You may have seen this snippet before:
“The Constitution is the supreme law, the foundation for all other law. If it doesn’t mean exactly what its text says—the public meanings of the words as ordinary people understand them—then no one can possibly know what it means. But if no one can know what the Constitution means, then no one can know whether any other law conforms to it. At that point, all that matters is the will of whoever’s in power. And that’s an exact definition of tyranny.”
[From Shadow of a Sword]
But why do we need a “supreme law,” to which all other laws must conform? Indeed, what is it about the Constitution of the United States that fits it for that purpose?
Once again, the historically literate Gentle Reader will already know: when it was first proposed, the Constitution did not fit the purpose. Had it not been amended a little while after its initial ratification in June, 1788 – i.e., by the Bill of Rights in December 1791 – then by agreement among the state governments, it would have lost its legitimacy.
Americans who are literate about their nation’s history are aware that the Bill of Rights, which made the rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence explicit, was “the price of ratification” of the Constitution. That is: Without a solemn promise that the Constitution would be amended to acknowledge individuals’ rights explicitly in its text – the entire point of the Bill of Rights – the pact that created the federal government would not have been ratified. Back then, promises of that sort were taken seriously.
Think about that for a moment. Americans believed in their rights to life, liberty, and honestly acquired property so strongly that they would have denied the legitimacy of a federal government that refused to acknowledge them. Indeed, they would have rebelled against it…as some, who held that even the Bill of Rights wasn’t an adequate protection of those rights, actually did.
This is not “of course” / “everyone knows that” stuff. This goes to the heart of the American political ethic. Yet it’s been suppressed in the education of young Americans for a number of decades. By whose decision…and to what end? Even more to today’s point, why did the great majority of Americans deem the Bill of Rights a sufficient corrective to the original Constitution’s text?
Give that a few CPU cycles while I pour myself some coffee.
Recently, at the “Truth Over Fear” Online Summit, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, formerly the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, gave a remarkable address about the “COVID-19 pandemic,” its use by the political elite, and the devastating effects on our society. Have a snippet:
If we make a comparison between how we lived in January 2020 and how we have been reduced to living today, we cannot fail to recognize the success of this infernal plan, accepted by the majority of people as unavoidable. There are those who, unable to accept the intrinsic irrationality of the provisions adopted by their rulers, suspend all judgment and hand themselves over to their executioners. Others, trying to find a supernatural meaning in collective madness, pray to God for the end of a non-existent plague or adapt to the new pagan liturgies of Covid. Still others, more combative, are unable to resign themselves to the monstrosity of what is happening and hope for a divine intervention.
If only we had the good sense to think autonomously, to use the rationality with which we have been endowed by the Eternal Father, we would immediately understand that this horror is nothing but the “world turned upside down” that is desired by the eternal Enemy of the human race, the hell on earth longed for by the servants of Satan, the New Infernal Order that is the prelude to the advent of the Antichrist and the end times. Only in this way will we be able to understand the apostasy of the highest levels of the Church, all taken to give proof of obedience to the globalist ideology, to the point of denying Christ on the Cross and preferring the heavy chains of Lucifer to the gentle yoke of Christ.
This resonated powerfully with me. It’s a restatement of a truth that was nearly universally accepted even as recently as 1950: not because it is explicitly Christian, but because when it looks for a Supreme Law, it looks to a Supreme Authority, whose will is infinitely superior to the preferences and decrees of men. When men deny the Supreme Authority, they immediately lose their way. Yes, even men in Holy Orders, should they disdain the Gospels for the preachments of the international political / commercial class. Such clerics are not few. One of them sits on the Throne of Saint Peter as you read this.
It was not men who gave us the rights protected in the Bill of Rights, duly incorporated into the Constitution in December of 1791; it was God. The human design makes those rights an absolute precondition for human flourishing and peace. The Author of all things –where did you think Supreme Authority comes from, eh? – wrote those laws into our bodies, minds, and souls. They require no legislation, for they are self-enforcing. To transgress against them is to forsake flourishing and peace and opt for poverty and strife.
And nothing that snot-nosed, half-conscious, reality-challenged pseudo-Catholic in the White House says, including that “no amendment is absolute” bilge, can change that.
The Constitution, as amended by the Bill of Rights, was deemed acceptable by the colonials of the late 18th Century because the Supreme Law it affirmed was the one God the Creator had written into human nature. Catholic, Protestant, Unitarian, Jew, or Deist, those colonial Americans agreed on that much – heartily. They would not have had it any other way. Too many had experienced too much hardship and privation for too long. Too many others had died.
Rights are not permissions. Governments cannot decree that a right need not be respected because of some sort of “emergency” or “crisis.” The hubrists of the Usurper Regime will try to word-mince without limit. They’ll defame, castigate, intimidate, and outrightly bludgeon as many of us as they can into compliance. Nevertheless, what powers God and the Constitution have forbidden them, they do not have. They may not exercise them without calling Nemesis down upon them.
Nemesis is limbering up. Getting equipped and provisioned. Soon to be on the march. Sooner or later it will strike, whether by force of arms or by the inexorable withdrawal of Americans’ consent to be governed. The Usurpers’ continuing derogation and denial of the Supreme Law guarantees it.
