OPINION:
Does the government work for us, or do we work for the government?
We pay its taxes, obey its laws and regulations, finance its wars and submit to its surveillance. We are told that all this is necessary for personal safety, collective prosperity and national security. Yet the government has become totalitarian while individuals have become powerless.
The very institution established to protect our natural rights has become our greatest threat.
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The Fourth Amendment protects the right to privacy by prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures and requiring judicial warrants supported by probable cause. Yet the National Security Agency has developed a surveillance apparatus capable of intercepting and examining all electronic communications traveling through the fiber-optic cables that carry the world’s internet traffic.
The NSA literally captures every keystroke and telephonic conversation of every person in America. It subjects Americans who are suspected of absolutely nothing to continuous surveillance. The distinction between collecting information first and examining it later offers little comfort to someone whose private life has become government property.
Privacy is not a privilege granted by government. It is a natural right protected by the Constitution. The burden falls on the government to establish probable cause before invading an individual’s privacy, not on its victims to demonstrate afterward why they deserved privacy before the government stole it.
The loss of privacy produces fear. People who believe their conversations, correspondence, internet searches, medical, legal and banking records, and political associations are being monitored become less willing to be candid. They hesitate before criticizing or challenging government officials or associating with controversial organizations. They begin self-censorship.
This is how surveillance destroys freedom without ever having to prosecute anyone.
Freedom of speech is the linchpin of all other freedoms. Without it, there can be no meaningful political opposition, no effective accountability, no public exposure of corruption and no peaceful means of challenging government abuses.
George Washington warned that if men were prevented from expressing their opinions, reason would become useless and, “dumb and silent, we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.” Yet the government deports lawful U.S. residents and threatens American college students because it hates and fears their speech.
Congress has enacted approximately 5,000 criminal laws, and federal agencies have produced more than 300,000 regulations that carry potential criminal penalties. No person can reasonably claim to understand all of them. Federal criminal laws are often written so broadly that ordinary Americans can violate provisions without realizing that they have committed a federal crime.
Do not dare write a check for less than a dollar, clean fish in a national park or toss caught fish back into the sea.
The Constitution was never intended to create a federal government with unlimited criminal jurisdiction. It establishes a government of limited and enumerated powers. It authorizes only one federal crime: treason. It does not grant Congress a general police power to criminalize whatever conduct it finds objectionable.
The proliferation of federal crimes is a signpost of government corruption. When almost every aspect of human activity can potentially be brought within some criminal prohibition, selective prosecution becomes an instrument of political power. The old observation attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, the head of Josef Stalin’s secret police, captures the danger: “Show me the man, and I will find you the crime.”
A government with too many criminal laws can find a legal pretext to punish almost anyone it wishes.
Meanwhile, the government has demonstrated criminal irresponsibility with the people’s money. The government’s debt has now surpassed $40 trillion and grows by $2 trillion or more annually.
Perpetual war compounds the damage. For generations, administrations of both political parties have treated military intervention as an ordinary instrument of American foreign policy. Wars are launched, expanded and continued without the serious constitutional deliberation the Founders intended.
Congress has increasingly surrendered its responsibility to declare war, while presidents have claimed authority to commit American lives and resources to conflicts with no clearly defined objectives or endings.
War is the health of the state and the enemy of liberty. It produces death, taxation, borrowing, secrecy, executive power, censorship, surveillance and the diversion of productive resources into destruction. It creates permanent bureaucracies whose institutional survival depends on permanent threats.
The national security state becomes an unaccountable government within the government in the name of emergencies that never seem to end. What makes this tragedy particularly infuriating is that neither political party can claim innocence.
Republicans and Democrats have alternated control of the White House and Congress while expanding surveillance, increasing federal spending, accumulating debt, multiplying criminal statutes and perpetuating foreign military interventions.
The problem is not which politicians are in charge. The problem is the concentration of power itself.
Our elected officials increasingly behave as if the Constitution they have sworn to uphold is an inconvenient and avoidable historical artifact rather than the supreme law of the land. The First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.”
If “no law” does not really mean no law, what does it mean? It means whatever any five justices of the Supreme Court say it means, and that makes them, not the Constitution, the supreme law of the land.
The Declaration of Independence tells us that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Consent is meaningless if people are afraid to speak, cannot understand the laws governing them, are watched without suspicion and are forced to finance debts and wars they never authorized.
We were not born as subjects of Washington. We were born free, with natural human rights that no legislation or executive command has the moral authority to extinguish.
Today, the government does not work for us. We work for it. We have lost the republic. It has become a fading bankrupt empire. It is time for massive resistance to reclaim personal freedom — to alter or abolish the government that has failed to preserve our liberties and instead assaults them.
• To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
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