OPINION:
In an interview on Fox News Channel’s Fox News Sunday, Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch talked about how some legal minds see that America has become so filled with regulations and laws that the average adult-age citizen commits at least one felony each day.
Such is the state of a nation that has forgotten its foundation is God-given rights and liberties, and has instead moved to recognize government as the provider of all. When government is allowed to run roughshod over individual rights by pretending as if government and only government can solve society’s problems — that’s where tyranny blooms.
“Some professors say there are now so many federal laws on the books that every American over the age of 18 commits one felon a day,” Gorsuch said to host Shannon Bream, Breitbart reported. “That’s happened in my lifetime — [from] 1970 to the present, we’ve seen maybe a doubling [of] the number of federal crimes on the books. And this just counts within the U.S. code passed by Congress and the tip of the iceberg because federal agencies have been busy.”
Yes. Add to that local and state laws and regulations and codes and it’s probably more to truth each individual is committing numerous felonies each day.
Free America has become kinda free America.
Freedoms in America have moved from the inherent to the government-granted.
This is actually by design of nefarious forces within government — nefarious forces of all political persuasions and parties. And the destruction of God-given freedom has progressed to such a point that sometimes it’s not even laws but rather dictates or mandates or some other form of decree from a government bureaucrat or body that has the citizenry goose-stepping and tip-toeing and treading lightly on eggshells, all to avoid offending the arresting powers. It wasn’t law, for example, that pushed Americans to wear those ridiculous face masks during the years of COVID. It was bureaucrats on egos.
That’s just one example.
Republicans go nuts with laws and quasi-laws under the guise of safety and security — think the Patriot Act, in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Democrats go nuts with laws and quasi-laws under cover of social justice — they like to shove down citizens’ throats policies and agendas they can’t get passed the duly legislative route, using words like equality and equity and tolerance and diversity.
The end is the same.
The end breeds more government, more government, more government.
And because the public school systems have been feeding rotten lies into the minds of America’s youth for so many years — lies that have then been molded and shaped and padded into activism by all the leftist-leaning professors who’ve taken over college campuses — the end of more government, more government, more government is really Marxism and communism. If America doesn’t get off this path of Big Government, collectivism will supplant individualism.
“On the one hand,” Gorsuch said, “we need laws to keep us free and safe. On the other hand, if you have too many laws you impair the same freedoms.”
In America, where our nation’s framers saw fit to give us a government in subservience to the people who take their rights and liberties from God, today’s national spirit of “too many laws” is a sign of a flipped balance of power. It’s a tell of an arrogant government and a cowed, submissive citizenry. It’s a show that the political class has become above the reproach of the people; that politicians know best and the people who elect politicians need to shut up and let the politicians run the country; that the servant class has become the ruling class.
It’s a wake-up call to how far this nation has strayed from its American Exceptionalism.
If Americans truly put God first in this country, then the rights described in the Declaration of Independence — life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness — would indeed still flow to each individual as “endowed by their Creator,” and there would be no discussion on the lawfulness of forced face masking, for instance, because the politicians would not even try to force masks onto faces because they would recognize they didn’t hold that authority.
Bureaucrats wouldn’t dare because these same bureaucrats would recognize they were only humble servants, constrained in powers by the Constitution, by concepts of morality from God, by fear of the voters.
We have too many laws on the books today because God has been pushed off the public stage in America, leading to a morally degraded society leading to a country of chaos and division, leading to distress in communities and calls for a return to saner times, leading to government — a heavily secularized government voted into office by a heavily secularized people — stepping in and ramping up its presence, including its punishments, as a so-called promise means of instilling calm. Laws, laws, laws.
The people can’t control themselves any longer so let’s make more laws to punish and jail the ones who are caught.
That’s what’s taking place in America right now. The solution to overregulation and government-run-amok, drunk on power, insanely making law after law after law? Put government back in its place. And to do that requires a moral citizenry capable of self-governance. And to get that — requires God.
• 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 and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Lockdown: The Socialist Plan To Take Away Your Freedom,” is available by clicking HERE or clicking HERE or CLICKING HERE.
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