CONSTITUTION RESTORATION ACT (Destruction, really)

[emcguffie]

Sorry if this is old news to you here at DU. It is quite new to me.

This is from an e-mail I received from DFA today. I'm going to post the whole thing....

Tired of waiting for the Second Coming to enforce Christ's rule on Earth? Fortunately, so is your Congress and they know how to "bring it on."

Just when you thought the corporatist/Christian Coalition had milked the 9/11 "surprise" for all it was worth in powers, profits and votes, we regret to report that you may have to think again. Just in case you've briefly fallen behind on your rightwing mailing lists, you might have missed the March 3rd filing of Senate bill S. 520 and House version is H.R. 1070, AKA the "Constitution Restoration Act" (CRA).

In the worshipful words of the Conservative Caucus, this historic legislation will "RESTORE OUR CONSTITUTION!", mainly by barring ANY federal court or judge from ever again reviewing "any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or
local government, or against an officer or agent of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official or personal capacity), concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government." http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:S.520:>.>

In other words, the bill ensures that God's divine word (and our infallible leaders' interpretation thereof) will hereafter trump all our pathetic democratic notions about freedom, law and rights -- and our courts can't say a thing. This, of course, will take "In God We Trust" to an entirely new level, because soon He (and His personally anointed political elite) will be all the legal recourse we have left.

This is not a joke, a test, or a fit of libertarian paranoia. The CRA already has 28 sponsors in the House and Senate, and a March 20 call to lead sponsor Sen. Richard Shelby's office assures us that "we have the votes for passage." This is a highly credible projection as Bill Moyers observes in his 3/24/05 "Welcome to Doomsday" piece in the New York Review of Books: "The corporate, political, and religious right's hammerlock... extends to the US Congress. Nearly half of its members before the election-231 legislators in all (more since the election)-are backed by the religious right... Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the most influential Christian Right advocacy groups."

This stunning bill and the movement behind it deserve immediate crash
study on at least 3 different fronts.

1. Its hostile divorce of American jurisprudence from our hard-won
secular history and international norms. To again quote the
Conservative Caucus: "This important bill will restrict the
jurisdiction of the U.S. Supreme Court and all lower federal
courts to that permitted by the U.S. Constitution, including on
the subject of the acknowledgement of God (as in the Roy Moore
10 Commandments issue); and it also restricts federal courts from
recognizing the laws of foreign countries and international law

as the supreme law of our land."

Re the last point, envision some doddering judges who still revere
our Declaration of Independence's "decent respect to the opinions
of mankind," and suppose they invoke in their rulings some
international precepts from the UN's Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, the Covenant on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women or, God forbid, the Geneva
Conventions.

Well, under the CRA that would all be clearly illegal and, thank
God, that's the last we'd ever hear from them.

2. The political implications of replacing "we the people" with a
Christian deity as the "sovereign source" of all our laws.
Imagine hyper-zealous officers or "entities" of the Federal,
State, or local government (like a governor, legislature or
school board) that mandate Christian prayers, rituals and/or
statuary in public buildings under their control. Were this to
happen, some local Jews, Muslims and/or Buddhists might be moved
to hire a lawyer and legally object. But if the CRA passes, their
objection would be beyond any court's jurisdiction and that's the
last we'd ever hear of that. It in fact demands "impeachment,
conviction, and removal of judges" who dare to even hear a case
that challenges its "Last Days" morphing of Christian church and
state. (Just how our new Sovereign Source of Government's
advocacy of public executions for adultery, gay-ness,
contraception and blasphemy will fit into our current corrections
system still remains to be seen.)

3 The incessant mainstream media blackout on the bill's existence
and import.

The potential impact of the Constitution Restoration Act on
American life, law and politics is so radical and vast that you
would expect a boiling national debate. Yet just as with the
crimes and questions of 9/11, everyone in the media seems
terrifically busy looking the other way. If you want yet another
dramatic metric of US journalistic dysfunction, try
Googling "Constitution Restoration Act" in their News category
and see what you get. Today, three weeks after the bill was
filed, I find a grand total of three throwaway mentions in
Alabama's Shelby County Reporter, the Decatur Daily, and
the Massachusetts Daily Collegian. ("Terry Schiavo" in
contrast will net you over a thousand news hits, and "Michael
Jackson" just passed 36,000 with a bullet.)

If the Alabama paper interest seems a little odd or sponsor Shelby's
name a bit familiar, you should recall that this old boy AL senator was high among those same wonderful folks who kicked off the 9/11 cover-up.

As his Senate bio proudly relates:

"From 1995 to 2003, Senator Shelby served on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In this capacity, he and the other committee members provided oversight of the intelligence community, and following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Senator Shelby served diligently to investigate the intelligence failures that led to those attacks."

Got that? First he "oversees" intelligence for six years before 9/11,
then "diligently investigates" its bizarre "failures" for two years
more, and finally finds--in a no-fault judgment--it was all due to "deep institutional defects" and "systemic miscommunication" that he'd apparently never noticed or heard about before. Having so brilliantly defended the country before 9/11 and the official story since, some seem to find it comforting that he's now busy defending our court-harassed Constitution with a legally bulletproofed God. Some, alas, do not -- feel comforted, that is, either by Shelby's blurry oversight or fundamentalist agenda, not to mention the Orwellian performance of our autistic corporate press.

In the meantime, however, before the CRA takes force and reduces legal education to a Bible study course, what say we undertake a little Constitutional defense of our own? To get up to speed on the current Christian right agenda, Moyers' "Welcome to Doomsday", Katherine Yurica's "The Despoiling of America" and John "The 9/11 Truth Candidate" Buchanan's "Fixing America" are excellent places to start.

None of these analyses offer a silver bullet or paint a pretty picture, but as students of 9/11 now know, spreading the courage to face the truth is really the only hope we've got.

W. David Kubiak is a Project Censored award-winning journalist and executive director of 911truth.org. He can be reached at david(at)911truth.org. (He is indebted to John Buchanan for the latest heads-up on this story and the Shelby office call.)

[impeachthescoundrel]

1. I feel certain God Is saying

NOT IN MY NAME!

[emcguffie]

2. This is really terrifying.

If they do this, which I guess they can, I will -- I don't know what. We're trapped in a nightmare that keeps getting worse.

Maybe we can raise a ruckus and get this stopped?

[Freedom_from_Chains]

3. An excellent resource page for these issues is:

http://members.tripod.com/~candst/toc.htm"> The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State

It was arguments from this page that finally got me kicked off of FR as the fundies just could not dispute them. Another good source is:

http://www.theocracywatch.org">Theocracywatch.

There have actually been several attempts at this kind of stuff over the years, and unfortunately some of them came through only to end in disaster. The dominionist have been around since the end of the civil war but I don't think they have ever had access to power like they have today. These people are truly a threat to the American way of life.

[paineinthearse]

4. Senator Shelby of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

is one of the most onerous traitors and must be replaced.

[troubleinwinter]

5. If they pass it, we are done-for, once and for all.

If enacted into law, the CRA would:

Re-establish the right of public officials to affirm that GOD is “the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.”

“You simply cannot divest God from our country,” Shelby said. “Our country has no foundation without a basic recognition that God invests us at birth with basic individual rights.”

[OneBlueSky]

6. it will be declared unconstitutional in a heartbeat . . .

you think the judiciary is going to allow the legislature to unilaterally reduce their power? . . . no chance . . .

this is just a setup . . . they NEED something to be declared unconstitutional so they can say "See? We told you so." . . .

the unfortunate part of it is that some people will fall for it . . . and actually believe that the Constitution needs restoring, and that this legislation does it . . .

[ClassWarrior]

7. Exactly. It's meant to fail, so then they can villianize...

...the Constitution and Courts in one fell swoop, and fire up the base in the process. Another example of the Radical RW using its supporters as hand puppets.

NGU.

[tritsofme]

9. Congress may have the power to do this

Article III Section 2

In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

But that doesn't make it just.

The question is as to whether our congresscritters have the balls to stop this blatant departure from tradition.

[thecai]

8. Kick n/t

[usregimechange]

10. acknowledging = promoting