Okay, this is kind of off-topic, but having just read this court transcript I thought I would share my righteous indignation with the rest of you. First some basics, since we're pursuing careers that will cause us to have to think in legal terms and apply the law to certain issues before us, I thought I'd inform you all of just how unaccountable the law is to us, and how unaccountable the government is to the law.
This is not a "chicken or the egg" situation. The structure of law, power and sovereignty in this country is supposed to work thusly:
First came "We the People". We created the States. States are political entities established by the people to suit particular political needs, i.e., establishing and defining political delineations to claim their rights to exist as a homogenous people.
Next, the states, working through their duly elected legislatures and representatives by the people, created the Constitution of the united States of America. The Constitution is a federal compact whereby the States agree to abdicate a certain portion of their sovereignty to a federal government that is limited, defined, and bound by the express authority bestowed to it by the Constitution.
The federal government is not superior to the states, and the states not superior to the people. The people are the ultimate sources of all power and fundamental sovereigns.
Now, without waxing too loquacious, there was a case in North Carolina where In March of 2003, just prior to the invasion of Iraq, Donald Sullivan, an active duty Lt. Colonel, and Jeffrey Sullivan, his nephew -- an active duty Sp4 -- sued the government to prevent the application of the armed forces in Iraq unless and until the Congress declared war, in keeping with the war powers clauses of the Constitution.
I have provided a copy of this court transcript in .pdf format and the following synopsis with page references if you chose to follow along. If anyone has any reasons for justifying the judge’s opinion then I'd be interested in entertaining such arguments. Such viewpoints notwithstanding, I think we've long passed whatever slippery slope may have taken us down the road to our Republic's demise, and have jumped headlong into a uncontrollable tyranny that has rendered us all it's subjects and thereby at it's mercy.
A hearing for a temporary restraining order was held before the Senior United States District Court Judge James C. Fox. Note: The hearing was scheduled for March 21, 2003, without the knowledge that the war would start on March 20, 2005.
What federal judge Fox said in this transcript should disturb, rile, incite, offend and concern all of us. Our government of, by, and for the people, working on borrowed authority of "we the people", and accountable only to the people, has basically taken on a life of its own and is a run-amok rogue absent any accountability to we, its master.
Sullivan argued in relevant part, “I talked to the Governor; talked to the commander of the National Guard of North Carolina; wrote letters, as you saw in the exhibits, to the Congress asking how we can do this over and over and over without someone standing up and straightening things out. After the phone calls and the letters and no response, not even return phone calls in some cases from the congressional committees, because of the urgency of the case before the court, I went ahead and put the documents together and filed the case…Until the congress can meet and issue a declaration of war to the President, plaintiffs stand by their complaint…Plaintiffs [pray for] a final decision rendered to require the federal government to again obey the tenets of the constitution (page 4-5).
At one point during the hearing, Sullivan admits that when he filed the complaint he did not expect us to be at war so quickly. He says, “I would not ask the court in good conscience to stop hostilities now they’ve begun, but I would ask the court to require the congress to make it right for the future so we don’t make this same mistake again. We’ve been in, as I said in my complaint, 240 different conflicts since 1947, and I can’t identify one of those that was protecting my domestic security or my constitution” (page 20).
Remarkably, at this point, Judge Fox says, on the record, that the President and the Congress have been in collusion violating the war powers for a long time and that this long course of history has changed the constitution. He said, “I think that it has occurred over a long period of time, and consequently, there is less hesitancy on the executive branch to preserve [the Constitution]. It’s just like kids who break a rule the first 200 times and after a while they don’t care; they don’t acknowledge that the rule exists…the course of conduct over a long period of time has advanced that collusion, if you will, between those two branches.” (page 20).
The, Judge Fox, completely on his own initiative, brings up the income tax and offers it as another example of collusion by the President and the Congress that, because it has occurred over a long course of history, has changed the Constitution.
Judge Fox says, “If you were to go back and try to find and review the ratification of the 16th Amendment, which was the internal revenue, income tax, I think if you went back and examined that carefully, you would find that a sufficient number of states never ratified that amendment…And nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that it is part of the constitution of the United States, and I don’t think any court would ever set it aside.
Well, I’ve seen that – I’ve seen somewhere a treatise on that, and I think it was --- I think I’m correct in saying that actually the ratification never really properly occurred…Yet nonetheless, I’m sure no court’s going to say that the 16th Amendment permitting income tax is void for any reason…I think there may be something analogous there vis a vis the continued practice of the Executive to have incursions and police actions or to commit the country to hostilities without the formal declaration of war.” (page 22-24).
Bye bye America.
