By Rick Manning
America stands at a crossroads, a time when our nation will choose whether to affirm the very concept that individual rights are from God with government being the guarantor of those rights or we will pursue the broken down pathway of government determining what privileges the people should enjoy.
Let’s take the simple issue of the individual right to keep and bear arms, which is enshrined in the Constitution as its second amendment adopted as part of the Bill of Rights.
For much of our nation’s history, this right was largely ignored as it was assumed that every person had a gun for hunting, self-protection and for the common defense.
Yet, it took until the 2008 Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller for the individual right to keep arms to be fully affirmed and the 2022 Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen for the right to bear arms to be fully affirmed.
Two different Supreme Court justices would shift the Supreme Court to ending the individual right to keep and bear arms. No amendment process, just a shift in who sits on the Supreme Court.
This is why this election is important.
When it comes to the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, the press, religion and assembly to petition your government, just remember what the lone Biden appointee to the Supreme Court said about the individual right to free speech earlier this year.
Remember that Justice Katanji Brown Jackson publicly worried that the federal government’s ability to censor speech could be harmed by taking the position that individuals have a right to free speech. The entire concept behind the federal government’s aggressive effort to monitor and stop speech that was not approved on private social media channels was based upon “protecting the public” from inconvenient truths that derailed the government narrative.
Justice Brown-Jackson didn’t worry about the individual right to speech, she worried about the government’s right to censor that speech for whatever is determined to be the common good. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court shrunk from its responsibility to protect free speech from government censorship in the Murthy v. Missouri case that was being heard, so the issue is not yet won. But Brown-Jackson broke the Overton Window by voicing out loud what the statists believe – free speech cannot be allowed.
America was conceived as a nation where the government derives its power from the consent of the people with individual liberties protected both by the protections provided the political minority in the Constitution but also by a Bill of Rights which tied into Article I, Section 8 which enumerates powers of the federal government. While this concept of enumerated powers has been made more complicated over the years, its core principle remains – the presumption that an act is legal under federal law unless it falls outside of constitutional parameters. All other laws are the duty of the state government’s. This is why murder charges are state charges, and the federal law enforcement is only supposed to get involved when a crime is being committed across state lines.
In the world of the left, this idea is rejected. This represents the fault-line between electing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
In the world of Kamala Harris being unburdened by the past means unchaining the federal government from the shackles that the U.S. Constitution puts upon it.
It is a world where the federal government imposes strictures under the guise of making the public free from negative consequences rather than one where the operating presumption of life is that most things are legal and only a few rise to the level of being strictly prohibited.
In Kamala Harris’ world, it is more important to allow unfettered illegal immigration, directly in contradiction of one of the federal government’s direct responsibilities, than to even allow the deportation of those who are actively committing crimes here in America.
Being unburdened means seeking equal outcomes for all people under the guise of “equity” rather than seeking to provide equal opportunities for each to succeed or fail based upon their own abilities.
When the goal of the federal government is equal outcomes, then individual achievers become the enemy and initiative to solve problems is actively discouraged. Every worker, no matter how little they do, get the same – destroying the incentive to work hard or build anything new.
And that is why Kamala Harris’ view of the world only seems plausible in a country that is richer than any in the history of the world with a middle-class unseen ever before. The United States’ opportunity society created by a permissive, individual rights-oriented limited governmental structure, is the enemy of equitable outcomes. Because the foundational idea is that you earn what you produce, so those who produce much earn more and those who produce little economic value earn less.
In Harris’ world view, Elon Musk cannot exist. It is unfair that he has built things that people want out of whole cloth. Ironic for those who despise the internal combustion engine, it was Elon Musk who did the impossible and built a car company around the electric engine. It is Elon Musk who is challenging the way communications are delivered through his Starlink system ending the ability of governments to block communications by controlling bandwidth access. It is Elon Musk who build SpaceX which has pioneered reusable boosters creating massive cost savings of getting to space — and returning. And it is Elon Musk who purchased Twitter (now X.com) to preserve at least one mainstream platform where speech is allowed without federal government interference.
We have a choice in America this election.
It is the stark choice between the maintaining our individual rights and freedoms that are guaranteed by the past constitutional contract which governs our nation, or moving forward with the government unmoored from the anchors which limit it “that have been”, where every situation is regulated by a federal government which is all-powerful, even though it knows little.
Joe Biden called this the battle for the soul of America. On this he was right. This is the election that will either affirm or deny our nation’s history and heritage of individual liberty and freedom. Let’s not lose it because we did not care enough to defend it.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
