This is Not Taught

These days a certain segment in our political arena is hell bent on centralizing more and more power into the federal government. They are using end runs hoping the common citizen does not see it. Misrepresentation of their agenda is also used to prevent the real purpose of their legislation being discovered. The radical left is relying on a few things in order to blind side the mass of Americans: a left leaning news media that routinely skews the news in one direction, an internet controlled by power hungry autocrats, plus a radical left influence making its way into our classrooms.

In order to put more and more centralized control into the hands of the federal government, the afore mentioned groups are able to lie through their smiling teeth as they push more and more legislation that moves control out of the hands of the individual states and you and I into the grimy hands of the central federal government and its vast network of bureaucracies.

In the days of my youth none of this would have been even be remotely possible. Why not? The vast majority of the schools in my generation and for a while there after taught a course called American Government. This course went into the details of how our state and national governments are organized, what they were designed to do and most importantly, what their limits were.

In the courses I had in my junior and senior years at Monroe High School, Fairbanks, AK, we learned how our nation’s founders meticulously crafted the two most powerful documents in the history of America: The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States. We read and studied many of the articles that were printed during those early days that led up to the acceptance of the Constitution. Minute details were hashed over in exquisite detail in a series of articles called the Federalist Papers.

These papers written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison delved into the details about the whys and wherefores of the proposed Constitution. Their writings frequently examined both the pros and the cons.

One of the things that stood out to me in these papers was the fact that the central power that was to be set up over all the states, i.e. the Federal Government, was to be answerable to the individual states and to the people residing in those states. Once the original Constitution was accepted by the various states of the new Union of the United States a process went into effect immediately: the process of Amendment.

Over time two amendments were made to the original Constitution that are extremely important to our current situation: Amendment 9 and Amendment 10.

Amendment 9 states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” What this means is that just because these rights are not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution of the United States, they are retained by the people (you and I) and cannot be denied or infringed upon by either federal or state governments. This infringement is happening almost daily in today’s federal government. The power to shut down an entire national economy by federal mandate is NOT one of the Constitutional powers given to the federal government. Throughout the year long shut down the federal government used fear to enable it to gain more and more power over citizens, their lives, states and the economy at a pace and level never seen before in this country.

Amendment 10 states: “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.” Hmmmmm… seems to me this explicitly says that those powers not specifically given to the United States (the federal government) belong to the individual States and to you and I. The “nor prohibited by it to the States” portion concerns specific actions that the individual states were not allowed to take that would violate the Constitution.

Yet since the early part of the COVID pandemic the federal government has been grabbing more and more power unto itself. It is amazing what the use of fear can make free people submit to! Our individual freedoms were violated day in and day out by the federal government. The authorities of the individual states of the Union were trampled underfoot, and still are.

These things were hardly contested at any level. We were so scared witless by the threat of COVID.

Before you get all bent out of shape over these statements, consider what damage has been done to you and your kids by the shutdowns. Also consider the fact that the reported numbers of deaths attributed to COVID have not been substantiated. I know of several instances where friends of mine and members of their families died of causes that were not in any way shape or form caused by COVID, yet were listed as covid deaths. One in particular, a long-time friend and Navy veteran died in Florida during the covid shut down and his death was listed as being caused by COVID. It was not. He died of heart failure and other medical complications derived from his military service. He never contracted covid. It took his wife almost eight months to get his death certificate corrected.

Hmmm… I wonder how many other deaths were not caused by covid? We may never know.

I also wonder if we will ever be able to regain our control over the federal government. Or, will we become more and more controlled by it? I guess that is something you and I have to deal with.