Written by Philip Mauriello Jr., a local attorney and host of the California Underground Podcast
The Constitution is dead.
It had a good run. It was a remarkable document when it first was written. It was the first of its kind and laid out a new style of government. Written with the goals of providing a government that derived its power from the people it governed, rather than the old style of deriving from the government itself.
The document laid out what was the small area that the government could work within and that was it. The rest was to be left to the people. To say it changed the modern world would not be hyperbolic as most countries have adapted some sort of constitution of their own.
It discussed natural rights, derived from our Creator, that should be protected at all costs. It limited the reach of an overbearing federal government and dispersed power amongst its member states to allow them to govern themselves in the specific way they saw fit. In doing so, these member states became laboratories for experiments regarding public policy, preventing a “one size fits all” solution when it is neither needed nor warranted. The system was created to prevent the overreach of a centralized federal power, thereby letting the people decide in their own localities what was best for them.
But now, that is all over. Today, we have an enormous federal government which is expected to be the be all and end all of authority. When states are mismanaged, the federal government can bail them out. Neglect to prepare for a global pandemic that can kill thousands of your citizens? It’s fine, the federal government will bail you out.
Not too long ago, when New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, the federal government declined to step in and help. It was their local problem, so they needed to deal with it. Today? Here’s a blank check for whatever you need.
I don’t bemoan the federal/state partnership that is required to attack a pandemic such as this one. I bemoan the fact that state leaders have all but abdicated any responsibility to run their states efficiently. Governors don’t need to worry so much about budgets and preparedness, when Big Papa Fed will come to the rescue. New York had the chance to buy thousands of ventilators back in 2015, but declined. Now they beg for tens of thousands of ventilators which go unused. Here in California, we had mobile hospitals at the ready specifically for an influenza-like pandemic. They were scrapped because of budget reasons, but that didn’t stop California from returning to the well of the federal government when all of this went down.
The collapse of our federalist system may be one contributing cause of the Constitution’s death, but it’s not the main one.
No, the cause of death that will be scribed on the death certificate of the Constitution will be the easy surrender of the rights we are granted not from the government but by our Creator. The natural rights inscribed in the Constitution are not rights given to us, they are rights we are born with. As such, the government shall not infringe upon them.
But that rationale is now gone. Those rights became instantly disposable in the face of this pandemic. The government simply waved its hands and poof, your rights were gone. The illusion was over, we never had those rights to begin with.
We as a people played ball and now the government is changing the rules of the game. They said to cooperate for this small period and then we’ll go back to normal. Now with the numbers dropping, curves flattening, and predictions shrinking, the people ask meekly, “Can we have our rights back?” The government simply replies, “no.” You don’t get those back until we say so.
That’s not how this works. Those rights are not the government’s to give. They were always ours to have and to hold. The Constitution died when we rolled over and just let the government take them without so much as a whimper.
It was a good run while it lasted. It’s a shame that what started with an amazing revolution ended with a silent killer.
