Thread: A Great Moment in our History by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

A Great Moment in our History

Posted on 02 August 2009

by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

Keynote speech at the Ohio Rally for State Sovereignty, August 1, 2009.

Let me set down a couple of fervent beliefs that animate everything I do and everything I say.

I believe that God created heaven and earth and every single individual on the planet.

I believe that the God who gave us life gave us liberty and that freedom is our birthright.

I believe that the States created the federal government and not the other way around. And that the power that the States gave to the Federal Government - they can take back.

When we were colonists, and the King and the Parliament needed money from us, and they always seemed to need money, they devised ingenious ways to tax us. One of them was called the Stamp Act. The Parliament decreed that every piece of paper that the Colonists had in their homes; every book, every document, every deed, every lease, every pamphlet, every poster to be nailed to a tree had to have the King’s stamp on it. You think going to a Post Office is bad? You had to go to a British Government office and buy a stamp with the King’s picture.

Question. How did the King know that his picture was on every piece of paper in your house? The Parliament enacted a hateful piece of legislation called the Writs of Assistance Act which let the king’s soldiers write their own search warrants, and bang down any door they chose to look for the stamps or anything else that they were looking for.

It was the last straw.

We fought a revolution. We won the revolution. We wrote the Constitution. The constitution doesn’t grant power, it keeps the government off our backs.

When they were debating the Constitution in the Summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, there were two great arguments - one by the Jefferson and Madison crowd and one by the Adams and Hamilton crowd. Jefferson argued, though he wasn’t physically there in Philly, as he did in the Declaration of Independence that our rights are ours by virtue of our humanity. That as God is perfectly free, and we are created in his image and likeness, we too are perfectly free. The big government crowd - yes they had them even in those days - argued that you can’t have freedom without government, and that government gives us our rights, and therefore, that government can take them away. This is not an academic argument. Jefferson and the natural law argument prevailed because the Constitution was written to keep the government from interfering with our natural rights.

And so, your right to think as you wish, to say what you think, to publish what you say, to travel where you want, to worship as you see fit, to keep and bear arms to defend yourself against a tyranny. And, after the right to life, the greatest and most uniquely American of rights - and I say this in front of the seat of the government - is the right to be left alone.

We wrote a Constitution to ensure that the government would never interfere with these rights. Think about it - if rights come from the government, then the government, by ordinary legislation, or presidential decree can take them away. But if the rights come from our humanity, then unless we violate someone else’s natural rights, the government cannot take our rights away.

This is not just a democrat, upper case D, or a republican, upper case R, problem. It’s a problem with government today. There’s a republican version of big government just as assaultive to our liberties as there’s a democrat version of big government.

We fought a revolution because British soldiers could knock on our doors and demand that we house them, and demand that we turn over property to them because they could write their own search warrants. In the Patriot Act, the most hateful piece of legislation since the Alien and Sedition Acts, a republican congress and a republican president authorized federal agents to do the unthinkable - to write their own search warrants. And the republican administration didn’t even let members of the House of Representatives read the Patriot Act before they voted on it.

Why should the government be able to spy on us? We should be able to spy on them!

When some judge is rationalizing away our liberty, or some congressman is plotting to take away your freedom or your tax dollars, we should know what they do every minute that they do it.

I was speaking to a group of congressman from a neighboring state - I won’t tell you which state it was, but they don’t play football there - and they came up to me and said “this is the first time we have heard that the Patriot Act allows federal agents to write their own search warrants.â€

AWESOME!!! LUV THE JUDGE! Thanks for posting. I just copied it and forwarded it off to a bunch of people on my email list. I suggest everyone do the same.

This needs to go on other forums as well - both Liberal & Conservative. People need to be aware that we are AMERICANS first - NOT REPUBLICANS or DEMOCRATS. The politicians and the media are driving a wedge between us - using their divide and conquor techniqe that they do so well, and the people are once again taking sides and falling for it. It keeps Americans focused on fighting one another instead of the politicians!

"Our political system is like the same person owning 2 football teams that go to the Super Bowl. Either way, they win. It's time for us to realize that. It's not what they say. It's what they do." - A. Jones