Lawless Government

The executive branch was never intended to carry with it so much power. According to Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, the President requires the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate to make treaties, appoint judges to the supreme Court, and appoint all other ambassadors, public ministers and consuls, officers of the United States Government. However, we have Presidents making “agreements” with other nations without ratification by the United States Senate, making recess appointments while the Senate is not in recess, and a whole army of czars with incredible power that are appointed without any oversight by Congress. Regulatory agencies, and other agencies under the executive branch, have been making and modifying law despite the fact that Article I, Section 1 grants all legislative powers to the two Houses of Congress. In violation of the 4th Amendment the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Child Protective Services (CPS) can seize your property (or children) without due process. In the eyes of federal agencies, one is guilty until proven innocent, and fear and threats are the tools they use to ensure they receive the truth they believe to exist. While some members of the citizenry fear we may be headed towards becoming a police state, the reality is that a police state is already in place. The U.S. Constitution was written to create the federal government, and then limit it to the role originally intended by allowing the central government only the authorities expressly granted by the Constitution. The federal government, however, over the last two hundred years, has been seizing power, expanding its scope of influence, and intimidating the States until the several States that are supposed to be sovereign entities have come to obey the powerful government in Washington, D.C., partly out of fear of reprisal, and partly out of fear of not receiving federal funding that was unconstitutionally seized in the first place.

How do you tame a lion that has experienced the taste of human flesh? How can you return evil back into the serpent? Have we let the cat out of the bag for good? And if we have, how long before our system breaks down and returns us to a condition of bondage? Or, perhaps, we are not faced with an impossible situation. Maybe what we have is opportunity. As Charles R. Swindoll once said, “We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.” The appearance of lawless agencies in the American System, and the rash of unconstitutional practices by the federal government, is merely a symptom. Statism yearned to destroy the Constitution the moment the document was signed. Forces conspired against the concept of limited government as it was being designed during convention in 1787. There are always those that seek power, and will destroy any system that guards against the misuse of power, not necessarily because these characters seek the power for themselves, but because they believe in a system that is humanistic in nature. They place their faith not in divine Providence, but in whims of men, and the alleged wisdom of a ruling elite. Jean Jacques Rousseau believed in the existence of a general will. According to Rousseau, the general will is not necessarily expressed by the people, but is presumed to be known only by the ruling elite. The general will, explained Rousseau, controls all aspects of human life, and people refusing to obey the general will must be restrained by the body politic. Rousseau’s perfect system was one built upon a utopian collective in which the people are dissolved into a single unit. To achieve such a system the power structure must abolish decentralization, and remove representative institutions so that the general will may be observed and promoted by the ruling elite. The general will, according to Rousseau, was necessary for the public good. The American politicians are following the same kind of blueprint. Their agenda is based on the philosophy that individualism cannot be trusted, so a collective must be created, and they must be the ones running the system. This is why in recent judicial cases we are seeing judges acting as if they are more interested in making a political statement than upholding the rule of law. The rule of law, which is the United States Constitution, and the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, must be discarded for the statists to achieve their utopian collective. To these people, their agenda comes first, and the opinion of the people, even through the ballot box, means nothing to these ideologues. As a result, the Congress and the vote of the people is becoming irrelevant, and the Executive Branch is gaining power in ways never intended by the Founding Fathers. What we have is the rise of an American Oligarchy, and only State Sovereignty will stop it, if the States are willing to follow through, and stick to their guns. During the 1780s and 1790s, a Scottish political philosopher and historian by the name of Alexander Tytler suggested that lawlessness in government is inevitable, and a part of a cycle that all civilizations encounter. The Tytler Cycle suggests that each system that achieves freedom begins in bondage. The sequence then leads the civilization, not counting bondage, through eight different conditions, before returning the civilization back to bondage. According to Tytler, the cycle lasts about two hundred years. The sequence is a follows:

• Bondage
• Spiritual Faith
• Courage
• Liberty
• Abundance
• Selfishness
• Complacency
• Apathy
• Dependence
• Then back to Bondage

Tytler organized these items in a circle. If the United States is indeed following the Tytler Cycle, then the current condition with lawless agencies, and a government that disregards the United States Constitution, is to be expected. The United States declared independence in 1776, so the time period has already exceeded two hundred years, and our system is likely somewhere between apathy and dependence. Common sense tells us that the Tytler Cycle may very well have some validity. After all, when one is in bondage, do we not cry out to God? Remember, there are no atheists in a foxhole. The Great Awakening prior to the Revolutionary War was America’s move from bondage under the British Empire to Spiritual Faith. That faith led our founders to be courageous, and that courage encouraged them to fight the Revolutionary War, and declare independence. The result was liberty, and in any free society, abundance (or prosperity) always follows liberty. With all of that abundance, however, it is now long before selfishness sets in, be it from expectations of success, or demands of the lower economic classes for their fair share. As their selfish desires are fulfilled, complacency and apathy becomes the norm. With their bellies full, why fight for liberty? Why care about what goes on in government? Why should anyone even notice the creeping incrementalism that is slowly changing the nature of society to one that is dependent upon the government, and ultimately one that leads the sheep back into bondage? We accept lawless agencies and lawless actions by the federal government because we have been too satisfied to care. Our bellies are full, and politics is a problem for someone else to care about. We have too many distractions to worry about to recognize that bondage is on the horizon.