A modest proposal to update the US Bill of Rights to 2012 NDAA ‘law’

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Carl Herman

Credit to the incisive Video Rebel – home here; my contribution is adding a few links and minor edits. Of course, Occupy’s endgame is not to surrender the US Constitution, but to demand arrests of the criminal 1% attempting to destroy it. When education like Video Rebel’s causes critical mass among the 99% to recognize the 1%’s “laws,” wars, and economic looting for the criminal acts they are, this “emperor has no clothes” transformation will stop the criminality and open the door for policy that benefits 100% of Earth’s inhabitants.
The Bill of Rights can only legally be changed through an amendment or a Treaty ratified by the United States Senate. The Supreme Court can interpret the Bill of Rights to make it apply to new technologies such as, television and the Internet, but it cannot amend the Bill of Rights.

By NDAA, the First Amendment has unlawfully been revised to eliminate free speech, freedom of assembly and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments were similarly revised to allow search and seizure without probable cause and to allow torture and indefinite detention without trial.

The recent announcement of the acquisition of 30,000 drones to patrol the American skies (here, here, here) will require major revisions to several amendments as the majority of these drones will be armed. At first, they will be only be armed with shotgun tasers which can be lethal but could quickly be replaced with shotguns, machine guns and missiles. Tasers kill two people every week (here, here), so they already violate the right to a trial and the prohibition of both torture and cruel and unusual punishment. But there is another problem presented by the use of drones in law enforcement.

US laws must be revised to give drones and robots the same protection as the police have in cases of armed resistance. A human policeman has the right to defend himself from a violent assault. This includes deadly force. But what of a drone? Suppose a drone has issued a verbal order to disperse to an “unlawful” assembly (compare to 1st Amendment content and context). Someone in the crowd responds by shooting at the drone. Another drone returns fire and kills the man for resisting an armed robotic agent. The constitutional problem is that the drone is not currently granted the same right to life as a human. This must be revised so drones have the right to use lethal force to protect themselves from the citizenry.

Of course the right to preemptively kill anyone, including American citizens, on a list of enemy combatants would require the government to rewrite the Bill of Rights to allow summary execution without trial and the right to confront witnesses, the right to a lawyer and to reasonable bond. And all that nonsense against torture in the Eighth Amendment has got to go. The Fifth Amendment right to refuse to incriminate yourself would be a moot point as enemy combatants would be dead and not need to face a trial of their peers.

Drones and robots owned by the federal, state and local governments will have to be granted the right to life. But those rights must be denied to any privately owned drone or robot. This will require a return to the original Constitution which did allow voting for white men but not for women and blacks.

My modest proposal is that we eliminate the Second to Tenth Amendments. I would rewrite the Fifth Amendment to apply it to drones and robots but not to humans. It would be impossible to rewrite the Fourth Amendment to include TSA genital groping at malls, sporting events and dances. Or how could we rewrite the Bill of Rights to allow for self-incrimination when there are no more trials? And the right to reasonable bail and a speedy trial should be just excised from our collective memory rather than be rewritten.

Here is my proposed First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law prohibiting the right of the people to worship their government. Congress shall make no law prohibiting the right of the government to freely communicate its views to the people nor abridge the right of the people to peaceably assemble and listen to their government.

The Fifth Amendment should be renamed the Robot Right to Life Amendment. The remainder of the Bill of Rights is to be terminated so calling it the Second Amendment would just confuse people who were looking for the original version. It would also unnecessarily perplex those who were looking for Amendments Three through Ten which will, as I said, no longer exist.

Thank you, Video Rebel.

A modest proposal to update the US Bill of Rights to 2012 NDAA