The Constitution of the United States of America?
http://www.lonang.com/exlibris/vattel/index.html
http://www.constitution.org/constit_.htm
http://www.lonang.com/exlibris/blackstone/
Arguments have been made that the Common Laws of England influenced the drafting of our constitution and was accepted therein by the Founding Fathers.
My contentions, along with many other Constitutionalists and legal scholars, contend this assumption is not true.
In those arguments one needs to research and read the Law of Nations, The Common Law of England (circa 1765) and the Articles of the United States Constitution, and draw comparisons thereto.
Above are the research sites for all.
Please recognize the following are my belief, based on my study of Our Constitutional Republic, a nation of laws, which our Founding Fathers gave us, and the various States of the new republic ratified in 1776.
First, in my opinion, the influences seen in the articles of our constitution more mirror Vattel’s Law of Nations than it could ever be conceived in the Common Law of England. It does not take much reading of our constitution and the reading of the Law of Nations to see the influence it had in the drafting of our constitution.
When you look at Article I of our Constitution and then look at corresponding Chapter 3, 6, and others, of Book 1 of The Law of Nations; you can readily see, not in every word, but in the influence Vattel had on the drafting of our constitution.
As you read further, in each, you will see the differences between The Common Law of England and the Law of Nations, and how each influenced our constitution, or had no influence it. In Vattel’s writings on constitutional republics you find the word citizen(s) use to describe you and me in country, while the English Common Law refers to subjects in its reference to their countrymen.
In that regard, our revolution was fought because our fore fathers wanted to be free from the King’s tyranny, and absolute rule to make a better life for them and the people of this country. We fought that revolution to be freemen.
In that regard, to be freemen, our founding fathers were not about to setup a Monarchy that limited government, and put control in one persons hands, since they had lived that life both in England, and in the Colonies, and found it restricting, over taxing, and invasion of one’s rights as freemen. Since this was the case why in “God’s” green earth would the Founding Fathers set about saddling themselves, and the new nation, with the same? And, so….
they set up a constitutional republic, with representative government, where there are elective branches of government, and those elected were subject to re-election every few years at the will of the people.
In our Constitutional Republic, the President of the new United States of America could only serve two 4 year terms, and then step down; in this manner the new nation could not come under the control of one person, or group of individuals, and then be come something other than a Constitutional Republic, a nation of laws.
You will also find the influence of Vattel, where the means to change the constitution very much came from the Law of Nations, where it references the need from time to time to amend or change the Constitutional Republic, but not at the whims of a few, and thereby set out the process to accomplish that means. In that means it required the people of the new nation to ratify those changes before they become law, through the amendment process. The amendment process was intended to be burdensome and no an easy process for that very reason. In The Common Law of England you find no such mechanism by which this could be accomplished because that nation is ruled by one person, with no representative councils of meaning.
Today, as in the past, our Constitution is constantly under attack from those who want something other than what our constitution provides us; those who see the fruits of their labors and mind sets differently want this nation to be socialistic, marxist, or communist, or some variation thereof, in how we are governed, because they want control with no oversight from We the People, because in their rationale we are to stupid to know what is best for us and our nation. Our Constitution is constantly under attack from within.
There is one quote that resonates with me, and it comes from our recent President Ronal Reagan:
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children what it was once like in the United States when men were free. ”
in that quote we can see the warning President Ronald Reagan tried to convey to all of us; just because we live in this country, are born of American citizens, are American citizens, does not guarantee our nation will survive by blood rights. It takes our attention to what is going on around us, and in the halls of our representative national and state governments, and to take responsibility thereto.
We as a nation have not done a very good job of paying attention in the past, and all one has to do is look to the current sitting congress to see how much we have not paid attention.
We are now ruled, not by representative government, but by a bunch of socialist/liberals we have allowed to sit in our representative seats of government; mainly by our lack to due diligence at the ballot box each election cycle.
This is changing since our last election (2008), people are waking up (myself included) and realizing that they cannot trust our neighbor to vote our consciences at the ballot box, and thereby forgo making the trip to the voting booth to make our wishes known during the elections.
We all need to get up off our chairs, and couches, and make the trip to the ballot box every two years to make sure on Constitutional Republic survives in its present form; if we all do that then those who would seek to destroy of way of government will not succeed in their quest. The answer is in all of us!
One other quote I will share with you is from Samuel Adams (no not the beer maker):
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”.
Next blog article we will revisit, Article II and Obams’s eligibility, study well.