Our Constitution Means What It Says, and is not open to interpretation!

Written Constitutions mean exactly what the writers and ratifiers say they mean and nothing else in the form of this essay from MI Supreme Court Judge Thomas McIntyre Cooley.

Cooley's books on the subject is also posted here for purchase at amazon.com and for instant reading here at Google books.




A cardinal rule in dealing with written instruments is that they shall receive a unvarying interpretation, and that their practical construction is to be uniform. A constitution is not to be made to mean one thing at one time, and another at some subsequent time when the circumstances may have so changed as perhaps to make a difference rule in the case seem desirable.

A principle share of the benefit expected from written constitutions would be lost if the rules they established were to be so flexible as to bend to circumstances or be modified by public opinion. It is with special reference to the varying moods of public opinion, and with a view to putting the fundamentals of government beyond their control, that these instruments are framed; and there can be no such steady and imperceptible change in their rules as inheres in the principles of the common law. Those beneficent maxims of the common law which guard person and property have grown and expanded until they mean vastly more to us than they did to our ancestors, and are more minute, particular, and pervading in their protections; and we may confidently look forward in the future to still further modifications in the direction of improvement.

Public sentiment and action effect such changes, and the courts recognize them; but a court or legislature which should allow a change in public sentiment to influence it in giving construction to a written constitution not warranted by the intention of its founders, would be justly chargeable with reckless disregard of official oath and public duty; and if its course would become a precedent, these instruments would be of little avail. The violence of public passion is quite as likely to be in the direction of oppression as in any other; and the necessity of bills of rights in our fundamental laws lies mainly in the danger that the legislature will be influenced by temporary excitements and passions among the people to adopt oppressive enactments.

What a court is to do, therefore, is to declare the law as written, leaving it to the people themselves to make such changes as new circumstances may require. The meaning of the constitution is fixed when it is adopted, and it is not different at any subsequent time when a court has occasion to pass upon it."





I have added a discussion between Mike Church and Dr. Kevin Gutzman shortly after obamas` 1st nomination of a female,latin supreme court judge.....

Mike: Dr. Kevin Gutzman on the line here. But he watched the hearings. So we’ll get the Doc’s take on this. How are you today, Kev?

Dr. Kevin Gutzman: I am very well, Mike. How are you?

Mike: I am fantastic. Did I miss anything? You watched the hearings, I suppose. I was on vacation. I didn’t. What did I miss?

Kevin: Well, what I was reminded of in thinking about her comments about the superior merits of the wise Latina judge, was an experience I had in law school at the University of Texas Law School 20 years ago now. We had class protests by Hispanic and black students and people who were sympathetic with them in which they demanded that there should be particular chairs in law, that is, professorships, set aside for black and Hispanic academics.

Mike: Okay.

Kevin: And the idea was that only a black or a Hispanic academic would have the knowledge of the world that a black or Hispanic academic would have, and that there could not be a first-class legal faculty without the particular insights, I suppose, of wise black and Latina or Latino academics. So not only was it not an offhand comment that Sotomayor was pilloried for, but it was also not anything peculiar to her. This is a very widely believed notion in legal academia, and that means also among lawyers that basically when it comes to judging, there are special insights of blacks and Hispanics that white men just don’t have. And so we need to have some kind of, at least what was being proposed at UT Law School, which is one of the top five public law schools in the country, what was being proposed was a quota system in hiring professors. And of course what we see now is essentially a quota system in appointing people to federal judgeships, and apparently to the Supreme Court.

Mike: It is nothing short of – I can’t even say it’s amazing anymore because it’s not amazing. It happens all the time. I mean, it is the daily grind of the “bidness,” would you say the energetic business of government? Isn’t that what the framers – isn’t that what the federalists that were framers called – said that we needed, Dr. Gutzman, we needed an energetic government? Could they have imagined that we would have one that was not only energetic but had been injected with about 5,000 gallons of Winstrol V steroids?

Kevin: Well, they certainly said there should be energy in the executive. I’m not sure that they ever imagined the wide-ranging law-making prerogative exercised by federal judges these days. But, yeah, that was an idea that was held by a lot of nationalists in the 1780s. I have to say that I thought that the proposal my classmates were making at UT Law School 20 years ago – this is the University of Texas at Austin Law School.

Mike: Right.

Kevin: This idea that there should be particular positions on the faculty set aside that only black or Hispanic academics could apply for, I thought this sounded very South African. And in fact, I...

Mike: [Laughing] You mean like apartheid?

Kevin: I thought it was precisely apartheid.

Mike: Okay, all right.

Kevin: And in fact at the time I was president of the UT chapter of the Federalist Society. And so we put up signs all over the law school saying that these should be referred to as the P. W. Botha chairs in law. And apparently we’re now going to have P. W. Botha chairs of, I don’t know, Supreme Court Justice.

Mike: I suppose, I mean, if you’re looking for a silver lining here, and I don’t think this is a silver lining, but just the fact that she replaced another incompetent nincompoop in Justice Souter, who famously decided the Kelo v. New London case, right down the road from where you are in Western Connecticut – right? That’s a Connecticut place; right?

Kevin: Well, yes. Actually, though, I think a lot of people are saying that. But I think it’s mistaken. It seems to me that, while Souter was pretty reliably going to come out in favor of upholding left-wing precedents, he was a pretty strong devotee of the idea of what’s called “stare decisis,” that is, that what the Court had done before should not be changed without some really good reason. And that’s actually not so left-wing a position as we might fear that Judge Sotomayor might follow. The idea of quotas for minorities and so on was not one that Souter endorsed. And so far as I can tell, Sotomayor supports it. So I actually think that Sotomayor is very likely to be worse than Souter.

Mike: Yeah, but she’d have to have four others to go along with her. Not to say that there won’t be because you have Kennedy. You have Darth Vader Ginsburg. Who is the other, John Paul Stevens. So that’s four right there.

Kevin: Right.

Mike: It doesn’t portend well. But I say it doesn’t portend well. The Supreme Court was never designed to have this authority anyways, was it?

Kevin: No, that’s exactly the problem. Ever since at least ‘87 when Bork was nominated we’ve paid more attention to nomination processes for the Supreme Court than we pay to any Senate race, as if the Supreme Court were the Supreme Legislature. And of course the reason for that is that the Supreme Court is the Supreme Legislature, and this is more important than any Senate race. So think about the attention that was given to this, and compare it to the attention that was given to the difficulty in deciding who had won the Minnesota Senate election this year, and you’ll see that it’s just orders of magnitude difference. The reason is Ms. Sotomayor is now more important than Al Franken. Maybe that’s a good thing, but...

Mike: You may not want to disparage that statement just too much. Dr. Kevin Gutzman, who’s got three books out. The paperback edition of “Who Killed the Constitution” is out now. You can get that at fine bookstores and at Amazon.com. And at KevinGutzman.com, “Virginia’s American Revolution” and “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution.”

We just had another guy who called, right before you were on, Kevin, and he was asking the constitutionality. And people call me for these things all the time, you may have heard him, of how can Obama sit there, or Congressman Rangel sit there and say that they have the sovereign authority to force or to compel me to buy something that I don’t want, namely health insurance, under the threat of a tax increase or a fine if I fail to do so. And of course the short snickety answer to that is, well, that they’re a national legislature now, do whatever the hell they want. The constitutional, if there was such a thing in effect, answer would be, well, they don’t have the authority. What would you have responded to that gentleman?
Kevin: Well, that’s precisely right. You know, one provision of the Constitution that left-wingers like to point to in support of their idea that we should say that there are rights to have abortions and engage in homosexual sodomy and all kinds of things that had always been not only not rights, but illegal before, is the Ninth Amendment. They want to say that the Ninth Amendment is a general protection of rights and that judges, federal judges should be able to invent new rights under the Ninth Amendment and force them against the states. I, of course, think that’s illegitimate.

Mike: Right.

Kevin: But on the other hand, the right to hire somebody to be your doctor and pay him the amount that the two of you have agreed to actually is a longstanding right of English-speaking people. And I think it’s something that does actually fall under the Ninth Amendment. So it seems to me that you could make a legitimate argument, and of course that means it’s one that wouldn’t be accepted by a federal court, you could make a legitimate historical argument that you have a Ninth Amendment right not to have Obama tell you who your doctor will be or how much you’ll pay him. But, you know, this is America, so we have arbitrary unlimited central government. And there’s really nothing you can do about it except try to vote out the congressmen who voted to impose this on you.

Mike: Right, and this is what I – one of the things that I find, well, it’s interesting to me and it’s interesting to you because we have read these things. Unfortunately, there’s 309,999,997 – I’ll include Dr. Woods in the people that have read the Ratification Debates in Virginia of the Constitution. This is exactly, this is happening according to prophecy, is it not? Isn’t this exactly what Patrick Henry and what William Grayson and what James Monroe – mainly Henry, though – said was going to happen? Aren’t we following the course?

Kevin: We could not be any closer to what he predicted. And, you know, anybody who thinks that we have constitutional government now should just compare the predictions that Patrick Henry made about the worst possible fruit of ratifying the Constitution...

Mike: Right.

Kevin: ...to what we actually live under. And what we actually live under is his worst-case scenario. We don’t call Obama the king, but other than that it’s about as bad as any of those people had nightmares it might be. That is, the central government feels free to tell you what to do in any sense at any time of your day, and it feels free to veto any policy of state government it doesn’t like, and the executive is free to make war anywhere he wants and force you to pay for it. Besides which, they feel free to put stay laws in effect and essentially transfer money from people who have loaned money in good faith to people who’ve decided they can’t pay. So, yeah, it’s an absolute failure.

Mike: Which is...

Kevin: The only question, I think the question it leaves is, is it just because of the American Constitution, is the federal constitution shortcomings that we’ve ended up in this situation? Or is this a general problem that is always going to inhere in written constitutions? Are written constitutions just ultimately bound to fail? Or is it because our own particular Constitution has led to this point that we have this problem we have now?

Mike: Well, how...

Kevin: I don’t know the answer to that. But I do know that I can’t think of a written constitution that has worked over a long period of time.

Mike: Well, I was going to ask you, our forefathers were very reverent towards the English Constitution; right?

Kevin: Right.

Mike: Or I guess the one that came out in – I’m going to get the date wrong, so you can correct me, 1678 or whatever it was.

Kevin: 1688.

Mike: 1688, okay. So how long did the English live under their vaunted – and it was a great charter at the time; was it not? How long did they live under their Constitution?

Kevin: Well, of course the English Constitution of 1688 was unwritten. And they would argue that they live under it now. But the problem that the people who made the American Revolution had encountered was essentially that the English had decided that it did not apply to colonists living in North America. That is, that while there was a right under the English Constitution to be represented in Parliament, that didn’t apply to people who were outside the mother country and so on.

Mike: Right.

Kevin: So the point is, written constitutions were supposed to be a way to provide a firm check on the tendency of people in office to grab at more power than the people had intended to give them. And that was not an idea that was part of the English Constitution. There was a general idea that Parliament was sovereign and could do basically whatever it wanted to do. Then the Americans decided to reject that by writing constitutions that say exactly what government officials could do. But again, what we have now is a situation in which, as that last caller was complaining about, there is no limit to what federal officials feel entitled to do to you. There’s no limit to what they feel entitled to do to foreign countries in your name. There’s no limit to what they feel free to impose on your state government. There’s just no limit. And that’s exactly and the only thing the written Constitution was supposed to do was provide limitation on the power of the government.

Mike: Well, that’s what it was supposed to do.

Kevin: Yeah, yeah.

Mike: And it did for a while. But, I mean, as you pointed out in your books, the usurpations began as soon as the gavel banged down the First Congress in 1790; didn’t it.

Kevin: I fear that they certainly began trying to grab more power almost instantly.

The Supreme Answer To Westboro Baptist

I think we can all agree that protesting at the funeral of a dead soldier is a distasteful, classless, heartless, despicable act. I am of course referring to the offensive protests of the Phelps family of Westboro Baptist Church. What we might, but should not disagree on is whether or not this is a first amendment case. Most of you say it is because you have been taught Supreme Court precedent and not the Constitution. I respectfully dissent.







The first 10 amendments to the Constitution were written and ratified to erect bulkheads against the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT passing laws and acts or judicial rulings in the area of religion, the press and free speech, these matters were left to the sole discretion of the states. Anyone that is “for a return to the Constitution” must therefore then be for a return to the Bill of Rights as it was ratified but alas, most conservatives and Tea Party members do not want this return.






These protests are a matter for the towns where they are organized to occur in, to vigorously oppose with dedicated anti-Phelps crowds wielding pitchforks and torches and if that doesn’t work, try bare knuckles.

Ever hear the phrase that,"how do you know where your going, if you dont know where you came from"?

Now stick with me for a minute while I state my case as I explain who foner is and why he is important to this post.....

Eric Foner: Profile

By Jacob Laksin
DiscoverTheNetworks.org
May 24, 2005

Eric Foner is a neo-Marxist professor of history at Columbia University and one of America’s most prominent tenured radicals. A prolific author and lecturer, he is a former president of several professional historical associations, including the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. He is also regarded as a leading expert on the Civil War and the Reconstruction period that followed it. A member of the editorial board of The Nation, and his extreme leftist politics have earned him the sobriquet “Eric the Red” among Columbia students.

In many ways, Foner’s radicalism is born of his background. Growing up in New York City in what he has described as a “Communist oriented” family, Foner has long cited his father, a Communist fellow-traveler, as an influence. In his books, Foner has striven to cast his father as a victim of anti-Communist hysteria. To this end, he has related the story of his father’s firing from the City College of New York, where he worked as a history professor, following a series of hearings by a state legislative committee into the clout of Communists in academia. For Foner, this story is illustrative of the unfair treatment suffered by Communist-sympathizers at the hands of “McCarthyite” censors. (Foner’s father understandably declined to testify before the hearings about his political preferences.) Missing from Foner’s account, however, is any mention of the fact that the hearings were coterminous with the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Communist hangers-on such as Foner’s father pushed the line that the free West, symbolized by America and Britain, posed a far greater threat to world peace than Stalin and his then-allies in Nazi Germany. Foner’s father was hardly the only Communist of his bloodline. Foner’s uncle was the Communist Party labor historian Philip Foner.


Eric Foner has carried on the radical tradition. An outspoken champion of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 70s, he could not be swayed from his attachment by the USSR’s collapse. This was clearly demonstrated in the summer of 1994, when the leftwing magazine Dissent published an article by a lapsed Communist writer, Eugene Genovese. Titled “The Crimes of Communism: What Did You Know and When Did You Know It?” the article was critical of the Soviet Union’s supporters among the American left, charging them with a willful blindness to the crimes perpetrated by Communist regimes.


In an outraged rebuttal to Genovese’s article, which also appeared in Dissent, Foner attempted to justify the left’s “silence in the face of unspeakable crimes” commited by the Soviet Union. He praised the “communists’ contribution to some of the country’s most important struggles for social betterment.” For Foner, the noble ends justified the murderous means. He further asserted that Genovese’s “current outlook has far more in common with a long tradition of elitist antiliberalism, including Tory romanticism and Old South criticism of capitalism in the nineteenth century, and with various expressions of right-wing ideology in the twentieth.” But Genovese was guilty of a yet more baleful thought crime, according to Foner: He was no longer a reliable propogandist for the radical cause:


The principles he enumerates offer no guidance whatever to those desiring to rethink the history of socialism while retaining a commitment to social change. Had they prevailed throughout American history, there would have been no antislavery movement, no feminism, labor movement, or civil rights struggle.


Foner’s undying support for the Soviet Union found its most vivid expression in his 2002 book, a collection of previously published essays called Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World. In one of these essays, called “The Russians Write a New History,” Foner trained his ire at a new generation of Russian historians. What galled Foner, who worked as a visiting professor in Russia during the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev, was that these historians dissented from Foner’s hagiographic view of the Soviet past; no longer serving as mere stenographers for Soviet propaganda, they “painted the history of the Soviet era in the blackest hues,” and cared little for the interpretive lexicon of “class” and “imperialism.” Worse, in Foner’s book, they looked with admiration to the United States. So much so, in fact, that Foner was moved to deride his Soviet students’ "love affair with America," and sought to disabuse them of their belief that "America has become the land of liberty and prosperity of our own imagination." Such a belief was unpardonably “one-dimensional,” Foner insisted, reminding his students that the U.S. “has its own complement of mistakes and crimes,” and cautioning them to take note of “America’s ills: poverty, homelessness, racism, unemployment.” With discernible dejection, Foner reported that his condemnations of America were not “greeted with enthusiasm.”



As an avid practitioner of the historicist school of scholarship, Foner has long concentrated on rewriting history in accordance with his radical politics. Yet he is not forthcoming about his patently political revisionism. In innumerable articles and lectures, he has presented his approach as “a candid appraisal of our own society’s strengths and weaknesses, not simply an exercise in self-celebration,” one that invites students of history to think “historically—not mythically” about the American past. But Foner presents only one side of the balance sheet. The history of the United States, he claims, is an unrelieved march of bigotry and oppression. Thus, he has claimed that slavery and racism “were embedded in the Constitution.” Likewise, the American ideals of “freedom” hold no allure to Foner. America, as he sees it, cannot be redeemed from its “debasement of millions of people into slavery and the dispossession of millions of native inhabitants of the Americas.” In Foner’s telling, modern America can scarcely be distinguished from its slave-owning past. In a 1995 editorial for The Nation, Foner impugned the “American residential apartheid” between blacks and whites, which he blamed on “the inequitable operation of a putatively free market.”



Foner’s contemptuous view of American history informs many of his classes—not least his course surveying the history of American radicalism, “The American Radical Tradition.” Because of his bleak reading of America’s past, Foner felt little sympathy for his native country in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Writing in the London Review of Books, he stated: “I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the [Bush] White House.” (He also urged “[American] allies to impose some restraint on the White House.”) Moreover, Foner denounced America’s preemptive war against Iraq. Of the doctrine of preemption, Foner, in an interview with the Columbia Spectator, insisted that it “takes us back to the notion of the rule of the jungle,” and claimed that it was “exactly the same argument” used by the Japanese to justify the attack on Pearl Harbor. Nor was Foner prone to any doubts about the root causes of anti-Americanism around the globe. In a September 2004 article for the History News Network, he explained, “It is based primarily on American policies -- toward Israel, the Palestinians, oil supplies, the region’s corrupt and authoritarian regimes, and, most recently, Iraq.”



Similarly, Foner explained that “longtime allies in Europe” believe that “the war on terrorism is motivated in part by the desire to impose a Pax Americana in a grossly unequal world.” He did not altogether dismiss the notion that the U.S. might have a noble interest in championing democracy across the globe. “Nonetheless,” he wrote in an April 2003 op-ed for the New York Times, “other societies have their own historically developed definitions of freedom and ways of thinking about the social order, which may not exactly match ours. The unregulated free market, for example, can be profoundly destabilizing in societies organized on traditional lines of kinship, ethnicity or community.”

when Communist hangers-on such as Foner’s father pushed the line that the free West, symbolized by America and Britain, posed a far greater threat to world peace than Stalin and his then-allies in Nazi Germany. Foner’s father was hardly the only Communist of his bloodline. Foner’s uncle was the Communist Party labor historian Philip Foner.


Yesterday Ann Coulter wrote this: “The very author of the citizenship clause, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, expressly said, ‘This will not’” – speaking of the Fourteenth Amendment – “‘This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.’ In the 1884 case Elk v. Wilkins, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not even confer citizenship on Indians” – so Foner’s saying they were talking about Indians is incorrect, incorrect – “because they were subject to tribal jurisdiction, not U.S. jurisdiction.


“For a hundred years, that was how it stood,” writes Ann Coulter, “with only one case adding the caveat that children born to legal permanent residents of the U.S., gainfully employed, and who were not employed by a foreign government would also be deemed citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. And then, out of the blue, in 1982, Justice Brennan slipped a footnote into his 5-4 opinion in Plyler v. Doe, asserting that ‘no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment “jurisdiction” can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.’ (Other than the part about one being lawful and the other not.)

“Brennan’s authority for this lunatic statement was that it appeared in a 1912 book written by Clement L. Bouvé. (Yes, the Clement L. Bouvé – the one you’ve heard so much about over the years.)” Have you heard about Clement L. – no, nobody has. That’s her point. She’s making a joke. “Bouvé was not a senator, not an elected official, certainly not a judge – just some guy who wrote a book.

“So on one hand we have the history, the objective, the author’s intent and 100 years of history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that the Fourteenth Amendment does not confer citizenship on children born to illegal [aliens]. On the other hand, we have a random outburst by some guy named Clement – who, I’m guessing, was too cheap to hire an American housekeeper.”

So it just continues on, ladies and gentlemen. Now we have this argument here that is not an argument at all. And I wish to spend just a moment going over this, again, because I find myself in the position where some of my peers think that the history of this doesn’t matter. “Chris, what does this have to do with the future? Talk about today. People don’t want to hear about your stupid history lessons.” Well, it does matter. The original intent of that damn amendment is all that matters. What the ratifiers said that it meant is all that matters. When you cave in and say, “Ooh, ooh, well, we have a Supreme Court that says since 1992, ooh, hoo hoo,” that is what is irrelevant.
You must defend the original intent! This is absolute nonsense here with McCain and all these other guys running, “Well, we need an amendment to clarify.” No, we don’t. All we need to do is objectively support and obey the history of the Fourteenth Amendment and what the ratifiers said that it meant. And furthermore, how it was historically implemented!!

So I’m not going to back off the history. The history does matter. And if you don’t like the history, well, then, you should propose an amendment. But not Senator McCain’s amendment. You should propose the anyone that’s born here, they can sneak in by any means, doesn’t matter how they get here, if they pop a kid out here in the territory of a united state, then that kid is a citizen, end of story. But that is not what the Fourteenth Amendment says. So stop regurgitating the lie. It is a misstatement and distortion of American history, and I will not stand for it. And I certainly find it very objectionable and offensive that I am asked to move on. “C’mon, Chris you idiot, let’s deal with the future.” No. Our future is only our future when it relates to our past.

We have institutions for a reason. There is a reason why a Constitution is written. If you desire to amend it and change what it means, then you must pose an amendment. What Senator McCain and Gregg and Graham are droning on about is their ignorance of the Fourteenth Amendment, not their support of it. And all these people out there, “Oh, the Republicans are trying to do this to the Fourteenth Amendment,” this is all playing into the hands of the ruling class, the elitocrats. Let’s distract the people.

You ask yourself how in the hell things got this bad, simple, the marxists have been taking over our educational system and brainwashing our kids for damn near 50 years with their socialist agenda, did you people really believe that when you dump your kids in public schools for 12 hrs a day, 5 days a year, for 12 years that none of their american destroying, hating ways wouldn`t rub off??? Please, wake the hell up, the bottom line is that we did this to ourselves!

According To Congress The Constitution Requires Racism

“Establishing a so-called Office of Minority and Women Inclusion within each agency is the idea of Democratic Rep. [Marxine] Waters, a Congressional Black Caucus leader and conferee. According to her amendment to the bill [which passed], ‘Each agency shall take affirmative steps to seek diversity in the workplace of the agency, at all levels of the agency,’ including recruiting,” blah blah blah, historically black colleges, women, minority universities, da da da da da. Here’s the worst part. “Each agency, in turn, is required to report to Congress detailed information describing the actions it took to diversify its staff and contract with minority-owned firms.”

This by definition is not – what is that word? What is that term used in the Constitution? Direct taxation, equally apportioned? This is not equally apportioned. The benefits of the tax certainly aren’t equally apportioned. They’re skewed. It says right in there you shall, meaning the Congress shall, enforce this. How? They will compel financial institutions to make decisions, not based on credit-worthiness, not based on employment, based on race solely. Again, the people that have been masquerading around as the defenders, oh, we’ve got to make everything fair, oh, we just want an equal shot, oh, we ought to make all the races equal. You don’t want to make it – you want to do anything but make it equal. It is a playing field that is tilted to one side. And I suppose, if you are fortunate enough, if that’s how you view fortune, as people giving you things, as having money confiscated from those that earn it stolen from them at the point of the IRS’s gun, and then redistributed to someone else because they happen to have been born in the proper racial category, I suppose that’s fortune. Is it?

Are there millions of people, tens of millions that will accept this? Absolutely. With impunity. And they’ll tell you about it that they’re accepting it. Oh, yeah, I’m taking it. You owe me. I do? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This country owes me. The world owes me. Why? Because once upon a time there were people that looked like me that were locked up, and they were called slaves, and you owe me. So this is the payback here. You know what I would rather? I would just rather the Spike Lee types and all the little foot soldiers that follow him and Marxine Waters and all the rest of them, why don’t you just tell me – I want to spare my children from this ignominious fate. Why don’t you just give me a bill? Give me an amount. What do you want from me? Even though my ancestors weren’t here when that happened, just give me an amount. How much is enough? What do you want? What do you want from me and my family? Give me a bill. I’ll pay it right now. If it’ll shut you up and make you stop pining away to do this to my kids, I’ll give it to you right now. What’s the amount? C’mon, be honest with me, you cowards. You want 50 grand? You need 50 large? Is that what you need? Will that shut you up? Will that make you happy for the rest of your life? Will that make it equal? Will that make it fair?

I mean, this, folks, this is a criminal enterprise here. This is legitimizing racism, consecrating it in law, and in financial law. It’s not eliminating it. It is making it legal to be racist. It is making it legal. It is making it compulsory to make decisions based on race. This is the exact opposite. This is what Martin Luther King, Jr., was talking about? Really? This is what people rode buses and got up from the back seat and went to the front for? Really? Someone pushed people aside at water fountains and those purported, what do you call them, iconic lunch counters, really, for this? Boy, that equality thing is something. Where’s the indignity, is what I want to know? Where’s the indignity from those that this is purportedly designed or made to help? Hmm? “Chris, what do you mean by ‘indignity’?” Why aren’t they saying, get out of my way, sucker, I can do that myself? Where’s the pull up by the bootstraps, frontier rugged individualism mentality? What, that only happens if you happen to be born in the right race? Really? You really want to take that to your grave? You really want to pass that along to your children? Do you really? Seriously?

This is pathetic. And the fact that the Dodd crime family and Frank crime family are participating in this, and they’re being cheered on by a willing sycophantic media and by a White House that’s only too happy to embrace this, is chilling. Oh, but we’re going to give police powers, meaning someone, somewhere, is going to have a gun. And to enforce this, they’re going to use the police state. And let’s see, what am I talking about?

“Still, as insurance, the bill also calls for an audit of Fed” – that’s the Federal Reserve – “‘governance’ to examine, among other things – this is from the bill, ‘the extent to which the current system of appointing Federal Reserve bank directors effectively represents the public without discrimination on the basis of race, creed, color, sex, or national origin.’ More, the bill sets up a data collection system to monitor small business loans for discrimination. Lenders will now be required to report if small business applicants are minority owned.” What if they’re majority owned? Well, get to the back of the line, then, I guess. “And we haven’t even gotten to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” – that’s what Jon Belmont was droning on about – “the huge new bureaucracy whose mission, among other things, will be to ensure that ‘traditionally underserved consumers and communities have access to lending investment and financial services.’”

Where are these communities? Can you show me one? If I go into the most putrid, ghetto-like, Third World-looking neighborhood in the United States, I will still see people driving around in brand new cars. They will have brand new plasma televisions in their not-so-attractive homes. They’ll be walking around, chatting it up on the latest version of the iPhone or the Crackberry or whatever the hell. Where is the disparity?

“The bureau will wield a big stick in the Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity, whose role will be enforcing ‘nondiscriminatory access to credit.’ It will have the power to subpoena witnesses and documents, as well as issue temporary orders requiring banks to cease and desist any practice. They will add to and work with HUD’s and Justice’s own diversity cops. The bureau adds a massive new layer of bureaucracy to the four federal agencies already enforcing fair lending compliance under the onerous [Community Resource Act, that’s the] CRA. Banks will now be under enormous political pressure to bend underwriting rules for protected classes with iffy credit.” So if you thought the first subprime mortgage meltdown, bubble, was bad, oh, just wait’ll you get a load of this one. Good grief, folks.

“The bureau, which is the White House’s baby, will invite ‘experts in fair lending [and] civil rights,’ as well as ‘representatives of communities’ – where have I heard that word, oh, community organizers, right, right, got it – ‘representatives of communities that have been significantly impacted by higher priced mortgage loans’ to sit on a Consumer Advisory Board and consult on policy. A research unit, meanwhile, will solicit data and ‘experiences’ from urban housing activists about consumers in ‘underserved communities.’”

You mean like Detroit? Yeah, let’s look at where all the subprime, Section 8, free money lending got home prices in Detroit, Michigan? What is the average sales price now of a home in Detroit, Michigan? Would you like to take a guess? Oh, this has been tried. We already know where this has been tried. It’s been implemented. I can show you where it’s been tried. Detroit, Michigan, average home sale price $7,000. $7,000. What were those same homes worth around 2000? 135,000? 145? That’s a great job, Obama. That’s a great job, Barney. That’s a great job, Chrissy. Wow.

Your gonna sit there and tell us that this is all being done for the betterment of mankind?
I BEG TO DIFFER, THIS IS NO DIFFERENT THAN ANYOTHER SCAM.....
This is just simple minded folks that think they know more than you do, folks that think they can do whatever the hell they please...and it looks to me that they may be right.
So, the question remains the same it has been since 1776, what are we prepared to do about it?

Everything You Wanted To Know About Constitutional Conventions But Were Afraid To Ask...

This is a special treat today folks, a conversation between Mike Church and Dr. Kevin Gutzman about how to implement a Constitutional Convention to stop our runaway government.



Dr. Kevin Gutzman: We want to have a convention at which we would discuss revision of the Constitution.

Mike: And is this limited to any particular articles? Is it open-ended? How is it convened? How is it conducted? There are a lot of questions that people have out there.

Kevin: Right. Well, what Article 5 says is the states, if 38 of them call it, the Congress will have to convene a convention. And the short answer is, no, the matters that the convention could take up cannot be limited. However, the proposals the convention makes would not be law. That is, they would be only proposals. So just as in 1787 in Philadelphia there was a convention that proposed what supposedly was a federal constitution, so – and then that had to be sent to the states for their separate ratification. So in case a Constitutional Convention made proposed amendments, those would have to be referred to the states for their ratification.

Now, people commonly say, well, you know, they’re just going to – Pelosi will dominate it, and Das Kapital will become the Constitution of America. I think this is really absurd. It’s the kind of scare tactic that people have taken against the idea of constitutional amendment ever since the beginning of the 19th Century. It’s extremely unlikely to the point of a vanishing amount of likelihood that having called for a convention because you were worried that the federal government was grabbing unlimited power for itself, the state legislatures would then turn around and ratify some horrible, centralizing measure that had been proposed by the convention. So myself, I am sanguine about that. And of course what this worry also ignores is, what people who make this argument ignore is that we are going to have Pelosi’s Constitution anyway. We have it right now. [Audio glitch] will do to us whatever it wants and will legislate [glitch] they like. So the idea that there’s going to be some horrible eventuality that Pelosi and Company will get what they want as the result of a process in which we try to amend the Constitution to limit their power, that assumes that they don’t get what they want anyway. Right now they get exactly what they like.

Mike: True.

Kevin: So I don’t know how it could possibly be that having this kind of a convention could make things worse. And just to give you an indication of the extent to which the current constitutional culture in the United States has given centralizers like Pelosi and Obama, that is, people who want the federal government to have authority over everything you do, every minute of your life, how they have gotten what they want through a “we’ll never amend the Constitution to correct what the Congress is doing” attitude among conservatives, let me read for you a little bit of the appendix to Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose.”

Mike: Okay.

Kevin: Milton Friedman was the leading advocate of liberty in American economics in the 20th Century. Now, I myself am not at root a Monitorist. I mean, people who are expert in economics know that he was also the leader of what was called the Monitorist school of economics. And I think he was mistaken at root about that. But the bottom line is Milton Friedman was a very prominent libertarian in the 20th Century, somebody who stood for freedom.

Mike: Right.

Kevin: And he had a bestselling book, coauthored with his wife Rose in I think 1978, called “Free to Choose.” It was a number one bestseller for months and months. And in the appendix to that book, Friedman reprinted the Socialist Party platform of 1928. And the reason why he reprinted the Socialist Party platform of 1928 was to show us that by 1978 we were living with the Socialist Party platform of 1928. That is, every single element of it has been adopted. So plank one in the Socialist Party platform of 1928, “Nationalization of our natural resources, beginning with the coal mines and water sites, particularly of Boulder Dam and Muscle Shoals.” And then in parentheses he says “Boulder Dam, renamed Hoover Dam, and Muscle Shoals are now both federal projects.”

Number two, “A publicly owned giant power system under which the federal government shall cooperate with the states and municipalities in the distribution of electrical energy to the people at cost.” And in parentheses he says, “We’ve made a regional start on this with the Tennessee Valley Authority.” There’s actually more to it now than there was in 1978.

But anyway, number three, “National ownership in democratic management of railroads and other means of transportation and communication.” Parentheses, “Railroad passenger service is completely nationalized through Amtrak. Some freight service is nationalized through Conrail. The FCC controls communications by telephone, telegraph, radio, and television.” And of course what Friedman didn’t know in 1978 was that now the federal government feels free to wiretap millions, literally millions of Americans, without ever identifying them, without ever getting a warrant from any kind of a judge. It’s even more problematic than it was when Friedman wrote this.

Mike: Right.

Kevin: Number four, Socialist Party platform of 1928, “An adequate national program for flood control, flood relief, reforestation, irrigation, and reclamation.” Well, Friedman in parentheses says, “Government expenditures for these purposes are currently in the many billions of dollars.” And of course they’re far greater now than they were when he wrote that. I mean, I could go through the rest of this platform from the Socialist Party of 1928. But my point is, for those of you who think the Constitutional Convention idea is dangerous because we’ll lose the republic that the founding fathers bequeathed us, wake up. We already...

Mike: We lost it.

Kevin: We don’t have the constitutional republic the founding fathers bequeathed us. We are living with 20th-century socialists’ idea of what a central government ought to look like.

Mike: Well, and Dr. Kevin Gutzman with us. It’s our first crack at this. It’s called “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About a Constitutional Convention but Were Afraid to Ask.” I might add a coda to number four, Doc. And that is, that since I live in a flood zone here in Southeast Louisiana, the only place I can buy flood insurance from is from NFIP, National Flood Insurance Program.

Kevin: Right.

Mike: Which has been taken over by the – it’s administered by the federal government. Now, your agent can broker it, but it is backed up by the full faith and credit of Uncle Sucker. Just so you know. So you can count number four in the Socialist Party Platform of 1928 as having been completed, absolutely completely. And just ask anyone in Florida how they get homeowners insurance if they live in Jupiter, Florida or below, and they’re probably going to give you a similar answer.

Kevin: Well, my point, and as I said, I could go on with the...

Mike: Right, I know you could.

Kevin: ...rest of the planks of this. But I omitted the planks about what became Social Security and Medicare and all this kind of stuff. So the bottom line is people commonly object to the idea of a Constitutional Convention by saying, oh, lord, the socialists will get control of the government. Well, you know, have you looked at the Democratic and Republican parties lately? And how do you think they behave? The idea that the federal Constitution is doing what it’s supposed to do, that it’s performing its only function, which is to limit the power of people in federal office, is absurd. You’d have to have been asleep. That you’re going to lose that by having an attempt to rein in the federal government – now, I think that if there were a federal Constitutional Convention, what they should take up should be the way the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause has been interpreted, the way the Commerce Clause has been interpreted, and the notion that the powers of Congress listed in Article I, Section 8 are exhaustive.

So there’s no reason why, if we had a Constitutional Convention, we couldn’t have three amendments saying the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is only procedural. It includes no grants of substantive rights. That the Commerce Clause is only about trade between the states. It has nothing to do with matters that are entirely internal to the states. And of course that’s the way it was intended in the first place, but federal judges and the Congress have completely remade it so that the other day, when Pelosi was asked where do you get authority to tell people who their doctor will be, she laughed because it assumed, you know, the question had underlining it the idea that there was something illegitimate about the way federal officials have been behaving since 1937. Well, of course, as you and I know, there is something illegitimate about the way that federal officials have been behaving since 1937. And the only way to slap some sense into them is to have a Constitutional Convention. That’s it. There’s no other mechanism.

Dr. Kevin Gutzman: When you want to become an attorney, you get a law degree from an accredited law school. And then you take a bar exam. Before you take the bar exam, you take a bar review class, several weeks of cramming to learn everything about being a lawyer that you didn’t learn in law school.

Mike: Right.

Kevin: And when I took the bar review class, getting ready to take the Texas bar exam, I took it from one of the popular national companies that give this kind of a class in states all over the country. When we got to the part of the bar review course in which the instructor was preparing us for the multistate multiple choice section, that is, for the section of the Texas bar exam that was multiple choice and that is given, not only in Texas, but in various other states in the country. She told us, if one of the options you’re given is the Tenth Amendment, you know that that is always wrong. You never choose the option Tenth Amendment on the bar exam because that is always incorrect. In other words, by the time I was taking the bar review class in 1990, everybody knew that Tenth Amendment is never enforced. It is never respected. The principle that the Congress has only the powers that are enumerated in the Constitution is completely absent from, quote/unquote, “constitutional law” these days. So, you know, there’s that.

Mike: This is how we...

Kevin: And then the other possibility, besides calling on the Tenth Amendment to limit the powers of Congress, is nullification. And there are people now who are talking about nullification, which is the idea that the state governments would stand up to the federal government and prevent them from doing something. We’ve seen that tried in American history. You know, the federal government has the weapons, has the army. It’s absurd. There’s no way that nullification is going to work

Mike: So nullification is not going to work. You can’t have...

Kevin: No.

Mike: ...a citizen-led – what Kevin’s question was, could the citizens call the Convention, and you answered no. It has to be called by the legislature.

Kevin: That’s right.

Mike: So then to clarify here – and “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Constitutional Convention but Were Afraid to Ask” with our special guest Dr. Kevin Gutzman here. What is needed is – and I believe there’s only two states left that need to call; right?

Kevin: I don’t know what the current number is.

Mike: There’s 34.

Kevin: I’ve read varying accounts of that.

Mike: Okay. Well, we can get an inventory on that, is to get to 38 states, three quarters of them necessary or needed to call the convention. And then the next question is, before I get back to your phone calls at 1-866-95-PATRIOT, my question, here’s the one that I have. So the state legislatures will then, I would assume, much as Madison and Hamilton were able to convince the various state legislatures and assemblies in 1787 to send delegations, they would then appoint delegations to go meet in a central place, say it’s Kansas City or wherever, and they would hold this convention. Is that how – that’s how you would envision the pragmatic, actual workings of it would take place; correct?

Kevin: Yes. It’s just a carbon copy of the process that yielded the Philadelphia Convention that wrote the Constitution in the first place.

Mike: Okay. So we may need to have a failure, then. We may need to go to Mount Vernon and lose. We may have to go meet in Annapolis in a bar and not accomplish anything other than commit that, okay, we’ve got to go back and redouble our efforts because they tried twice. Well, Maryland and Virginia tried to meet. And then Madison and Hamilton tried to conspire to get it together in Annapolis, and of course they were successful. But unlike Madison and Hamilton, though, let’s set the record straight, too. We learned this in “The Fame of Our Fathers” and learned this in Dr. Guzman’s books and in my movie, “The Spirit of ’76.” The advertised purpose for that convention, Dr. Gutzman, was amending the Articles of Confederation; right?
Kevin: Right.

Mike: And we wound up with an entirely new plan of government. Which we’re not seeking here.

Kevin: Again, the bottom line is, well, of course, in a sense we are seeking an entirely new plan of government. It depends how you want to look at it. If you want to say we like the original frame of the federal government, and we’d like to see it actually implemented, or if you want to say we’d like to have a different government from the one we actually live under, we’d like one that looks more like the one the founders gave us. So I guess you could say it’s new, or you could say it isn’t, whichever way you want to look at it. But, yes, it’s true that in the first place, people like Madison and Hamilton wanted to strengthen the central government. And we’ve had three major episodes in American history when the central government was drastically strengthened. One was when they ratified the federal Constitution. One was at the time of the Civil War and immediately after. And then the third one was the so-called Revolution of 1937, which was really the culmination of things that had been going on for 15 years before that.

So we live today under not the Constitution of 1788, but the Constitution of 1937. And we’ve seen where that’s taken us. We have an absolutely unbridgeable gap between the federal government’s revenue and its obligations. And the gap is growing as people in federal office see that every incentive for them leads to more spending, more borrowing, permanent enserfment of our descendents. I think that’s why this is the first time we need a formal effort drastically to reduce the power of the central government.

Mike: I concur. Curt is in Ohio with a great question, next up here on “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Calling a Constitutional Convention but Were Afraid to Ask.” The time has come, my friends. Curt, how are you?

Curt: Good, sir. How are you?

Mike: Fantastic. What’s your question?

Curt: My question, I think we already answered. Originally my question was, once the convention is convened, I’ve heard rumors that the entire document is at risk at that point, where anything could be amended by the convention. Is that correct?
Kevin: No, the convention can’t amend anything. This is a very important point.

Mike: Okay.

Kevin: The convention would be called to make proposals. But if there were going to be any actual amendment adopted, it would have to be adopted through ratification by the states. So it would take 38 states then to amend. That’s why this idea, this scare idea that people are floating out there, that there’d be a coup d’état, and we’d end up all singing the Marseilles, or May 1st would be our new national holiday because we’d all be wearing red all the time, this is just inaccurate. A convention cannot actually change the Constitution. It can make proposals. So if they came out of the convention with a proposal, you know, let’s get rid of the Congress and have a military government, bang, you’re stuck, that’s not what could happen. All it could do would be make recommendations to the states for their ratification. And again, I think that a Constitutional Convention that grew out of a movement to reassert state governments’ Tenth Amendment rights is highly unlikely then to say we want, you know, Nancy Pelosi to be our queen. That’s just not going to happen.

Mike: Right. And I get this question a lot, too. “You don’t know what you’re – this is dangerous.” But as you pointed out, and I think this needs to be part of the recap that we’re going to post online on our website, you can hopefully help us get it linked up on some other popular sites, that – and this is something that I’d never heard before. But that document that you cited that was in Friedman’s, the appendix to Friedman’s book, how much more evidence or how much more destruction, ignorance, and outright – what’s the word when you violate your oath? I mean, I get calls all the time, Kevin, from “Are they committing treason when they violate their oath, and they do this to the Constitution, and they do that?” And I always say, well, no, they’re not really conspiring with the enemy. They’re not making war with the enemy against us here. But yes, they are violating their oath. And apparently there is no penalty, and Bill Clinton can attest to this, for perjury anymore.

Kevin: Well, he paid a $90,000 fine and was disbarred for five years. So I guess that was some kind of penalty, although of course it was not nearly so stiff a penalty as you or I might have paid if we had been found to have done exactly the same thing as he did. Let me read you a little bit more of this Socialist Party platform of 1928 from the back of Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose.” Plank nine, “A system of health and accident insurance and old-age pensions, as well as unemployment insurance.” So people who say, wow, we’re going to have socialism if we have a Constitutional Convention, plank nine is what they’re voting on in Congress right now. This is what they think they’re empowered to do by the current federal Constitution. In other words, they completely ignore the limitation on the powers of the central government that were supposed to have been created by the Constitution. And they are writing into law the Socialist Party platform of 1928.

Mike: Amazing.

Kevin: The whole thing is going to be what we live with. So people who say, oh, no, we can’t have a Constitutional Convention because it’ll mean the death of our beloved Constitution, signed by Washington and Franklin and Adams and, I mean, and Hamilton and Madison, you’re wrong. That frame of government is long gone. And what we’re talking about here is the question, is there any way to bring it back? Is there any way actually to have a limited decentralized government in which most decision making is done by elected state legislators? And I’m saying the only mechanism that the Constitution provides is the Constitutional Convention. There’s no other way effectively to limit the powers of Congress.


Want to learn more about Dr Kevin R.C. Gutzman(He received his BA, MPAff, and JD from the University of Texas and my MA and PhD in American History from the University of Virginia) and the real facts of the constitution from a real Constitutional Scholar?

I would suggest you read a couple of his books in the matter:
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution...
Who Killed the Constitution?: The Federal Government vs. American Liberty from World War I to Barack Obama...
Virginia's American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776-1840...

Its always refreshing to have a debate and actually have facts to back up your arguement....

I have to thank my good friends Mike and Kevin for this keen insight to the constitution