ABE LINCOLN'S STAFF

I am by no means a historian. Nor am I a lawyer. I rely on expert sources though who are. My history inclined sources tell me that not only did "Abe" be the only president that came from a "third political party"; but, that his staff consisted of only two persons.

With these, he successfully "sneaked into Washington DC" under fear for his very life to assume the office to which he was elected. He wrote a magnificent "All American Document", the Gettysburg Address. He declared, with the help of Congress whose duty it is to make the formal declaration, war against the south on Constitutional grounds forbidding a state to succeed. He fought this war with an unbelievable mess of generalship bungling and won that war. He freed slaves and led the effort to make slavery illegal. He started, I'm told a rational reconstruction; but, it was soon perverted beyond recognition after his presidency. He carries that "sin of association" still in the south.

All of these were done in difficult times while he himself was suffering what has been described as "debilitating depression".

Compare to us now. We have a president served by a staff of scores of scores, who declared a war by resolution with the help of Congress who also contributed to declaring war by resolution: but who actually has the only War making powers given in the US Constitution: the power to declare war. He has fought this war, or s o we hear, as a possible negligent ex-service person himself, without our knowing his orders to his military, how well those orders are being carried out, and what the reasons are for this war are. And he seems to be only loosing while not supporting and defending the US Constitution from all enemies both foreign and domestic, but rather by bending it quite out of shape. Or so it is that my informants indicate.

Perhaps he needs a staff of only two. If Abe can do it, cannot the man from Crawford Ranch TX do so also? Seems cost effective!

UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS.

All these are shortened paraphrases folks:

1. The word liberty is used only once in the Constitution.

2. States can't make money....except they can use silver and gold in transactions.

3. More people know the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag than know the "Constitution's first 

paragraph."

4. There is no Pledge of Allegiance to the US Constitution.

5. The Constitution makes us "Independant" and a "Republic" but are we either.

6. The Constitution has more "Congress shall.." statements than any other.

7. Liberty and Justice are not in the so-called "Bill of Rights".

8. Congress can only "Declare War", not let war become as a "Resolution".

9. The "militia" is to be used only on "US territory" to repel invasions and suppress riots.

10. Bill/Law Making" is well defined, Resolutions are only "mentioned".

11. Nowhere is the process of "delegating" Constitutional power or duties" allowed.

12. Nowhere is "Administrative Law" allowed.

13. "The Rule of Law" phrase is nowhere used in any form except in recent rhetoric.

14. If a treaty or agreement gives away independence, we are not independent.

15. Congress sets the value of our money, it is now "fiat money" having no value.

MILITARY LAW AND US!

There is a separate set of "laws" for those in the military. They seem to have come from the words of the the USA's Constitution for our Congress to regulate, etc., the military.

In the days of our Constitution's writing, it seems to have been very common for a separate set of "common law" like "laws and practices for the military. Such things as "keel hauling" (way worse to my way of thinking than the "waterboarding" apparently practiced today in the US military) and "forced enlistment against ones will" (whose implementors were called press gangs), by the Navy arms and one of our heavy complaints against British rule of the 13 Colonies called out explicitly in our Declaration o Independence, all were Naval accepted common "military discipline measures".

Flogging was also an accepted punishment means. I may be wrong; but the last "common users of flogging" as military punishment and/or disciplinary measures was the French Foreign Legion. In many countries, death for cowardice is allowed by their forms of "military law". Spain, who otherwise has banned the death penalty from its legal system still allows death as a punishment for certain "military crimes".

Treason and several forms of spying and aiding and abbetting an enemy were and still are in some countries punishable by death in many single country and treaty allowed punishments.

The US has cowardice in the face of the enemy as punishable by death. In modern times, this was enacted only one time on one soldier in WW-II.

Present US "military law" is supposedly encoded and enforced via portions of the Congressionally mandated United States Codes. It is called the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), and seems sometimes to be separate from and sometimes to include the Manual for Courts Martial. But is it uniform? And is it followed appropriately?

My logic of the evidence says no. A general officer, or the Naval equivalent Admiral, is allowed to resign from the service, for which many an enlisted man's equivalent punishment was often and informal "sent to walk point in enemy country" (ie death and wounding/maiming probability greatly raised, or by any of several means sent to do "hard time" in Long Binh Jail (yes it was known as "LBJ") during my war. And how does one make sense of Article 15 processes as "lawful due process in all this"?

And is it uniformly adhered to? Evidence seems not. General Officers and even President Eisenhower, i.e. his warming against the "military industrial complex, have a record of "airing ills" at the 11-th hour of their service or later, rather than bring formal charges as they are "supposed to". And lastly, the evidence seems to indicate that a collective military "wrong" seems to be punished only by a very low ranking persons.

Is the UCMJ uniform? Is it just? Can it not be brought more in line with "non military law"? How do we get secret trials here? Is is not time to review and reform military law as written and as practiced? Many of my sources overwhelmingly say YES!

GOVERNMENT SERVANT LAW

It has come to pass, that it is common now for most parts of our Constitutional National Republic's government to have practices that seem to have "just evolved", without being checked for consistency, for not violating "laws of nature", (e.g. one state legislature made it a law that the math and science value of "pi" be forced to be 3 rather than its "known certifiable" true value of 3.14159..., so calculations would be simpler), and all too often "delegating their powers and responsibilities to others".

The worst offenders seem to be in Congress. They have created a huge structure called "Administrative Law", whereby much of the Executive and Judicial branches are allowed to make "their own laws", which are then "rubber stamped" by Congress, sometime with the "approving terms" that "these are just mild administrative rules, that said "branch' is the expert on", and sometimes with no words of justification at all.

My review of these is that they are not allowed in the Constitution as a granted "power or responsibility", so if they are to be allowed as "law" at all, it is to be done by the States or the people (My translation of the Constitution's word States includes all levels of a Republic's "States" down to the individual "citizen". I expect the "lawyer" vested interests to "counterattack".)

In all such "rubber stamped bodies of this Administrative Law", I find massive portions of self servant bureaucratic words whose only aim that I can see it to serve the interests of that bureaucracy or it's "slush funding" constituencies. This is government run amuck and is most definitely NON-CONSTITUTIONAL. It has resulted in the massive United States Codes, which I challenge any and all to "derive from Constitutionality".

The judiciary is no better! But because of it's smaller size, it appears not to be so damaging in its "Government Servant Law" structures. I disagree. There is no jury above a certain level in court cases, and in many "lower subsets of its laws", such as court due process, jury treatment and directions processes, hierarchical seating and pomp and ceremony within a court, Law by "no comment", which our "Supreme Court" uses to let a lower court decision stand, (How do we know they actually made such a ruling and it is not just a loss of paperwork, e.g. Amendment XXVII) and the already mentioned "wrongly assumed Power of Judicial Review" by the Judiciary.

The way this Constitutionality determination" works is that someone must have a "legal case', either civil or criminal, for which he pays considerable legal fees. That case must rather "willy nilly" work it's way up through the court system, the legal fees paid by the civilians, until it has made it, rather gratuitously to the level of being "possibly considered by a jury-less Supreme Court. This is too frivolous to be allowed to continue and puts an undue and random penalty on civilians for expenses.

In this context, I see our Congress, as duplicitously duplicational, which it need not be. Of its two arms only the House appears Democratic. So, lets do away with the Senate, take their office space and budgets and form an arm that determines Constitutionality, law of nature compliant and both frugal and efficient in its impact on our Commons, and let this body have the second vote on all bills/laws/referenda/etc., that the former Senate had. But lets not let it be a politician's den! Much detail remains to determine the details of just how to do this. But it seems to fill two needs simultaneously. So its good!

WORDS AND MEANINGS

In our Constitution there are a lot of words, and many style forms. Those had the meanings "in common use" in the 13 colonies from about 1770 onwards. It is a fact that if words meanings are not defined, many conclusions can be reached by rational people who only have different meanings for the word. Word meanings also change over time "naturally in common conversation use" and become "to have new formal meanings" in limited domains such as the law, government and courts. Often this process both changes the original intent/meaning of a word or a whole document that depends upon that word. Since these words were not defined in our founding documents, their meanings then, and their meanings now are probably different. Initially, the words meant what they did at the times of those writings, and to cover that issue in "matters of law", we have inherited much of Colonial times British "common law" as part of our system of justice. However, many of the present day re-defining of those words have occured in courts, the legislature, and at the lowest level of the practice of law (e.g. cops in the street, low level courts, elected judges, etc.) it operates only on a list of "do's and do not's" that are quite arbitrary and many juries are "directed by judges" as to what they can and cannot do as juries. The constitution gives judges no such power, and Congress has passed many laws to these effects under powers, such as the so-called "necessary and proper" power, without that "necessary and proper" being shown to be so to meet the stated purposes of the Constitution, as in the so-called Preamble and Amendments.

This use of "common law" is actually still a part of our legal system, and can be used to the advantages of the citizenry. However, it seems that those "presently controlling the legal and legislative" systems are working hard to negate it.

One of the most common abuses is the negation of verbal agreements. In the 1770 era, writing was not a very common skill, and many "contracts" were verbal.  In jury sittings, evidence is and was allowed based upon verbal testimony of the facts the speaker believed true. That still is the case often; but often also it is not. Public officials, juries, soldiers, and others are made to make oaths of performance. Those oaths are verbal contracts between speaker and listener, and dire consequences follow from their being broken.

But in others, such as marriage contracts/agreements, which the present legal system now calls only marriage vows, these verbal contracts are not accepted. Instead, there are whole bodies of these low level laws, which most of us know nothing about that are set to rule all that follows a marriage under the rubric of "family law". I maintain these are non-Constitutional and that a jury of peers are the only ones able  to judge the present "commonly accepted meanings" of words, and they are fully capable of judging cases of verbal contracts  based on their own observations of speakers words and reactions. And that is how it should be. An elected judge, or a lawyer in a system where his interests must be assumed to be "self-interest" is likely out of touch of the world of the common man of "peers", and is biased toward his interests. So on the basis of their ignorance and bias, they should not be a part of the interpretive nor the decision on guilt/fairness in law and/or equity. By common law, which is still part of our historical law, verbal contracts must be accepted as valid for jury decision in courts.

Prepare yourself to hear all sorts of arguments contrary to this, mostly from those who gain from its not being "presently allowed"; but believe only your neighbors with no such self iterest and your fellow jurors, whom you must test to see whether they have any such self interest.

THE BIG EIGHT?!

So for now, I get that our Constitutional purposes are to be at least:

1. By and for "We the People" and our Posterity, and as such is interpreted by "We the People": 
2. for forming a more perfect Union,
3. to establish Justice,
4. to insure Domestic Tranquility,
5. to provide for the Common Defense
6. to promote the General Welfare, and
7. to secure Liberty.

and some more that the clerical, grammar, punctuation, spelleing and word processor capabilites of the time allowed to be mis-written are:

1. To promote the Progress of Science and the useful arts, (note 7 + 1 = 8)

MORE TAKE OUTS

It seems that in the last 300, and maybe even earlier, there has come into the psyche of those who often end up in government or positions of authority, to stray and wander from what our charters allow them to do. They also seem to begin "gaming" their acts, words, and even the charter itself. Many say this requires us to go back to "the founding Fathers intent". I tried that and could not find a consensus description of this other than the words written in the four documents in the first "post". So, starting from there and what I personally have observed or derived from my reading of the documents themselves, and my observations on governmental practices generally, I get more non-constitutionality for our joint consideration as "take outs" from the list of acceptable practices. Some are:

1. No time limit on the state's time for approval of amendments or referendums is given to any of the the governmental branches established by the Constitution. Therefore said time limits, if any, can only be established by "the states" or "the people". Therefore all past proposed "Amendments et al" remain as active candidates for approval by the states regardless of wordings implying time limits, and will remain so in perpetuity". And all such statements, such as those found at the end of several Amendments to the effect that "this article shall be inoperative unless ratified...within (some time limit)" are non-constitutional. Then if follows that all such past forms and the ERA remain ratifiable candidates, as do all other such time governmental "time limits" that are states and the peoples rights to determine, if the elect to do so at all.

2. Since Article II, Section 8, para 8 gives Congress a power "in order to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts..." it seems that that is a purpose of the Constitution that is fully equal to the first six at the beginning of the Constitution. It follows then that no office holder can hold any office if he does not in any way believe in and/or fully support "Science, the useful Arts, and Progress of Science an Progress in the useful Arts". A good many present office holders and candidates are thereby full disqualified from holding or pursuing any office of our Constitutional government. Televised statements by many current office holders and candidates is proof enough for their immediate resignation and/or withdrawal from candidacy now. So "let it be so!"

3. It being hundreds of years since the writing of the constitution, and that science, math, engineering, and technology have changed our capabilities to function "jointly" in ways unbelievable, even 10 years ago many would say, there seems to no longer be a need for many operations that are now way better, faster, and more completely and accurately done with the many "new technologies." Voice votes "counted auditorially" being one for sure, and full total video/audio recording of all actions of Congress being another, to be no longer allowable. (Seems identical in "actionable content" to #2 immediately above.) And if no other data would suffice to convince, the fact that "government" lost the XXVII-th Amendment for over 100 years, what else have they misplaced, and what possible "general welfare, etc." reason would we need to not do so immediately. So, "let it be so!"

4. And now redundancy. It bothers me as needless and confusable rhetoric. The several Amendment statements, and their cousins less easily identified elsewhere, to the effect that:

"The Congress shall have the power to enforce this...by appropriate legislation" is needless so long as it stays within its granted powers. Moreover, why just the Congress? Should not all branches, departments, etc., have the power, within their each separately granted elsewhere powers, "...to enforce by appropriate..."?

5. Secrecy! This is a thorny one. I see more abuse in it's use:

• Every secret weapon of mass destruction "development" was classified secret, yet each was know to "enemies" who got them, before we could even know of them.
• There is a gaming strategy "within the beltway" and perhaps everywhere, to "leak secrets"with no fear, when it is politically in the interest of some special interest, either within or without (yes I mean both meanings) government.
• It has gone so far as to limit the actionable information that our "representatives" have at hand to make decisions as our representatives, by the artifice of selecting only a few of Congress to have these types of information. That's not full representation of We the people!
• Many a dirty deed has been fully and nefariously done, and effectively "buried from public knowledge" by this "secrecy mantle". How does anyone do anything for us without having full open knowledge of "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"? They simply cannot! So in these regimes, we have only non-Constitutionality!