Preserving the Constitution Includes Knowing What’s In It

This coming Tuesday is Constitution Day, the 237^th anniversary of the signing of the US Constitution on September 17, 1787. I love our Constitution and try to celebrate it every year. This year in particular it seems urgent to do so. I’m getting offers for ebooks and online courses for educating people on our Constitution, more than usual. And I think it’s because our country, which is based on the law of our Constitution, is on the ballot—up and down the ballot, but particularly in the presidential race.

"Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States" by Howard Chandler Christy
image found on Wikipedia

Back almost a decade ago, I didn’t originally jump on the Trump train, because I didn’t believe he valued our Constitution—until, as President, he more strictly abided by it than we’d seen in decades. I still think he—and everyone around him—needs monitoring; we need to be vigilant in our insistence on abiding by the Constitution, every letter of it. But I believe Donald Trump is someone God can use to defend our inspired Constitution.

On the other hand, his opponent, our current VP (who obviously isn’t running the country, either before or after the coup that has technically dethroned the mentally incapacitated Biden) is the daughter of a socialist/communist professor, who had the most extreme leftist (anti-Constitution) voting record as a one-term senator, who rose to prominence in California by having affairs with political influencers, who champions baby killing as the most important “right” to “protect,” and who lies incessantly—when she can remember what she’s saying at all.

I watched the September 10 presidential debate on Robert Gouveia's
livestream with commentary. Screenshot from here.

Rather than go through this past Tuesday’s debate (there are plenty of people doing that quite thoroughly, including the necessarily ubiquitous fact checking), I will share just a couple of information sources:

·       “Everything You Need to Know About Kamala in Her Own Words in One Place,”  Breitbart’s collection of video clips, by category, September 12, 2024.

·       “Kamala Harris FINALLY put some policy positions on her website. JD Vance offered his thoughts.” This is NotTheBee’s collection of responses from JD Vance to the “policies” that have finally appeared on Kamala Harris’s campaign website (cut and pasted, quite literally, it turns out, from the Biden campaign). This was from just before the debate, September 10, 2024, rather than in response to it. 

One more small point, and then we’ll get back to the Constitution.

I’m affected by sound. The sound of voices. Women tend not to be as likely to have mellifluous voices as men. We lost James Earl Jones this week, whose voice was iconic in its richness. And Viva Frei interviewed Matt Christiansen, one of the content providers affected by the Russia 3.0 attack this past week. I hadn’t heard of Christiansen before, and I haven’t explored his content. But his voice is lovely to listen to.

Megyn Kelly does fine in the female voice category; it's resonant and not too high or low. Others, like Rosanne Barr, are rather grating but interesting; her voice contains both place and personality. I don’t have a great speaking voice either; allergies and age are part of it. Oh well.

Kamala Harris is in an irritating category that spans well beyond ideology. Her sound is nasal. This is not an instrument flaw; we forgive RFK Jr’s instrument challenges and get so we hardly notice. But hers is a wrong-use-of-the-instrument flaw. Anyone can talk with a nasal sound. You simply close the back of your throat and send sound through your nose. To avoid a nasal sound, you open the back of your throat and don’t send all the sound through your nose. For someone in the public eye as long as she has been (she’s supposed to be the young, fresh future, but she’s about to turn 60, and has been political since her 20s), you would think she would have had some voice coach say, “You know, you don’t have to talk like that.” I look forward to a day—soon, I hope—when we no longer have to be subjected to her voice.

US Constitution, first page,
image from Wikipedia

Our Beloved Constitution

I’m doing a sort of “best of” collection today. It turns out I’ve written on the Constitution quite a lot. Often I do that in celebration of Constitution Day. So I’m not going to come up with much new today; I’m going to reference what I’ve already written.

The Constitution is made up of distinct parts: Preamble, Article I (about the legislative branch), Article II (about the executive branch), Article III (about the judicial branch), Article IV (about citizens and states in relation to the government), Article V (about amending the Constitution), Article VI (about the Constitution being the supreme law of the land), and Article VII (about the ratification of the Constitution). Then come the Amendments. Amendments 1-10 were added by the time of the ratification, and are called the Bill of Rights. There are at this time 27 amendments, including those original 10.

The Constitution is not long—4,543 words (before the amendments). It’s a legal document, yet surprisingly clear and easy to read, despite some evolution of language over the past couple of centuries. That was the point I was making in 2020, when I wrote a series summarizing the first three articles.

So I’m starting with that collection today, and then adding in a number of other Constitution celebrations that I hope, in totality, would make a good primer for a budding Constitution scholar.

·       Try Reading the Constitution, Part I, September 17, 2020: This is an introduction to the series. 

·       Try Reading the Constitution, Part II, September 22, 2020: This pertains to Article I, the legislative branch. 

·       Try Reading the Constitution, Part III, September 25, 2020: This pertains to Article II, the executive branch. 

·       Try Reading the Constitution, Part IV, September 29, 2020: This pertains to Article II, the judicial branch. 

I had previously written about the Preamble, which probably belongs with this summary:

·       Review of the Proper Role of Government, March 31, 2016: This goes through the meaning and importance of the Preamble, which identifies the proper role of government. 

Now for some others, mostly from Constitution Day posts, plus a few other times I wrote about the Constitution. I hope these add to and enrich your understanding of the Constitution:

·        Celebrating the Constitution, September 16, 2011 

·        Constitutionalism, September 22, 2011 

·        Happy 225th Birthday, September 17, 2012 

·        Remembering Constitution Day, September 18, 2013 

·        Timeless Constitution, September 19, 2016 

·        Revering the Constitution, September 18, 2017 

·        Can We Keep It? September 17, 2018 

·        Constitution Quiz, September 19, 2019 

·        No, We Haven’t Evolved Beyond Our Constitution, September 23, 2021 

·        Our Miraculous Constitution, September 15, 2022 

·        Divinely Inspired Constitutional Principles, April 5, 2021 

·        One Nation Under God, June 30, 2023 

·        Resistance Is Necessary, December 20, 2020 

 

The Yellow Dog Is Down

I had started a post on another topic yesterday. But that was before I watched the debate. People everywhere are responding and commenting, so anything I add here is unnecessary. And yet, because it was historic, unprecedented, and a lot of other adjectives, I want to do a little collection of responses here for the sake of history.

The Setup

My attitude before the debate was that it was likely to be interesting, and maybe I’d tune in. I’ve speculated (I’m not alone in this) that their plan A was to hope he would do well enough. But their more likely plan B was to have this debate early—it comes before either party’s convention and official nomination—so they could finagle some way to replace him on the convention floor (procedures to make that legal TBD).

The question was how Biden would do. We’ve seen him be feeble and deteriorating since his 2020 campaign, and yet the media hides that and says, “nothing to see here.” And his most recent State of the Union wasn’t as disastrous as might have been expected. There’s speculation that he’s drugged to keep him alert and looking somewhat functional for limited periods of time. And this debate was short, with all kinds of limitations to favor Biden. CNN hosted, so we could all predict the questions. Microphones would be cut off except during each candidate’s one-minute answer or response. Biden took over a week away from either campaigning or running the country, secluded at Camp David to prepare. Meanwhile, Trump was out on the campaign trail, during this space of time he’s not tied up in court (and hasn’t been sentenced to jail yet).

They were to have no audience, no notes (they had a pad of paper and a pen for their own use). No campaign people could talk to them during the advertising breaks. No earpieces. Biden did fuss with his ear, making people think he might be adjusting an against-the-rules earpiece so someone could be feeding him the answers. He likely also wears a hearing aid. It seemed to me they could disguise an earpiece to appear to be just a hearing aid, and they could cheat thereby. I can’t prove that, but they haven’t given us reason to trust them.

With all the advantages for Biden, I was concerned that he might not look all that bad. Maybe anti-Biden media scores the footage for only the stumbles, while the other side tries to eliminate those moments from their reporting. So I wasn’t sure we really knew how far gone he was.

But he was bad. Undeniably bad. His dementia was evident. And, even though we’ve seen him like that for years already, people who only watch certain biased news sources were seeing this version of Biden for the first time. And they were shocked.

So the question today (which has been floated around and being denied for a while) is whether/how to replace Biden, and with whom.

How Bad Was It?

I’m on a group chat with some fellow precinct chairs. The reposted tweets and memes started coming well before the debate was over. Many of the memes I’ve used are from that thread. I can’t attribute where I got them all, although many show names of who the original posters were. And some came from Facebook. I don’t mean to take personal credit for any; I’m just not able to trace them all.

Before we get to that fun, I want to state unequivocally that I am against elder abuse. Jill Biden is guilty of this. And whoever else has been propping him up Weekend-at-Bernie’s style. Joe Biden has been an evil person, and evidence from the laptop shows he has been selling out our country (I call it treason) for a long time. He deserves no respect. But the shell of a person they’re using isn’t capable of taking responsibility for his actions. He’s a prop, a puppet—more literally than any I know of in history or literature. It’s shameful to use a human in this way.

That said, there’s a fair amount of glee in response to last night’s debate. It started even before the debate began. I came across this version of Biden Debate Bingo, originating I think from Dan Scavino:

This was worth a chuckle beforehand. But during the debate I realized it was actually worth playing. (There are plenty of other versions of debate Bingo that I came across trying to re-find this one.) Biden came close to checking off the whole card. That first one, about Scranton, PA, was there, even though he left at age 10, nearly seven decades ago, never actually lived in working-class neighborhoods in Pennsylvania, and did his formative years in a wealthy area of Delaware.

Biden's walk onto the stage was a shuffle. His opening speech was a soft and hoarse mumble. Heavy slurring happened. He blamed Trump for all of the ills his administration has created. He needed his wife to escort him down the stairs and off the stage.

There were the lies—so plentiful that the middle free space on the Bingo card makes sense for that. He got fact-checked in real time, with Snopes, which has been notoriously wrong on this, finally admitting that Trump never said “there were good people on both sides” about actual hatemongers, only on both sides of the confederate symbols issue, which those of us who pay attention have known all along—because we listened to Trump’s actual speech at the time instead of the news spin about it.

And then there was Biden’s claim that the Border Patrol endorses him. There came a swift reply: “To be clear, we never have and never will endorse Biden.”

The brain freeze that happened not that far in was not something they could cover up by claiming those rascally Republicans created what Karine Jean-Pierre calls a Cheap Fake. The brain freeze moment was a historic turning point for our country. I’ve seen speculation that this is when the drugs they juiced him with kicked in. Or maybe they failed to kick in. Or maybe they wore off. Mr. Reagan (Chris Coles) speculated that he had a cold and it prevented him from getting drugged, because those drugs in addition to cold meds might kill a person in Biden’s condition. Before his response livestream was over, they learned that the media had indeed been informed ahead of time that Biden had a cold. That gives the media a way to excuse his less than stellar performance. Except—it was so bad, and so consistent with how he acts regularly (montages abound), that the media doesn’t seem willing to be other than shocked at his abysmal performance.

That first really big stumble is here. Benny Johnson clips it, and he’s pretty gleeful about it, but it’s a convenient clip. By the way, Biden does correct “trillionaires” to “billionaires” eventually, not shown here. Not that it helps. The math, if correct (dubious), of taxing billionaires in a way that would cause them to put money elsewhere—but if you assume they don’t change their behavior, then he says the additional taxes would be $500 million, which he corrects to $500 billion, over ten years. So $50 billion a year he says would wipe out all “his” deficits (does he mean Trump’s?) and do a bunch of other things. But he’s given more than $50 billion a year to Ukraine regularly now. So that would pretty much wipe out any theoretical new tax revenue. Right? It’s hard to tell what he means through the stumbling.

There was a point where he got stuck, backed up, and repeated words, the way you do when you have a memorized statement that you can’t quite remember, so you have to start at an earlier point to get the flow going again. In other words, he wasn’t thinking of answers; he was just trying to regurgitate talking points, and even that is what he was failing at.

There was a question on abortion. Biden thinks killing babies up to and beyond birth is a winning issue. And here’s how he “articulated” that:

Trump passed along this Babylon Bee meme, which is very nearly not satire:

Almost immediately afterward, to talk of replacing Biden began. CNN’s John King was one.

Houston radio guy Michael Berry passed along a tweet from NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wishing for Biden to step aside. Kristof is assuming, of course, that Biden is capable of reflecting on his debate performance, which I wouldn’t guarantee.

Charlie Kirk points out a Politico announcement that “Biden is toast.”

And a couple more:

During Robert Gouveia’s response video on Friday, he mentions a New York Times tweet, reported on by Cassandra McDonald with Tim Pool’s team, asking: “I would like to know why Nick Kristoff and the New York Times had this article calling for Biden to drop out due to his debate performance. Why was that already preloaded on their back end on June 25^th, two days before the debate.”

It may be like that old photo showing a headline that “Dewey Defeats Truman” back in1948; they have two versions, and they may print a limited number of both, and then when the news is certain they go ahead with the one that happened.

mistaken news headline, Truman won in 1948
image found here

But the New York Times seems to be pushing this message now. Today, Fox News reported this: “New York Times editorial board calls for Biden to drop out: His candidacy is a ‘reckless gamble’” (by Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News, June 28, 2024). It’s getting weird when news outlets report as news the news and opinions of other news outlets. But I digress.

By the end of Friday I was hearing speculation about invoking the 25th Amendment. The downside of that is Kamala Harris, who is both sides' worst nightmare.

Today a Business Insider headline showed up in my news feed, with some fill-in-the-blank possibilities to replace Biden. I think seven is a stretch; they do not have a deep bench. Or any bench:

Among the nightmare scenarios, the most likely may be Gavin Newsome, who has ruined the formerly beautiful state of California beyond recognition and would like to do similar service to the entire US. And there’s Hillary still waiting around. (This is a meme, not real, I shouldn’t have to say, but…”

 

Was It Planned?

Was this all a setup? Was it planned as a way to take Biden out? It’s possible. Carol Swain is a careful thinker, but she’s looking at what we’re all seeing. And others agree:

It’s Not about Trump

Trump had some good moments in the debate. He was quick and capable, and answered what he wanted, regardless of the questions that were meant to set him up. One of the better moments was, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.” Biden had said something about the border being better now than under Trump, but even with the transcript it wasn’t intelligible, or truthful.

Trump was very understated. Almost never has there been a debate or major even like this when the talk wasn’t about Trump. He knows how to make talk happen. But this time—I believe intentionally—he was steady, less bombastic, clear, and clearly capable. He got out of the way and let Biden be the story, because it was not going to be anything but a bad story.

Polling show Trump shooting up about 15 percentage points and Biden dropping by about that many. Such a fall, for such good reason, is not recoverable. It’s probably well beyond the cheating margin.

Robert Gouveia shows a polling result immediately after
the debate, during his livestream and response

Serious Talk

There’s some satisfaction in seeing what we all knew finally being acknowledged by all but the “yellow dog Democrats” [i.e., those who would vote for any Democrat on the ticket, even if it’s a yellow dog], and even some yellow dog voters are bailing.

But the serious situation is, our country is being led by an incompetent man. Dr. Hur had said he wasn’t capable of standing trial because he’s an old man with memory problem. Maybe one ought to extrapolate from that that such a person doesn’t belong in the Oval Office, ostensibly running the free world.

And since we know he’s not capable of running the free world, we are being “ruled” by someone we did not vote for. (Not that We the People ever truly voted Biden in.) We don’t know who that is.

Glenn Beck pointed out the serious danger we’re in with a dementia patient who has access to the nuclear codes. He walked through the seven minutes it would take for a missile from, say, North Korea, to reach us, in which the president must make the decision to use such a weapon in response—before we even know whether what is launched at us is nuclear or not. If we respond a nuclear weapon, we would wipe out several hundred thousand people. And fallout would affect possibly hundreds of thousands of Chinese as well, which would be taken as an act of aggression, of course. And fallout could affect Russia as well, with them taking it as an act of aggression against them. Can this demented old man make such a decision? Clearly he cannot. And our enemies around the globe know this. They have known for a while—hence wars in Ukraine and Israel. But it still wasn’t spoken of openly. Now our weakness is exposed.

We ought to make note of who has tried to foist this incapacitated puppet leader upon us. His wife is one. His close staff and cabinet. His VP. His spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre, and her staff. Many upper leaders—possibly of both parties, although you can mainly blame the Democrats for this travesty. Media people. All of these people knew he was incapacitated, and yet they pretended he was fully capable—not just of a campaign but an additional four-year term. They hid him and covered up, and blatantly lied. They put our nation at risk to perpetrate this deceit on us. Their betrayal is not a small thing.

We can hope to get to the election and to the transfer of power. If we can get that far, before our enemies take advantage, then there is some chance for recovery. And then we need accountability—a better word than retribution, and more accurate. We absolutely need the swamp cleaned out.

We need to return strictly to our Constitution.