We the people are the masters, not the police or the alphabet agencies

We the people are the masters, not the police or the alphabet agencies
Liberals LOVE the Police State




One of the most pervasive falsehoods repeated in American politics today is that “liberals” – progressives, the Left – are for greater personal freedom and less intrusion into our lives while conservatives – the Right – are for less personal freedom and more intrusion.  Your average American, when they envision the sort of person who wants to send in the police to enforce the letter of the law over and against common sense and fairness, thinks of the stereotypical “right-winger” with his crew-cut hairstyle and horn-rimmed glasses, looking ever so much like a high school math teacher from the 1950s gathering signatures for a petition in support of Joe McCarthy.

Yet, this perception is bunkum.  Completely and utterly.

This was demonstrated to us recently in New York City, erstwhile progressive capital of the East Coast, in the tragic case of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old New Yorker who was choked to death by NYPD officers for selling untaxed cigarettes on the streets of Staten Island.  Garner’s death, which was ruled by the medical examiner to be homicide by strangulation, appears to be an open and shut case of excessive police force and brutality.
http://reason.com/blog/2014/07/18/watch-the-nypd-choke-a-guy-to-death-over

As disturbing as Garner’s murder may be, as well as those of hundreds of others each year all across the country at the hands of police officers, the response of New York City’s leadership was even more disturbing.  “The law is the law,” opined Democrat Mayor Bill deBlasio as he affirmed that the city would continue to “strictly enforce” laws like the one that resulted in police strangling Eric Garner to death on a public street.  Standing next to him in the news conference was Bill Bratton, NYPD Chief, who chimed in that people should “correct their behavior,” since that’s what “democracy is all about.”

Sure, Mr. Bratton.  The Founders totally envisioned the constitutional republic that they established to be one where public officials would have free rein to kill citizens extra-judicially for minor infractions of the law.  Not.

Some in the punditry were worried that Bill deBlasio, darling of the far Left, would lose his “progressive cred” over his position of the “law’s the law.”  But those who think so are reading the Left completely wrong.  Not only will deBlasio not lose any “cred” with the radical Left, but he is actually right in line with their big government mentality.  Let’s not forget, after all, that what raised the ire of the law against Eric Garner was the fact that he was selling untaxed cigarettes.  New York’s leviathan was not getting its cut, you see.  And a man’s life is obviously worth less than New York City getting a little extra revenue to spend on handouts and other programs.

Liberals LOVE big government.  We all know this.  The problem with this, as Scott Rasmussenhttp://washingtonexaminer.com/nanny-state-mindset-leads-to-police-brutality/article/2551562 pointed out a few days ago, is that this also means that liberals love the police state.  After all, when you’ve made all of these petty, piddling little laws about everything from trans-fats to Big Gulps to untaxed cigarettes, somebody has to enforce all of those.  The more laws, the more enforcement, the more extent and reach of the police state.  If you build the sort of nanny-state that the far Left envisions, you must guarantee that you will have a police state to back it up.

Let’s think about this for a minute.  Which side of the ideological divide is it that put the laws into place that allowed Homeland Security SWAT teams to invade the private properties of innocent citizens and confiscate their Land Rovers, all because the vehicles didn’t meet stringent EPA guidelines?  Which side makes it possible for government agents to steal your land if an endangered species is found on it?  Which side will close down your restaurant if you accidentally use cooking grease that contains trans-fats?  Which side will fine and imprison you if you refuse to bake a cake for a gay “wedding” that you oppose on personal moral grounds?  Which side will sick the IRS on you if you don’t make the personal choice to buy health insurance, or if you donate money to the “wrong” organization or say the “wrong” thing in a church sermon?  Which side will fine you and throw you in prison for the mere act of saying something against abortion on a public sidewalk?  Which side will fine and imprison you for owning a rifle magazine with one too many bullets in it?

One guess – and it’s not the side that had Reagan and Goldwater on it.  It’s not even the side that has Huckabee and Santorum on it.

Oh, and should liberals want to argue that the drug war is solely the province of the “right wing,” let’s not forget that anti-drug legislation largely originated out of the progressive “improving society through better living” mentality of the early 20th century.  And many liberals today are still as fanatical drug warriors as anyone on the Right – and this is because the drug war is the perfect excuse to make more laws, expand government into more areas, take away more constitutional rights, and raise more revenue (through property forfeiture) for the government.  Liberals love all of that, even despite their recent movement toward loosening up on marijuana.

It is completely and thoroughly unsurprising that all of this is coupled with a complete disregard for the actual words and meaning of the Constitution by those on the Left.  To liberals, the Constitution is an impediment.  This is why they hate that document so much.  Better than 90% of what our federal government currently does and has on the books is patently unconstitutional.  But when you’re a liberal who knows better how to run other peoples’ lives than they themselves do, what is the Constitution?  Just a musty old scrap of paper that keeps you from protecting other people from their own self-destructive impulses to drink 40 ounce sodas and drive vintage Land Rovers.

Unfortunately, this attitude of complete and utter disrespect for the strictures of the Constitution filters down to the jackboots on the ground who have (or maybe I should say “get”?) to enforce all of the thousands upon thousands of pages of federal, state, and local statutes telling us how to conduct our affairs every second of the day.  This goes on for too long, you start getting police officers like this one who openly tell “persons of interest” that since Obama doesn’t follow the Constitution, well, he doesn’t have to either.
http://reason.com/blog/2014/08/07/from-the-mouths-of-thugs-obama-has-decim

Tacitus once wrote, “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.”  Rarely outside of the Holy Scriptures have truer words been written.  Corruption goes hand in hand with left-wing politics.  If this corruption confined itself merely to taking bribes or giving somebody’s brother-in-law a construction project, at least it would be tolerable.  But when it involves corrupt people make corrupt laws to harass, plunder, and subjugate the citizenry of this nation, that’s when we need to push back.

Any law that does not agree with the letter and intent of the Constitution is an invalid law.  The only thing that impels us to obey the myriad of intrusive, unconstitutional laws that the Left makes is the fear of violent punishment – there is no sense of moral right or justice in these laws, nothing that demands we obey them because of their inherent rightness.  The same goes for the overbearing, sledgehammer-to-kill-a-fly approach of the police statists today.  This is much of the reason why there was so much support for Cliven Bundy earlier this year – regardless of the actual legal issue of who could graze what, where, when, and for how much cost, the whole thing very quickly took on the appearance of yet another overbearing, excessive use of force by jackbooted thugs with badges, aiming guns at pregnant women and bragging about how they wanted to shoot down all of the Bundy Ranch protesters.

The response at the Bundy Ranch was the right one.  We the people are the masters, not the police or the alphabet agencies.  We saw that we are not yet so far gone that people won’t stand up to the thugs, even if the threat of armed force is necessary, and put the government in its place.  Likewise also with the near complete rejection of Connecticut’s new law against semi-automatic rifles by the hundreds of thousands of owners of such rifles.  Despite their blustering, the government in Connecticut has thus far had to back down, knowing that there are hundreds of thousands of individuals with the necessary weaponry to defend themselves from unconstitutional tyranny.  We need MORE of this sort of thing, not less.

I doubt it will ever happen, but if there is one thing this country sorely needs, it is for liberty-loving legislators to go through all 50,000+ pages of the federal law code and take a black marker to every law that does not conform to a strict interpretation of the Constitution, and then pass one omnibus bill enacting all of those deletions once and for all.  At the stroke of a pen, liberty would be restored, and the American people would no longer have to worry about things like armed FDA agents (why does the FDA need a SWAT team?) descending on their dairy farms to confiscate and dump their milk because they didn’t pasteurize it.  No more fines for picking up the wrong rock in a National Park.  No more threat of fines and imprisonment for selling food out of your garden to your neighbors.  Like I said, it’ll probably never happen.

But I can dream - until the federal government makes that illegal, too.

By Tim Dunkin


FREEDOM OR ANARCHY,Campaign of Conscience.