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First They Came for the Southerners ...(From a column by Mike Tuggle - November 2006) Well, look who’s warning us about the Federal government overstepping its constitutional restraints—the liberal Consortiumnews: Though not understanding the full import of their actions, the American voters will have endorsed the elimination of the “unalienable” rights handed down to them by the Founders, instead allowing “plenary” – or unlimited – power to be invested in the President. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights will have been turned into irrelevant pieces of paper.And what will happen if the current Chief Executive does not respect the letter of the Constitution? Bush will have the authority to send American young men and women to war wherever he chooses; he will have the power to spy on anyone he wants; he could imprison citizens and non-citizens alike under the Military Commissions Act while denying the detainees the right to file motions with civilian courts; he could order harsh interrogations which could then be used to convict defendants (assuming they are ever brought before one of his hand-picked tribunals for trial, conviction and execution); he could ignore or reinterpret any laws that he doesn’t like; he would have rubber-stamps in Congress and very soon in the U.S. Supreme Court; he and his potential successors would be, in effect, dictators.We Southerners don’t know whether to laugh or cry. We’ve been denouncing unconstitutional power grabs by the central government since Jefferson and Madison unmasked the naked despotism of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. They penned the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions to assert that the States had delegated – NOT surrendered – specific powers to the Federal government, and could nullify actions which exceeded that delegated authority. Jefferson and Madison opposed these acts not because they supported foreign governments sabotaging our republican institutions, or sedition, which were the purported purposes of the acts. Instead, Jefferson and Madison opposed the Federalists’ usurpations because they were unconstitutional. One of the most powerful alarms about the unconstitutional projects of the Federal government came in 1956, in reaction to DC’s assertion that it could dictate to the States how to run their own schools: The unwarranted decision of the Supreme Court in the public school cases is now bearing the fruit always produced when men substitute naked power for established law. The Founding Fathers gave us a Constitution of checks and balances because they realized the inescapable lesson of history that no man or group of men can be safely entrusted with unlimited power. They framed this Constitution with its provisions for change by amendment in order to secure the fundamentals of government against the dangers of temporary popular passion or the personal predilections of public officeholders.The Southern Manifesto, which was signed by 19 Southern senators and 63 Southern congressmen, was not a statement against education, nor was it motivated by hatred of black people. But it has been portrayed as such by leftists: HOW DID supporters of Jim Crow respond to the one-two punch of Brown and Montgomery? With virulent defiance that historians have called a “strategy of massive resistance.” “By 1956, southern white opposition to desegregation had begun to mushroom at every level of society,” Manning Marable wrote. It began with top political leaders of what was then called the “southern bloc” in Congress. North Carolina Sen. Sam Ervin, a Democrat, drafted the racist “Southern Manifesto” in March 1956, calling for a defense of Jim Crow by all “legal means.” Ervin got support from 101 out of 128 members of Congress (almost all of them Democrats) from the 11 former states of the Confederacy.Aha! That’s the real motivation – those Southerners just wanted to stick it to black people. All that talk about preserving their precious Constitution was just a smoke screen. The leftists and proponents of central government won that battle, ensuring Federal control over the States’ school systems – which is why government schools are the shining examples of educational excellence and ethnic harmony that they are today. The latest Federal assault on the Constitution has an even more urgent purpose than social reengineering – the very safety of the American people, as the Neocon New York Sun reports: Since the New York Times first reported the existence of the surveillance program in December 2005, administration officials have confirmed that the eavesdropping occurs without a court warrant, and have said it targets communications between persons on American soil and Al Qaeda associates abroad. … Eavesdropping on terrorists and their associates in America is a battlefield prerogative that belongs to President Bush and cannot be taken away, a Justice Department attorney told a federal judge in Manhattan yesterday.So today, when leftists shriek in panic at this blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment, the Neocons fire back that they’re supporting terrorists. As the Sun article continues: “This is an area that is as close to the modern-day battlefield as you can get,” Mr. Coppolino said in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. “Where is Al Qaeda today and what are they planning to do? Where are they going to hit us?”Yeah, liberals, just whose side are you on – America’s or Al Qaeda’s? All that talk about preserving your precious civil liberties is just a smoke screen for your real agenda – to destroy America! You want to live under a Moslem caliphate, ruled by terrorists, don’t you? Payback is hell. Yes, thanks to the South-hating liberals and Rockefeller Republicans, the machinery of the Federal government is now so all-reaching that no one can stop it – it has all the weapons it needs to swat any opposition. With its hands on all the levers of power, there are no means to prevent it from doing whatever it wants. Could the Commander-in-Chief declare all political enemies “unlawful combatants” ? Who’s going to stop him? |
