Constitutional Neoconmen by Thomas DiLorenzo

…..Neocons like Levin, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh who now fancy themselves as constitutionalists since there is a Democrat in the White House are hypocrites of the first order. All during the eight years of the Bush regime their standard response to anyone who would object to the PATRIOT Act and myriad other attacks on constitutional liberty was to proclaim that “9/11 changed everything.”

Translation: the hell with the constitution; we’re engaged in a never-ending “war on terra,” as George W. Bush called it. We need to destroy our constitutional liberties in order to protect our constitutional liberties, they told us. It is the hatred of those liberties by people in the Middle East that caused the terrorists to attack us on 9/11, they ludicrously proclaimed (and still do).

War is not just “the health of the state,” as Randolph Bourne sagely stated in his famous essay of that title; it is the health of unlimited and unconstitutional government. Governmental powers always ratchet up during wartime at the expense of constitutional liberty (and prosperity) despite the fact that every federal politician, and every soldier, takes an oath to do the opposite – to defend the Constitution.

This notorious “ratchet effect” is described in great detail in Robert Higgs’s classic book, Crisis and Leviathan.

The Lincoln administration set the template for tactic of using war as an excuse to destroy constitutional liberties. Lincoln illegally suspended Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political dissenters without due process; shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers in the Northern states; deported a political opponent, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio; confiscated firearms in the border states; illegally created the state of West Virginia out of Northwestern Virginia; and much more. Indeed, Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern states was the very definition of treason under Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution which reads: “Treason” against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort” (emphasis added).

The founders were careful to always speak of “the United States” in the plural in all of the founding documents. That’s why the constitution’s definition of treason refers to “them” and “their.” A central government that wages war against the free and independent states (the language of the Declaration of Independence) is guilty of treason. That of course is precisely what Lincoln did. (He always insisted that the Southern states never legally seceded, were never a legitimately separate country, and were always a part of the U.S.)…..

EXCERPT

via Constitutional Neoconmen by Thomas DiLorenzo.

 

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