Restoring the Constitution in Auburn

Usually we’re told to silence our cell phones. Judge Andrew Napolitano held up his Blackberry to a crowd of students from all over the world and said, “turn your iphones and Androids ON, so the NSA can listen in.” Yes, the government has you wired with that thing you can’t live without. What Napolitano had to say–the truth–would alarm the authorities.

It’s been a long slippery slide from the liberty the Founders contemplated when they wrote the Constitution, to last week when the Fox News constitutional expert was in Auburn to teach “The Constitution and the Free Market” to young scholars from as far away as China and as close as Auburn University.

[amazon asin=1400320291&template=*lrc ad (left)]The Fox TV star known affectionately as “The Judge,” taught ten hours on America’s founding document. It was just a small part of the donor funded Mises University held annually at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Believers in the Constitution are hard to find, especially on television. “Advocates of a ‘living’ Constitution prefer lawmaking by zeitgeist,” writes Doug Bandow, former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. “If it feels good, interpret it, sums up this philosophy. Most non-’originalist’ jurisprudential theories offer no standard for anything, let alone for protecting people’s fundamental liberties.”[amazon asin=1595553517&template=*lrc ad (right)]

The proud work of Thomas Jefferson has been ignored to the point that its lawful for the President to kill Americans. Napolitano told the story of David Barron, who co-authored a legal memo justifying the use of lethal force against American citizens suspected of terrorism abroad.

Because his now infamous memo would pose a threat to his subsequent confirmation, Barron was conveniently voted to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit two weeks before his controversial opinion was leaked to the press.

[amazon asin=1595552669&template=*lrc ad (left)]This sort of government chicanery might not have shocked students from South America and the Far East, but it should jolt every American that Napolitano acknowledged that, “the Constitution has utterly failed to preserve liberty.”

A student asked the Judge what he would do to restore the liberty this country was founded on. It’s something he’s clearly thought about. The 16th and 17th Amendments, allowing for an income tax, and U.S. senators to be elected by voters instead of by state legislatures, respectively, would go first he said.

Next for the chopping block would be the nation’s central bank. And the country’s money must change from the fiat variety, so easily created to fund big government, and return to commodity money of gold and silver.[amazon asin=0849946883&template=*lrc ad (right)]

While he knows every nook and cranny of government oppression and constitutional law, Napolitano spoke in a hopeful tone to an audience of brilliant, freedom-loving young people.

Government always gets bigger, he said, and guessed that is why Jefferson wrote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is natural manure.”

It will be left to today’s youth to pick up the pieces after “the federal government falls like an overripe apple.” The Judge wants to make sure they will do the right thing, as do we all.