President Obama made his 2012 State of the Union address and as expected, it was
primarily a campaign speech to reinforce his changes for re-election in November. He is not the
first President to have done this, and will probably not be the last. However, this speech was
different because what Americans need to look at now, and consider when voting in
November, is not just the State of the Union, but the State of the Constitution. The fact is that if
we discard our Constitution there will be no union. The United States of America will cease to
exist.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration, with the help of the leftist elite in the U.S.
Senate, the House of Representatives, and even some Federal judges are systematically
destroying our Constitution, our freedoms, and our country. It is not an accident; it is being
done with malice and design. Here are the facts about what has occurred in the three years
that Obama has been in office.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution has been violated by Congress passing the
Obama health care bill. Congress has no authority under that section or any other section of
the Constitution to enact legislation requiring the American people to purchase health care
insurance, or to provide free health care to illegal aliens. Yet, this among other things is what
has been done. I am confident that the U.S. Supreme Court will rule that it is unconstitutional;
yet, President Obama has repeatedly shown his disdain for the rulings of the Judicial Branch of
government.

Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution also gives Congress the sole legislative powers in
the federal government. Article 2 of the Constitution that establishes the Presidency and the
Executive Branch of government gives no such legislative powers to the President. In other
words, only Congress can make laws and the President and his cabinet appointees can only
enforce laws made by Congress; the President has no authority to make laws. Yet, that is
exactly what Obama is doing.

By misusing the power to issue Executive orders to enforce laws or take emergency
action if Congress is not in session the President is bypassing Congress and the Constitution to
implement his personal agenda on immigration, cap and trade, gun control, and in many other
areas. He actually brags about this in his taxpayer funded campaign speeches, and during the
State of the Union Address he stated that he plans to continue the practice if Congress doesn’t
do exactly what he demands.

In addition, ever since he took office Obama has continuously violated Article 2, Section
2 of the Constitution by making appoints to major positions in the Executive Branch of
government without the required Senate approval. I’m referring of course to the over 40 Czars
that the President has appointed. These appointments are in numerous areas from overseeing
the takeover of the automobile industry to regulating free speech on the internet. These Czars
are not under the control of the Congress, and are given massive budgets at taxpayer expense.
By the way, the very use of the term Czar violates Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution that
specifically forbids the U.S. government from bestowing titles of nobility on anyone.

Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution does give the President the right to make short
term appointments when the Senate is in recess. The important point here is that the
Constitution only empowers the Senate to declare when it is in recess. Obama recently showed
his disdain for that part of our governing document by making several high level appointments
when the Senate had not formally declared a recess. Obama claimed he has the right to decide
when the Senate is in recess. The purpose of these appointments was to put people in positions
of power that the Senate would not have approved. The reasons are already becoming clear
because the new appointees to the National Labor Relations Board are preparing to order
companies that are not unionized to turn over the private phone numbers and email addresses
of their employees to labor union organizers. This is a clear violation of the right of privacy of
these individuals.

Article 2, Section 2 also authorizes the President of the United States to sign treaties
with other countries; however, the Senate must ratify the treaties by a two thirds vote of those
Senators present and voting. Now Obama has decided that this Constitutional requirement
should not keep him from doing what he wants. Since the SOPA and PIPA bills were withdrawn
in Congress Obama is looking for a new way to take control of the Internet and limit freedom of
speech.

According to the U.S. Justice Foundation Obama is going to sign and enforce an
international treaty “which will give governments and special interest groups the power to shut
down websites, and terminate your access to the internet, without the due process of law.” It is
called the ACTA Treaty and Obama does not intend to send it to the Senate for ratification, but
instead will do it as a “sole Executive Agreement.”

There is nothing in the Constitution that allows such agreements although Federal
courts have allowed Presidents to enter into some international agreements that are minor in
nature. The ACTA agreement is not minor, but would allow websites to be shut down, such as
my blog site, at the whim of the President. I also suspect that Obama is planning to use the
same approach to enter into and enforce the United Nations “Small Arms Treaty” that would
virtually eliminate the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution that protects the rights of Americans
to keep and bear arms.

The state of the constitution is not good; in fact it is gravely ill. This article has just
scratched the surface and in my next post I will talk more about Obama’s all out assault on the
Bill of Rights. A good friend of mine recently said that this upcoming election is not about
personalities or even the economy. It is instead a referendum on the Constitution and whether
it and our American way of life are to survive. I concur with that statement.

Michael Connelly
mrobertc@hotmail.com
www.michaelconnelly.jigsy.com
www.constitution.jigsy.com

Mr. Byron Kerns of the Byron Kerns Survival School has graciously consented to be the speaker at our Febuary RLCNEF meeting.

Tuesday, February 7th    6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott – Jacksonville
4888 Lenoir Ave
Jacksonville, FL 32216

Having received some of the best and toughest survival training in the world at the US Air Force Survival Instructor School, Fairchild AFB
near Spokane, WA, Class 71-02, Byron is one of a select few of former USAF SERE instructors who have designed and created from
start-up a successful survival school for civilians.

http://www.byronkernssurvival.com/

Mr. Kerns will lecture  on what basic equipment and skills civilians need to master in order to survive an extended natural or man-made disaster.
He will also provide information on the courses and individual instruction available at his school.

In addition, there will be vendors displaying the latest innovations in survival equipment available on the market.
We look forward to seeing you there.

In the Spring of ’04, I was struck by the idea that I had to have a piece of chocolate pudding pie. I decided to make it myself. The crust was made by hand, with flour, ice-water and butter. The filling was made with cocoa, sugar, cornstarch, vanilla, butter, and whole milk mixed together in a bowl and then microwaved it until it came to a slow boil.

After baking my pie shell in the oven and filling it with the warm pudding, I left it to set up in the refrigerator for several hours. For the topping, I used heavy whipping cream, vanilla, and sugar, with just a touch of rum to help flavor it. Let me tell you that it was everything you could ever want a chocolate pudding pie to be! I cut a generous slice and ate it with the whipped cream along with a hot cup of coffee. Not something that you would want to eat every day, at least if you valued your health, but offered as a punctuation of one’s life, a brief interlude of pleasure, it was truly perfect.

This pie cost me about six dollars and fifty cents to make. Most restaurants assume a thirty percent food cost so you would expect to pay two dollars and seventy cents for a slice of this pie if it was cut into eight pieces. The problem is you that cannot find it at that price anywhere. What you are offered instead is a poor imitation of the reality that is chocolate pudding pie. A chiffon filling with artificial flavor that is more air than anything else, and topping made of whipped oil instead of cream. All this for about three dollars and fifty cents and that doesn’t include the coffee. The sad thing about it is that most people don’t realize that they are being served a cheap imitation. They like the way it tastes.

A silly thing to be writing about, chocolate pudding pie. But I submit to you that so much of what we are being served up today by our suppliers, our corporations, our media and our government is so pervasively artificial that we should be seriously considering what it might take to replace them with the genuine article. To begin with we would have to stop swallowing the stuff they are feeding us. Even if we often like the way it tastes.

by Roderick T. Beaman

I never really cared that much whether homosexuals were permitted to serve in the military. I figured this was just as much their country as mine and they’d be just as tenacious, and perhaps more so, defending it as anyone else, especially when you consider that in some countries homosexuality is punishable by death.

Barry Goldwater wrote that he didn’t care either. All he wanted to know was that the guy next to him in the foxhole could shoot straight. Ken Hamblin, the Black Avenger, wrote something similar about affirmative action; that he never cared what color the pilot was when he flew, he just wanted to know ‘did he kick ass in flight school.’ I’ve always felt that way and never really understood the problem.

Some claimed that it would create a sense of unease if military people knew that homosexual members were looking at them in the shower which seemed reasonable until I realized that I’d already been in open showers at YMCAs and health clubs where it was highly likely there were homosexuals anyway. So what was the big deal?

A number of years ago, one of the Lucian Truscotts, the fourth I think, wrote an article that appeared in The Providence Journal about his experiences in the Korean War when the men in his battalion thought one was homosexual. Truscott wrote of the cruel taunts heaped upon him but also, finally when he was killed, how they all wept. That’s what it takes sometimes to awaken people to their intolerances, I’m afraid. We forget all too quickly that we are all Children of a Creator and that none of us is more worthy of His love than another. We’re all capable of some cruel things and some wonderful examples of decency. At any rate, I’m glad that’s all over.

But there is a far more vexing question which has not been posed by either the conservatives nor the liberals in this matter. That question is, why do we have such an extensive military in the first place?

Article I, Section 8 of The Constitution empowers the Congress ‘To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; (and) To provide and maintain a Navy. Article II, Section 2 states ‘ The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States;…’

The wording of The Constitution with regard to the navy is much more permanent than that for the army. I think this is no accident. A mere look at the map is enough to tell why.

Even today, we’re isolated from many of our trading partners. At that time, we were contiguous only to Canada; Spanish and French colonies lay to the west and south with Mexico, a long overland distance away, all with indistinct borders. We were just a short sail from many Caribbean and other New World nations but an ocean away from Europe.

We had to become a maritime nation and we needed to have a navy to protect our shipping. In fact, a lot of what it did in those early years was just that, as evidenced by the Barbary Coast Wars and the Quasi-War with France. Our shipping was being harassed and it also contributed to our War of 1812 with Britain. Shipping was vital to our survival! It still is.

We have five basic military services; Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard but we really need just two. The Marines are actually part of the Navy anyway; the Coast Guard a naval service. Aircraft carriers could many of the needs of an air force. That would leave only domestic ground defense to be provided which, of course, is where the militia come in which could also fill the remainder of the needs of an air force, which was part of the Army to begin with.

It’s also obvious that Founders wanted us to rely extensively on our various militias for defense. That was part of the purpose of the Second Amendment. So we really have little need of a standing army but like everything else governmental, the military has become a huge bureaucracy whose main interest is self-preservation.

Most military spending is unnecessary. Harry Browne once estimated that the entire defense budget could be covered with just $100 billion; later he lowered it to $50 billion. A stripped down federal military, especially the Army, with reliance on militias, run by the states, necessitates only a skeleton federal crew with fifty states as laboratories for developing the most efficient & effective models.

Anyone who has spent any time on a military base knows about the budget jokes; how at the beginning of the budget year there’s meat loaf for dinner and at the end, roast beef and lobsters. That’s how all bureaucracies work. They have to spend their allotment for the year so their officers can trek to Capitol Hill to request an increase for the next year to mourn how ‘woefully inadequate’ the current allowance is for their current mission, which, of course, always has to be expanded.

Whether it’s health education, welfare, environmental, law enforcement or military services, a bureaucrat is a bureaucrat is a bureaucrat. You will never hear a department or military Chief of Staff ask for a budgetary decrease. That has to be a sure ticket to a funeral for any government career.

Cyril N. Parkinson formulated his famous, humorous law, partly from observations of the military while in the British Civil Service. He noted how the number of personnel in the foreign service increased as the empire dissolved. An essence of Parkinson’s Law is that any bureaucrat wants subordinates, to magnify his own position; he doesn’t want competitors and he certainly never wants to resign.

I don’t know what was going through so many of our minds during those years when, unbeknownst to us, the Soviet Union was collapsing from within. We got snookered by the military and the CIA that kept up the alarms about Soviet capabilities. For me, I began to see the light about the military sometime during the 1980s, the Reagan years.

Our children were going to school and my wife became friendly with another woman whose husband was a career military man. She told my wife, one day, that they were anticipating that the next hot spot would be the Mideast.

At that, I said, whoa! Aren’t we simply fighting to end the communist threat to us? Isn’t that why we’ve had this huge military presence all these years? The answer, I came to realize was, of course it’s not. We’ve had this military presence to ensure the military’s survival.

It was then I realized that the military is just like any other government bureaucracy. Its first order of business is its own preservation. Karl Marx predicted the withering away of the state once the workers’ paradise came to pass but, the neither the state nor its bureaucracies, ever withers; no earthly paradise is possible. And so, today we find ourselves in imbroglios around the world.

That’s why the military discerned future problems in the Mideast. It needed a secondary bogeyman if the first one faltered and falter it did with the collapse of the eastern Europe Soviet satellites and finally the Soviet Union itself in 1991. And the fun continues.

The groundwork for overseas intervention that began with William McKinley, accelerated with Woodrow Wilson making the world safe for democracy and Franklin D. Roosevelt maneuvering us into World War II and the CIA’s unconstitutional foreign policy interventions that Robert Taft warned about, all have come to fruition. The military-industrial complex has been saved.

If tomorrow, somehow, peace descended over the entire arc from Morocco to Bengla Desh, the military would scramble and discover a new enemy du jour. You can count on it. It’s the truth about the military.

And as far as freedom goes, one of the greatest dangers to a free society and the world, is from soldiers sitting around with little to do. But don’t ask and don’t tell about it.

This article originally published in The Freedom Beam, November 7th, 2011 Dr. Roderick T. Beaman is an osteopathic family physician practicing in Jacksonville, Florida. Born in New York City, he attended New York University as an undergraduate. He is a recipient of a 2003 Ron Paul Liberty in Media Award. He has written a novel that he has given up hope of ever getting published and so has made it available for the asking through TheFreedomBeam@comcast.net.