For a very long period of time we have had an extra-constitutional government, acting unrestrained by what Thomas Jefferson described as “the chains of the Constitution.”
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, our government has engaged in systematic policies of torture, targeted killing, indefinite detention, and mass surveillance. It violated the rule of law, eroded many of our most cherished values, rights and liberties, and made us less free and less safe.
Some of these policies, such as torture and extraordinary rendition, are no longer “officially” condoned. But most other policies—indefinite detention, targeted killing or assassination by drones, trial by military commissions, warrantless arrest and imprisonment without legal counsel, warrantless surveillance, and racial, religious, and other forms of profiling—remain core elements of U.S. national security strategy today.
We have become an invasive leviathan state running out of control, with preemptive, undeclared no-win wars overseas, and a growing police state at home.
Governor Abbott is probably perfectly sincere in his naïve desire for constitutional reform but the totalitarian statists have been eagerly preparing for such a window of opportunity for decades.
See [ Proposed Constitution for the Newstates of America ]
Review your American history. America’s original constitution, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, was ratified during our American Revolution from the tyranny of King George III and secession from the British Empire.
Later the Articles were considered unwieldy and too restrictive of power by certain nationalists who believed in a strong consolidated central government. The plotters organized a special convention to meet in Philadelphia in 1787 under the pretext of amending it. Instead they executed a coup d’état. These nationalists met in secret session behind closed doors, completely threw out the Articles and created a totally different constitution and a new mechanism to legitimize their coup.
A passionate and heated debate over the ratification of the plotter’s Constitution soon resulted between the Federalists (the nationalist supporters of the coup document) and the Anti-Federalists (the opponents of the plotters who supported a decentralized federal republic of explicitly limited power to the general government with most authority residing among sovereign independent states.) They believed that was what our Revolution from Britain had been all about.
In any new constitutional convention as proposed by the governor and others, history could very easily repeat itself. Delegates could easily get control of the convention through spurious/rigged delegate selection process or parliamentary procedure tactics and substitute a new document such as the proposed Constitution for the Newstates of America referred to above. In one bold gesture it would not only be the end of the republic but of any remnant of liberty itself.
We are under the most serious constitutional crisis we have faced since 1861.
We ceased being a decentralized constitutional republic of independent sovereign states in 1865.
We became a National Security State with the enactment of the National Security Act of 1947, which among other draconian measures, created the Central Intelligence Agency.
See [ Supplanting the US Constitution: War, National Emergency and ‘Continuity of Government’ ]
See [ The Deep State: The Unelected Shadow Government Is Here to Stay ]
See [ National Emergencies and the Subjective Prerogative of the Sovereign ]
See [ White House Continuity of Government Plan ] Is this parody or leaked expose?
I believe that two related but seemingly independent efforts of subversion are underway by the statists to impose a fascist government, one openly discussed in the mainstream media – naïve but well-meaning efforts (such as that by the Texas governor) calling for a new constitutional convention (but not how these “reform movements” could be manipulated for totalitarian ends); and the other covert and undiscussed – national emergency planning under executive orders and continuity of government directives.
We had our “Reichstag Fire” on 9/11 and the implementation of COG, the USA PATRIOT Act, and the various Military Commissions Acts and National Defense Authorization Acts, TSA dehumanizing gate-rape at airports, and the widespread use of SWAT teams and the increasing militarization of local police forces, propelling us into planned chaos and engineered insecurity.
Calling a new constitutional convention does not address the most serious constitutional crisis we face – that of the usurpation of power and authority of the public state by the deep state.
Professor of International Law Michael J. Glennon of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University has composed one of the most fascinating and comprehensive studies of what many policy analysts such as Peter Dale Scott are now calling “the public state” and “the deep state.”
The Harvard National Security Journal online article is entitled “National Security and Double Government.” Glennon contrasts the “Madisonian” public state described in the first three Articles of the United States Constitution (and taught in junior high Civics) with that of the covert “Trumanite” National Security State established in 1947 (and rarely known of by anyone outside its inner clandestine corridors).
In many ways he is reaffirming what the great Old Right libertarian Garet Garrett prophetically observed at the creation of this monstrosity. Glennon strips bare any illusions as to where the true source of power lies. His descriptions of the inner workings, motivations, bureaucratic inertia, institutional loyalties, of this “double government” are brilliantly outlined. He conclusively demonstrates that although the transparent public face of power in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches may change with each new presidential administration or rotation in office of elected congressional officials or appointments to the courts, the faceless elite forces shaping national security policy are deeply entrenched, unapproachable, and unaccountable.
This parasitic deep state feeds off its public state host, (and in turn off those hapless tax slaves who sustain both of these ravenous leviathans in our midst). An expanded book-length analysis is also available.
For the past fifteen years the momentum has been building for a deadlier transformation.
3:22 pm on January 10, 2016
