The Constitution:  
 Blueprint of the Republic 

 

As many people are aware, there are some serious problems taking place within our federal government. Some people are ignoring the problems, others are scared by the problems, others are seizing on tiny portions of one of the problems and arguing that fixing that portion of that problem is obviously a higher priority than doing anything else. Some people are trying to take a bigger view of the whole thing but don't know where to start from. It is the purpose of this essay to try to give you enough background information so that you will know where to start from, and what things might possibly be more important than other things. 

In many respects the best way to do this is to start with an argument by analogy. This has the disadvantage of making the essay longer, but I believe that it is important in order to give people the reasons why certain courses of study can be expected to be more productive than other courses of study. The sad truth is that it is very difficult to be able to paint a true and accurate picture of what somebody really needs to know about how their government operates with sound bite sized chunks of information. It is vitally important that people realize the problems inherent in trying to figure out just what is happening and how to correct it if all they are getting are just 30 second clips of stuff that are basically designed to yield an emotional as opposed to a rational response. 

In order to do that, we will start with examining a problem that is being faced by a government agency and studying how it dealt with that problem in a successful manner. Then we will look at what parts of that solution are applicable to helping us as citizens of this great country solve the problems that we have with the federal government itself. Because in many ways the methods and techniques that were developed by this particular government agency have a much wider application. 

The United States Navy has a problem. 

They have well over 400 ships each of which is a very complex piece of machinery that is absolutely and totally dependent on its propulsion plant to get anywhere. They also have to deal with a very large turnover rate in their personnel, and they have to be sure that the personnel that they have on board assigned to man those propulsion plants can not only operate them under normal working conditions but also what are termed "casualty conditions." 

"Casualty conditions" are essentially those that result from such things as the breakdown of plant equipment, the derangement of plant equipment by battle damage, and in short just about anything that can make machinery go haywire. The Navy has found out from hard past experience, literally paid for in blood, that training personnel to be able to deal with casualty conditions in the propulsion and engineering spaces of ships must be the controlling factor in designing the training curriculums, the classes, and most of the drills that get run for the personnel that are assigned to work in those spaces. 

Given that the Navy has through time developed a lot of institutional expertise in how to deal with this, they have been able to design training curriculum in this regard that are arguably better then those of any other navy in the world. The results of these training programs, applied not only to the men who man the propulsion spaces but also to the rest of the ships' crews as well have been what has enabled crews to save ships that have been so badly damaged that other navies would have given them up for lost and abandoned ship. 

For example, the Stark took 2 Exocet missiles in the chief's quarters immediately adjacent to her missile magazine and had her aluminum superstructure catch fire. The crew saved their ship. The British navy lost ships that had suffered similar damage in the Falklands war. The Samuel B. Rodgers in another incident hit a mine. A six foot long section of her keel disintegrated. The crew was still able to save the ship, and when they got back stateside they were able to maneuver their ship from the floating drydock that they were towed back to the shipyard in to the drydock that they were repaired in at the shipyard under their own power. That is the equivalent of somebody walking unaided from the ambulance to the emergency room in a hospital after having had several lumbar vertebrae ripped out of their spine. 

Now, the whole point of all that was to demonstrate that Naval casualty control and damage control techniques work. The main reason that they work so well is because of the training programs that the Navy has implemented to train their crews how to deal with battle damage and casualty conditions. The Navy has found through hard won experience that they cannot train their personnel to be able to perform at that level unless some very important preconditions have been met. 

The most important of those preconditions is also in some respects the simplest to explain. Each person has to be carefully trained in exactly how each piece of gear that they have to work with functions from the ground up. All the way from the mechanical and physical principles employed in the design of the piece of equipment originally to how each portion of the piece of equipment works with every other in order to get the gear to work, and how all the pieces of equipment assembled into systems react with each other to affect system performance, and how all the systems work, function and interact with each other. In each case, each person becomes familiar enough with each system to be able to diagram the thing out from memory, with all the interaction linkages with other systems noted as well as being able to explain how the entire set of interconnected systems works as a whole. All this is done with respect to the original design drawings of the pieces of equipment and systems in question. 

Now, what does all this have to do with the problems that we are having with the federal government? What possible relevance can this have to dealing with out of control federal agencies, run away levels of national debt, private property forfeiture procedures that resemble those used by Genghis Khan's Mongol Horde and assorted other problems too numerous to mention? 

Quite simply to the extent that the federal government is "broken" or in a "casualty" condition, then it has to be fixed. But, in order to fix what is wrong with the federal government, one has to be able to identify what the specific problems are. Now, quite simply, one can not identify the problems and malfunctions in the federal government in such a way that they can be successfully solved without reference to and a thorough understanding of the original design philosophy and "blueprints" for the federal government. In short, the Constitution for the United States of America and the writings of the Founding Fathers as contained in the Federalist Papers and other appropriate sources. In fact, without that background, you won't even be able to identify what is actually working right from what isn't, and which parts of the system need to be tweaked in what ways in order to fix things. 

In the various Naval training programs there is a term for what happens when you try to deal with casualty control discussion questions, or even try to describe the proper workings of various systems when this sort of background material is not properly understood. It is referred to as a "Loss of Big Picture Accident." Doesn't matter how smart you are, or how well you know some of the other stuff. Once you lose the view of how the whole thing functions together you invariably end up trying to do the wrong things to fix the problem and as a result blow the test. Or in real life break machinery, injure people, kill people or even possibly lose the ship. 

Now, to the extent that people feel that references to the Constitution used in order to figure out just who should be doing what are inappropriate, then they have lost the big picture. Doesn't matter how smart they are, doesn't matter how learned they are or what professional/academic qualifications they hold. If somebody loses the big picture they're going to blow their attempted solution. The big picture in this case can simply not be obtained without a thorough understanding of the Constitution and the design principles that were used to create it. 

Fortunately, this is easy to acquire. For a minimal cost you can go to any good book store, pick up a paperback copy of "THE FEDERALIST PAPERS" published by Mentor books, (ISBN 0-451-62541-2) and read where the people who wrote the Constitution take it apart section by section, sentence by sentence and clause by clause, explaining exactly what they meant and did not mean by what they had written. There is also a sort of companion volume published by Mentor books titled "THE ANTI-FEDERALIST PAPERS", (ISBN 0-451- 62525-0) which is a collection of the speeches and writings of those Founding Fathers who initially opposed the adoption of the Constitution. Taken both together you have not only the design blue prints for the system, but also what amounts to the casualty control manual for the federal government in that just about everything that can go wrong with it is discussed and analyzed, with most of the appropriate corrective actions outlined. 

So, obtain the books, invest the time studying, and then you will know why questions about jurisdiction are paramount. Either that, or ignore my advice and decide that I am wrong without even doing the most basic of studies for yourself. That will leave you attempting to fix something without knowing how what you are fixing is supposed to operate in the first place. The result of that will be to condemn your descendants to living under a nightmare Orwellian government because you lost the big picture. 

Now, it is probable that we may see the problems people are having with the federal government escalate to the point where some sort of revolutionary or civil war breaks out. If that happens it becomes even more important that the design principles the Constitution was based on have been properly taught to as many people as humanly possible. Those people must then continue the ongoing work of educating as many more people as possible regardless of how long or how hard the battles and wars may rage. Once the war has started there will be no way of knowing how many people will survive to see the end of it or who those people will be. And if those people do not know what it was the fighting was for, and do not know what to demand of the government that gets formed when all the dust has settled, then that government will almost certainly be some form of totalitarian dictatorship rather than a viable constitutional republic that guarantees the rights, freedoms and liberties of its citizens. For those who would desire to uphold our present Constitutional Republic must look not to winning the battle, they must look not to winning the war, they must look to winning the peace that follows or it will all have been in vain. 

The most important part of the whole picture takes us back to the very basics of what one has to know in order to be able to live in society with other people. People have to be able to determine what the correct course of action is to take, and for the purposes of fixing your government the answer is that it must be the right or moral course of action. It is vitally important that people be able to identify the moral high ground so that they can be sure in their own minds that the actions that they end up taking are both correct and justified. The need for that was recognized as far back as the first person who ever wrote about the theory and practice of warfare over 2,000 years ago. 
The First Factor is MORAL POSITION. You must operate from such a strong sense of moral justification that even the threat of death will not deter you from your course. You need such a firm sense of moral resolution to overcome the debilitating effects of the inevitable dangers, setbacks and hardships which will accompany any war. For a nation to have this moral strength and resolution, the government must have the support of the people. The people must agree that the reasons for the war are necessary, just and deserving of the utmost sacrifice. Leaders who would wage war without this strong moral justification, and without the support of the people, will find their own power bases quickly crumbling when setbacks and hardships occur. (1)  

That statement is all the more amazing when you consider that the author, Sun Tzu, lived in a time and place when feudal warlords reigned supreme over peasantry who looked upon them as either gods or the direct descendants of gods. Thus, even in a governmental system that was essentially based on the theory of rule by the divine right of kings and the might of the strongest sword arm, and where unlimited numbers of peasants could be executed on the merest whim of the nobility, it was felt that the actions of the rulers had to be moral. If the actions of the rulers were not moral, then the people would simply not support them, and through time their rule would fail as enemies attacked them and their states were weakened by the unwillingness of their own people to support their regime. 

Now with that firmly in mind, we must look at which actions of the government are moral, and what actions the government can take that might legitimize a revolt against it. However, as ideas of morality tend to vary somewhat with which religion is being practiced, the ancient chinese examples are not always that applicable. So, I will move forward in time by about an order of magnitude and we will examine the events that occurred a little over 200 years ago in our own country. Again, we find ourselves dealing with people who were being ruled by what was pretty much a feudal form of government. 
WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. (2)  

While there is a lot of good food for thought in the second paragraph to the Declaration of Independence, for the purposes of this discussion we will limit ourselves to only considering the idea that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. As our country evolved, we fought and won the Revolutionary War, obtaining our independence from the King of England, and then later we exercised our right to institute a new form of government, fashioning it after such principles as seemed best to use at the time. Thus, we come to The Constitution for the United States of America. 

Now, it is very important to note that not all of the Founding Fathers wanted to adopt the Constitution. There were some who saw some serious problems with it, and in retrospect I would guess that one could say that in some cases they hit pretty close to the mark. However, it is important to realize that while the debates were raging throughout the country as to whether or not to adopt the Constitution, the Founding Fathers who wrote it and argued for it, known in general as the Federalists, established the case for its adoption by the American people. In so doing, they laid out as clearly as they possibly could just how this new form of government was to function. They were exceedingly emphatic and explicit about the point that the federal government could only legitimately do that which the Constitution specifically stated it could do and no more. 

Thus, when you see somebody arguing for a strict, literal interpretation of what the Constitution says, you are not dealing with a "wacko." You are dealing with a person who is making exactly the same arguments given by the people who wrote the Constitution to begin with. They are stating that the government needs to be run in the manner in which the people consented to have it run, when they were given a voice in the matter. The people decided then upon the adoption of the Constitution that it was to be interpreted very specifically and very narrowly as the Federalists had argued it would be, as that was the basis it was voted into being on. The people have never formally consented to any other way to interpret the Constitution. And, given that you cannot have a legitimate government without the consent of the people, then that is what has to be the controlling factor in order for the actions that the government takes to be legitimate. 

Now, once the Constitution was adopted, it became the Supreme Law of the Land. Because the Founding Fathers realized that conditions change through time, and they were not wise enough to foresee any and all possible circumstances that might arise, they wrote the Constitution so as to provide mechanisms to change it. There are two and only two valid mechanisms provided in the Constitution that will enable it to be legitimately changed. The amendment process and the potential for the calling of another Constitutional Convention. In any event, nothing in the Constitution, or anything that shows up to succeed the Constitution, has or will have the effect of nullifying any of the theory of government provided by the Declaration of Independence. 

So, even if the people of the United States were to pass a Constitutional amendment stating that the government could deprive people of life, liberty and property at whim without any due process at all, that amendment would still not result in valid law, or actually give the government the authority to legitimately do that. Quite simply, nobody can legitimately, legally and morally step between you and your Creator to strip you of the rights that He endowed you with so long as you are living your life in accordance with His law. That is the essence of the moral high ground in America. The second part that follows from it is that the federal government can only legitimately exercise the powers granted to it in the Constitution. Anything else constitutes rule by fraud and force and has no more moral standing than a protection racket run by organized criminals. 

Now, people may say that's all well and good in theory, but what about treaty law, the UCC, the suspension of the Constitution under the War Powers Act, Executive Orders, declared States of Emergency, Presidential Decision Directives and any one of a number of other different things that have been done to usurp the power of the people in this country? The simple answer is that again it does not matter who says what. It does not matter what the International Monetary Fund or the Federal Reserve decides, or Bhutros Bhutros Ghali in the United Nations says, or depend on how many jack booted grenade throwing submachinegun using baby killing thugs somebody has got to slavishly follow their orders, it does not even depend on the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, or even what Mikhail [deleted] Gorbachev and the international bankers want. NOBODY CAN STEP BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR CREATOR TO LEGALLY, LEGITIMATELY AND MORALLY STRIP YOU OF THE RIGHTS THAT HE ENDOWED YOU WITH AS LONG AS YOU ARE OBEYING HIS LAW. 

Not to say that you might not decide to knuckle under in the face of terror, force and fraud. But that is not the basis of legitimate government, and the government that results has no moral standing. As the Founding Fathers saw it, you would have not only the right but the absolute duty to rebel and throw off such a government. That is the essence of the moral high ground, and the moral check on the power of any government anywhere in the world. However, here in America, we still have the Constitution to finish considering. 

Now, one of the problems that has occasionally cropped up for people today trying to interpret the Constitution is that the Founding Fathers apparently thought that there were some things that were so inherently obvious that they were not worth stating. However, given the passage of time and the long slow work of various different groups of highly intelligent and cunning people seeking to subvert the Constitution, some of those things that the Founding Fathers thought were inherently obvious can only be brought out again by a very careful study of what they had to say and very carefully considering the logical preconditions that would have to hold for what they were talking about to be valid. 

The first thing to realize, is that the Founding Fathers, unlike modern politicians, by and large meant what they said and what they wrote. Many of them had put their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on the line to establish this country, and they were not about to see all that hard work go down the drain for nothing. Thus, my argument earlier that the Declaration of Independence is the governing body of  theory behind how the government should operate. The Founding Fathers thought this was so inherently obvious that they did not appear to say that much about it in the writings that I have had the chance to study. 

The second thing that needs to be brought out is that the Constitution, for all intents and purposes, is essentially a sort of contract or power of attorney written in common law. Therefore, as I will show later, there is no way that the UCC can supersede the common law, for the common law is the basis of the Constitution, which the UCC must remain within the scope of in order to be valid. But be that as it may an argument has been put forward by certain clever and devious people, that treaty law supersedes the Constitution. That is a lie. But in order to understand that you must first understand that one of the properties of the common law, which the Constitution was written in, was that every attempt was made to keep things as logical and consistent as possible. In some respects, the Founding Fathers would have made Mr. Spock from the TV show Star Trek look like an emotional bag of jelly when it came to the logical analysis that they did to ensure that the laws they wrote and the contracts they drafted were consistent with the body of common law that was already in existence up to that point in time. 

The other main feature of the common law that should be brought out is that one of the reasons it was called the common law was because ideally it was held that everybody should be able to read and understand it, thus it would be the body of law that the people could have in common. In this manner everybody could understand their rights, duties and obligations under it. Thus, the idea that the members of the Supreme Court were the only people capable of correctly interpreting the Constitution would literally have been laughed at by the Founding Fathers. They wrote the Constitution very specifically and they wrote it to be understood by everybody. 

So, we now come to an analysis of treaty law under the Constitution. This can only be understood by a very careful and specific analysis of the second paragraph of Article VI, but nothing that I am about to quote or say from here on out should be any mystery to anybody who can simply read and understand English. 
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made under the Authority of the United States, shall be the Supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. (3) 

Now, the sort of analysis that I am about to do is exactly the same sort of analysis of what the Constitution means that you will see used by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay in THE FEDERALIST PAPERS where they explain exactly what they meant by each and every section, sentence and clause of the Constitution. The first thing that you will notice is that this entire paragraph is one long sentence. It is broken up into three clauses by semicolons. Within those clauses are some very important qualifiers without which the meaning of the sentence can not be properly understood and would not yield a logically consistent meaning. And everything that the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution was intended to have such a logically consistent meaning when compared with every other part of the Constitution. 

The first clause is: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof;". The important thing to note here is that this clause and those which follow then specifically do NOT refer to laws which might be passed outside the scope of the Constitution and that therefore would not have been "made in Pursuance thereof". 

The second clause is "and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land;". Quick question, what does it mean to make a treaty under the authority of the United States? For the Founding Fathers, this was a no brainer. The treaty had to cover subjects within the specific scope of the powers granted to the Federal government by the Constitution. Otherwise the treaty would not be "under the Authority of the United States." This is logical, consistent with both common sense and standard English usage, and to suppose otherwise would involve serious convolutions of not only logic but just the simple meaning of the actual words themselves. 

The third clause is where some lawyers have a field day, because they think they can trick you into believing that the words as written do not actually say what they mean. However, when we take it apart, we will find that to interpret them any other way but that in which the Founding Fathers obviously intended is to violate both the rules of logic and common English usage. The third clause reads, "and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." Now, is the third clause talking about the national level government or about the State level governments? If you look carefully at the third clause you will see that it applies only to State level governments. Thus, as opposed to referring to "This Constitution", which is the terminology used by the Founding Fathers when they are referring to the Constitution for the United States of America, they referred to "the Constitution or Laws of any State." What does that mean? THAT MEANS THAT THEY ARE SPECIFICALLY REFERRING TO THE CONSTITUTIONS OF THE STATE LEVEL GOVERNMENTS! Does this make sense? 

I think that anybody who looks at that carefully will realize that it can not possibly make any logical sense, or even be in keeping with the rules of common English usage any other way. Observe the location of the commas within that clause. The words "any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding" is all one phrase located within a clause that starts out with a specific reference to State level officials! Therefore, to assume that somehow they are talking about the Constitution for the United States, which heretofore throughout the entire text was referred to as "this Constitution", and then somehow it ended up with no specific reference in a phrase located within a clause dealing with State level officials and laws worded such that it could apply to any State, "the Constitution or Laws of any State" is absurd. 

Now, observe that if the Federal government passes a treaty which is within the Authority granted to it by the Constitution for the United States of America, under the interpretation that I have advanced the terms of that treaty would be binding on the several States, and could potentially supersede portions of State Constitutions. Does that make sense? Yes, because it was one of the major design functions of the United States government to handle treaty making and foreign affairs. If the State level governments could nullify the treaties that the Federal government had entered into by changing their Constitutions, then the treaty making power, and hence one of the major reasons for having a federal government would be voided. The Federalists wanted to vest the treaty making power in the Federal government because otherwise they were afraid of the foreign relations nightmare that would ensue from each individual State negotiating separate treaties with foreign governments. They felt the result of that would be chaos. I think that even a moment's reflection would lead one to believe that there is a great deal of sense to that argument, and this was one of the reasons that the Federalists eventually carried the day. 

Now, if we interpret that the other way, that treaties which would be made under the Authority of, or in other words in accordance with, the United States Constitution then superseded the very Constitution whose Authority they were made under, we have what would be a logical absurdity. So, when somebody tells you that the Constitution for the United States doesn't matter anymore because the government ratified the United Nations treaty or some sort of trade agreement or covenant on something or other, you now should know that they are full of manure. Plain and simple, there is no other way to analyze it. That line of argumentation is only being put forward by people who are trying to deceive others as to the very nature of our government, usually for their own gain, but sometimes these days merely due to sheer ignorance as well. 

Will that sort of deception work? Only if enough people come to believe that they are not intelligent enough to figure out what a document written in plain English and designed to be interpreted by the entire body politic actually means. How could that happen? If enough people are told that only lawyers and Supreme Court Justices are capable of interpreting it because the Constitution is a "living" document whose meaning changes over time, and then actually come to believe that garbage, then they might find themselves deceived into going along with almost anything. Would that make the resultant treaties, laws, trade agreements, covenants on whatever and other assorted cattle droppings valid? NO, because the deception and fraud perpetrated upon the people to get them to go along with that effectively nullify their alleged consent to be governed that way. 

In the final analysis, we will either have the rule of law in this country, or the rule of force, terror and fraud. The one forms the legitimate basis for a stable and viable constitutional republic. The other forms the basis for a tyrannical dictatorship, and a form of government that you have not only the right but the absolute duty to rebel against. 

However, I do not see how this sort of argument can be presented in sound bites and still have any hope of convincing intelligent and independent minded people that some of the things they might think are true about the way their government operates are actually only a calculated fraud being perpetrated upon the body politic. The only way to actually figure out the real story is to go back to the most basic principles and work your way forward from there. It's actually not that difficult, and was never intended to be difficult, but it has been the sort of knowledge which has been repressed in this country because the powers that be are afraid that the people will wake up one day. Once the people wake up and realize what is going on they will try to take their country back. And there isn't a thing that the powers that be can do either legally, morally or ethically to stop the people from reclaiming their country under the legitimate rule of law in a Constitutional Republic which guarantees the rights, freedoms and liberties of all of its citizens. 

- Michael E. Johnson Spokesman, 
North Central Florida Regional Militia 
This essay is part of a larger work in progress. Therefore the author retains any and all copyrights. However, the author does grant permission for people to copy and redistribute this essay by any means that they see fit as long as it is used for educational purposes only and and its authorship is properly attributed. 

Notes 
 
(1) Sun Tzu, MANUAL FOR WAR, translated and edited by T.W. Kuo,
Atli Press, 1989, ISBN 0-910169-02-0, p. 18.
This is the best translation I have run across and I recommend it highly 
(2) Declaration Of Independence, second paragraph. 
(3) United States Constitution, Article VI, second paragraph 
 

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HTML March 17, 1997