Neal’s Soapbox

James Madison: “The preservation of a free government requires not merely that the metes and bounds which separate each department of power be universally maintained but more especially that neither of them be suffered to overleap the great barrier which defends the rights of the people. The rulers who are guilty of such an encroachment exceed the commission from which they derive their authority and are tyrants. The people who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them and are slaves.”

Just fair warning, this one is a tad bit long, even for me.

My last article garnered a comment from someone I know that proves that I was right when I said that most people couldn’t name even five of the rights protected by the Bill of Rights. This person, who I won’t mention, but who knows who they are, said that I was nuts because we can still exercise all our rights. So I asked them to name five of the rights, just as the article said. The first thing they said was freedom of speech, followed by a long pause. So I prodded, what else? Then they blurted out I plead the fifth. To which I replied, you ought to before you make a bigger fool of yourself than you already have. Of course that didn’t go over too well, but it proved my point that most people CAN’T name the rights which our Founders felt were so important that they listed them individually in the Bill of Rights.

If people aren’t capable of telling you which rights the Founders specifically listed in the first ten amendments to the Constitution, how in the hell are they capable of telling you if they have been infringed upon? On top of that, I don’t think they understand, no matter how many times I have tried to explain it, what the word infringed really means. So let me try and make this as simple as I can.

Okay, say you have a television in your home. You can watch whatever you want, for as many hours a day as you want to, that is your right. Now say someone passes a law which says that you can no longer watch certain channels, or that you can only watch your TV for a certain number of hours every day. Your ability to exercise your right to watch whatever, and for how long, has been limited. That is infringement.

Although watching TV is not a right protected by the Bill of Rights, I think that SHOULD help explain what infringement means. Therefore, as that applies to those rights protected by the Bill of Rights, any law, ordinance, or code which LIMITS a person’s ability to exercise a specific right is an infringement, and has violated the Constitution.

It does not matter if 99.9% of the people support a law which limits, [infringes upon], a person’s ability do exercise one of the unalienable rights protected in the first ten amendments to the Constitution, such a law cannot legally be passed.

I know I have used this quote probably hundreds of times before, but I will keep doing so until you get it. In 1943 the Supreme Court, specifically Justice Robert Jackson, ruled, making it a legal precedent, “The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote’ they depend on the outcome of no elections.”

In his Second Treatise on Civil Government, John Locke argued that our fundamental, or natural rights, predates government, that is they have existed since man first walked the earth and that no form of government may interfere with them. In fact, Locke also argued that any government which does limit a person’s ability to freely exercise their rights loses all legitimacy. Locke wrote his treatise in 1690, long before the thought of independence ever crossed our Founders minds.

It was almost 100 years later that James Madison would write his Memorial and Remonstrance, in which he said, “The preservation of a free government requires not merely that the metes and bounds which separate each department of power be universally maintained but more especially that neither of them be suffered to overleap the great barrier which defends the rights of the people. The rulers who are guilty of such an encroachment exceed the commission from which they derive their authority and are tyrants. The people who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them and are slaves.”

This principle applies to government in general, be it federal, state, or local. Any governmental body which therefore passes any law which limits, in the slightest, a person’s ability to exercise ANY of their rights is therefore tyrannical.

continue article here:

http://www.zombie-slayer.com/neal/?p=932