A WEEKLY COMMENTARY
Year Twnety-Nine ... Number Ten ... March 5, 1982
THE SEPARATION SYNDROME
In many of our public gatherings, we often pledge ourselves to the proposition that this is a Republic and "one Nation under God." As a people, we have deceived ourselves on both counts. This is no longer a Republic according to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution of the United States, which supposedly remains the "Law of the Land." We have become a Democracy and since democracies cannot long exist, we are fast becoming a Socialist Welfare State, and are well on the way toward becoming a North American Administrative Region in a Socialist World Government. We still give lip service to the phrase "one Nation under God," but it has become meaningless to the majority, thanks to our politicians, the media, the state schools, and the institutional churches. Although it is not always recognized by its court-established name, Secular Humanism has become our state religion in these United States. And since it has become so well established, there has been a constant hullabaloo about a perverted and misunderstood doctrine called "The Separation of Church and State." It is never levelled at Humanism, of course; the humanists and those they have been able to deceive promote the idea. And it's levelled against the Christians who take any active part in the affairs of government and society. But while this wholly unconstitutional slogan is being bruited and ballyhooed throughout the land, there is another wholly Constitutional doctrine which is seldom, if ever, mentioned seriously. It has to do with Separation of Powers in our govermental structure. The Constitution has it all worked out in detail and it was splendidly successful so long as we had a Constitutionally ordained Republic -- which wasn't for very long. However, since the Constitution, even as the Holy Bible from which it derives its authority as the Law of the Land, is ignored, rejected, misinterpreted; let us pause and consider some important facts which should be brought to the people's attention, facts which lie at the root of our national social, political, fiscal and economic distress.
First, any Christian American should realize, with a certain sickness of heart, that those little gummed stickers that we see on so many patriotically-inspired papers and envelopes are no longer true. There little stickers insist that this is a Republic, and that we should keep it that way. Too little and too late. We became a Democracy some years ago, and since democracies are merely here today and gone tomorrow, we are now a Regional Socialist Welfare State, and are headed toward becoming an Administrative Region in a Socialist One World Government.
We were not really surprised to read in the 1981 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary that a republic is defined as "any political order that is not a monarchy." The second definition: "A constitutional form of government, especially a democratic one." Webster and most other standard dictionaries now agree with these definitions. But this is not at all what our Founding Fathers meant when they said we had a Republic. Nor is it what the Constitution means when it says that every State shall be guaranteed a Republican form of government. As the term was understood by the authors of our Constitution, a Republican form of government is a state headed by a president or governor who is elected by a qualified electorate. That word "qualified" makes most of the difference that separated a Republic from a Democracy. A Democracy means a rule by the majority; which sounds okay until we realize that a majority of the voters are tax-consumers rather than tax-payers. Tax-consumers rank from a Rockefeller to the meanest welfare recipient, and they greatly outnumber the hard-working, tax-paying producers. And, just as honest statesmen have said ever since the word was introduced into the English language, any democracy is bound to destroy itself because when tax-consumers voting as a majority, write and pass laws which force the producing individuals to share the wealth we get into the situation in which we find ourselves today. And when the politicians, in order to get more votes, spend more money than the government can collect through honest revenue, they resort to counterfeiting. Aided by a Central Banking System that is happy to comply, the printing presses begin to turn out more and more supposed wealth whose value the people are not supposed to question. This is what is bound to happen when an unqualified electorate is allowed to vote.
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PRAYER IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
DOES GOD REALLY WANT IT?
There is a cherished myth that when our fathers were children, they went to public schools, and that the public schools always had a ritual of reading from the Bible or a morning prayer of some kind. The myth further contends that this ritual was the dam holding back the flood of evil in the schools and among the younger generation, and that its removal by the Supreme Court opened the floodates. The conclusion of the myth is that the restoration of the ritual by Constitutional amendment will banish evil once again from our schools and from their students...
But ... two years before the Supreme Court decision [only] 8% of all public schools in the Midwest had Bible reading and [only] 6% had full-on "devotional" homeroom exercises. Percentages for the West Coast were even lower. That meant that at least 82% of students in the fifties were unprotected against evil! We have reason to hope that parents sometimes made up for this "deficiency." But the cause of the decline is a complicated one, and the repeal of classroom religious exercise was only a symptom.
But do we want the ritual back? Prayer is either in the name of Christ or it isn't. Public school prayer in the name of Christ would require a drastic change in the Constitution and in the beliefs of most people regarding the relationship between government and religion. And the 'name of Christ' is no gaurantee of orthodoxy. The Gallup Poll showed that about 25% of the American people believe that Christ is fully God and fully man; 53% take the Arian views that He is the Son of God, but not God the Son.
And "neutral" prayer? If I were the devil, I could think of no more effective way to convince a generation of school children that it really doesn't matter what you believe about God. After all, aren't Christian, Jew, Muslim and Hindu together in that classroom? Worse than that -- all the legal barriers against chanting or Transcendental Meditation in the schools, which we have struggled so hard to defend, will be laid to rest. Why can people not see this?
First, many parents are looking to public school to make up for their own failures. Since the public schools have failed, many have diverted their children to more consistently Christian schools. If the ritual is restored in the public schools, will these Christian schools be emptied? If so, the people have misunderstood the issue. The issue is learning all things under the Word of God. The issue is not a matter of rituals ...
(Howard F. Ahmanson in "Chalcedon Report", March, 1982 P.O. Box 158, California 95251 U.S.A.)
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That's why our Founding Fathers were so very careful about voters being qualified to vote. The States already had their own laws. In many of the States only confessing Christians were allowed to vote. In other States, ownership of real property was a qualification for the franchise. James Madison, known as the "father of our Constitution," was very firm on this latter qualification, said if people without property were allowed to vote, this would eventually lead to an abolition of private property by the nonproperty owners. Which is a good way of defining Socialism-Communism. But the Constitution is not specific in the matter of voter qualifications, because there was the matter of States Rights, and the States were handling the situation by themselves. Also, the only federal officials for which the people were to have a direct vote were the Members of the House of Representatives. The electorate had no direct voice in the election of Presidents and Senators. That's what made ours a Republic, not a Democracy. However, as time passed things began to change. First, the Electoral College, supposedly an independent nonpartisan group of respected citizens, were to vote for a President and a Vice-President. But almost from the very beginning, this was taken over by political parties. Now we vote for a group of electors selected by party bosses. The electors, in their turn will meet and vote, not according to their conscience or knowledge of the nominee, but according to the dictates of their political bosses. Then we the electorate every four years vote for a group of selected party pigeons, under the quaint assumption that we are voting for a President. Later on, there came another step toward Democracy. Instead of Governors and State Legislatures selecting two United States Senators who would represent their State for the next six years, a direct vote of the people was instituted. Right after the Federal Reserve Act and the Income Tax Amendment, came the 17th Amendment, providing that the people should vote directly for their Senators. This destroyed the very important House of the States, and converted the Senate into just another House of the People; another giant step toward total Democracy. Still later, it was decided that the States could no longer be trusted to decide who could, or who couldn't be qualified to vote in any election. The Democratic ideal of "one man, one vote" became the law. That's when the non-consumers became the majority and the distribution of wealth in accordance with the doctrines of Democracy, and Socialism, really began. It was all spelled out in The Great Society policies that had been written by a Fabian Socialist and adopted by a Democrat who came to power by virtue of a President having been murdered.
So much for the manner in which our Constitutional Republic became a Democracy. The story of the destruction of our Constitutionally demanded Separation of Power is equally important. We have seen this terminal illness of our Nation develop in our own lifetimes. Article I of the Constitution declares that the Congress -- the exclusive Legislative Branch of our federal government -- shall have certain specific and limited powers. But these powers were to be separated, divided between the Senate and the House so they could check each other. The Representatives were to serve but two years. That was designed to make them more responsive to the electorate. And, because they were responsible directly to the people, only the Representatives could initiate laws dealing with taxes or the spending of tax money. The Senators, serving for a period of six years, where to have their own specific duties and limitations; and both the Senate and House could check each other, and be checked by the President through the veto power. These checks and balances were essential in the Constitutional Separation of Powers. Also most important and now ignored: The Congress, and only the Congress, has the power to pass laws, and the Congress, not the Treasury, the IRS not any other administrative or independent agency; only "The Congress shall have Power To Lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, and to pay the Debts and Provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States;" also "to coin Money (and) regulate the value thereof." This means it is thoroughly unconstitutional for the IRS or any executive agency to collect taxes, or for any of the federal agencies in the Ten Federal Regions to have anything to do with the dispensing of welfare funds, revenue sharing, or other matters dealing with the spending of federal tax money. Only Congress has such power, and it has no power to turn over such duties to the Executive branch of government.
The Executive branch of government is made up of the President, Vice President and the necessary staff. Their power is limited to administrative functions. Making new laws through Executive Orders and Presidential Proclamations is a violation of the Separation of Powers. As an interesting sidelight to this subject, it was President John Kennedy speaking at Columbia University, who said: "The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the Americans' freedom, and before I leave office I must inform the citizen of his plight." Ten days later he was assassinated.
Article 3 of the constitution defines the powers and limitatons of the judicial branch of government. Here is where we could wish, as did Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, that the Constitution could have been more detailed in limitations upon the judiciary. But it is specific in stating that its power shall extend to "all Cases in Law and Equity arising under this Constitution." There is no power to make laws, or to impose regulations such as school bussing, or tell city governments how they shall elect their officials.
Another most important Separation of Power has to do with those powers that have been taken from the States by all three branches of the federal government. The framers of the Constitution established a fundamental check on the exercise of governmental power, and at the same time protected the rights of State, County and Local governments. The right of such local governments was further reinforced against the threat of expanding central power by the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." In unlawful disobedience to this Constitutional prohibition the Central Government has erected a system of Ten Regional Councils which are designed to establish centralized control over the legislative, administrative and judicial branches of State governments, and to assume control over all of the activities and duties of County and Local governments. This regional control is, in fact, a fourth branch of the federal government. And it constitutes one further unconstitutional step leading from an already failing Democratic system toward a Socialist-Welfare system which can end only in a totalitarian system "to prevent total collapse of society."
It was President John Adams who remarked that "Our Constitution was made only for a moral, religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Since our answer to our national dilemma involves restoration of the Constitution, and repeal of all unconstitutional laws, and if Adams was right, then it must be the moral, Christian people who must do the job.
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