These people are defeated before they even begin

  Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment, that parchment, being scribbl'd o'er, should undo a man?

 

Frank Meyer knew better but had it exactly backwards

Seen here:

The political questions are not unimportant, but they pale in comparison to the importance of the moral and religious aspect of our lives. As Frank Meyer put it in his book In Defense of Freedom, “in the moral realm freedom is only a means whereby men can pursue their proper end, which is virtue.”

This is a defect of that poor thing, the libertarian mind, which compartmentalizes reality into aspects, repudiating, with the rest of modernity, the pre-Englightenment understanding that the moral realm is the only meaningful realm inhabited by humanity.

Perhaps the more important defect of this libertarian mind is viewing freedom as a means or instrumentality, rather than as a result of virtue.

In truth, freedom is a condition, a by-product, a sign. It is subsidiary and not the main show. You can't wrangle enough of it and produce virtue with it. That's putting the cart before the horse, as we used to say. In fact quite the opposite. An excess of freedom makes a monster, because men are first and foremost not angels. The excess of freedom in the United States is the precondition for its licentiousness, making it the world capital for obesity, indolence, drug abuse, empty celebrity, sexual perversion, immorality, violence, entertainment, self-loathing, and a host of other ills. Eventually such a people tyrannized by themselves will require an actual tyrant to rule them.

You will not have a good society without good people, as Meyer did recognize as parents in the 1960s gave up being good and expected "institutions" such as schools and churches to take over their responsibility to be so.

This failure of nerve already had the country firmly in its grip by Meyer's time. Today we see the same shirking phenomenon but now writ even larger, as we expect a Trump, a political party, the Conservative Movement Inc., the Federalist Society, the rule of law, the police, the courts, or constitutional parchment to fix what only the individual can fix.

Only you can fix what is wrong. You must, as Bill Buckley once famously said, "Cancel your own goddam subscription". You can. You must. Or it's over.

If you don't the woke will fix it for you. The current rage for and of "woke" is nothing if not a response of the young "nones" to this libertarian misunderstanding. Their chief enemy is freedom. The woke see all too clearly that American culture is incapable of saying No, which is the only true mark of the free man. Instead we think being free means saying Yes, to everything.

And if history is any guide, we'll say Yes to that, too, to the new tyranny of woke. 

Sometimes Ann Coulter is an idiot, for instance when dissing federal encouragement of having children

You'd think someone who wants America for Americans would want to encourage anything which promotes Americans having more children instead of importing them, but you would be wrong.

Rubio's insistence on a larger child tax credit stops some of the damage being done by Republicans to people with families larger than four.

Abolishing the personal exemption meant parents lost those exemptions for all their children, and the increased standard deduction didn't go far enough to replace them, meaning they'd pay more in taxes just because they have more kids.

Coulter's indignation appears to be purely personal, an ugly intrusion of the irrational into her otherwise often rational positions.

She doesn't realize how libertarian she sounds (she hates them by the way). Americans who have children are making it possible that something like America survives into the future, which is a more sure and lasting contribution than any law which might be passed.

Some of the founders recognized that laws are a mere parchment barrier. When the pirates are attacking, you need a navy, which means sailors, not a bill of rights.

James Madison had little faith in a bill of rights, repeatedly violated in "every state" in his own time by the tyranny of the majority

From a letter to Jefferson in 1788:

[E]xperience proves the inefficacy of a bill of rights on those occasions when its controul is most needed. Repeated violations of these parchment barriers have been committed by overbearing majorities in every State. In Virginia I have seen the bill of rights violated in every instance where it has been opposed to a popular current. Notwithstanding the explicit provision contained in that instrument for the rights of Conscience, it is well known that a religious establishment wd have taken place in that State, if the Legislative majority had found as they expected, a majority of the people in favor of the measure; and I am persuaded that if a majority of the people were now of one sect, the measure would still take place and on narrower ground than was then proposed, notwithstanding the additional obstacle which the law has since created. Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents. 

James Madison on parchment's powerlessness to stop the legislative's theft of our money

From Publius, Federalist 48:

Will it be sufficient to mark, with precision, the boundaries of these departments, in the constitution of the government, and to trust to these parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power? This is the security which appears to have been principally relied on by the compilers of most of the American constitutions. But experience assures us, that the efficacy of the provision has been greatly overrated; and that some more adequate defense is indispensably necessary for the more feeble, against the more powerful, members of the government. ... [A]s the legislative department alone has access to the pockets of the people, and has in some constitutions full discretion, and in all a prevailing influence, over the pecuniary rewards of those who fill the other departments, a dependence is thus created in the latter, which gives still greater facility to encroachments of the former. ... The conclusion which I am warranted in drawing from these observations is, that a mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments, is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.

Upset by Jeh Johnson election overreach, Mark Levin proposes yet another constitutional amendment

"There outta be a law", we used to say.

As if the other eleven he's already proposed stand a chance of being passed, or followed any more than are the current twenty-seven or the constitution itself. 

President Obama, unfortunately, is correct. The constitution is a mere parchment barrier. That's why he keeps burning it right up to the last minute.

In a decent country, Obama would never have been elected in the first place.

Publius Decius Mus rightly mocks Mark Levin's convention of the states

Not in so many words, but he does nevertheless, here:

"[I]n the federally consolidated super-state, what good do state legislatures do anyway? Does Voegeli or doesn’t he agree with me that federal and administrative state control will become more consolidated rather than less in Clinton II? We could have every statehouse in the nation, and everything we try to do (which, once again, is: not much) would just be overridden by judges and bureaucrats."

It was amusing to hear Mark Levin play an Antonin Scalia audio this evening, in which Scalia ridiculed the parchment barrier of The Bill of Rights, which Levin's grand scheme is to increase the length of with his manifold "liberty amendments". Does Levin even listen to Scalia, or just grovel at his feet?

Scalia clearly expressed in the audio that the separation of powers was key to our liberties, not the Bill of Rights.

Yet, yet, neither Scalia, nor Levin, nor Publius Decius Mus for that matter recognize that it was Abraham Lincoln, their hero!, who destroyed the separation of powers and arrogated all the power to the executive, the very heart and soul of the once and future "federal and administrative state".

That Lincoln did so over slavery was simply the pretext.

Hello Barack Obama. Hello Black Lives Matter. Hello . . . communism.

Constitutional parchment was no "practical security" against the US Senate's ObamaCare, was it?

After discriminating, therefore, in theory, the several classes of power, as they may in their nature be legislative, executive, or judiciary, the next and most difficult task is to provide some practical security for each, against the invasion of the others.

What this security ought to be, is the great problem to be solved. Will it be sufficient to mark, with precision, the boundaries of these departments, in the constitution of the government, and to trust to these parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power? This is the security which appears to have been principally relied on by the compilers of most of the American constitutions. But experience assures us, that the efficacy of the provision has been greatly overrated; and that some more adequate defense is indispensably necessary for the more feeble, against the more powerful, members of the government. The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex. The founders of our republics have so much merit for the wisdom which they have displayed, that no task can be less pleasing than that of pointing out the errors into which they have fallen. A respect for truth, however, obliges us to remark, that they seem never for a moment to have turned their eyes from the danger to liberty from the overgrown and all-grasping prerogative of an hereditary magistrate, supported and fortified by an hereditary branch of the legislative authority. They seem never to have recollected the danger from legislative usurpations, which, by assembling all power in the same hands, must lead to the same tyranny as is threatened by executive usurpations. In a government where numerous and extensive prerogatives are placed in the hands of an hereditary monarch, the executive department is very justly regarded as the source of danger, and watched with all the jealousy which a zeal for liberty ought to inspire. In a democracy, where a multitude of people exercise in person the legislative functions, and are continually exposed, by their incapacity for regular deliberation and concerted measures, to the ambitious intrigues of their executive magistrates, tyranny may well be apprehended, on some favorable emergency, to start up in the same quarter. But in a representative republic, where the executive magistracy is carefully limited; both in the extent and the duration of its power; and where the legislative power is exercised by an assembly, which is inspired, by a supposed influence over the people, with an intrepid confidence in its own strength; which is sufficiently numerous to feel all the passions which actuate a multitude, yet not so numerous as to be incapable of pursuing the objects of its passions, by means which reason prescribes; it is against the enterprising ambition of this department that the people ought to indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their precautions. The legislative department derives a superiority in our governments from other circumstances. Its constitutional powers being at once more extensive, and less susceptible of precise limits, it can, with the greater facility, mask, under complicated and indirect measures, the encroachments which it makes on the co-ordinate departments. It is not unfrequently a question of real nicety in legislative bodies, whether the operation of a particular measure will, or will not, extend beyond the legislative sphere.

On the other side, the executive power being restrained within a narrower compass, and being more simple in its nature, and the judiciary being described by landmarks still less uncertain, projects of usurpation by either of these departments would immediately betray and defeat themselves [don't laugh, he really wrote this]. Nor is this all: as the legislative department alone has access to the pockets of the people, and has in some constitutions full discretion, and in all a prevailing influence, over the pecuniary rewards of those who fill the other departments, a dependence is thus created in the latter, which gives still greater facility to encroachments of the former. I have appealed to our own experience for the truth of what I advance on this subject. ...

The conclusion which I am warranted in drawing from these observations is, that a mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments, is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.

-- James Madison, 1788 (Federalist 48, emphases added)

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Repeal the 17th Amendment.

The Founders Got Many Things Wrong, Especially The Role Of Their Own Rationalism

Here:

"American politicians and those who serve them think that they’re ducks, and although they aren’t, they are likely to continue to quack ideologically. [I]t is doubtful that a non-ideological politics, which emphasizes both the limitations and the necessity of political activity—the need for real consensus, the need to address actual not 'potential' problems, etc.—could succeed in the United States."

Not to mention the rise of political factionalism, the declining influence of religion and morality, and the power of parchment.

The Constitution Was in a Shambles Long Before Obama Came on the Scene

So says Lawrence Hunter here, who thinks the expedient of a Bill of Rights was only a parchment barrier to begin with:

The Founders gave us The War Power Clause of the Constitution vesting the exclusive power to declare war with Congress. Politicians replaced it with The War Powers Resolution and presidential wars of whim.

The Founders gave us myriad constitutional restrictions on the powers of the federal government both explicit and implicit. Politicians and judges replaced them with a series of court rulings, on the Commerce Clause for example, so sweeping in their expansion of the federal government’s regulatory powers beyond the Constitution’s writ that, in the words of Cornell Law Professor William Jacobson, “The Commerce Clause has proven voracious enough to swallow the rest of the Constitution. Any scraps left over will be devoured by the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment.”

The Founders gave us habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment, protecting against arbitrary arrest and guaranteeing that people would be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. Politicians replaced them with The Patriot Act and the Homeland Police State, preventative detention, rendition, unauthorized wiretaps, secret searches and seizures and TSA.

The Founders gave us the Fifth Amendment, guaranteeing the people protection against over-reaching police and prosecutors, forced self-incrimination and double jeopardy, and against laws that would confiscate private property without due process and just compensation. Courts and Politicians gave us a series of rulings and legislation allowing the police, prosecutors and judges to act arbitrarily in the name of the general welfare, public safety and national security without regard to the cherished Rights of Englishmen that were passed down to us through the United States Constitution.

The Founders gave us the Eighth Amendment protecting the people against the imposition of excessive fines and infliction of cruel and unusual punishments. PB&J gave us RICO, prosecutorial charge stacking, extortionate plea bargaining, lawless and pathological judicial/prosecutorial misconduct, GITMO and water boarding.