- Obama’s Eligibility- Will courage or cowardice prevail?
- Does elite refuse to clear Obama eligibility doubts so as to exploit “affirmative action” resentment?
- Obama’s eligibility: the true issue
- Obama gives reason to question his legitimacy
- The eligibility case Obama wants no one to hear
- Why Lt. Col. Lakin is not mistaken
Every day efforts intensify to intimidate or discourage Americans who rightly insist that Barack Obama properly document his constitutional eligibility to hold the office of President of the United States. It has even spilled into the political arena. In Arizona John McCain apparently believes that the mad stream media’s scurrilous slanders against such constitutionalists have succeeded. His campaign is airing commercials identifying J. D. Hayworth as such a constitutionalist, as if that alone is sufficient to turn all right thinking Arizonans against him.
Actually McCain’s abuse of the issue ought to be enough to convince Arizonans still loyal to the U.S. Constitution to vote out of office a Senator who has forsworn his oath to support and defend it. Despite so many deceitful efforts to distract from the real issue involved, it remains quite simple- Is the Constitution of the United States the Supreme Law of the Land, or not? Can it be amended, in violation of its terms, by a simple majority vote or by the dereliction of public officials? Do its words still bind the officers and actions of all levels of government in the United States, or not?
In one of his literary works the 1st Earl of Beaconsfield famously wrote that “it is with words we govern men.” A superficial review of human experience seems to put the lie to this observation. Fear seems more often to have been the basis for human governments, roused and sustained by examples involving the successful application of brute force and violence. More often than by words, people have been cowed into submission by striking images, etched in memory with the sharp edge of the sword or the axe, the gallows or the guillotine. Yet because collective memory cannot be sustained without communication, even government achieved through fear relies in the end on the power of words.
What is true in general is more obviously and decisively true of the government of the United States. It was from the beginning intended “to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” (Federalist, No. 1) With its words, the U.S. Constitution conveys the results of such reflection and choice. It has authority as law, however, only insofar as respect for those words obliges people to conform their actions to the terms and requirements they set forth. Once the words are no longer upheld by that sense of obligation, they no longer govern. Once they no longer govern, the Constitution will have been overthrown. Just as the commitment to be bound by words can establish a form of government, so the destruction of that commitment can and will bring it down. It dies first in the will not in the streets.
This is certainly the reason the Constitution requires all government officials at both the State and national level to swear an oath that obliges them to uphold the Constitution. Should all or most of those officials neglect to fulfill this obligation, by that fact alone the Constitution’s authority is undone. Only one issue in our political life today confronts us with the spectacle of such wholesale dereliction of duty- failure to substantiate that Barack Obama satisfies the Constitution’s plainly stated eligibility requirements for the Office of President of the United States. Can there be an issue more vital to the people of the United States than the overthrow of the Constitution that embodies their authority to govern themselves? It may be that the eligibility involves nothing more than respect for a few words in the Constitution. But as we Americans have special reason to remember, “with words we govern men.”
