The ultimate check

Joe Farah reviews the book "Who Killed the Constitution?"

I had recognized years ago the ways the Constitution had been subverted and undermined intentionally by those in government who sought to increase their own power illegitimately. I wrote about this in my own book, "Taking America Back," in which I offered my own prescription for returning our country to its roots of limited constitutional government...

What I never considered before was the possibility that constitutions that limit power grabs might be destined to fail precisely because of those limitations on something that cannot be limited.

"It is perhaps jarring to consider the possibility that constitutions are destined to fail," the authors write. "After all, we are indoctrinated from early childhood with the idea that the Constitution is the font of our liberties – even though Americans were free before it was written. And it is to the U.S. Constitution that every government official still swears his fidelity. But when we look beyond the grand rhetoric to the actual record, we must confront a troubling conclusion: Once an institution obtains supreme force, it is probably utopian to expect its powers to remain limited over time – especially when the one thing doing the limiting is a document that is interpreted and enforced by the very institution it is supposed to retrain."

The Founding Fathers understood the Constitution was only a document capable of serving a people equipped for self-government – meaning a moral people, a people who could distinguish between right and wrong, a people who held themselves accountable not just to the force of government but to a sovereign and almighty God.

Whether we remain such a people is in doubt today.

This flash of insight, like those of so many others today, doesn't add to anything the Founders' generation already knew and expressed:

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
-- Thomas Jefferson

The great "charters of liberty" such as the Declaration of Independence, were the result of the deadly serious work of confronting centralized authority. The generations immediately following those charters had direct knowledge of what it cost to obtain what those papers codified. The more removed people became from the generation who could "tell the tales," the more people began to take those charters, and the freedoms listed in them, for granted. That is why the natural progression is for liberty to yield. The State always returns to ask for an increase in its power. Unless the people are vigilant and willing to assume responsibility for themselves, versus trusting their fate to an all-powerful Oz, no Constitution in the world can pin down would-be tyranny.

Remember, the Soviets had a Constitution, too. Fat lot of good it did them. For all we learn about checks and balances alleged to still exist in our system, the primary one is this:

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
-- Thomas Jefferson