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"The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and for
people, equally in war and peace, and it covers with its shield of protection
all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine
involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of men
that any of its great provisions can be suspended during any of the great
exigencies of government."
- Ex Parte Milligan (1866)
The above statement was made by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1866 in the
context of its ruling that the Lincoln administration's suspension of Habeas
Corpus was unconstitutional. As long as the civil courts were operating
(which they were), the Court ruled, it is unconstitutional for either the
president or the Congress to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus. What
this statement says is that it is precisely in times of national emergencies,
such as war, that civil liberties must be most jealously protected. If not,
then governments will be encouraged to generate crises, or perceptions of
crises, in order to grab more power for themselves by diminishing individual
liberty.
This profound truth gives the lie to the notion that one can be an
advocate and supporter of the American state's unconstitutional and
aggressive wars on the one hand, and a "constitutionalist" on the
other. War is the enemy of constitutional liberty. The current poster boy for
this contradictory outlook is the radio talking head Marc Levin ("The
Grate One," as Lew Rockwell calls him) who bloviates endlessly about how
devoted he supposedly is to the Constitution while aggressively supporting
the neocon agenda of endless war in the Middle East and elsewhere - and all
of the accompanying assaults on civil liberties at home. So as not to appear
to be sexist, I should also point out that Congresswoman Michele Bachman is
the current poster girl for this position, claiming that of all the
candidates for the Republican presidential nomination she is the most devoted
to the Constitution, while rabidly supporting the never-ending expansion of
the warfare state.
Neocons like Levin, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh who now fancy
themselves as constitutionalists since there is a Democrat in the White House
are hypocrites of the first order. All during the eight years of the Bush
regime their standard response to anyone who would object to the PATRIOT Act
and myriad other attacks on constitutional liberty was to proclaim that
"9/11 changed everything." Translation: the hell with the
constitution; we're engaged in a never-ending "war on terra," as
George W. Bush called it. We need to destroy our constitutional liberties in
order to protect our constitutional liberties, they told us. It is the hatred
of those liberties by people in the Middle East that caused the terrorists to
attack us on 9/11, they ludicrously proclaimed (and still do).
War is not just "the health of the state," as Randolph Bourne
sagely stated in his famous essay of that title; it is the health of unlimited
and unconstitutional government. Governmental powers always ratchet up
during wartime at the expense of constitutional liberty (and prosperity)
despite the fact that every federal politician, and every soldier, takes an
oath to do the opposite - to defend the Constitution. This notorious
"ratchet effect" is described in great detail in Robert Higgs's
classic book, Crisis
and Leviathan.
The Lincoln administration set the template for tactic of using war as an
excuse to destroy constitutional liberties. Lincoln illegally suspended
Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political
dissenters without due process; shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers
in the Northern states; deported a political opponent, Congressman Clement L.
Vallandigham of Ohio; confiscated firearms in the border states; illegally
created the state of West Virginia out of Northwestern Virginia; and much
more. Indeed, Lincoln's invasion of the Southern states was the very
definition of treason under Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution which
reads: "Treason" against the United States, shall consist only in
levying War against them, or in adhering to their
Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort" (emphasis added). The founders
were careful to always speak of "the United States" in the plural
in all of the founding documents. That's why the constitution's definition of
treason refers to "them" and "their." A central government
that wages war against the free and independent states (the language
of the Declaration of Independence) is guilty of treason. That of course is
precisely what Lincoln did. (He always insisted that the Southern states
never legally seceded, were never a legitimately separate country, and were
always a part of the U.S.).
Ever since Lincoln's day, tyrant after tyrant has invoked the myth of
"Father Abraham" to "justify" the destruction of civil
liberties in wartime. Woodrow Wilson did it when he imprisoned dissenters to
the First World War (including people imprisoned for reading the Bill of
Rights in public); the Roosevelt administration did it when it sent
third-generation Japanese-Americans to concentration camps; and of course
today's neocons, who run the Republican Party, rarely ever make a speech
about anything without claiming that "Father Abraham" would agree
with their political agenda if he were alive today. For example, In a
September 7, 2006 Wall Street Journal article Newt Gingrich advocated
a military invasion and occupation of Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and
North Korea and titled the article "Lincoln and Bush." Even the
former dictator of Pakistan quoted Abe Lincoln as "justification"
for imposing martial law in his country several years ago.
The big money people of the Republican Party even funded a think tank -
the Claremont Institute - to do almost nothing but perpetuate the myths and
superstitions about Lincoln as a means of "justifying" whatever the
Republican Party wants to do. The Claremont Institute has indoctrinated
hundreds of "Lincoln fellows," who are mostly Republican
congressional staffers, executive branch political appointees, and tabloid
propagandists from such places as The Weekly Standard, with the
Lincoln myths, which the Institute hopes will be inserted into political
speeches. Their apparent purpose is to censor all criticism of the GOP's
policy proposals. If you oppose them, why, you must be a Neo-Confederate
slavery defender! Ken Masugi of the Claremont Institute even took a leave of
absence to become a speech writer for the disgraced former U.S. Attorney
General Alberto Gonzalez. Masugi's insertion of Lincolnite political
boilerplate into Gonzalez's speeches failed to save him as he was forced to
resign.
Like all the other neocons at the Claremont Institute, Masugi claims to be
a self-appointed guardian of The Official Truth about the Constitution, even
though he defends the unjust and tyranical imprisonment of his own people -
Japanese Americans - by FDR during World War II. As Lincoln might have said,
if that was not unconstitutional, then nothing is unconstitutional.
The phony neocon "constitutionalists" in the Bush
administration, with the support of the Claremont Institute, AEI, Heritage
foundation, and all the neocon talking heads on radio and television, waged
war on the U.S. Constitution. The Congress gave President Bush the power to
declare martial law; Bush claimed to have unconstitutional powers of
"the unitary executive," as though there was only one branch of
government; the so-called PATRIOT Act allows the government to declare that
almost anyone who protests government actions as an "enemy
combatant" who has no constitutional rights; allows warrantless
wiretapping; proclaimed that the Bush administration was exempt from the
Geneva Convention; permits the government to order individuals and financial
institutions to turn over to it private financial information, travel
itineraries, email and phone records, and more; and imposes prison sentences
for anyone who reveals that such snooping has taken place; and abolishes the
traditional lawyer-client privilege for anyone accused of being an
"enemy combatant."
The neocons have called for a Nazi-style national ID card, and supported
journalist Michele Malkin's book, In
Defense of Internment, in which she advocated the rounding up and
imprisonment of Muslim-Americans, similar to FDR's Japanese-American
concentration camps. (Like a good neocon, she cites Lincoln as her
"authority").
War is the enemy of constitutional liberty and also of prosperity. It is
impossible to support the American regime's unconstitutional and aggressive
wars and be devoted to the Constitution at the same time.
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