Bob Barr on Fiscal Responsibility

A Path Back To More Constitutional Government

Real conservatives, libertarians, and constitutionalists are at a loss in this presidential election cycle to effect real, positive change. John McCain is the GOP nominee, but he is no conservative. His record as a senator reflects a flagrant disregard for basic constitutional prinicples. Barack Obama is an ideological leftist. But the Democratic nominee benefits from being somewhat charming and from actually having public speaking skills which his major opponent lacks. He is also a largely unknown quantity with the American people. Thus he has an easier time adapting his public positions on policy to suiting whichever portion of the electorate he wishes to appeal to.

Knowing that we will not have a friend in the White House is discouraging. We could even be tempted to give up hope for steering America back to her roots of limited government and individual liberty. There is something we can do, however. We can hold officeholders accountable for their actions. Edwin Viera, Jr. writes in his article Government Is Not The Problem:

In short, “the government” cannot deprive any American of his rights, because only by acting consistently with those rights, precisely as the Constitution guarantees them, do public officials function as “the government” at all. When any public official steps even a single Angstrom Unit outside of the government’s constitutional boundaries, his actions become lawless and unauthorized, and he ceases to act as or for the government, but instead acts against and in defiance of the government.

Of course, the complaint that “the government is denying us our rights” does contain a modicum of practical insight: namely, that many people in public offices today do increasingly disregard and infringe upon Americans’ rights “under color of law.” However, although these misdeeds may be carried out ostensibly in the name of the law, and supposedly through the procedures of the law, they nonetheless remain in violation of the supreme law. Therefore, notwithstanding that the perpetrators may hold public offices, with respect to such aberrant behavior they are not acting as public officials or in the capacity of “the government” at all.

The essential point and fundamental basis for remedial action is that, under America’s political system, oppression is not and can not be the product of a disembodied generality called “the government” that is somehow above the law because it makes, interprets, and enforces the law. Rather, oppression is always the product of identifiable individual wrongdoers in public office, all of whom are themselves wholly subject to law — whether the law of the Constitution, or the higher law of the Declaration of Independence, or the highest “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” upon which both the Declaration and the Constitution rest. The responsibility for every act of oppression against the American people must be assigned specifically to these individuals, not to the public offices they happen to occupy or to “the government” as an institution.

One solution to the continued usurpations of power by government officials is to prosecute them for their misconduct. Another more practical solution is to vote them out of office. The combination of these two tools, if applied consistently and vigilantly, can steer us back to more constitutional government.