To the unhappy chagrin of the saavy Ivy League pundits who, over the last 60 years, have fashioned through their verbose sophistic commentary and political influence the hardly constitutional tradition of the Office of the U.S President (comprising the ruling influence and authority of "appointed" federal bureaucrats as opposed to one elected chief executive) Article 2, Section 1, of the Constitution of the United States still reads, as it did when first ratified by the 13 Original states, "The executive Power shall be vested in (only) a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice-President chosen for the same Term, be elected..."
Sadly, the last U.S. President who, for a time, actually took this literal text of the U.S. Constitution to heart was Harry S. Truman, the 33rd President following the birth of the American republic in 1789. "The buck stops at my desk," insisted give-em hell Harry, when he accepted the burden of the office after the sudden death of FDR. Yet, the ultimately grave mistake that Truman made during his time in the White House was willing and quite un-constitutional yielding, in 1948, of almost all of his, and only his, elected executive authority, under the Constitution, to congressional fiat in the wake of the 1947 National Security Act, wherein a vicious, almost fascist, covert intelligence organization, the Central intelligence Agency was organized and placed under the direct operational control of the U.S. Military (the Pentagon) to literally check the authority of the U.S. President. In essence, the National Security Act gave the CIA the power to render an unequivocal 'no' to any order issued by a standing U.S. President that the CIA deemed as inappropriate. And the subsequent creation of the National Security Agency, in 1952, expanded, even more so, the national and international jurisdictions of the intelligence community to unilaterally implement its own standards of law above the constitutional authority of the President and, especially, the collective will of the American electorate. Case in point, the blatant refusal of the CIA to back down and cancel its operations when President Trumen, in 1953, refused to go along with planned Operation Ajax, the covert U.S./British overthrow, or coup, of the democratically elected government of Iran, and installment of the Shah as its tyrannical pro-American ruler. Instead of cancelling its preparations for the coup in 1952, the duplicitous agency kept everything intact for the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as President, whom the CIA knew it could rely on to put a de facto stamp of approval on the unconstitutional operation. The same basic thing occurred with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and, most probably, the horrendous tragedies of 9/11. If any of this is doubted by of my readers, I encourage them to read the entire texts of the 1947 National Security Act and the 1952 National Security Agency Act, and their legislative histories, in addition to the histories of the aforementioned debacles.
Those convoluted post-Second World War congressional acts probably, at that time in history, went as unread, and blindly passed, by the great majority of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives as were the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the National Recovery Act of 1933, and the Patriot Act of 2001. These congressional acts were, as Thomas Jefferson said specifically about the Alien and Sedition Acts, as constitutional as a golden calf in the United States Senate. So, after the un-officially official demotion of the U.S. President through the National Security Act of 1947, with its quasi-legal creation of the "Office of the President," (comprising a National Security Advisor, a White house Chief of Staff, and seven-or-more appointed "officers" in addition to the traditional cabinet secretaries), executive decisions, in the enforcement of federal laws, were no longer rendered expressly by the elected President, but, rather, by the executive officers appointed to decide policy for the President. Though the President would publicly announce such decisions, and lead the nation to believe that he had made the decisions in an effort to faithfully enforce the laws passed by Congress, the decisions were 'actually' made by a select circle of specially appointed handlers, with the President having already agreed to abide by their will. This process is much different from that of the executive decision process prior to 1947, where the President, alone, made executive decisions. Even though there were Presidents who illegitimately, and unconstitutionally, used their power for corrupt purposes, the authority to wield executive power officially resided in the "one" elected chief executive and a group of cabinet advisors offering their opinions about policy to the President. What Colonel Edward House was, secretly and unofficially, to President Woodrow Wilson, Karl Rove and Condilezza Rice were, by extra-constitutional interpretation endorsed by U.S. Supreme Court ruling, to George W. Bush. David Axlerod, Rahm Emanuel, and, who knows how many more appointed pundits, constitute the same type of decision mantra for Barack Obama. The American public are led to believe otherwise, but it's basically the same for every Presidential administration.
Popular movies would have you believe that Presidents, such as John Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crissis, made final decisions by themselves in regard to the deployment of military force against other nation-states, such as Cuba. But the National Security Act of 1947 set the historical precedent for a group of "smart" advisors to determine the proper course to follow, and for the President to voice that course as his decision. Unfortunately, this is hardly true. Though the appointed have more power than the elected, there are certain issues which should never be determined only by the Executive branch. As I have opined before in other essays, policy affecting the overall security of the people of the United States, such as a decision to wage nuclear war, should never be decided only by the President," but by a vote-in-council between the three branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial) comprising the President, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Senate Majority Leader, and the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead of appointed pundits determining the appropriate public policy to follow, when crucial decisions must be made, a deciding vote of three of these four constitutionally designated leaders would properly determine the proper course of federal public policy. Similarly, the President, or the "Office of the U.S. President" should not be allowed by Congress to create de jure wars through police actions. Nonetheless, since Congress was basically responsible for the creation of the "Office of the President," through the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, the swaying legislative clout of a few very powerful senators and representatives has, since that time, been the force behind the terrible things that have happened to slowly shred our beloved Constitution.
Who would want to readily admit to the American nation that such a drastic deviation from the text of the U.S. Constitution has actually been an accepted policy of the United States Government since shortly after the Second World War? Especially after a newly elected President has placed his hand on a Bible and sworn to preserve, protect, and defend the same Constitution of the United States that that same elected leader is committed to subversively undermining. Who would want to confess to the people that it's all really a farce?
Take, for instance, Barack Obama, who, since being elected, has followed suit in the further disparagement of the U.S. Constitution by systematically seeking to extend expanded federal power over matters reserved specifically to the states by virtue of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, such as education and health care; and has sorely disgraced the American republic by bowing to a foreign head of state (the King of Saudia Arabia). Moreover, Obama has sought to use the Federal Reserve Act and its unconstitutional creation, the FED, in order to bail-out the private banking cartel, created by the Federal Reserve Act, with billions of tax dollars. He has done his best to follow the example of previous inept Presidents by endorsing the spending of billions of tax dollars every month that the republic does not have, in order to perpetuate U.S. influence over foreign matters which are really none of the nation's concern, such as the proliferation of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which, in all probability, were created as a result of the federal orchestration of the atrocities that occurred on 9/11. To top things off, Mr. Obama has personally spent nearly 2 million dollars in legal fees, of contributed campaign money, to keep out of the American public's purview his long-form birth certificate and other records which might show him not to be a natural born citizen of the United States, and, therefore, an interloper and false president. Obama would like to see the United States republic become like the Federal Republic of Germany, with total control emanating from a central government. He would like to see the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abrogated by a new constitutional convention, which would place all of the states under the direct control of the federal government, thereby making the institutions originally placed by the Framers under the dominion of the states, such as public education, under federal control. If Obama is a constitutional scholar, as he claims to be, his scholarship only extends to the history, and Machiavellian techniques, of perverting the sacred document for purposes of usurpation of executive and legislative power. I doubt whether Obama has a fraction of the knowledge possessed by Woodrow Wilson, who, regretfully, was intimidated into signing the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 into law. After signing it, he stated that he might have done so to the detriment of the nation.
Being Democrat, Republican, or Independent, conservative or liberal, has currently nothing at all to do with being a dedicated American wanting federal and state government based upon the preservation of the sacred principles contained in the U.S. Constitution. Abraham Lincoln, the, supposedly, compassionate President/dictator during the American Civil War, once quipped that, if a small majority of a diverse electorate of people can be convinced that a principle of government is right, even if it is dead wrong and corrupt, the corrupt principle can be lorded over the whole population with impunity. This was how the 14th Amendment to the U.S. constitution, and its equal clause, were ratified, which, in essence, began the evisceration of the 10th Amendment. It seems today that most supposedly educated people in the American republic go about their daily activities thinking that, merely because they have the apparent freedom to buy gas at over-3 dollars per gallon, to get in their cars and drive across the country as far as their money will permit, and to purchase the basic necessities of life (food, shelter, and clothing) at prices 500-or-more percent above what they were in 1950, they are getting the benefit of a government and a political economy run by the electorate. Back in 1912, a U.S. senator by the name of Nelson A. Aldrich, who was responsible for authoring the text of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, while secreted away with a few other conspirators on an island off the Georgia coast during 1910, made a statement just after the FRA's passage that was recorded by only a few people who were listening close enough to hear it. He said smugly, "It's a great victory for the bankers who will benefit gainfully from the tax money used over time to grease the wheels of finance slowed by mistakes in capital judgment. What is even greater is that taxpayers will be made to look forward to yielding their money for our purposes."
A wise person once said that the power to tax is the power to destroy. This bit of common sense makes even more sense when you compare the trillions of dollars that have been collected through the federal income tax since 1913 with the current national debt and the inflation that has been wrought through the Federal Reserve System since the elimination of the gold standard in the 1950s, and silver coinage in the 1970s. Federal income taxation has done nothing more, since 1913, than destroy the balance of finance in this country by making a very few wealthy people even more wealthy, and millions of poor and struggling citizens even poorer and more struggling. As I have said before, inflation only occurs when a unit of exchange is devalued, and presently, the American dollar is worth less than 30 cents, or a fraction of the worth of a dollar in 1945. This inflationary value is, in and of itself, politically contrived, but, for some innane reason, most Americans under the age of 40 think that what they are buying is worth what they are paying. And these supposedly educated people know nothing about the true history of the fall of the American dollar. Just after the turn of the 20th Century, a few pragmatic Machiavellian politicians and bankers, like J.P. Morgan, envisioned a federal system where the states would be controlled through money provided by the federal government through an unapportioned federal income tax. The taxpayers would be conditioned to finance a military-industrial complex geared to imperial international dominion of other nation-states and would look forward to bailing out the federally contrived capitalists who would always gain lucratively from federal investments.
Allowing Mr. Obama to continue the agenda formerly advanced by George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan, while in the guise of Democratic Party politics, will be furthering the destruction of the American republic and its glorious Constitution. Perhaps it's time to listen much more closely to the wisdom espoused by congressional leaders such as U.S. Rep. (TX) Ron Paul, who has a standing resolution in the House of Representatives to abolish the Federal Reserve System and to reinstate the gold standard by restoring to the U.S. Congress its Article 1, Section 8 power to coin money and to determine its value. I would much rather hear an active U.S. citizen asserting the textual constitutional requirement that a President is required to be a natural born citizen of the U.S, than one spouting that a woman has a constitutional right to have, or not have, an abortion. For there are millions of literate Americans who have never read the U.S. Constitution and don't have any idea what their constitutional rights comprise. It is this prevailing ignorance of constitutional fact and law that is allowing Obama, and the many like him, to do their dirty work on the fabric of American government. It is good to remember that fascism does not have to be exerted from the extremism of conservative, or right-wing, political forces in order for its effect, the abrogation of human freedom, to be experienced. A denial of freedom can as easily be felt through extreme liberalism, in applying extreme federal constraint where it should not be applied. I, like Henry David Thoreau, believe that under the type of system espoused by the Framers, and defended by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay in the "Federalist Papers," the federal government is best when it governs least, or as the U.S. Constitution directs it to govern.
In summation, I like to think about the response of the great Benjamin Franklin to a lady who curiously greeted him after he emerged from the Constitutional Convention that had produced the U.S. Constitution. "What have you made in there," she asked. To her question, Franklin replied, "A republic, if you can keep it."
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