liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone,” it “would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other departments.”

That’s what some district court judges are attempting to do. These unelected, unaccountable judges are attempting to upend the constitutional order.

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Disobedience to Judges is Obedience to the Constitution

Judge James Boasberg issued an oral order demanding that planes carrying Venezuelan gang members, who were not even a party to the lawsuit before him and over which he did not have jurisdiction, be turned around in international airspace. Boasberg is now infuriated that his mere utterance, not even set down in writing, was not immediately obeyed.

Democrats and their media have taken to crying that any disobedience of Boasberg, who was appointed by Barack Obama to apparently rule not only the entire country, but the planet and all its airspace, is a “threat to democracy” and a violation of checks and balances.

It’s not. If anything, it’s an urgently needed restoration of those checks and balances which have been trampled on by judges who have seized unlimited power from elected officials like Trump.

Boasberg’s coup began when the D.C. judge decided to hear a lawsuit from the ACLU based on the detention of four inmates in Texas and one in New York. Despite it being the entirely wrong venue, Boasberg took the case. The 5 inmates who were on average 1,500 miles away from Boasberg denied that they were members of the Tren de Aragua gang targeted by Trump. Despite that, they claimed they were at risk of deportation because Trump had invoked the Alien Enemies Act and demanded that Boasberg block a 200-year-old plus law that predates D.C.

The lack of minor matters like venue and standing didn’t stop Boasberg from blocking the implementation of a law that predates the White House, the Capitol and the entire principle of ‘judicial review’ that only came 5 years later in Marbury v. Madison before issuing an oral order turning around planes in midair. King George III would have been less presumptuous.

There’s a term for this that ends in a ‘y’ and it’s not ‘democracy’.

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The Deep State Wins Again: All the Ways ‘We the People’ Keep Losing Our Freedoms

Almost one month into the Trump presidency, and the Constitution and the entire section on the various branches of government and how they work together are still missing from the White House website.

This is no small thing.

This omission, deliberate or inadvertent, speaks volumes about the priorities of this current administration. It also explains a lot about the legal mindset that is driving the Trump train, which continues to push forward with a theory of unitary executive power.

You know what is not driving the Trump government? Any sense that it is bound by the rule of law, i.e, the US Constitution. As Trump recently declared, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Then again, Trump has never made any pretense of his aspirations to rule as a strongman. As the Washington Post reports:

In 2017, he claimed “an absolute right to do what I want with the Justice Department.” In 2019, he claimed that Article II of the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” In 2020, he said he could override state and local public health orders related to the coronavirus pandemic by saying: “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be. It’s total.” In 2022, he said that purported voter fraud in the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” In 2023, he mused that he would be a dictator, but only on Day One of his presidency. And a year ago, he argued that presidents should have total immunity from criminal prosecution, even for “EVENTS THAT ‘CROSS THE LINE.’ ”

Listen, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.

Then again, maybe the majority of Americans just don’t care about the Constitution anymore.

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Tariffs and the Constitution

The taxing power in the federal government resides in the Congress. The Constitution states that Congress has the power to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts” of the federal government. Indeed, in order to emphasize the location of this power in the Congress, the Constitution also requires that all legislation “for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.”

So, if only Congress can impose taxes, how can the president impose tariffs?

Here is the backstory.

However one characterizes a tariff, since it consists of the compulsory payment of money to the federal government, it is a form of taxation. It is – to use James Madison’s language – a duty or an impost. The federal government survived on duties and imposts – some of which were imposed on the states – from the time of its creation in 1789 until the War Between the States. Even under Abraham Lincoln, when unconstitutional income taxes were imposed, they were done by legislation, not executive fiat.

Then came Franklin D. Roosevelt and a congressional ban on the exportation of armaments to be implemented at the president’s discretion. This sounds fairly benign, yet it fomented the supercharged presidency that we have today. When Congress banned the sale of American arms to foreign countries, it did so by giving FDR the power to decide what to ban and upon which countries to impose the ban. Then it did the unthinkable: It made a violation of the president’s fiats a federal crime.

I call this unthinkable because under the Constitution’s Due Process Clause jurisprudence, at the federal level only Congress can make behavior criminal.

In defiance of FDR’s ban, Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, an American manufacturer of military hardware, sold armaments to the government of Bolivia, and the Department of Justice persuaded a federal grand jury to indict the corporation. Then a federal judge dismissed the indictment on the constitutional basis that only Congress can decide what behavior is criminal and it cannot give that power to the president.

The trial court merely enforced the well-known and universally accepted non-delegation doctrine. It stands for the principle that the three branches of government cannot delegate away any of their core powers. Among Congress’ core powers is writing laws and deciding what behavior is criminal. By giving away this power to the president, the trial court ruled, Congress violated the non-delegation principle, and thus FDR’s determination that arms sales to Bolivia was criminal was itself a nullity.

The government appealed directly to the Supreme Court. Had the court simply reversed the trial judge and sent the case back to him for trial, we might never have heard of this case or the policy it established.

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