Whither now for Colorado?

Well t’was a mixed bag in the mid-terms for the GOP in general around the country. Losing the majority in the House while increasing the majority in the Senate.

In my home State of Colorado it was pretty much a wipe out for the GOP – both statewide and within my home county. We have a straight Democrat House, Senate and Governor which means we will have to sit and endure while the cretins of the left bring Colorado to its knees.

For Colorado, IMNSHO, the problem rests with the State GOP which is a busted flush of an organization and which LONG AGO lost the support of conservative voters.  The State Party seems to have fossilized into some sort of “gentleman’s club” mindset that “if only we were more like Democrats…”. Walker Stapleton was the preferred candidate of this hidebound little grouping. I did not meet ONE conservative voter who supported his candidacy, nor did I meet any GOP voter who thought he could win anything.

Stapleton’s campaign never appeared out where I live – which is rural and solid Republican. NEVER APPEARED!!  I would have thought that in combating a campaign that had oodles of personal cash it would have behooved the State GOP to have worked on maximizing the turn out of the areas where it was assured of support? Apparently I am dreamer…

The entirety of the campaign seem to consist of robo-calls and suggestions that people sign petitions.

The one thing that could have energized the base? Having Donald Trump do an event here – never seemed to occur to anyone except conservatives.  But “energizing the base” does not seem to be a priority for the CO GOP.

Whither now?

Well first of all we need to acknowledge some unpalatable truths.

The Party of and for the Rich is the Democrat Party. They poured in millions of dollars (in addition to the personal millions from rich guy Polis) billionaires like Steyer, Soros and Bloomberg made sure that state wide campaigns and initiatives had a lot of monetary support.

That one simple statement carries within it the idea that to have any hope of winning the GOP needs to change its mindset from the expensive and unproductive “consultant driven drivel” and start spending its money on activism and organization. Lose the “Robo Calls”, hire real organizers who can motivate and run local activism throughout the state.

Consultants have uniformly failed the GOP. Harsh but true. I would like to see who was paid what from the Stapleton Campaign and, more interesting, WHY?  Can anyone name ANY consultant who has helped the GOP in Colorado?  I am sure that they did help themselves of course. But I think that it is time to take a look at actual performance and realize that it is time to dump the losers and actually start hiring activists.

The State GOP needs to come to the realization that the GOP strength is not in Denver or Boulder Counties. Now one would think that this little gem would be a no brainer. But it is not. The GOP consistently, for example, holds its State Convention in places like Boulder!!!  the Convention is for delegates from all the counties of Colorado and yet, for some reason, the state GOP organization thinks that spending its hard won cash in a County which is so lefty that people outside of the Denver Boulder conurbation refer to it as “The People’s Republic”, is a great idea.  Why not hold it where it would benefit a county that actually votes Republican?

If the State GOP will not change and adapt it is probably past due that we set up an alternative, conservative organization that will support actually winning the elections, getting conservative ideas being actively carried out in the Counties and in the State.

Power of “Purse” and “Sword”

There are two basic powers in government. The Power of the Purse is one and The Power of the Sword is the other.

One of the big points that the Founding Fathers wrestled with was keeping the Power of the Purse and the Power of the Sword separated in the powers of the government.

Realize that the Founders came from a British tradition and with the Parliamentarian fear of absolute Monarchies. Where the ruler had the absolute right to levy taxes and the absolute power to enforce their collection. A Civil war had been fought and won to separate those two powers.

The Power of the Sword lay with the armed people of the country who were the basis for the militia and who controlled – on a local basis – what laws would and would not be enforced. Please think about that for a moment. No matter who a central authority appoints someone to enforce rules, diktats laws regulations – they cannot do so if the Power of the sword is in the hands of the locals.

When President Trump and the GOP won the elections of 2016 they assumed that the Power of the Purse was enough.

They have now found that they needed to take the Power of the Sword out of the hands of the Deep State like the DoJ and the FBI, the NSA, THE EPA etc.

Sessions needs to remove the people in the DoJ who are not using the Power of the Sword to forward the policies of the President and who are, instead, using that Power to oppose implementation of those policies. They need to be, if not fired = transferred to meaningless jobs without Security Clearances. And the staff need to be instructed to get their jobs done.

The Federal Judiciary needs to be addressed. And the Executive branch needs to act like it has the powers given to it from the Constitution. Like, for example, President Trump wrote an executive order that was totally within his purview and yet it was setaside by a lower federal judge.

Why did the executive branch pay attention to something that was interfering with their legitimate actions? Why was it not just ignored?

Think for a minute. The three branches are co-equal. Trump wrote something that was within the delineated powers of the Presidency. It was not up the Federal Courts to decide whether it was something they liked. Period.

That also means that when the House passes a resolution on how Federal money is to be spent – that is SOLELY their power. Not the Judicial Branch.

Stop being afraid of enforcing the Constitution.

Guns, Yanks, Brits – rights remaining and rights lost

Since I first read “The ‘Nice Girl’ Who Saved the Second Amendment” on the National Review site:

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-nice-girl-who-saved-the-second-amendment/

I have been looking and reading and seeking to understand how a “Right To bear Arms” that was a universal right held by both the Colonists in the USA and by the British People in the home country became such a cherished right in the new country and an abolished right in the old.

Some background on me. I was born in England had a pretty good schooling in the classic mode (even had Latin class)and discovered a love of English History which has never left me. Went on to be a bit of a rolling stone (alas the kind that gathers absolutely no moss) working and living in Denmark the US and in various places in Europe.

My wife and I and kids emigrated to the USA, well I should say my wife returned to the USA accompanied by the rag-tag crowd of the rest of us clutching our green cards. I finally became a citizen in 2011 after living here for 21 years (legally I hasten to add).

My love of English history has been joined to a love of American history and particularly those magnificent documents The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Now time for a confession. In my studies of English History my initial period of interest was Roman and Anglo-Saxon and on to the Middle Ages. Like most British people – I think – I absorbed my ideas of modern “rights” through conversations with parents, friends family and so on. Also from reading newspapers, magazines, novels. In short I really did not have much of a clue about things like “free speech” or “right to bear arms” it turns out, of course, that this ignorance is a) common and b) disastrous.

About the only “right” that got any traction in history studies in school was the “right to vote”.

So when I came to the USA and started in on trying to understand the “Colonial mindset”. I went by the assumption that the USA and the UK are two separate countries and cultures and that the founding documents of the USA bore no real relation to the UK. So, when it came to gun rights for example, to my mind there was the American view and the British view and they were just different.

I assumed (there’s that word again) that we Brits had never owned guns in meaningful amounts, that “ordinary working folks” had no need for them and that it had always been that way, always. We will be re-visiting that little gem further on.

And here in the USA? Well I just assumed that there were some radicals in that radical bunch in Philadelphia who had the hots for guns. Not quite but it it was basically the mental shortcut I used to separate the concepts.

Gradually I came to the understanding (and it took a while to sink in) that the Bill of Rights and the Constitution are not instructions to individuals. They are the rules which government is permitted to live by. This was a watershed moment in my education. Government “rights” and permissions were allowed by the governed. They were not given by the government to itself. They were not powers delegated from some ruler, the Constitution was a document laying out what the governed were giving permission to the government to do. And the things they specifically told the Government it could not do.

I had, during this time, observed and taken part in on-line arguments and discussions about guns, Yanks, Brits etc. I took the stance, for the longest time, that the right to bear arms was a cherished right for Americans and that it was just different here in the USA than it was in England.

During that time I also studied the endless argument about whether or not the second amendment and the right to bear arms depends upon having an organized militia or whether it means that the statement “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” directly implies that the condition of having a well regulated militia for the security of a free state is dependent upon the citizens having the right to bear arms.

Oh the arguments about the placement of the comma. The parsing, the back and forth.

And then came the Supreme Court decision on DC v Heller.

To my lackadaisical view I was not surprised. I had not realized that there was any real debate about our right to keep and bear arms for our own use. But I felt “validated” in my view by the decision. And moved along.

Until the publication of that article I mentioned right at the top of this little piece.

I read the article and became intrigued. Who the hell was “Joyce Lee Malcolm” and why on earth would some history book be a lynchpin for a Supreme Court Decision? And , what on earth was the English Bill of Rights?

So, off to Amazon I trotted to purchase the book. Of course, no Kindle edition. I ordered the paperback ($27 ! Priced like a text book thats for sure) and then received notice from Amazon that they were all out of it and I would have to wait. Three months later it finally arrived. (If a passing thought about big corporations working to stop Constitutional rights passed through my mind during that time – could anyone blame me?).

The book is called To Keep and Bear Arms by Joyce Lee Malcolm. It is an incredible work. Seriously. The historical scholarship seems precise exacting and thorough. It is a book that requires study rather than just a quick read.

It shook my self satisfied view of this whole debate and made me realize – THERE IS NO DEBATE. A Militia is not possible unless there is a population that has the right to keep and to bear arms. The Militia comes from the people. Not from anyone else.

And why is this important? Well the English thought it was incredibly important because the existence of the Militia kept a check on the potential tyranny of the Crown. The English landed gentry and political and commercial classes were rightly terrified of standing armies – supported by enforced taxation and loyal to the central authority. While the Crown was restricted by the cost of trying to maintain a standing army – the parliament through the local militias had no such problem.

A King lost his head in this debate. And after the interregnum of Cromwellian rule. Charles the 2nd was restored to the throne.

He was restored to the throne with a wave of enthusiasm and embarked on living the Good Life and in trying to break the power of the Militia. As part of his restoration he was given the right to raise a standing professional army. His allowance from parliament was agreed upon. Throughout his reign he sought various ways to separate the peasants from their weapons and to bypass the force of the Militia. He was fairly successful at it.

He converted to Catholicism just before his death keeping his promise to the King of France who had supplied him directly with the money to raise a larger standing army than Parliament wanted or would pay for.

Charles’ death and the succession to throne of his brother, James II (Of england James VII of Scotland) proved to be the end of the Stuart rule in Britain. James was a Catholic and determined to rule as an absolute Monarch.

After just under 4 years of his reign he fled England after the protestant landed class (and vast majority in the country) sent for James’ eldest daughter Mary, who was married to William of Orange and offered them the Crown. It was called The Glorious Revolution.

As a part of ascending the throne King William signed The English Bill of Rights in 1689 which included thirteen articles but these three may sound a little familiar:

That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal;

That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law;

That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp

As Professor Malcolm put it – what had been a duty before (each man was responsible for the defense of his family, property and community and had the obligation to arm himself in order to do so) had now become a right.

So by the time Independence for the Colonies was being talked about, discussed and agreed upon – the right to keep and bear arms was a right of all Englishmen (which the Colonists were of course – until that memorable declaration of Independence).

And using that right – the Colonists raised militias from their armed population to defend themselves and their new independence from the standing armies of the Crown.

I hope I have done justice to the sterling work of Professor Malcolm and that the brief background here shows the logic and necessary background for the correct reading of the Second Amendment.

Whatever happened to the Brits? How did we end up with none of this?

Well back in 1900…

Read this webpage and see how you can lose rights you never knew you had.

http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle558-20100221-07.html

Civil Asset Forfeiture

Civil Asset Forfeiture has to be the single most boring title I have yet used in this blog. But it is a subject that is fraught with passion for many people.

This, to me, is one of those initiatives beloved of policy makers that must have sounded good in whatever committee room they were in.

“Those drug dealers! They use their ill gotten gains to pay for fancy schmantzy shysters to get off!”

“You’re right but what can we do?”

“We can freeze their assets when they are arrested so they cannot use it to wriggle away. If they are found innocent with their public defender then they can get their money back”

And just that easily we have turned prosecutors, AGs, police chiefs and Sheriffs into unlicensed, unsupervised and relentless tax collectors. They collect their taxes by seizing money and assets from public people – some accused of a committing a crime, some not. Like the Mob, the takings are shared upwards and downwards, and an innocent person can find themselves fighting an entire system to get their property returned to them.

And I have been disturbed to find that Jeff Sessions – whom I had considered to be a Conservative is very much in favor of this grotesque practice of taking money from the public BEFORE any conviction.

I am not any kind of a lawyer – I do not understand how this procedure can pass any kind of muster as “Constitutional” I just do not. But it would appear that now there is far too much budget wrapped up in this subject for anyone in the “Judicial-Criminal Complex” to want to upset the applecart. If the Attorney general of the US is all for it – I doubt he is going to get much pushback from all the people who report up to him.

But no matter what weasel wording is used – it is not Conservative. It is not something I wish to be associated with and I will agitate and push to get rid of it wherever I can.  It is not “rule of law” it is “misrule of law”. I have no problem, at all, with a convicted felon having his ill gotten gains seized by the state AFTER  he or she is convicted.

 

The Tea Party

I am a “member” of the Tea Party. Unlike most leftist top down organizations – we all know that what defines Tea Party members is not a card or a meeting but a state of mind. I am a conservative which is why this website exists.

More importantly I am, I hope, a learning conservative. I do not believe that the best days of conservatism are in the past and I do not believe that the best ideas have all been discovered or articulated as yet.

I believe that part of our “job” is to enable conservatism to develop and to ensure a future for our families and our country. Part of that lies in our restraining government wherever possible. Legislation needs to be slowed down, the federal government needs to be forced to devolve power back to the states we have to revive the idea that proposals need to be public and need to be based in principles.

We are now, as I write this, in a time of great agitation. The Trump Administration is probably going to be an agent of sudden change in the next 4 years.  there are going to be things that appeal to us, things we wish to see handled right now. But much as the feelgood factor would be high it is very risky.

The rollback of the Obama era EO’s and departmental regulations that were rushed out from Mr “I have my phone and my pen” are best eradicated as soon as possible, that will help give the populist supporters a boost and will cut back government something that we know, philosophically, is a good thing to have happen but hard to explain simply to people who are not that interested.

The cutting of the EPA Energy and Education Departments is another area which is something which coincides with the principles of small government conservatism.

There are other things that need more looking at – Health Care for example.  The repeal is imperative but we need there to be frank and open discussion about what and why and how.