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Four people were killed and several others injured in a violent stabbing attack in Rockford, Illinois, on Wednesday that left neighbors reeling.
The post VIDEO: Four Killed and Several Injured in Stabbing Attack That Left Illinois Community Shaken appeared first on Breitbart.
The Congressional Family Caucus seeks to reverse a process of constitutional sliding that began after the Civil War.
Many commentators have marveled to see the hand of God in the establishment of our Republic and our Constitution. One such was Orestes Brownson who frequently referred to our providential constitution. In one of his last essays, “The Democratic Principle,” he wrote, “The will of the people is the most direct and authentic expression of the divine will that can be had or desired.”
The American Constitution was the first to synthesize the individualistic and humanitarian social strains of democracy. History showed Brownson the dangers in each of these alone; the logical consequence of the former being anarchy and of the latter tyranny.
The genius, the providential element, of our Constitution was that it encompassed another, unwritten, factor respecting place, tradition, religion and family in the various states. For an ordered liberty, the rights of God, the order of creation, must be observed. Brownson was convinced that “no simply human wisdom, no adjustment of positive and negative forces, no organization of interests, or system of checks and balances, will do it.”
Writing at the conclusion of the Civil War, Brownson foresaw that the dialectic had been impaired and the humanitarian, egalitarian, and social strain of democracy represented by strong economic interests would prevail. The rights of God would be ignored and the pursuit of a virtuous citizenry would be abandoned in a headlong rush for wealth. He was particularly adamant that the influence of place, tradition, religion, and family would be crushed under the power of the banks, railroads, and industrialists.
“I cannot conceive a more profoundly philosophic, or more admirably devised constitution, than that of our own government,” Brownson wrote. Yet “the people have forgotten its providential origin, treat it as their own creation, as a thing they have made, and may alter or unmake at their pleasure.” The progressive and atheistic mind sees the violation of the Constitution as “no moral offense, for it is the violation of no moral law, of no eternal and immutable right. Nothing hinders the people, when they find the constitution in the way of some favorite project on which they are bent, from trampling it under their feet, and passing on as if it never had any existence.”
There have been many examples since Brownson’s time—the Civil Service Act abrogating executive power; the act of Home Rule for the District of Columbia; the legislation enabling the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency. All of these were passed as if the Constitution didn’t exist, since the majority in Congress had the power to pursue these favorite projects.
We would do well to review Brownson’s warnings. The strong interests have just about taken over. In addition to those of the banks, railroads and industrialists, today we have the teachers unions, Big-Whatever and the military-industrial complex. To these we must add the 2 million employees of the administrative state and, perhaps most insidiously, the lobbyist-loving Republican National Committee. Like the frog in the pot, good people complain of “creeping socialism,” unaware that the water has been boiling for quite some time.
Americans are finally waking up to the danger and taking action. At the local level, it started with participation at school board meetings, and at the federal level, with the creation of the Congressional Family Caucus, which, since its inception in March of this year, has grown to 24 members of the House of Representatives.
The caucus puts God back where he belongs: at the origin of all beneficial legislation. The first of the caucus’s principles, “The family is ordained by God as the union of a man and a woman for their mutual benefit and the procreation and education of their children” is in full agreement with Brownson that democracy is “eternal justice ruling through the people” and that any valid civil law must conform to the laws of God’s creation.
The members of the Congressional Family Caucus are by and large not financed by the strong interests. They are elected by the people and for the people and can more robustly respond to their constituencies. Here is the promise to reconstruct a culture founded on the family; to return to place, tradition, and religion; to overturn a century and a half of expansive Federal power and return to a spirit of participatory democracy with all the people engaged.
Let us pray that the members of the caucus are faithful to their mission and that their numbers increase so that we can once again marvel at the providence behind America’s constitutional government.
The post A Hundred-Fifty-Year Hurt appeared first on The American Conservative.
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