The Washington Post Is Clueless
Armstrong Williams / August 24, 2023
The Washington Post ran a front-page story on Aug. 21 that is
incoherent, betrays constitutional ignorance, and misunderstands
the purpose of government, Armstrong Williams says.
A front-page story on Aug. 21 in The Washington Post sounds a
false alarm: “American democracy is cracking. These forces help
explain why,” by Dan Balz and Clara Ence Morse.
**The analysis is incoherent, betrays constitutional ignorance,
and misunderstands the purpose of government—not majority rule but
justice secured through checks and balances and separation of
powers, enabling every person an opportunity to march to their own
drummer, fearless of domestic predation or foreign aggression.
The glory of the United States is liberty, not a Leviathan ad-
ministrative state that dulls ambition and protects corporate be-
hemoths by agency regulations navigable only by $2,000-per-hour
elite lawyers.
The United States, of course, is not perfect. Mankind is made
of crooked timber. But it is adorned with the optimal form of gov-
ernment to secure justice than any other on the face of the earth.
Just ask the millions of immigrants yearly who risk life and limb
to enter the United States in search of opportunity and freedom.
The soundtrack of The Washington Post’s fault-finding is the
Constitution’s checks on majority rule. Why these checks should be
scorned is difficult to apprehend.
Thomas Jefferson observed, “An elective despotism was not the
government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded
on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be
so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that
no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectual-
ly checked and restrained by the others.”
James Madison, father of the Constitution, observed in Federal-
ist 55, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian
assembly would still have been a mob.”
Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson added in West Virginia
Board of Education v. Barnette (1943):
The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain
subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place
them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish
them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right
to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, free-
dom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not
be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.
In any event, The Washington Post’s exaltation of majority rule
is insincere. It first castigates the White House, Congress, and
the Supreme Court for not echoing the majority. But then excoriates
state legislatures that do! It deplores the fact that in numerous
states, the “dominant party has been able to move aggressively to
enact its governing priorities.”
Janus-faced, thy name is The Washington Post.
The newspaper deplores the supermajority required to amend the
Constitution to foster stability (two-thirds majorities in the
House and three-fourths of the state legislatures). Is The Washing-
ton Post afflicted with amnesia? Has it forgotten the 18-year-old
voting rights amendment (26th Amendment) ratified on July 1, 1971,
within four months of its submission?
Reporters Balz and Morse applaud the easy changeability of
state constitutions: “Over the history of the country, state con-
stitutions have been amended thousands of times.”
But unlike the United States Constitution, no state constitu-
tion has served as a template for constitutions fashioned by
foreign countries. No state constitution has earned the accolade
the U.S. Constitution elicited from British icon and statesman Lord
Gladstone: “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time
by the brain and purpose of man.”
Contrary to The Washington Post, the Constitution is our deli-
verance from the nation’s afflictions.
Its abandonment has begotten our cosseted multitrillion-dollar
military-industrial warfare state that has spiked the national debt
past a crushing $32 trillion pursuing fool’s errands in Afghani-
stan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Ukraine.
It has begotten a surveillance state demolishing the Fourth
Amendment right to be let alone from government snooping absent
probable cause that crime is afoot.
It has begotten a cycloptic administrative state that daily
pours forth regulations to stifle individual ingenuity and to
shield corporate giants from competition.
Congress routinely delegates limitless legislative powers to
the president and executive agencies where checks and balances are
nonexistent. Executive agencies promulgate an average of 3,000 to
4,500 legislative rules annually—delegation run riot.
Congress persists in limitless giveaways of its legislative
power to escape responsibility for policies that might provoke a
primary challenge. A Congress member’s heaven is an uncontested
election indistinguishable from China or Russia.
The Constitution will be restored only if the American people
vote out of office its countless defectors who currently occupy
the corridors of power. A beginning would be the restoration of
civics as the centerpiece of public education.**
We have been conned out of our Constitutional freedoms by a
group of unelected puppeteers leading the man they installed to
the position through an untold number of anti-American, unethical
means that violated numerous state election laws and then found
themselves backed up to a wall with no way out except to break
even more constitutional laws.
And with all of that they never showed any concern for the
American people or responsible use of the hard-earned taxes paid
by those people.
Don't get me started on the Oath of Office they swore to ad-
here to or dangers of opening the Southern border.
The obvious thing is their hate for America and her people.
We continue to pray that God will still save our land and
His Love and Grace.
Conservatively,
John
Conservativelyjohn.com 