As Congress gears up for another fight over funding the government, the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, commonly known as ObamaCare, once again takes center stage. In the funding process, only the House of Representatives is authorized to originate bills raising revenue for the government and the House has approved a bill that would fund the general operations of the government, but not ObamaCare. For this bill to become law, the Senate must also pass it and the President must sign what was passed by both houses of Congress. So if the government were to experience another shut down whose fault is it?
Category: Domestic Policy
Freedom in America: Paradise Lost
America was once the freest nation in the history of the world and set the standard for others countries to follow. It has since lost much of the freedom for which the founding cultures sacrificed their lives, fortunes and sacred honor and now America can no longer make this claim.
Evidence of this decline is objectively displayed in the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation’s 2013 Index of Economic Freedom, available at http://www.heritage.org/index/, in which America is ranked tenth behind Denmark out of 177 ranked countries. The index measures ten benchmarks of economic freedom that it defines as the fundamental right of every human to control his or her own labor and property.[1]
What are Gay Rights?
By passing a majority opinion that married same-sex couples are entitled to federal benefits, the Supreme Court has once again stepped outside the realm of original intent in interpreting the Constitution. The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community have always possessed the same rights as every citizen in the United States, hence there is no such thing as “gay rights”.
Freedom in America: The Unifying Idea
The four cultural migrations out of England that established America and left their indelible cultural stamp upon it were as diverse in their ideas about freedom, liberty and social governance as any four groups of Christians could be.[1] In spite of these differences, the descendants or the actual immigrants of the four migrations unified behind Reformed theological ideas to win independence and establish a workable national government that allowed them to preserve their individual ideas about liberty.
Freedom in America: Our Cultural Heritage
From its earliest history, the United States has been identified as the land of freedom. In 1814, Francis Scott Key touted America as the land of the free and the home of the brave in his poem that later became America’s national anthem, but explaining American freedom has been problematic throughout our nation’s history. Freedom and liberty, although not synonymous, are very closely linked and many Americans differ in defining these terms as they apply to America’s brand of freedom and the liberties they think its citizens should possess. Oddly, this battle has been waged long before America obtained its independence.
Continue reading “Freedom in America: Our Cultural Heritage”
Rotten to the Common Core
Common Core, an education program developed with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve academic standards in public schools, will fall far short of its stated objective, but not very far from the tree upon which it grew.
Its promoters tout it to be a “state-led effort to establish a single set of clear educational standards for English-language arts and mathematics…” to provide teachers, parents and students with a set of well defined expectations and “[h]igh standards that are consistent across states…”
Underlying these statements is the proposition public schools are not performing very well or completely failing to educate students to a necessary standard. Based on the fact SAT scores, since 1962, have twice been adjusted downward to artificially depict higher scores among students taking the exam but have continued to decline and national literacy scores continue to decline as a percentage of the United States population it is difficult to refute the dysfunctional public school proposition. Their solution to this very real problem, however, is like putting a gangrene infected band aid on a gangrenous open wound.
America’s Cyprus
While people around the world may be appalled at the actions of the Cyprus government to close their banks and confiscate a portion of certain accounts, many in America claim it “will not happen here.” Perhaps they are correct for at least the immediate future, but far worse was done to Americans in 1933 and it could happen again.
On April 5, 1933, approximately one month after first taking office, Franklin D. Roosevelt commanded, via Executive Order No. 6102, “All persons are hereby required to deliver on or before May 1, 1933, to a Federal reserve bank … all gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates now owned by them or coming into their ownership on or before April 28, 1933[.]”
By his executive order Roosevelt deprived Americans of their property “without due process of law” under the Fifth Amendment. To add injury to insult, he also ordered up to a $10,000 fine or ten years in prison or both for anyone who willfully violated any provision of his executive order.
Constitutional Currency
Very few Americans understand how the Constitution defines “dollars” or the constitutionally delegated monetary powers and prohibitions to Congress and the States. As a result, Americans take many unlawful monetary policies for granted, because they have known nothing different and have not questioned the national government’s authority to do the things it has done.
Every American should question if the government has the authority to emit a legal-tender paper currency irredeemable in silver or gold coin. If they have the authority to seize the people’s gold like the FDR administration did in 1933. If they are authorized to make the notes of private banks obligations of the United States and legal tender or allow private banks, through an administrative agency exercising unlimited discretion, to draw money from the Treasury without specific appropriations made by law.[1]
Religious Freedom
In the entire later half of the 20th century, Christianity has been under attack in America. Some of these attacks have manifested themselves as restrictions on the display of the Ten Commandments in schools and other public places, erecting Christian crosses on public property in memory of lost loved ones, displaying nativity scenes during the Christmas season, or individual public expressions of Christianity such as school teachers giving a “glance at inspirational Bible verses between classes.”[1]
In each case of public displays of Christianity, the alleged law-breakers have the same things in common: they are not Congress, they are not making a law, they are not establishing a religion, and they are not restricting the free exercise of religion. To the contrary, they are all doing exactly what the First Amendment protects their right to do.
Are all Laws Necessary?
If anyone were to take the time to read the Federal Register of Laws, in which all laws passed by Congress are recorded since its first session in 1789, and they read an average of 700 pages per week, it would take them over 25,000 years to read them all. This number becomes even more daunting every two years, since Congress passes an average of 2,000 bills during each session. In light of this impossible task, the old adage “ignorance of the law is no excuse” is completely unreasonable. As a matter of fact, this quantity of laws makes unwitting lawbreakers out of every person living in America. Consequently, to claim all these laws are necessary is either a gross exaggeration or an outright lie, because in many cases Congress has exceeded their constitutional authority in passing them.