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"The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and
for people, equally in war and peace, and it covers with its shield of protection
all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine
involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of men
that any of its great provisions can be suspended during any of the great
exigencies of government."
– Ex Parte Milligan (1866)
The above statement was made by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1866 in the
context of its ruling that the Lincoln administration’s suspension of Habeas
Corpus was unconstitutional. As long as the civil courts were operating
(which they were), the Court ruled, it is unconstitutional for either the
president or the Congress to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus. What
this statement says is that it is precisely in times of national emergencies,
such as war, that civil liberties must be most jealously protected. If not,
then governments will be encouraged to generate crises, or perceptions of
crises, in order to grab more power for themselves by diminishing individual
liberty.
This profound truth gives the lie to the notion that one can be an
advocate and supporter of the American state’s unconstitutional and
aggressive wars on the one hand, and a "constitutionalist" on the
other. War is the enemy of constitutional liberty. The current poster boy for
this contradictory outlook is the radio talking head Marc Levin ("The
Grate One," as Lew Rockwell calls him) who bloviates endlessly about how
devoted he supposedly is to the Constitution while aggressively supporting
the neocon agenda of endless war in the Middle East and elsewhere – and
all of the accompanying assaults on civil liberties at home. So as not to
appear to be sexist, I should also point out that Congresswoman Michele
Bachman is the current poster girl for this position, claiming that of
all the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination she is the most
devoted to the Constitution, while rabidly supporting the never-ending
expansion of the warfare state.
Neocons like Levin, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh who now fancy
themselves as constitutionalists since there is a Democrat in the White House
are hypocrites of the first order. All during the eight years of the Bush
regime their standard response to anyone who would object to the PATRIOT Act
and myriad other attacks on constitutional liberty was to proclaim that "9/11
changed everything." Translation: the hell with the constitution;
we’re engaged in a never-ending "war on terra," as George W.
Bush called it. We need to destroy our constitutional liberties in order to
protect our constitutional liberties, they told us. It is the hatred of those
liberties by people in the Middle East that caused the terrorists to attack
us on 9/11, they ludicrously proclaimed (and still do).
War is not just "the health of the state," as Randolph
Bourne sagely stated in his famous essay of that title; it is the health of unlimited
and unconstitutional government. Governmental powers always ratchet up
during wartime at the expense of constitutional liberty (and prosperity)
despite the fact that every federal politician, and every soldier, takes an
oath to do the opposite – to defend the Constitution. This
notorious "ratchet effect" is described in great detail in Robert
Higgs’s classic book, Crisis and Leviathan.
The Lincoln administration set the template for tactic of using war as
an excuse to destroy constitutional liberties. Lincoln illegally suspended Habeas
Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political dissenters
without due process; shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers in the
Northern states; deported a political opponent, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio; confiscated firearms in the border
states; illegally created the state of West Virginia out of Northwestern
Virginia; and much more. Indeed, Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern
states was the very definition of treason under Article 3, Section 3 of the
Constitution which reads: "Treason" against the United States,
shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering
to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort" (emphasis
added). The founders were careful to always speak of "the United
States" in the plural in all of the founding documents. That’s why
the constitution’s definition of treason refers to "them" and
"their." A central government that wages
war against the free and independent states (the language of the
Declaration of Independence) is guilty of treason. That of course is
precisely what Lincoln did. (He always insisted that the Southern states
never legally seceded, were never a legitimately separate country, and were
always a part of the U.S.).
Ever since Lincoln’s day, tyrant after tyrant has invoked the
myth of "Father Abraham" to "justify" the destruction of
civil liberties in wartime. Woodrow Wilson did it when he imprisoned
dissenters to the First World War (including people imprisoned for reading
the Bill of Rights in public); the Roosevelt administration did it when it
sent third-generation Japanese-Americans to concentration camps; and of
course today’s neocons, who run the Republican Party, rarely ever make
a speech about anything without claiming that "Father Abraham" would
agree with their political agenda if he were alive today. For example, In a
September 7, 2006 Wall Street Journal article Newt Gingrich advocated
a military invasion and occupation of Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and
North Korea and titled the article "Lincoln and Bush." Even the
former dictator of Pakistan quoted Abe Lincoln as "justification"
for imposing martial law in his country several years ago.
The big money people of the Republican Party even funded a think tank
– the Claremont Institute – to do almost nothing but perpetuate
the myths and superstitions about Lincoln as a means of
"justifying" whatever the Republican Party wants to do. The
Claremont Institute has indoctrinated hundreds of "Lincoln
fellows," who are mostly Republican congressional staffers, executive
branch political appointees, and tabloid propagandists from such places as The
Weekly Standard, with the Lincoln myths, which the Institute hopes will
be inserted into political speeches. Their apparent purpose is to censor all
criticism of the GOP’s policy proposals. If you oppose them, why, you
must be a Neo-Confederate slavery defender! Ken Masugi
of the Claremont Institute even took a leave of absence to become a speech
writer for the disgraced former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. Masugi’s insertion of Lincolnite
political boilerplate into Gonzalez’s speeches failed to save him as he
was forced to resign.
Like all the other neocons at the Claremont Institute, Masugi claims to be a self-appointed guardian of The
Official Truth about the Constitution, even though he defends the unjust and tyranical imprisonment of his own people – Japanese
Americans – by FDR during World War II. As Lincoln might have said, if
that was not unconstitutional, then nothing is unconstitutional.
The phony neocon "constitutionalists" in the Bush
administration, with the support of the Claremont Institute, AEI, Heritage
foundation, and all the neocon talking heads on radio and television, waged
war on the U.S. Constitution. The Congress gave President Bush the power to
declare martial law; Bush claimed to have unconstitutional powers of
"the unitary executive," as though there was only one branch of
government; the so-called PATRIOT Act allows the government to declare that
almost anyone who protests government actions as an "enemy
combatant" who has no constitutional rights; allows warrantless
wiretapping; proclaimed that the Bush administration was exempt from the
Geneva Convention; permits the government to order individuals and financial
institutions to turn over to it private financial information, travel
itineraries, email and phone records, and more; and imposes prison sentences
for anyone who reveals that such snooping has taken place; and abolishes the
traditional lawyer-client privilege for anyone accused of being an
"enemy combatant."
The neocons have called for a Nazi-style national ID card, and
supported journalist Michele Malkin’s book, In Defense of Internment, in
which she advocated the rounding up and imprisonment of Muslim-Americans,
similar to FDR’s Japanese-American concentration camps. (Like a good
neocon, she cites Lincoln as her "authority").
War is the enemy of constitutional liberty and also of prosperity. It
is impossible to support the American regime’s unconstitutional and
aggressive wars and be devoted to the Constitution at the same time.
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