LOOK WHO CAME UP FROM THE DEEP AND WHY I MIGHT RETURN

One may think that the Constitution as a document may be a difficult piece of literature to walk away from with a true understanding of all the fruits and nuts contained within. In fact, many of you out there may be 'Constitutionally Challenged' or suffer from CDD, 'Constitution Deficit Disorder'; have no fear though because Michelle Bachman has taken the liberty to offer you Constitutional Idiots a remedial course in just that, The Constitution.

Wait a minute though, before you enroll in class and buy the textbook, Constitution For Dummies, hear what Ron Paul has to say about 'obeying the Constitution which strictly limits the power of the government'... nothing else ever sounded so sweet!


Related Material: If you'd rather try and 'test out' of Constitution for Dummies 101, then freshen up on your Constitutional fortitude with The Constitution of the United States

You want proof that written Constitutions mean exactly what the writers and ratifiers say they mean and nothing else in the form of this essay from MI Supreme Court Judge Thomas McIntyre Cooley.  

Thomas McIntyre Cooley on Written Constitutions- Excerpted from "A Treatise on Constitutional Limitations"   purchase at amazon.com and for instant reading here at Google books.

"A cardinal rule in dealing with written instruments is that they shall receive a unvarying interpretation, and that their practical construction is to be uniform. A constitution is not to be made to mean one thing at one time, and another at some subsequent time when the circumstances may have so changed as perhaps to make a difference rule in the case seem desirable.

A principle share of the benefit expected from written constitutions would be lost if the rules they established were to be so flexible as to bend to circumstances or be modified by public opinion. It is with special reference to the varying moods of public opinion, and with a view to putting the fundamentals of government beyond their control, that these instruments are framed; and there can be no such steady and imperceptible change in their rules as inheres in the principles of the common law. Those beneficent maxims of the common law which guard person and property have grown and expanded until they mean vastly more to us than they did to our ancestors, and are more minute, particular, and pervading in their protections; and we may confidently look forward in the future to still further modifications in the direction of improvement.
Public sentiment and action effect such changes, and the courts recognize them; but a court or legislature which should allow a change in public sentiment to influence it in giving construction to a written constitution not warranted by the intention of its founders, would be justly chargeable with reckless disregard of official oath and public duty; and if its course would become a precedent, these instruments would be of little avail. The violence of public passion is quite as likely to be in the direction of oppression as in any other; and the necessity of bills of rights in our fundamental laws lies mainly in the danger that the legislature will be influenced by temporary excitements and passions among the people to adopt oppressive enactments.

What a court is to do, therefore, is to declare the law as written, leaving it to the people themselves to make such changes as new circumstances may require. The meaning of the constitution is fixed when it is adopted, and it is not different at any subsequent time when a court has occasion to pass upon it."

Much has been made about the “Tea Party” movement and other American’s calls to “return to the Constitution” and get “our government back” from the politicians and special interests that have stolen it. There are many thoughtful plans being promoted that should the Republican Party regain control of the House of Representatives, they should pursue. These plans offer various degrees of remodeling the federal system but do nothing to alter its inexorable course toward either an Oligarchy or acting national democratic legislature.

Mike Church offers as a counterpoint this brief list of actions that would merely begin the process of “returning to the Constitution”. The list could easily number in the hundreds of pages and resemble one of the current Congress's legislative acts in both size and scope and even that wouldn’t completely “return us to the Constitution.”
Go here to read more of a true conservative view of  The little "r" republican path back to the Constitution !

And as the Beatles asked " You say you want a reVoltion", well check out what my little'o Republic of Tejas has to sing back. Because not everyone thinks that the right to secede is some sort of illegal taboo that Lincoln exterminated with his war


And here's another little history lesson for the rest of us in the "Hayseed Rebellion" 
 from 1949's "All the King's Men"

h/t The King Dude