Part of me does not understand all the hullabaloo on HR1, the House Bill proposed by Democrats to permanently codify and enable institutional vote fraud. It is the Constitution that establishes who is responsible and has authority over election laws. The Constitution cannot be changed by legislative action, by executive orders or any other actions by a single branch of government. It can only be amended. That process requires passage by both houses of Congress and then ratification by three-quarters of the states.

This is not to say that the federal government has no place in election law or even in the administration of it, only that the federal government’s role is Constitutionally proscribed and cannot be formed by legislative statutory action. State legislatures are Constitutionally charged with establishing and administering election law in their jurisdictions, subject only to uniform rules as to who is entitled to the franchise. Even this, when changed, must pass muster with the ratification process. The last time it was done came in March of 1971 when the Congress approved lowering the voting age to 18. When that was ratified by three-quarters of the states in July of 1971, it became the law of the land. Without that ratification, it would have been a dead letter.

The Congress cannot change the Constitution without ratification by three-quarters of the states. That, of course, would not stop this Congress from doing it and the evil empire our federal authority has become from enforcing it if they got the votes to pass it. Don’t count on Republicans to fight on obvious Constitutional grounds; few national Republicans have the wit or backbone to take their own side in a fight.

I am not collecting outrages here or even suggesting that we can use the Constitution to stop these abuses. Rather, I am pointing out how far we are from Constitutional safe harbor – which is as far from port as the Titanic was when it hit the iceberg. It has been drifting this way for over a century, starting at a trot, then moving to a canter 70 years ago and into a full gallop by the 90’s. Now it is a stampede.

You probably know that the First Amendment requires the separation of Church and State. If so, that is another thing you know that is not so. When the Constitution was ratified, several states had established Churches – and they kept them after ratification. The First Amendment wording that, “Congress shall make no law…” concerning religion was NOT formed to keep church and state separate: it was worded that way to prevent the federal government from ever having jurisdiction over religious matters. In fact, it was the states which had established religions that were most adamant in seeing the amendment passed, specifically so the federal government could never interfere in their arrangement. What we usually call First Amendment cases are actually 14^th Amendment cases – for it was the 14^th Amendment that was eventually used to justify the federal camel poking its nose under the religious tent. The founders intended the First Amendment to have exactly the opposite meaning we have come to think it does in the last century. Don’t believe me? Read the transcripts of the debates from the original Constitutional Convention. I would that you would read them anyway. So many modern thinkers are mere “technicians” who know what the rules are, as currently interpreted, but have no clue of the animating principles behind them – so have no clue what those rules were intended to accomplish or why. Without knowledge of those first principles, one cannot make an honest assessment as to whether the rules are accomplishing what they were supposed to.

Many are worried that the Republic may fall. I say it has already fallen, given its death blow on December 11, 2020, when the Supreme Court refused to even look at the evidence of massive election fraud initiated by Texas and joined by 17 other states. For a very long time, we have been ignoring the Constitution and making it up as we go along. It is all about power and influence. If the Constitution clearly rejects what the left wants, they shamelessly pretend that the Constitution’s language means the opposite of what it clearly says – and are glad to shop around to find a corrupt judge who will go along with the gag.

I long thought that comparisons of America’s decline to the fall of the Roman Empire missed the point. It was the earlier fall of the Roman Republic that was more comparable to our situation. A relatively free Roman Republic was gutted by dictators who kept the forms of free citizenship while gutting those forms of their substance. It concentrated power in an elite few while weakening the nation until it became vulnerable to outside assault – and that is what began the fall of the Roman Empire. We seem to have cut out the middleman now and are trying to accomplish both falls simultaneously. But the truth is, the Republic was on life support for a very long time before the Supreme Court pulled the last plug.

The 10^th Amendment to the Constitution reserves all powers not specifically granted the federal government to the states and to the people. It has been a long time since that has been the case. The federal government treats the states like nuisance branch offices of the monstrous colossus it has become. The Justice Dept. and the FBI have replaced the Ku Klux Klan as the paramilitary arm of Democratic Party. They pay no attention to actual domestic terrorists who set our cities aflame last summer and are seeking to expand their reach this summer. Instead, the “Justice” Dept. is busy defining normal people as domestic terrorists and seeking to make political prisoners of as many as they can – in hopes of intimidating everyone else into shutting up. The CIA is busy taping “woke” promotional ads that focus on critical race theory, identity politics, self-actualization without any discussion of keeping America safe. No matter how depraved you are, the CIA wants you – unless you are so depraved as to actually love and want to defend your country. Jack Ryan need not apply to this CIA.

Yeah, it’s scary stuff. Yet it is time for states to reclaim and re-assert the powers that the feds have usurped from them. It is time for honest Americans to stand up and be counted rather than sit down and shut up. The left is pushing so hard because they know how terribly tenuous their hold on power actually is. They know if they can’t push people into eliminating local police who, however many bad apples there are, constitute your neighbors, and replacing them with bureaucrats from afar who will not hesitate to follow orders to arrest or shoot you, their hold is going to collapse. That is the playbook the German fascists used in the ‘30s – and the gentle German citizens went along until the doom was already upon them. The illegitimate feds seek to purge the military of Christians and conservatives because it will make it so much harder to get the military to shoot on citizens if many soldiers remain who have a sense of patriotic Americanism.

The pagan left’s hold gets ever more tenuous with each day’s new overreaches. We are in a race to see if they can secure their hold on the instruments of power before enough of the folksies get wise and turn on them en masse. In France, a hundred-thousand people, including many top retired generals, have signed a petition urging a military coup against President Emmanuel Macron unless he cracks down on the depravities visited on the nation by Jihadist radicals. The “woke” British Labour Party was crushed in elections last week, losing some seats it had held for over five decades by monster margins.  Even liberal Europe is turning the back of their hands to the sort of theories the pagan left has been peddling – and England, particularly, is often a portent of how America will go a year later. In the last week, Colombia has broken out into civil war, Hamas is trying desperately to light the match on a global war with its attacks on Israel, a hack has left the American East Coast deprived of gasoline, illegal immigrants are surging across the borders in record numbers, unemployment is spiking upwards at the same time that inflation is flaring – and those who occupy federal office and “experts” in American newsrooms are claiming everything is just peachy. These are the same “experts” who, every month of a Republican administration tell us that economic indicators were “unexpectedly” strong while telling us every month during a Democrat administration that those same indicators are “unexpectedly” weak. If your expectations are always wrong, you are not an expert, however much you play one on TV. The pagan left is so furious because they know time is so short and their hold is so tenuous.

Every day more people are figuring out that the communism touted by the pagan left is the same as it has ever been – a formula for unremitting misery and servitude for the general population. People have to figure out that we are not in danger of losing the Republic; we have already lost it. When someone tells me that we must defund the police, I tell them we must defund the federal government, knowing that they are going to like the American Gestapo a LOT less than they do local police. The Republic is dead. Trying to figure out how to tinker around the edges to try to revive it is largely useless. We need a full-scale resurrection – and that can only come by a commitment to Godly principles, a renewed appreciation of the first principles that animated the formation of the American Republic, and a recommitment to both public and private virtue. We must find havens to preserve commitments to faith, family and freedom even as the country crumbles around us. That will require states reclaiming their authority, nullifying unconstitutional edicts from the feds, and breaking free of the federal government if it insists on continuing at breakneck speed toward the cliff. But first we must see clearly where we are in order to see clearly what we must do.

The Titanic was far from port when disaster struck suddenly and comprehensively. We are far from the port of Constitutional liberty. The iceberg looms.

I am focused on assembling the lifeboats.