The best government, it is said, is that which is centered closest to the governed. The Framers understood this. That's why the entirety of the Constitution is based upon the idea of "enumerated powers". Remember that from Civics class? It basically means that if a power or responsibility isn't specifically set forth in the document as the milieu of the Federal government, then said government has no say in it. Does that sound like the America we live in today?
The Constitution also goes out of its way to lay out the structure of the national government, detailing the structure, makeup, power, and function of each of its 3 branches. The Framers understood that absolute power corrupts, absolutely. They built in checks and balances against any one of the three branches of the national government gaining too much power. Why, you might ask? Kinda simple, if you think about it. The government they were creating was NEVER supposed to order the people about with mandates the folks didn't agree to. They were supposed to be GOVERNED, not RULED. To be ruled is to lack the ability to decide what should be allowed or disallowed in your life. The whole thing really is genius if, indeed, we were still following it. But as the saying goes, a funny thing happened along the road.
The power elite figured out that the way around the pesky little checks and balances written into the Constitution. In some cases, they just ignore them. If the currently elected Executive branch doesn't politically care for a particular law that a previous Congress passed and a previous President signed into law, they just choose not to enforce it. Wait, what? Yup, since they are solely empowered to enforce the laws of the land, neither the Congress nor the Supreme Court can do so. Rap your mind around that. There is a law on the books that makes a particular thing illegal (and thus, a CRIME). But if doing it doesn't get you arrested, tried, and punished (because the enforcers of the law look the other way), then ABRACADABRA!!! It's not really a crime! Not exactly the way you were taught about America in school, is it?
Another way the power elite get around having to follow the Constitution is to pass a law that creates an agency/department/bureau/commission and empowers these bodies to come up with their own "rules and regulations". It's sorta like watching a magician do sleight of hand. There again, not exactly the way the Framer's intended the country to be. So why is this important and how does it relate to the topic of this article: crime?
It's really quite simple, if you think about it. As the governed, we get to decide how free people will live out our lives. We, not anyone else, get to chose what is and what is not a crime. That's directly written into the Constitution and precisely why all of the mechanics of government are spelled out in the document. The election process is the master tool and a Constitutional Representative Republic is the blueprint set out to ensure this. How do you think it's working out so far? Judging from what I see and hear while observing this nation today, I'd say not so well. Not so well indeed. It's the very concept of "free" that is under assault. If you are free, you get to decide. If we, as a people, decide something should be illegal (and thus, a crime), we go to the polls and elect leaders to enact and enforce our decision. If they do so, they get re-elected. If they fail to do so, they get shown the door and we elect someone new who will. At least, in theory.
Those agencies/departments/bureaus I mentioned a second ago are but one example of where that theory goes awry. See, the power elite figured out that if they pass a law the masses disagree with, they will get voted out. The drastically simple solution was to create the A/D/B's to do their dirty work for them. The lion's share of "crimes" on the books today really aren't written into law. They are written into rules and regulations written by unelected drones in the A/D/B's who maintain sole power over their creation, enactment, enforcement, and execution. So, no matter how much the people may hate the rules and regulations the A/D/B's put forth, or rale against the limitations that it puts on their freedom, the elected officials get to do the ole Pontius Pilate "washing of the hands" routine. The really fun part is that our elected leaders get to equally rage against the machine that they, themselves, created in solicitation of our votes in order to stay in power. Genius, right?
Even at the earliest stages of this country, it would have been impossible for any small group of elected officials to have any real impact on the day to day freedom of the average American. The contructs of the Constitution just didn't allow for it. I've said many times in the past that the Constitution wasn't just a blueprint for a new nation, it was a peace treaty between 13 disparate nations (colonies) that allowed them to join together without losing their individual identities. The newly formed Congress was supposed to only pass laws that affected the nation as a whole. En toto, if you will. It was the job of the state legislatures to pass more specific laws when it came to the daily lives of the people. The best government is the closest government, remember? The people of New York state, for example, could and should be the only ones deciding what the people of New York want to be considered a "crime". That very same behaviour could be totally legal in North Carolina, Virginia, or any one of the other colonies if they decided it should be so. Different regions of the newly formed country had different value systems, beliefs, and historically derived tenets based on where the majority of the population had immigrated from. There wasn't supposed to be a one-size-fits-all set of rules. If you lived in New York and didn't believe that the thing they called a crime should be illegal, you could move to Pennsylvania where it was legal. You were, dare I say, "free" to move. If you lived in Pennsylvania and thought that a particular behaviour should be a crime, but the majority of your fellow residents didn't, you could just move to Virginia where it WAS a crime.
So long as the laws that the states passed could pass Constitutional muster, all was well with the world. The idea of freedom was assured by close government, fair elections, and the ability of the individual to live where he or she felt that their values were expressed under the law. In other words, if we thought something should be a crime, it was. If we thought something shouldn't be a crime, we were free to move to where is wasn't. The original leaders in the newly formed nation understood the limitations that the newly formed national government had and the impact of said government wasn't even a blip on the average person's radar. As the country grew in territory and population, this very same limitation just got more vivid. Territories west of the Mississippi river literally started from scratch when it came to putting together their own "rule books". People fighting just to survive didn't have much use for any form of government. They were too busy making sure they had food to eat, shelter from the weather, and keeping their families from dying in the wilderness. After awhile though, once things got more settled, they did get around to the notion that there needed to be SOME rules to foster a more civilized existence. Their idea of a crime might, understandably, be different than what a person living in the overcrowded city of New York would be. Heck, maybe that's why the Framers had to put in that pesky little 10th Amendment (more on that in the next piece of this article).
The take home message here is that when the people felt comfortable that their wishes were being adhered to and their freedoms were protected, the American Experiment was rolling at a full boil. But when and where did ship go off course? Who is responsible? Where is the poison pill that is choking our democracy to death? More on that in the next piece of this article.
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