An Uneasy Independence Day

“The sovereign freedoms of men and women to think, worship, speak, and prosper are never in more grave danger than when they are at the whim of a majority whose purposes can be nothing but self-seeking – or worse, intent on making everyone bow to an evil they pray to.”

It’s been a busy few weeks leading up to the July 4th holiday in 2024, and we’ve learned a few things.

One is that we’ve learned anew that you shouldn’t appoint unserious people to the United States Supreme Court. Reading the dissents of the three radical leftists on the Supreme Court in the Trump immunity ruling is a reminder that we need to kick up high school civic classes a notch or two.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown (who famously couldn’t or wouldn’t define what a woman was at her confirmation hearings) had interchangeable dissents that were full of toxic emotional triggers to fire up the media and their fellow radicals. The majority opinion, they wrote, sought to “reshape[s] the institution of the presidency.” SCOTUS “makes a mockery” of the principle that no man is above the law. A president who “admits to having ordered assassinations of his political rivals or critics [has] a fair shot at getting immunity.” SCOTUS “[gave] former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more.”

Challenging the three radical Justices for the dumbest comments and fear-mongering, the appointed President, Joe Biden, stumbled out to make a brilliant comment. “Today’s [immunity] decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what a president can do.” And The Nation opined that a president can now “assassinate you” – officially.

The Constitution has no explicit immunity clause, yet since George Washington, no president has been charged for actions taken in office involving executive powers. The reason is that Congress can impeach and remove the President as a check. Underlying that is the implied concept of executive authority for the President to carry out the duties of the presidency without legal sharpshooting.

The chaos that would ensue for any president without this concept of immunity for the office’s core functions would mean nothing could be done without lawfare enveloping the President’s actions.

Examples of this go back over 200 years with every President. Recently, in 2011, the CIA, acting on authorization from then-President Barack Obama, killed an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen. Awlaki had never been charged or convicted of any crime in the US. Several weeks later, his 16-year-old son and a cousin were also killed in a drone attack. Not only were they minors, but they had also not been charged or convicted of any crime.

The Awlaki killings all happened with very vague Congressional oversight, and a lot of folks raised concerns and objections, including this writer, concerning the killing of a US citizen and his son without due process. Yet, it’s hard to second-guess the Commander-in-Chief carrying out his explicit core duties using information unavailable to the public.

Former President Trump ordered an attack in Syria in 2018 that wiped out “several hundred” Russian contractors and mercenaries advancing on a US operating site. Yet, the US is not at war in Syria, and again, there is only vague Congressional oversight, and the public doesn’t have the intelligence. Once more, it is hard to second-guess the Commander-in-Chief.

Citizens can only trust that both presidents acted only as a last resort and that the purpose was critical to the national interest or security.  

A president makes hard decisions regularly on a vast canvas of national issues that fall to the Executive Branch. The control mechanisms are a real Congress doing its job instead of fundraising 24/7, its power of impeachment, and an involved citizenry demanding an accountable government at all levels. For this, we have elections.

Aside from the Supreme Court’s decision this week, we were also alerted – again – that the top of the Democrat Party is brimming with people who don’t even pretend anymore to be liberal or “progressive,” as they like to claim, but are cold, hard Marxists hellbent on some form of neo-communist statism without the pretense of constitutional or legal constraints on their consolidation of power.    

History is nothing, if not frequently ironic, in its timeless flow, which carries men’s events bobbling along like fall leaves in a stream. Here is the now monotonous catchphrase sprinkled like salt on McDonald’s french fries: “We have to save democracy from Trump and the MAGA people!’ It’s on the lips of the whole phalanx of the radical Democrat party. Since they have an empty wagon from which to sell, hysteria and fear are their only option – and evidently they’ll keep hammering away at that phrase until everyone begs for mercy.

But this week, we celebrate the independence from a repressive King and weak parliament an ocean away and the events that would lead to the creation of a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy. The men and women who had clawed through the Revolutionary War regarded democracy and wisely assessed it as “mob rule.”

Instead, they rendered a representative democracy to us, with brakes on the processes and a Bill of Rights that protected the essential freedom of every generation, regardless of the governments’ avarice.

This July 4, we find the American Founding and its constitutional order under intense and coordinated attack by an assorted mob of radical judges, academics, Marxists, communists, anarchists, anti-capitalists, globalists, and the digital super-elite poised to claim their own superpower status among the world’s powers. The reason these people are increasingly virulent and unrelenting in their attacks on the Founding and the concept of human freedom is simple – they are not good people and they hate God’s freedom.  

Today should remind us that the sovereign freedoms of men and women to think, worship, speak, and prosper are never in more grave danger than when they are at the whim of a majority whose purposes can be nothing but self-seeking – or worse, intent on making everyone bow to an evil they pray to.