Here to Stay
by Thomas A. Droleskey
Although very few people read these articles and fewer yet seem willing to accept what is for them the hard truths that I write about the inevitable degeneration of a nation founded on false principles, let me state an additional hard truth that even fewer readers will be able to accept or understand as they become agitated into "doing something" to reverse the decision rendered yesterday of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the combined cases of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al. That decision is here to day. The so-called Protection Protection and Affordable Care Act, herein after referred to quite properly as ObamaCare is here to stay. It is not going away.
No, ObamaCare is not going to go away even in the unlikely event that former Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Willard Mitt Romney, upon whose "RomneyCare" it is based, is elected President of the United States of America on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. Even if the election results in this unlikely outcome, you see, and the hapless members of the organized crime family of the naturalist "right" in the Republican Party maintain control of the United States House of Representatives and take majority control the United States Senate, they will not have the sixty votes in the Senate necessary to block any filibuster that the opposite number in the organized crime family of the naturalist "left" will wage to the very death in order to prevent ObamaCare's legislative repeal. Mind you, that's the supposedly "best case" outcome that many clueless adherents of "conservatism" and "constitutionalism" can expect. There will simply not be a "filibuster proof" majority in the United States Senate to repeal ObamaCare in its entirety. It is here to stay in one form or another.
Moreover, there are two other scenarios, one "worse" and the other "worst."
"Worse case" scenario: The lawless, reckless statist who was known for a long time as Barry Soetoro, Jr., but has been known for the past thirty years or so as "Barack Hussein Obama" is, as I expect and predict will be the case, re-elected on November 6, 2012. Even if Republicans wound up controlling
both Houses of the United States Congress, which is possible, one is still back to the reality that any attempt to repeal even a single provision of ObamaCare, including the "individual mandate" that was declared constitutional as a result of Chief Justice John Roberts simply rewriting the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act's specific reference to a "penalty" upon taxpayers for not purchasing health insurance as a "tax" even though Congress specifically rejected referring to it as "tax," will be vetoed by a re-elected Obama. There will not be 290 votes in the House of Representatives or sixty-seven in the Senate to override such a veto.
"Worst case" scenario: Obama is re-elected and the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives as well maintaining their control of the Senate.
Remember, ladies and gentlemen, we live in a country full of boiled frogs, that is, citizens who have limited spans-of-attention and are easily distracted by the panoply of bread and circuses that our caesars use to keep the masses busy as they increasing their hold over us and the just exercise of legitimate liberties. Most people "get used" to their "government goodies." They got "used" to Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. They got "used" to the increase of the size and scope and the power of the Federal government during World War I and the New Deal and World II and the Cold War and the Great Society/War on Poverty. They expected Republican administrations under Dwight David Eisenhower and Richard Milhous Nixon and Leslie Lynch King, Jr./Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. and Ronald Wilson Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush to keep the various unconstitutional programs, create and maintained by the confiscatory taxing power of the Federal government. They so.
Dwight Eisenhower merely amalgamated the various agencies that had been floating around in inter-galactic space for the twenty years prior to his taking office on January 1, 1953, that had been created under the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He asked Congress to merge many of these agencies into what was called the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which became the United States Department of Health and Human Services in 1979 when the thoroughly unconstitutional United States Department of Education was created at the recommendation of President James Earl Carter, Jr. Ronald Wilson Reagan campaigned against Carter in 1980 on a platform of eliminating the Department of Education and the Department of Energy, which had been created at the initiative of the peanut man/appeaser of Communists worldwide from George on August 4, 1977. He did neither.
Indeed, the Republican Party platform of 1980 included abolition of the Department of Education:
We understand and sympathize with the
plight of America's public school teachers, who so frequently find their
time and attention diverted from their teaching responsibilities to the
task of complying with federal reporting requirements. America has a
great stake in maintaining standards of high quality in public
education. The Republican Party recognizes that the achievement of those
standards is possible only to the extent that teachers are allowed the
time and freedom to teach. To that end, the Republican Party supports
deregulation by the federal government of public education, and
encourages the elimination of the federal Department of Education.
We
further sympathize with the right of qualified teachers to be employed
by any school district wishing to hire them, without the necessity of
their becoming enrolled with any bargaining agency or group. We oppose
any federal action, including any action on the part of the Department
of Education, to establish "agency shops" in public schools. (Republican Party Platform of 1980.)
Just talk. All talk.
It is never any more than. It is never any more than insane babbling because the naturalists of the "right" do not want to offend "swing" or "moderate" or "independent" voters in "swing" states, those that actually decide presidential elections (see Step By Step Yet Again), who have gotten used to their "goodies."
It is actually worse than all of this if you recall that the "'compassionate,' 'pro-life' 'conservative'", President George Walker Bush, gave us the "Patriot Act" and "No Child Left Behind" and the over-the-counter sale of the "Plan B Emergency" baby-killing potion and the first "economic stimulus" under the Orwellian name of "Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) on October 3, 2008. He did not even make an effort to reverse the decision of the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, to permit the marketing of RU-486, the so-called "abortion pill," saying, quite infamously, in a debate with then Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., on October 3, 2000, that he would have no power to do as the FDA had determined that the baby-killing potion was "safe for women." Ah, but men continue to dream the dream of "settling" injustices without the true Faith as they trust in one "secular savior" after another despite all of the empirical evidence that demonstrates these men to be nothing other than craven careerists concerned only about "winning" (see Nothing Can Ever Be "Settled" Without The True Faith).
"Things" will be no different with ObamaCare. It is here to stay. People will grow more "comfortable" with it with the passage of time. Whatever opposition to it that exists at this time will fade. We are well on the path to a form of socialized medicine that comes complete with "panels" will ration health care as they see fit as the costs associated with this monstrous, unconstitutional exercise of statism that is in full violation of the Natural Law principle of subsidiarity continue to rise, placing pressure to restrict certain types of care to those for whom it can provide the most "utility" (in other words, what is the cost of the proposed care as opposed to the expected life span and "productivity" of the "consumer"). More than ever before, the Brave New World is upon us in its starkest form yet.
As readers of this site know and will be reminded once again in the concluding section of this commentary, this brave new world did not just "happen." No, it is but the logical result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King that was wrought by the Protestant Revolution and institutionalized by the organized forces of the naturalism of Judeo-Masonry, which is dissected so well by Mr. Hugh Akins in his new book on the subject. This is all a chastisement. Every single bit of it. And there is no "quick fix" to it as it was centuries in the making.
An Unsurprising Decision?
Although I had thought that the "swing" vote in the combined cases of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al. yesterday would be the Supreme Court's senior Associate Justice, Anthony Kennedy, an appointee of President Ronald Wilson Reagan who had voted in the plurality in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, June 29, 1992 (that's right, twenty years ago today), to uphold the essence of the Court's decision in the case of Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973, while also upholding key provisions g a Pennsylvania law requiring "informed consent" and "parental notification" as not to place a "restriction" or "undue burden" on "access" to surgical baby-killing, the actual "swing" vote was that of Chief Justice John Roberts, an appointee of President George Walker Bush.
Roberts essentially rewrote ObamaCare to make it constitutional, doing so in the name of "due deference" to the "will" of the legislative branch while finding that the "individual mandate" is a valid exercise of Congressional taxing power and not as, United States Solicitor General Donald Verrilli claimed in oral argumentation on Monday, March 26, 2012. an exercise of the commerce power as found in Subsection Eight of Section 8 of Article I of the United States Constitution, even though, as noted before, Congress itself referred to the fine imposed upon those of us who do not have an will not purchase health insurance as being a "penalty" and not a tax. Concurring justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan agreed with the outcome but said that they did find justification for the "individual mandate" in in the commerce clause.
This is what Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, wrote by way of a concluding evisceration of the totality of Roberts's sixty-five page Court opinion (see Text of Full Opinion):
The Court today decides to save a statute Congress did not write. It rules that what the statute declares to be a requirement with a penalty is instead an option subject to a tax. And it changes the intentionally coercive sanction of a total cut-off of Medicaid funds to a supposedly noncoercive cut-off of only the incremental funds that the Act makes available.
The Court regards its strained statutory interpretationas judicial modesty. It is not. It amounts instead to a vast judicial overreaching. It creates a debilitated, inoperable version of health-care regulation that Congress did not enact and the public does not expect. It makes enactment of sensible health-care regulation more difficult, since Congress cannot start afresh but must take as its point of departure a jumble of now senseless provisions, provisions that certain interests favored under the Court’s new design will struggle to retain. And it leaves the public and the States to expend vast sums of money on requirements that may or may not survive the necessary congressional revision.
The Court’s disposition, invented and atextual as it is,does not even have the merit of avoiding constitutional difficulties. It creates them. The holding that the Individual Mandate is a tax raises a difficult constitutional question (what is a direct tax?) that the Court resolves with inadequate deliberation. And the judgment on the Medicaid Expansion issue ushers in new federalism concerns and places an unaccustomed strain upon the Union. Those States that decline the Medicaid Expansion must subsidize, by the federal tax dollars taken from their citizens, vast grants to the States that accept the Medicaid Expansion. If that destabilizing political dynamic, so antagonistic to a harmonious Union, is to be introduced at all, it should be by Congress, not by the Judiciary.
The values that should have determined our course today are caution, minimalism, and the understanding that the Federal Government is one of limited powers. But the Court’s ruling undermines those values at every turn. In the name of restraint, it overreaches. In the name of constitutional avoidance, it creates new constitutional questions. In the name of cooperative federalism, it undermines state sovereignty.
The Constitution, though it dates from the founding oft he Republic, has powerful meaning and vital relevance to our own times. The constitutional protections that this case involves are protections of structure. Structural protections—notably, the restraints imposed by federalism and separation of powers—are less romantic and have less obvious a connection to personal freedom than the provisions of the Bill of Rights or the Civil War Amendments. Hence they tend to be undervalued or even forgotten by our citizens. It should be the responsibility of the Court tote a ch otherwise, to remind our people that the Framers considered structural protections of freedom the most important ones, for which reason they alone were embodied in the original Constitution and not left to later amendment. The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our Government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty at peril. Today’s decision should have vindicated, should have taught, this truth; instead, our judgment today has disregarded it.
For the reasons here stated, we would find the Act invalid in its entirety. We respectfully dissent. (Minority Opinion, at pages 64-65 of opinion, page 190-191 of the full .pdf.)
Even though dissenting justices "got it right" insofar as constitutional interpretation is concerned, they do not realize that a written document that admits of no higher authority than the text of its own words, which are as easily susceptible to deconstructionism (that is, being emptied of their true meaning and filled with false meanings to suit various perceived utilitarian"needs) in the hands of judicial positivists (those who believe the law is what they say it is regardless of moral truth and/or the plain meaning of words) as Sacred Scripture is in the hands of Protestants of any variety and of Modernist Catholics, many of whom, such as Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, make advertence to philosophically absurd and dogmatically condemned propositions claiming that dogmatic pronouncements are conditioned by the historical circumstances in which they were formulated. Nothing based upon these slender threads can hold up over the weight of time. Fabric sewn together with slender threads must come apart and disintegrate into bits of useless rags.
I have made this point repeatedly on this site. Repeatedly. I have made it in a sustained manner in Conversion in Reverse: How the Ethos of Americanism Converted Catholics and Contributed to the Rise of Conciliarism. Principles of right, limited governance can be maintained only when supported by the truths of the Holy Faith. Absent that, of course, documents such as the Constitution of the United States of America are utterly defenseless against their own deconstruction and thus degeneration into meaninglessness over time. Yesterday's decision is not unsurprising. Anything is possible in a world that is founded on false anti-Incarnational principles. Do not be surprised if the Supreme Court of the United States of America decides ultimately to uphold "gay marriage" as a matter of "states' rights" and/or "personal privacy."
National security? Protecting the borders? The same man who wrote the principal dissenting opinion in the combined cases of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al. yesterday, Anthony Kennedy, wrote the opinion of the Court in the case of Arizona, et al. v. United States on Monday, June 26, 2012, that upheld one key provision of the Arizona immigration law while declaring other parts as being a usurpation of the authority of the Federal government. Kennedy was joined with three of consistently "liberal" justices (Sonya Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) by none other than Chief Justice John Roberts.
It is no wonder, therefore, that Associate Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a scathing dissent of Kennedy's opinion. Here is a brief excerpt:
As is often the case, discussion of the dry legalities that are the proper object of our attention suppresses the very human realities that gave rise to the suit. Arizona bears the brunt of the country’s illegal immigration problem. Its citizens feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy. Federal officials have been unable to remedy the problem, and indeed have recently shown that they are unwilling to do so. Thousands of Arizona’s estimated 400,000 illegal immigrants—including not just children but men and women under 30—are now assured immunity from enforcement, and will be able to compete openly with Arizona citizens for employment.
Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty—not in contradiction of federal law, but in complete compliance with it. The laws under challenge here do not extend or revise federal immigration restrictions, but merely enforce those restrictions more effectively. If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign State. I dissent. (Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, Dissenting Opinion, at page 22 of opinion. page 51 of the document.)
It is rare for a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America to take extra-judicial notice of events that are not brought forth in the briefs submitted to the Court and during oral arguments. That Scalia did so was an indication of his frustration about the decision in the Arizona case as well as the then forthcoming decision in the ObamaCare case that was announced yesterday.
Alas, Scalia is himself a legal positivist who does not believe that the Natural Law has any application in American judicial decision-making. That he has found his revered constitution in such disrepair is the direct result of what must happen in nations that do not subordinate themselves in all things that pertain to the good of souls to the authority of the Catholic Church in her exercise, only as a last resort after exhausting all efforts of exhortation and admonition, of the Social Reign of Christ the King.
So Much Hypocrisy and Blindness
Understandably, Caesar Soetoro/Obama is very pleased with the outcome of the decision announced in the combined cases of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al. even if its principal holding concerning the constitutionality of the "individual mandate" as a tax rather than a penalty, which is what Congress specified it to be legislatively it to be in 2010 and what Obama himself said it was in 2009:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: ...during the campaign. Under this mandate,
the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you
don't. How is that not a tax?
OBAMA: Well, hold on a second, George. Here - here's what's
happening. You and I are both paying $900, on average - our families -
in higher premiums because of uncompensated care. Now what I've said is
that if you can't afford health insurance, you certainly shouldn't be punished for that.
That's just piling on. If, on the other hand, we're giving tax credits,
we've set up an exchange, you are now part of a big pool, we've driven
down the costs, we've done everything we can and you actually can afford
health insurance, but you've just decided, you know what, I want to
take my chances. And then you get hit by a bus and you and I have to
pay for the emergency room care, that's ...
STEPHANOPOULOS: That may be, but it's still a tax increase.
OBAMA: No. That's not true, George. The - for us to say that
you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is
absolutely not a tax increase. What it's saying is, is that we're not
going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than
the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance.
Nobody considers that a tax increase. People say to themselves, that is
a fair way to make sure that if you hit my car, that I'm not covering
all the costs.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But it may be fair, it may be good public policy ...
OBAMA: No, but - but, George, you - you can't just make up that language and decide that that's called a tax increase. Any ...
STEPHANOPOULOS: Here's the ...
OBAMA: What - what - if I - if I say that right now your premiums
are going to be going up by 5 or 8 or 10 percent next year and you say
well, that's not a tax increase; but, on the other hand, if I say that I
don't want to have to pay for you not carrying coverage even after I
give you tax credits that make it affordable, then ...
STEPHANOPOULOS: I - I don't think I'm making it up. Merriam
Webster's Dictionary: Tax - "a charge, usually of money, imposed by
authority on persons or property for public purposes."
OBAMA: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam's Dictionary, the
definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you're stretching a
little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn't have gone to the
dictionary to check on the definition. I mean what ...
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, no, but ...
OBAMA: ... what you're saying is ...
STEPHANOPOULOS: I wanted to check for myself. But your critics say it is a tax increase.
OBAMA: My critics say everything is a tax increase. My critics say
that I'm taking over every sector of the economy. You know that. Look,
we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not we're going to have
an individual mandate or not, but ...
STEPHANOPOULOS: But you reject that it's a tax increase?
OBAMA: I absolutely reject that notion. (Obama Declaring Mandate 'Absolutely' Not a Tax.)
Behold the "post-modern" man, a creature who can live comfortably with contradiction and paradox just as long as he gets his way. It's the "end result" that matters to such sanctimonious creatures, not the reasoning that gets one to the result.
Alas, the same holds true for many of those who adhere to the false opposite of the naturalist "right," people who keep insisting that the "political process" will "rectify" the current nightmare of a Supreme Court decision without realizing that it is the "political process" itself that got us to this point as a document founded on false premises falls victim to every passing whim and fancy.
We were told in 2000 that it was "necessary" for vote for the "lesser of two evils," then Texas Governor George Walker Bush, in large part because of his ability to "reshape" the Supreme Court of the United States of America. We are being told now that Willard Mitt Romney will "protect" the "correct" interpretation of the constitution by whatever appointments he is able to make to the Court.
This is wrong on two counts other than the inherently unstable nature of American jurisprudence.
First, former Governor Romney's record as Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is pretty much the same as that of Governor Bush twelve years ago. That is, Romney appointed men to the bench who were completely pro-abortion just as Bush had done in Texas. Think things will be "different" if there is a "President" Romney? Uh, what chance do you think there is of Democrats not blocking anyone deemed to be a "conservative" from replacing either Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Stephen Breyer if either or both should leave the Supreme Court on their own volition during a Romney presidency other than by dying? Keep dreaming. Keep dreaming.
Second, it is no refuge to point to the fact that President George Walker Bush nominated Samuel Alito in addition to John Roberts. So what? Bush turned to Alito only after his friend and confidante, the pro-abort Harriet Miers, was forced to withdraw her own nomination to replace Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the pro-abortion appointee of President Ronald Wilson Reagan in 1981, after Roberts, who had been nominated to replace O'Connor, was nominated instead to the position of chief justice that had been created by the death of William Rehnquist on September 3, 2005 (see (The Triumph of Protestantism and Posturing and Preening).
Alas, what did the appointment of John Glover Roberts, Jr., who took his oath of office on September 31, 2005, matter to the innocent preborn born who was murdered in Missouri back about a month later with the blessing of the entire membership of the Supreme Court, including himself, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas (Alito did not take his place on the Court until January 31, 2006)? Judge for yourselves:
The full court vacated an order that Justice Clarence Thomas had issued late Friday that had prevented a Missouri prison inmate from obtaining an abortion, to which a federal district judge had found she had a constitutional right.
The
inmate, identified in court papers only as Jane Roe, was pregnant when
she was sent to a women's prison in Vandalia, Mo., on a parole violation
and had been trying for seven weeks to obtain an abortion. She is now
17 weeks pregnant. She plans to pay for the procedure herself but, as an
inmate, needs the prison to arrange transportation to a Planned
Parenthood clinic in St. Louis, 80 miles away.
Under a policy it
adopted last year, the Missouri Department of Corrections will not
transport inmates for abortions that it deems not medically necessary.
Last Thursday, after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on the inmate's behalf, Judge H.
Dean Whipple of Federal District Court in Kansas City ordered the state
to provide access to the abortion. The inmate would otherwise "suffer
irreparable harm," he said.
The state then appealed to the United
States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, which
refused to grant a stay of Judge Whipple's order. The state next turned
to Justice Thomas, who has administrative jurisdiction over the Eighth
Circuit.
In the appeal, Crawford v. Roe, No. 05A333, Attorney
General Jay Nixon acknowledged that a state could not impose an "undue
burden" on the right to abortion. But in this case, he said, "it is not
the prison that has imposed the burden, but the prisoner's violation of
the law that resulted in her incarceration that has imposed the burden."
The inmate was jailed for a parole violation.
Justice Thomas gave
no reason for granting the stay on Friday night, and the full court, to
which he then referred the case, gave no reason for vacating the stay.
Neither he nor any other member of the court indicated a dissent from
the order the court issued on Monday. (Justices Reject Appeal.)
Each of the midget naturalists who ran for the 2012 Republican nomination gave effusive praise to the "conservative" quartet (Roberts Scalia, Thomas and Alito) even though three of them chose not to intervene the save the life of an innocent preborn baby of an incarcerated woman:
First, consider Romney's campaign website.
From the Courts & The Constitution section the campaign says:
"As president, Mitt will nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. These justices hold dear what
the great Chief Justice John Marshall called "the basis on which the
whole American fabric has been erected": a written Constitution, with
real and determinate meaning." (What Does Mitt Romney Think About Chief Justice John Roberts.)
Look, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon gave us five of the seven votes in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973 (William Brennan, Potter Stewart, Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun and Lewis Powell). Ronald Reagan gave us two of the deciding votes in principal plurality opinion in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey twenty years ago today (Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy) while George Herbert Walker Bush gave us yet another man, David Souter, whose pro-abortion record was made very clear to the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 19, 1990, by Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus Foundation (see Howard Phillips Testimony), something that did not matter at all to the supposedly "pro-life" Republicans in the United States Senate. Souter's concurring opinion in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey twenty years ago today was no surprised. We had be warned. We did not listen.
It will be no different under a "President" Romney even if he gets to appoint someone to the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
Believe what you want. Get all agitated if you want to do so. Yesterday's decision is here to stay. ObamaCare is here to stay. Get used to it.
Nothing Stable, Nothing Secure
Just as nothing is stable and nothing is secure in the philosophically absurd world of conciliarism, so is it the case that nothing is stable and nothing is secure on a court where "finality" depends upon the composition of its membership.
This is so eerily similar to what Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's repackaging of the "evolution of dogma" under his philosophically absurd and dogmatically condemned "hermeneutic of continuity" does to the very nature of the papacy by making each pope's pronouncements and even dogmatic statements made by Holy Mother Church's true councils nothing more than "contingent" reflections of a certain time in history that need to be "adjusted" over time. This is what must happen to the written document of a civil government . In other words, contingent beings unguided by any consideration of First and Last Things must become the prisoners of the arbitrary considerations of whoever happens to hold governmental power at any given point in time as law becomes what civil officials say it is regardless of written texts that are supposed to govern their actions. This is the path to tyranny, which must arise in preparation for the coming of the Antichrist, who will come only after "the people" have become completely docile and submissive in the secular ape of the Catholic Church that is the civil government of Modernity.
Nations need to be founded and governed according to right principles, starting with a due recognition of the Catholic Church as the one and only true religion and a due submission to her exercise of the Social Reign of Christ the King in all that pertains to the good of souls. Nations that are indifferent or hostile to this basic truth, which was reiterated by true pope after true pope in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, must degenerate over the course of time as they become subject to the arbitrary whims of those who serve in the civil government and/or whatever happens to constitute "majority" opinion amongst the populace at any given time. Among others, Pope Pius IX explained this in Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864:
For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;" and that "if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling."
And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that "the people's will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right." But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests? (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)
Nations that are not governed by leaders who understand First and Last Things thus will be at the mercy of various fleeting currents. There will be times when executives and legislators and judges take actions that are consonant with the common temporal good and are founded in solid jurisprudence and pose, at least minimally, no threat to the sanctification and sanctification of the souls of their fellow citizens (a goal that the Catholic Church teaches us must define the proper and just exercise of the authority possessed by civil rulers). There will also be times when executives and legislators and judges take actions that are manifestly opposed to a true conception of the common temporal good and serve as impediments to the sanctification and salvation of the souls of their fellow citizens. Such is the uncertainty of the modern civil state, founded upon false, naturalistic, semi-Pelagian and religiously indifferentist principles, that even trained scholars in constitutional law, a subject that I taught for a long time during my own academic career, are never quite certain what outcome might result from litigation challenging the constitutionality of a given executive action or legislative enactment.
One of the supreme ironies in all of this is that the lords of conciliarism in the United States of America who oppose the "mandate" imposed upon religious institutions to provide health insurance coverage to their employees for contraception and other "family planning" services is that most of them, with several exceptions, support ObamaCare in principle even though it is a massive violation of the Natural Law principle of subsidiarity and even though it supports the funding of chemical and surgical execution of innocent preborn babies disguised in the form of various "exchanges" that make it clear that such killings will be paid for by the American taxpayer. Who, including Mitt Romney, was talking about that yesterday? Who is talking about it today?
As noted earlier in this commentary, the brave new world that is upon us not the result of any single court decision or legislative enactment. No, the brave new world that is upon us was set into motion when a lecherous drunkard named Martin Luther posted those ninety-five theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517. It's been all downhill ever since.
Once again, repeat after me: Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order.
We must pray and sacrifice and fast as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary for the restoration of the Church Militant on earth and of Christendom in the world.
The Rosary, the Rosary, the Rosary. Use it well. The enemies of Christ the King within in our souls and in the world-at-large and in the conciliar church will be defeated by Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary and the fulfillment of her Fatima Message.
Saint Peter and Saint Paul shed their blood to make it possible for the Faith to be spread during the height of the power of the Roman Empire. Why are we so unwilling to look at everything through the eyes of the true Faith while believing that there is some "secular" shortcut to social order that can come only by the right ordering of souls in cooperation with the graces won for us on Calvary by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ?
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
