Constitution Day, which falls on September 17, is the national observance holiday that most Americans have never heard of. Yet this year, 2022, it may well be our most important holiday to understand, for almost all our most pressing national problems today are a result of corruption and departure from governance and law enforcement consistent with the Constitution. As a result, our country is threatened more now than at any time since seven southern states seceded from the Union and Civil War broke out on April 12, 1861.

To understand the present peril, it is worth going back in time to appreciate how the Constitution was conceived as both the founding and governing instrument for the United States government.

The War of Independence lasted five long years from 1776 to 1781, with the impoverished, underfunded, underequipped, and undertrained Continental army being mostly on the defensive. It was a miracle that this relatively small American militia could defeat Great Britain -- then the most formidable military power in the world.

The second miracle in forming the United States was the drafting of the Constitution some six years after the final and decisive military victory over the British at Yorktown in 1781. By contemporary standards, it is inconceivable how delegates from thirteen extraordinarily disparate states could muster the forbearance and magnanimity to agree on the terms of a new Constitution after only four months of deliberation. With God’s help they accomplished the impossible.

As good as that Constitution was, it had to be ratified by the states to become the law of the land. And several states withheld support out of fear the Constitution did not protect citizens and states from the inevitable overreach and corruption of federal government power. The hold-out influential and large states -- notably Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts -- finally agreed to ratify the Constitution on the condition that ten amendments called the Bill of Rights would be incorporated into the final Constitution. This Bill of Rights would define and protect both the people’s natural and unalienable rights and also the separate states’ rights against the abuse of federal government power.

 The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were revolutionary political doctrines because they clearly delineated citizens’ rights and established that these rights came from God and not the state. These rights being then sovereign and unalienable made the people in charge and government’s role subordinate -- not the other way around.

Another aspect of the Constitution was that it limited government abuse by creating checks and balances of power between three separate branches of government -- the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. Another mechanism of check in the Constitution was also to delineate power to be exercised between the federal and state governing authorities.

Frequent elections established by the Constitution provided yet another important mechanism to limit the extent and duration of government incompetence and corruption. This also meant that the most sacred responsibility of citizenship established by the Constitution was and is the right of the people to vote and decide who shall govern.

This combination of limiting governmental power and maximizing peoples’ rights makes the U.S. Constitution unique -- the longest-running constitutional democratic republic in human history.

Nevertheless, when determined and dishonest people manipulate elections to fix outcomes to install people who can be compromised or to determine who gets power, any constitution can be fundamentally undermined and circumvented, causing disaster for the people.

We can now see the results of political corruption that has undermined the Constitution all around us, the scope of which we have never seen before in America’s 239-year history:

• a record number of undocumented and illegal immigrants, criminals and terrorists pouring over our southern border daily.
• the defunding of police and wholesale increase in crime.
• the loss of energy independence.
•  runaway inflation.
• The inexplicable turnover of $80 billion in advanced U.S. military equipment to our terrorist enemy, the Taliban, in Afghanistan.
• the censorship and deplatforming of independent voices in the legacy and social media.
• the increase of government control of media narratives.
• the political weaponization of law enforcement agencies against people protesting school boards, questioning election integrity, or researching the patterns of vote fraud and polling irregularities.

How can anyone not see that this outcome is anything other than an orchestrated effort to subvert and destroy the Constitutional Republic of America?

The Constitution makes it clear that everyone -- whether in the public or private sector -- is equal before the law. Additionally, every elected federal government officeholder, judicial appointee, and executive branch cabinet secretary is required to pledge an oath before assuming office, to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Yet today everyone can see that application and compliance with the law is blatantly unequal and has become so bad that our country resembles a banana republic. And the betrayal of the oath of office appears to be widespread in our government and crosses party lines.

President Trump’s personal residence at Mar-a-Lago was raided by the FBI for alleged possession of classified documents. But President Barack Obama and quid-pro-quo Hillary Clinton never had their personal residences raided, although we learned directly from then-FBI director James Comey, that the unsecure inter net server located at Hillary’s residence with full knowledge of Barack Obama (who communicated with Hillary with a decoy email address) had classified information passing through it.

Now let’s face our present predicament with the present White House resident and president, Joe Biden. He is blatantly and willfully violating the oath of office that he swore to uphold, violating the very First Amendment which is the most important because it protects all the others. The First Amendment specifically gives the right to free speech and “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”  Biden has not only breached this right of the people but has done it in a manner that no prior president has done -- announcing he would even amp it up on prime-time national television.

In his September 1^st speech, staged for effect in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, complete with a blood-red backdrop, the flanking of military guards, and a delivery reminiscent of Hitler’s militant gestures at the Third Reich podium, Biden repeatedly disparaged supporters of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement -- that represents about half the voting population of the United States. His condemnation of anyone who questioned the honesty and legitimacy of the 2020 elections -- even suggesting that such people are “threats to democracy” -- revealed his handlers’ panic about the 2020 election fraud discovery evidence, which -- being collected for nearly two years -- is now copious and undeniable.

About a week later on September 9, Biden delivered on his threat. Biden’s Justice Department served thirty-five people considered close to Trump and his MAGA movement, requesting documents and communication dating from a month before the 2020 election until a month or two months after the election. The specific search is targeted at discovery regarding all people falling into such categories as alternate electors, fundraising around election irregularities and the January 6 Capitol protest.

The unconstitutional intimidation tactics have continued. On September 14, Mike Lindell, aka the Pillow-man whose cause celebre is the restoration of honest elections, was tracked down and boxed in a restaurant parking lot by three FBI vehicles, served with a search warrant, and then had his cellphone seized. The following day, a colleague of Lindell, Dr. Douglas G. Frank, a Ph.D. a scientist in electrochemistry who has developed expertise in algorithm modeling pertaining to voting machines -- and who has been traveling the country to scientifically demonstrate how those said electronic machines can be repeatedly and remotely manipulated to flip votes -- experienced the same fate as Lindell. On September 15, the day after Lindell’s apprehension by the FBI, he was also served with an FBI warrant and had his cell phone seized.

Now, as people have digested the unprecedented FBI raid on President Trump’s personal residence at Mar-a-Lago and all the subsequent FBI harassment and raids, what do we the people do about this unparalleled abuse of Executive Office and Justice Department power? Many who find this shocking are also confronted with a realization that we now have more in common with banana republics than constitutional democracies and that we are too close for comfort to completely losing this country to arbitrary rule and tyranny.   

The patriots’ answer must be to keep perspective, avoid any temptation or inclination to take up arms, overcome and wait out every false flag October surprise, volunteer to help get the vote out, demand that elections be held no matter what, serve to monitor vote counting at the polling places, and show up to vote in overwhelming numbers on November 8.

Scott S. Powell is senior fellow at Discovery Institute. His new book, Rediscovering America, has been #1 Amazon New Release in the history genre for eight weeks. Found here at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1637581599. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org

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