The U.S. Justice Department’s move to file suit against California’s lawmaking and executive acts seeking to discourage or forbid State officials and private sector employers and businesses from cooperating in the enforcement of U.S. laws regulating immigration raises the specter of civil war.

The lawsuit sharpens the issue of state and local obstruction of laws that naturally fall within the jurisdiction of the Federal government, since it is charged with defending the borders, territory and sovereignty of the people of the United States. Over the decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has heard cases in which this fact was argued based on the Congress’ exclusive power to make laws regarding naturalization and commerce with foreign nations. Even the language intended to prevent interference with the slave trade is written in words that plainly assume this Constitutional exception was required to prevent the common sense that must otherwise prevail of the U.S. government’s plenary responsibility for national defense and security.

By its provisions, the Constitution plainly supports this common-sense view. It directs that “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government and shall protect each of them against invasion.” (Article IV, Section 4); but by the same token it prohibits any State to “engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.” (Article I, Section 10). Invasion obviously involves the entry of outside forces into a state. The invasion need not involve armed forces. As I have elsewhere observed, the territory and sovereignty of a nation can be compromised, to the point of loss, by unarmed forces. But this is particularly true of our democratic republican form of constitutional government, framed in light of the principle that the just powers of government derive from the consent of the governed.

Once unarmed invading forces constitute a sufficiently large proportion of the population in a territory, this premise of natural right, explicitly cited in America’s Declaration of Independence, can logically give rise to the demand for participation or even control over the territory thus peacefully seized. This amounts to a kind of theft, putting it at odds with any claim of right, except in case of dire hardship. But people sensible of the inferior conditions of life where they live, may judge hardship by comparison, especially since they act as judges in their own cause.

The proper guard against this form of invasion is to prevent it by properly regulating immigration. This involves, as a first priority, securing the borders that define the territory supposed to be under the nation’s sovereign jurisdiction. And it involves consistently effective enforcement of immigration regulations. For several decades now, these requirements have been honored spasmodically, or else neglected, by the U.S. Government, no matter which wing of the elitist faction’s sham party system was formally in control. That faction appears to be committed to the “open society” delusion promoted by money powers like George Soros.

This delusion presumes the demise of the union that has, since the beginning, been our Constitution’s first aim. That aim was stated plainly in the Preamble’s words “in order to form a more perfect union.” Powerful forces in our day have, equally plainly, abandoned that goal. They seek by every means possible to exploit the vulnerability to dissolution necessarily involved in our effort to forge a nation of nations, making out of many, one. Though they pretend to favor the union of humanity, they obviously believe that the union of humanity sacrificially formed by generations of Americans must die.

If we Americans still care for humanity as God intended it, we should and must strenuously oppose them. Their support for the imperialistic culture of death belies their pretense of loving concern for downtrodden humanity. The barren idolatry of self-will and heedless pleasure they promote with garish visions of this or that pretended future appeals to the human heart’s reflection of God’s love of all creation. But it unsubtly implies what C.S. Lewis foreshadowed when he lamented the abolition of man. It goes further now, inviting credulous souls to surrender themselves to passions that imply the abolition of humanity as such. Even in this they deceive, however. For in their vision of the future, the next stage of evolution looks suspiciously like the past, with its domination by self-idolizing monsters in human form. The oppressive oligarchs of old took it as their pretext for confining the entitlement of humanity to themselves alone.

Their will to return to that age-old nightmare contrasts sharply with the will to respect God’s information of humanity, by which He authorizes us to explore the boundless possibilities of being; yet submit to remain just one of them. We are indeed such stuff as dreams are made on, yet within us dwells the substance that makes reality of dream. It is God’s substance, but also the substance of a human person, Jesus Christ. It fills us with longing for we know not what, and authorizes us to indulge that longing, so long as we depart not altogether from the way of being we are, perforce, supposed to represent.

Because America’s founding generation respected God’s good will toward us, their goal of union did not require the utter sacrifice of individuality; their celebration of individual vision, will and courage did not require disrespectfully abandoning the whole to ruin. It’s ironic that so many of the maryelitist faction minions who promote our nation’s demise profess to see worth in non-Christian paths that weigh things in the universal balance. For they are careless of the balance between infinity and perfection, both which are extremes of God, in which the example of Christ calls human beings to dwell.

God is beyond all bounds and boundaries. Yet in being so, it brings each and everything to its perfection. Between that idea, and the reality we humanly understand, is the difference between shade and shadow, comforting light, respectful of everyone, and the darkness in which all are lost to sight. This is such a balanced vision—philosophic and prudent, but faithful to the wisdom that flows God to God, and thence to us, in unity. It is being rejected, ridiculed and cast away by the very people who have most reveled in its material fruits. Sad but predictable—if only one remembers Christ and the Needle’s eye.

Alan Keyes is a political activist, a prolific writer and a former diplomat.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.