Crusader War College

Mary O'Grady summarizes the facts of the Honduran "coup":

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

She concludes her article:

The struggle against chavismo has never been about left-right politics. It is about defending the independence of institutions that keep presidents from becoming dictators. This crisis clearly delineates the problem. In failing to come to the aid of checks and balances, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Insulza expose their true colors.(P: emphasis added)

Ms. O'Grady pulls her punches, for President Obama also vigorously condemned the Honduran army's action to enforce the Honduran Constitution in obedience to the Honduran Congress and the Honduran Attorney General. This is the same President Obama who dithered for days before limply objecting to the violence perpetrated against Iranians protesting against what they perceived to be a rigged vote. He too shows his true colors. Both he and Hillary Clinton are rushing to support a wanna-be thug and condemn the enforcement of a nation's constitution because they don't want anyone to have an example of how to respond when they do the same.

I thank the Lord for this incredible confluence of events: in every abusive relationship, either existing or heading in that direction, the abuser makes a fatal and noticeable misstep that alerts his victims to his intentions and true nature. However, it is up to the victims to ignore the spin, hype, agendas, preconceptions, and preassumptions that they themselves believe that prevent them from recognizing the implications of the intentions revealed by the misstep, take the information presented to them at face value, and act upon it.

Much of what passes for "commentary" in the MSM are rhetorical and sophilistic attempts to get people to doubt the actionability of their own experience. Canadians claim that they are happy with their health care system, but shout down the complaints of those who actually HAVE to get health care. Those so treated are not being convinced that what actually happened to them did not really happen (although there may be attempts to deny that it happened to others) as much as they are being told that they have no right to act in a logical manner in response to that experience. In a sense, people's ability to respond to abuses are conditioned by their belief that they have the right to respond. Where that "right" comes from varies from culture to culture, but a unique characteristic of tyrants is that the abuser is also the source of the "right" to respond to that abuse.

What does this have to do with Obama's reaction to the situation in the Honduras? The supposed 'right' of Zelaya to be restored to the Presidency, regardless of his offenses against the Honduran Constitution, ignores the fact that Zelaya's claim to be President is based on his meeting the requirements laid out by the selfsame Honduran Constitution that he subsequently flouted. In this sort of worldview, constitutions are supported when they grant power but are not when they revoke that grant.

Of course, constitutions do nothing whatsoever of themselves and by themselves, for they are only collections of words on paper that have neither limbs to act nor mouths to speak. Rather, the power of a constitution lies in the people who believe that "their" constitution grants them the right and permission to respond when the actions of individuals flouts the rights, duties, and requirements of that constitution.

Given this, there are two core threats to any Constitution. The first threat is for its requirements or prohibitions to be ignored. This is especially true of the Constitution of the United States whose design principle was to facilitate the prohibition of the illegal exercise of government power. It was the prohibitions of the Honduran Constitution that Zelaya flouted, and whose punishment is being protested by his like-minded presidential compatriots who find the restrictions imposed by their Constitions on their own actions equally distasteful, and who desire, like Zelaya, to eventually throw those restrictions off. Obama, by his support of Zelaya, shows his true colors in his attitude toward prohibitive constitutions.

Another method for ignoring and flouting a constitution is to hide behind a deliberately mis-designed implementation of due process: the United States Constitution provides for the impeachment and removal of leaders, but the imposition of superfluous bureaucratic restrictions in the name of due process allows representatives and senators to cover for each other so that a vote is never taken. It may even be window-dressing if the majority, motivated by politics, ignores the facts in an actual trial and votes to acquit the truly guilty. The appeals to "due process" and the reminder of the downsides of "vigilanteism" and "mob rule" are used to rob the true victims of the belief that they have a right to respond. In the most egrerious cases, the post-modern view of "there is no truth" is used to erase the distinction of perpetrator and victim, again robbing the true victims of the ability to exercise the right to respond.

The other threat to a Constitution involves revising it to the extent that it permits behaviors that the constitution was originally designed to prohibit. This can be done using an otherwise legal amendment process, such as what Chavez has done with the Venezuelan Constitution (and what Zelaya was caught laying the foundations for). It can also be done by the Judicial interpretative process that permits what was originally prohibited. For instance, the use of Eminent Domain to transfer private property from one person to another is explicitly prohibited, but this prohibition was flouted with the judicial interpretation (Kelo vs. City of New London) that the transfer is legal if there is an incidental public benefit. In the face of such abuses, the victims and potential victims are, again, told to "obey the rule of law" and "due process" to eviscerate their willingness to exercise their right to respond.

The question before us is not how we restore the full rule of Constitutional law, but how we recover our willingness to respond to threats to constitutional rule or violations of the Constitution. We are, to an extent, bound and limited as private citizens because the Constitution explicitly reserves the right to correct abuses and abusers to the authorities it itself authorizes. Ironically, to stop an abusive situation it may be required that some abuse must be dished out: it may be as necessary to violate the constitution in order to save it as an abused wife needs to abuse her abuser. This is already recognized when the normal rule of law breaks down during natural disasters and martial law is declared. It is recognized that Martial law is an undesirable state of affairs if it is permanent, but it is allowed if it is a temporary measure that is removed when the more preferred legal environment is restored, and is imposed with the goal of restoring the preferred legal environment. Cancer damages the body and will kill the afflicted, but surgery itself can also kill the patient. It does not do so because it is skillfully applied and the damage is calculated to restore the patient to health: any surgeon who says "the operation was a success but the patient died" has a criterion of success calculated to save his ego, not his patients.

This is a very delicate subject: nobody except the mob believes in or wants mob rule. A deep respect for living "legally" and respecting the rule of law is necessary in all citizens for a constitutional republic to work, which is why I have problems with amnesty of "illegal" aliens whose behavior and presence testifies that they lack this essential respect.

What is happening is that our respect for law that translates into our belief that our behavior must be "legal" is being gamed. That is, people who benefit from exploiting us through the violation of laws, constitutions, and conventions (and their supporters, beneficiaries, and politicians), head off the exercise of just retribution from the victims by declaring any such actions as "illegal". This happens all the time, and not just in the War on Terror. We see it in sophists and opportunists everywhere.

How do we regain our belief that we have permission to act to restore a truly just society organized as a constitutional republic? Ironically, a hint of a solution can be found in the behavior of Islamists, who have no compunctions about attacking states and nations of all kinds, including those founded on Muslim principles. They act because they believe they have received authorization and permission from a higher authority.

Please note that I am not saying that we ourselves should only trust God to fix the situation, for rarely are worthwhile ends attained easily and without effort. Virtually every Revolutionary leader, from the time the American Revolution ended to the time of their deaths, privately and publicly credited and thanked Divine Providence for intervening at critical times to provide that little extra help or insight or change of circumstance that, when be added to their own necessary efforts, resulted in success.

Rather, what is required is the permission of Him whom the Declaration of Independence called "nature's God" Who "created all men equal" and Who "endowed them with certain unalienable rights". We need to see that there is a vast difference between telling a wanna-be tyrant "we don't need no steeking permission!" and "we don't need your steeking permission!" The first is the response of the mob, while the second is the response of principled free men.