Does it matter who is president? Not constitutionally

OPINION:

My family and friends are angry with me because I won’t tell them for whom I plan to vote for president.

I have not voted for the Republican or Democrat for president since 1984, when I happily voted for President Ronald Reagan. Since those days, the Democrats have gravitated to principles of big government that would make Franklin D. Roosevelt blush, and the Republicans have abandoned all principles.

I will give the Democrats credit. They do not believe that the Constitution restrains the federal government. They say so, and they act upon it. They believe that the Congress is a general legislature that can right any wrong, tax any event, regulate any behavior and intrude on any relationship if there is a national political will for them to do so.

Most Republicans believe the same but don’t acknowledge it for fear of sounding like the Democrats whom they profess to hate. All the growth in warfare, taxing, spending, regulation and suppression of civil liberties in the past 25 years has been bipartisan. The only exceptions have been the libertarian Republicans and progressives — the Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders types.

All others — about 90% of Congress — are in lockstep on the issues that matter most: war and peace, debt, personal freedom.

The two major party candidates for president exemplify this.

Both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump favor war against countries and people who pose no threat whatsoever to our national security. They even favor war in aid of countries with which the U.S. has no treaty obligating it to aid them — and they do so because it appears either domestically popular or financially beneficial to their campaigns.

Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris favor spending trillions more per year than the feds collect in taxes just to keep certain people happy. Some are the have-nots, and some are the wealthy bankers and arms manufacturers.

Both candidates believe in increasing the federal government’s reach so far beyond the Constitution as to make the government unrecognizable to those who crafted it 250 years ago. They believe in giveaways for the poor, tax breaks for the middle class, bailouts for the rich and bribes to the states, just to maintain themselves and their parties in power.

Neither believes in the values that underlie the Constitution.

One wants to amend the First Amendment — which guarantees the freedom of speech — so as to enable Congress to criminalize flag burning. When the Supreme Court last looked at this, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the flag itself stands for the right to express one’s political views by destroying it.

A flag is an infinitely reproducible piece of cloth, he wrote, about which anyone can express any opinion one wishes — until the First Amendment is amended.

The same candidate wants to amend the Fifth Amendment — which guarantees a fair trial before the government can take anyone’s life, liberty or property — so as to permit police and federal agents to administer corporal punishment at crime scenes.

Never mind that they might beat the wrong person, or that they might misinterpret events that occurred before they arrived. Never mind that one man’s punch in the gut is another man’s kiss on the cheek. This candidate wants the Constitution to permit “rough justice.” Where would that lead us?

The same candidate wants to deport all foreign-born people — even those here lawfully — because this candidate believes they are polluting the nation’s bloodstream. The U.S. has no bloodstream.

To this candidate, rights are not natural to all but are granted by the laws of the place where one’s mother was at the time of one’s birth. Tell that to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who, in crafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, underscored the inalienable possession and natural origin of personal liberty.

One candidate wants to amend the 14th Amendment — which guarantees equal protection — so as to permit mothers and their physicians to kill babies in the womb up to the moment of birth, for reasons of convenience. This candidate somehow equates baby-killing with personal autonomy, and even calls this killing a right.

This candidate needs to understand that the greatest human right is the right to be alive, and this is the gift of the Creator who loves all life. The other candidate, too, would permit baby-killing, but only up to 16 weeks of pregnancy. Killing a baby at any time should be unfathomable.

One candidate wants to put Walmart, Costco, Target, Amazon, Apple and Mercedes-Benz out of business by imposing a 200% tax on imported goods.

Both candidates have a remarkable antipathy to the Fourth Amendment. That amendment guarantees the right to be left alone — privacy — except when a judge determines that the existence of probable cause of crime justifies a search or a seizure of your property and issues a warrant.

Yet Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris agree that this amendment doesn’t really mean what it says, and that the feds should be able to listen to the phone calls, capture the keystrokes and surveil the bank accounts, legal papers and medical records of all people without search warrants — without probable cause or even articulable suspicion.

Both candidates want to spend more on the Pentagon than the next 10 countries combined spend on their militaries.

Does it matter who is president? It does emotionally, but not constitutionally. Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump will kill innocents, borrow trillions and crush liberty just to please their supporters and stay in power. Where are you, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

• To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.