Unforgivable Sin, Ineradicable Stain

     Perhaps you’ve already read about this latest infamy against the well-being of the American people:

     The Department of Interior (DOI) initiated a rulemaking process to “establish maximum protection” for 13 million acres of land across the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. It was set aside by. Congress for resource development.
     Biden added another 2.8 million acres withdrawn from oil and gas leasing in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska.
     The DOI boasted in a statement about delivering “on the most aggressive climate agenda in American history.” They added gleefully that Biden “secured record investments in climate resilience and environmental justice.”
     “And his economic agenda has put the United States back on track to reach its climate goals for 2030 and 2050, all while reducing America’s reliance on oil and protecting American families from the impact of Putin’s war on global energy markets.”

     Overbearing sententiousness is bad; mock-piety is worse. Combine the two with blatantly anti-Constitutional actions, and the resulting cocktail might prove lethal. But the practical effect is not what’s grabbed my attention this morning.

     The Constitution specifies the legitimate powers of the three branches of the federal government. Nowhere does that document award authority over “the climate” to any branch. Nowhere does it say even one word about “the environment,” much less “environmental justice.” The Biden / DoI action is an exercise of powers not granted to anyone. Yet I have no doubt that the Usurper Regime will get away with it.

     The federal government has swelled so far beyond its Constitutional bounds that a man from Mars who hoped to familiarize himself with its powers and duties by reading the Constitution would think he’d landed in some wholly different country. It gets away with the exercise of such usurped powers every day. We the Formerly Free permit it. The prevailing attitude seems to be that there’s nothing we can do about it. Our passivity disgraces us, yet we seem immune to the shame.

     We could talk about voting power and voting blocs. We could ponder the corruption of the judiciary at all levels. We could address the vague conception of “stakeholders” as superior to owners. None of that matters. What matters is that by permitting regulatory bodies to exercise unbounded, unreviewable quasi-legislative power, and permitting the president to arrogate legislative authority to himself by “executive orders,” we have lost the rights the country was founded to guarantee and defend.

     We’ve also lost something so important that no less a figure than Saint Thomas Aquinas discoursed upon it eight centuries ago in his Summa Theologica. Rather than oppress you with quotes from that document – not enough of my Gentle Readers read Latin – I’ll cite an old essay of mine:

     Law as something other than the whim of those in power is an ancient concept. Yet few nations have cared to try the concept in practice. Fewer still have managed to do so.

     For there to be a Rule of Law in principle rather than merely by lip service, the corpus of laws must meet certain criteria:

• They must be clear of impact.
• They must not distinguish among persons.
• They must not contradict one another in any way.
• They must be made by a consensus-approved process.

     That last condition requires elaboration. The process by which laws are made or changed must itself be controlled by a law which commands overwhelming popular assent. Moreover, the control must ensure that the legislative process is highly stable. If that process can be changed, the manner of change must be:

• Public;
• Difficult;
• Deliberate.

     Otherwise, private citizens would be justified in thinking that whim had taken command of the law. Under such conditions, there cannot be sufficient stability in the law to command the required consensus. In this we glimpse the great importance of a supreme law that governs the making of all other laws.

     It should be clear from the above that the United States has not known a true rule of law for quite some time. All the requirements above have been violated repeatedly, sometimes with callous disregard for any consideration other than the whims of elected officials, at the federal, state, and local levels for more than a century.

     The law is no longer within the bounds expressed above.

     “As above, so below,” say the Wiccans, and in this regard they are quite correct. What the federal government gets away with, state and local governments will attempt within their own demesnes – and they’ll usually reap an equal degree of success. This is nowhere more visible than in matters pertaining to land.

     Private persons and organizations have often purchased tracts of land – tracts that have no legal limitations attached – and have been told afterward that they’re not allowed to do what they’d purchased them for. Private homeowners suffer similarly, when local or state regulators decree some change to the conditions that must exist within the home or on the surrounding grounds. The ludicrousness of such doings can reach obscene heights. For example, when I purchased my home, there was a shed on it. I disliked the shed and decided to have it removed. More than twenty years later, my township attempted to extract a large fine from me for that – not because it was against the law, but because I hadn’t asked permission to demolish a structure I owned that sat on my own property.

     In a far more egregious case, a French consortium called Carrefour purchased a large plot of land not far from my home, with the intention of building a shopping complex there. The consortium had already certified that the land was zoned for such use…but the zoning board decided that it didn’t want Carrefour’s complex. So it revoked the previous zoning, under which Carrefour had paid many millions of dollars for the plot. The consortium was forced to sell the land at a loss – to another developer who put a shopping complex on it, with the tacit approval of the zoning board.

     A representative for Carrefour, upon learning of the board’s de facto seizure of the consortium’s rights, commented that “You can be told on one day that a thing is black, and on the next that it is white. This is a good lesson.”

     Stability in the law has become a complete fiction.

     The sin is ours for permitting such rule by whim. It’s a stain on our national reputation that will not soon be erased, if ever. It undercuts any claim we might have to being free men, jealous of our rights and ready to defend them.

     But hey, we have Lee Greenwood to flatter us that nothing of importance has changed. All rise for flag salute.