OPINION:
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in remarks to students at the University of Notre Dame, warned about the toppling of “our institutions” by those who seek short-term gratifications and partisan political whims, very often at the expense of the Constitution — very often because they care little for preserving the Constitution.
He’s got a point. Today’s vicious politics are killing the Constitution.
What started as a slow decades-long project under progressive will and Democrat Party shifts to the left, and accelerated under the Barack Obama administration’s abuses — the turn from law and order and democratic-republic principles and to “I want this and I want this now!” pen-and-cell phone wailings — has now landed squarely in the lap of the Joe Biden White House as a great reset of the Constitution.
The Democrats don’t even make any bones about being barely above Marxism now. The party’s devolved into a massive muscle arm of the Chinese will.
The battle over health freedom alone proves that.
“24 GOP states threaten legal action against Biden’s ‘disastrous’ vaccine mandate,” wrote Fox News in a recent headline.
“Gov. Kristi Noem: If President Biden mandates vaccines, South Dakota will see him in court,” USA Today wrote in another recent headline.
Why are we even here?
Once upon a time — once upon a time when we were a free society — it was a given in America that citizens hold the right to decide whether or not to take a vaccine. Even those vaccines that are required as conditions of entry to public schools come with exemption packets. And that’s the underscore of the right of parents, the authority of the individual, the constitutional presumption of power in the hands of the people over government.
But in a little over a year, the foundations of American society and governance have shifted.
The power of the people has given way to the power of Big Government.
With the coronavirus — a far less deadlier, far less dangerous disease than the other health problems tied to other vaccine mandates — the proper role of government has been tossed. Suddenly, for a virus that’s reportedly caused or contributed to 666,440 deaths — out of 41.6 million cases, according to the latest from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — suddenly, for this 1.6% fatality count, America’s gone bonkers.
Most who contract COVID-19 recover from COVID-19.
Most who test positive for the coronavirus recover from the coronavirus.
Many others walk around positive but unaware, because they don’t feel symptoms, so don’t get tested. In other words: They’re not sick.
Yet coronavirus clampdowns have rained down on America, sending churches into closing, students into staying at home, businesses into closing and otherwise thinking adults into little more than scared sheep.
It’s time to put a stop to the unconstitutional clamps on individual liberties. The socialists and communists and collectivists are coming on strong — they’re smelling the fear, they’re feeling their time has come. And they’re not going to quit until they’re forced to quit.
Biden may issue this, Democrats may mandate that, governors in left-leaning states may send their health bureaucrats to require this and that. But in the end, it’s all about the Constitution. It’s all about the law and order.
In the end, it’s really all about what liberty-minded Americans are willing to do to force the lawbreakers and secularists and power-lusty to obey the limited government constructs of the Constitution. In this day and age, the Constitution means only what the loudest want it to mean.
It’s time for those with love of country to show the haters of America what the Constitution truly does mean. It’s not too late. But it is growing late. The fight for God-given liberties must never be ceded — not until the last collectivist cockroach is shoved back in the shadows, not until the last communist-minded pinhead is pushed back into the corner.
American exceptionalism is real. And it transcends partisan politics — if we insist on it.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise Or America Will Fall,” is available by clicking HERE.
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