Independence Day is traditionally a time for celebration, relaxation and gratitude for the liberties declared to be universal rights on July 4, 1776. Maybe it’s time to also remember — and celebrate — that while our liberties and our independence may have been declared in 1776, they were secured for posterity by the blood of patriots, not the pens and inkblots of judges and politicians.
As a poet of the ’60s once said, the times they are a-changing. Indeed.
It is not a happy thought, but when in the course of human events, dependence not independence becomes the defining feature of our national character, maybe our Independence Day celebrations and speeches should take note of this “transformative” turning point—and make plans accordingly.
Shall we celebrate that we are not yet as corrupt as Greece? That we have not yet repudiated our national debts? Or should we put down the bottle and admit how fast we are approaching that day of reckoning?
Can anyone remember a week that has seen so many disappointments, betrayals and storm warnings as the one we have lived through since the Supreme Court’s shameless abandonment of the Constitution on June 26? We got more than revitalized Obamacare on that day, we got a cold shower: it is now impossible to ignore the naked truth that our elites are laughing at the idea of “limited government.”
True, there have been other decisions of the nation’s top court that have disappointed, even shocked conservatives. But has there ever been a ruling that said in giant letters written across the marquee in Times Square, “the Constitution be damned, separation of powers be damned, we will help Congress write laws we like and reject laws we don’t like.”
On Independence Day 2015, conservatives and patriots need to understand what has happened. By edict signed by our new lawgiver– the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush– the Founders’ principal legacy, the idea of a written Constitution, is now officially dead. The letter of the law is meaningless – and thus no longer a restraint on government — when replaced by the good intentions of our elite rulers.
Thomas Jefferson’s proposition that rights precede government and to protect these rights, governments are instituted among men—that proposition is now discarded in the dustbin of history. The Bill of Rights? Freedom of religion and free speech will mean what enlightened judges want them to mean.
The Republican Party’s white flag of surrender, deployed so often and so readily on Supreme Court nominees and Cabinet appointments, has become the Constitution’s white burial shroud.
Our Founders were not naïve simpletons. They understood that human freedom is a fragile thing, that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” The Founders understood, with Benjamin Franklin, that “you have a Republic, madam, if you can keep it.” Have we?
