
Yale President Ezra Stiles stated in 1783:
"Most states of all ages ... have been founded in rapacity, usurpation and injustice ...
The Nimrods ... (were) the first invading tyrants of the ancient ages ... The spirit of conquest had changed the first governments ...
All succeeding ones have in general proved one continued series of injustice, which has reigned in all countries for almost 4,000 years."
The first invention was the plow. The Bible tells of Cain being a "tiller of the soil."
Then people started hitting each other with and they turned into weapons.
British philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), wrote of man in his primitive state:
"Every man is enemy to every man ... Men live without other security than what their own strength ... (There was) ... no culture ... no society ...
And worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death ... The life of man (was) solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Insecurity for life and property caused people to gravitate together for protection.
When people who are threatened get together for mutual protection, one of them knows how to fight better than the rest, and everyone says, you be our captain to organize our defense.
The Book of Judges, chapter 10, gives an example of this:
"When the children of Ammon made war against Israel, the elders of Gilead went… unto Jephthah, 'Come, and be our captain, that we may fight with the children of Ammon.'"
When a captain organizes people to fight and they win, everyone tends to show preference to the captain's family.
The Book of Judges, chapter 8, has the account:
"Then the men of Israel said unto Gideon, 'Rule thou over us, both thou, and thy son, and thy son's son also: for thou hast delivered us from the hand of Midian.'"
Over time, the sons and grandsons claim to be an elite family, a political machine, giving out favors to their supporters and ostracizing their opponents.
Inevitably, one family member begins to act as a political boss, a gang leader, a despot, ... a king.
Even if a king concentrates power for the purpose of doing good more efficiently, after he dies, that power is passed on to his descendants who are tempted to use it oppressively.
The Book of Genesis, chapters 37-50, Joseph in Egypt helped concentrate power into the hands of the Pharaoh who used it for good, providing food for the children of Israel, giving them the best land of Goshen, and even employing them to care for his cattle.
Boasting of concentrated power, King James I told Parliament in 1609:
"Kings are not only God's lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called gods ...
Kings are compared to the head ... of the body of man ...
It is sedition in subjects to dispute what a king may do in the height of his power ...
Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Jarvis, September 28, 1820:
"You seem ... to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the DESPOTISM of an oligarchy ..."
Jefferson continued:
"Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so .... and their power (is) the more dangerous, as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control.
Thomas Jefferson wrote to Abigail Adams, September 11, 1804:
"Nothing in the Constitution has given them (judges) a right to decide for the Executive, more than to the Executive to decide for them ...
On OCTOBER 15, 1788, James Madison warned:
"As the COURTS are generally the last in making the decision, it results to them, by refusing or not refusing to execute a law, to stamp it with its final character.
On OCTOBER 15, 1991, the U.S. Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas as a Justice on the Supreme Court.
When questioned during the hearings by Senator Thurmond regarding judicial activism, Clarence Thomas replied:
Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, 1835, warned:
"The President, who exercises a limited power, may err without causing great mischief in the State.
Congress may decide amiss without destroying the Union, because the electoral body in which Congress originates may cause it to retract its decision by changing its members.
President Abraham Lincoln alluded to this decision in his First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861:
"I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court ...
The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made ... THE PEOPLE will have CEASED to be THEIR OWN RULERS,
Jefferson warned Mr. Hammond in 1821:
"The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in ... the federal judiciary;
an irresponsible body ... working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be USURPED from the States."
Jefferson lamented, September 6, 1819:
"The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please."
Jefferson explained to Supreme Court Justice William Johnson, June 12, 1823:
"On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates,
and instead of trying what meaning may be SQUEEZED OUT out of the text, or INVENTED AGAINST IT, conform to the probable one in which it was passed ...
Baron Montesquieu, the most quoted writer by the Framers of the Constitution, warned of the dangers of uncontrolled judicial power in his Spirit of the Laws, 1748:
"Nor is there liberty if the power of JUDGING is not separated from legislative power and from executive power.
If it were joined to legislative power, the power over life and liberty of the citizens would be arbitrary, for the JUDGE would be the legislator.
If it were joined to executive power, the JUDGE could have the force of an oppressor.
President George Washington stated in his Farewell Address, 1796:
"The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism ...
President George Washington stated in his Farewell Address, September 17, 1796:
"And of fatal tendency ... to put, in the place of the delegated will of the Nation, the will of a party - often a small but artful and enterprising minority ...
They are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to SUBVERT the POWER OF THE PEOPLE and to USURP for themselves the reins of Government;
destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."
President William Henry Harrison warned in his Inaugural Address, 1841:
"The great danger to our institutions does ... appear to me to be ... the accumulation in one of the departments of that which was assigned to others.
World War I fighter Ace Eddie Rickenbacker told the Chicago Economic Club in 1961 (Eddie Rickenbacker: An American Hero in the Twentieth Century, by W. David Lewis, The John Hopkins University Press, 2005):
"Every time the liberals discover a brand new misinterpretation of the Constitution, every time they invent a new way to circumvent the constitutional limits of the Federal power,
President Gerald Ford told delegates attending the Young Republican Conference, January 29, 1976:
"In my time in the Congress there was always a drive ... to concentrate power and authority in the Federal Government ... that the Federal Government knew how to do the job best and that it was better to undercut the role of locally elected officials ...
We piled program after program after program on the Federal Government ... We tried to control the lives of individuals ...
Mercy Otis Warren in wrote in Observations on the new Constitution, & on the Federal and State Conventions, 1788:
"The origin of all power is in the people ... They have an incontestable right to check the creatures of their own creation ...
John Adams wrote in his notes from an oration at Braintree, Massachusetts, Spring 1772:
"There is danger from all men.
The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with the power to endanger the public liberty."
President Andrew Jackson, July 10, 1832, stated in his Bank Renewal Bill Veto:
"It is easy to conceive that great evils to our country and its institutions might flow from such a CONCENTRATION OF POWER in the hands of a few men irresponsible to the people.
President Millard Fillmore, December 6, 1852, explained of America's founding freedoms:
"They were planted in the free charters of self-government under which the English colonies grew up ...
President Franklin Pierce stated in his Inaugural Address, March 4, 1853:
"The dangers of a CONCENTRATION OF ALL POWER in the General government of a confederacy so vast as ours are too obvious to be disregarded ...
Secretary of State Daniel Webster stated in 1852:
"Are we of this generation so derelict, have we so little of the blood of our revolutionary fathers coursing through our veins, that we cannot preserve, what they achieved?
Webster concluded:
"The Constitution has enemies, secret and professed ...
Friends of the Constitution must rally and unite ...
I hardly know ... the manner of our political death ...
We shall die no lingering death ... An earthquake would shake the foundations of the globe, pull down the pillars of heaven, and bury us at once in endless darkness.
May I never live, to see that day!
May I not survive to hear any apocalyptic angel, crying through the heavens, with such a voice as announced the fall of Babylon."
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