Catholic Journal

Humming La Marseillaise

The leading issue of this election season seems to be attacks on American Democracy and its most sacrosanct institutions, including the U.S Constitution. This is a document every educated person my age understands as the Number 1 Guarantor of each American’s individual freedoms as designated in its First 10 Amendments, better known as the Bill of Rights.

For years, the Democrats have proclaimed Donald Trump as the nation’s Public Enemy #1. Unlike any Republican since Abraham Lincoln, they have targeted him, so that his life has been constantly threaten and nearly taken twice, with just weeks to go before the elections. 

I have heard many television and radio hosts, resort to a playground mentality. He started it as their excuse for begging someone out there in crazy land to remove Trump, take him outeliminate Trumpstop him, and even kill him.Some amoral pollster asked Democratic voters whether they would like to see the former president assassinated. While they did not reach a majority, 29% was a high number of would-be Trump death wishers.

Other commentators, wishing not to offend, resort to the coward’s refrain, both sides are equally to blame. There is no moral equivalency in the audacity of the Left who wish for a candidate’s death and when it nearly happens appear disappointed. These people have no decency, nor shame. 

For years, I have argued that to be a Democrat you have to suffer from some sort of mental illness. Most of their arguments have rested on the psychological malady, called projection. When blame is needed for inflation, high unemployment, millions of illegal immigrants and violence in the streets, it is always the fault of the Republicans, though most of these social maladies arise from the Democrats’ reliance on Progressive policies, which have failed every time and everywhere they have been tried. 

One need look no further than the terrible conditions, plaguing the inner cities of our major metropolitan areas, such as Chicago, San Francisco, New York and many others. The Democratic Party has been in charge of these communities for the better part of 60 years. 

The Democrats have also tried to keep Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy off the ballot in several key states. It goes without saying how the Democratic Party has used their lawfare strategy with the FBI and the Justice Department to try to bankrupt Trump with a half billion dollars in legal fees and incarcerate him before the election with a flood of specious charges in New York City, Washington D.C. and Atlanta. 

In what can only be called, an October Surprise, Donald Trump blasted the DOJ for election interference, for violating its own rules when Special Prosecutor Jack Smith released the sealed documents from one of his indictments. Taken as a whole, all these actions amount to a real conspiracy to subvert the 2024 election and obviate the democratic will of the people.

This all raises the question. Just what is a democracy? My Websters define democracy as a rule of the majority…or a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people by the people and exercised by the directly or indirectly through a system of representation, involving periodically held elections.

Politics has always been about power. My first American history course at Holy Cross used Morison and Commager’s classic textbook, The Growth of the American Republic, which described government as the constant struggle between governmental power and the rights of its people. One thing to remember is that countries may call themselves Democracies or even Republics but one need look at how many rights its people really enjoy. For example, are Russia, Cuba and the People’s Democratic Republic of China really what they say they are? 

Before I go any further, I should engage in a little time travel and return to the late 18th century. Our Founding Fathers feared pure democracy. Theirs fears were based on the bloody reports of the French Revolution in the late 18th century where French democracy led straight to the guillotine and the rise of a world dictator, named Napoleon Bonaparte. 

To prevent this, they chose to establish, not a Democracy but a Republic, which was protected from the mobocracy of the revolutionary masses with their pitchforks and cocked hats, all singing the new song that later became their national anthem, La Marseillaise, written by Freemason Claude Rouget in 1792. 

By instituting checks and balances and a separation of powers into three distinct branches, each with its own powers and responsibilities, namely a legislature, executive and a judiciary. These were designed to protect one branch from becoming the center of power. 

The United States Constitution has historically been the greatest protection of our natural rights, such as the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which had been expanded from the original property. This lasted until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, which mostly out of necessity, leaned toward a centralized executive authority. 

Since Lincoln, every crisis, real or imagined, from economic panic, depressions and recession, not to mention the many wars we have engaged in since 1865, have led to an extension of government power and a gradual erosion of personal freedom. Perhaps a Republic is Kamala Harris’ burdens of the past.

I think the greatest threat to Democracy, beside the eponymous Democratic Party, is the uninformed voter. This kind of voter pays no attention to issues, debates or news commentary. They will make their decisions, not on intelligence but on emotion. A case in point, is a voter, such as the one in Georgia, who wrote the following to the local newspaper:

It has become very clear who I would want to explain and defend our country’s positions with other world leaders. Kamala Harris provided a practical demonstration of her skills in action. Through her ability to calmly but forcefully articulate the nuances of complex issues and her skills in countering confusing and false information, she clearly out-performed Donald Trump in their audition to be our country’s president and chief diplomat. Where has anyone heard the words in bold in any of the word salads, conjured from her brain?

My first reaction is that this writer had never witnessed the vice-president speak extemporaneously, in half-sentences, mumble meaningless word salads and cackle as it someone had told a joke, she didn’t get but had to hide her ignorance. However this letter is so articulate and nuanced, it could only have been written by someone, clueless to the realities of our candidates in the 2024 election or by someone on the Harris payroll. Where its danger rests is the fact that thousands who read it will believe its falsehoods.

While Democrats frequently call Trump a threat to democracy, they have proven several times that they have no respect for the democratic process. After passing off Joe Biden in 2020, who campaigned mainly from his basement, as a barely cognitively functioning candidate, after a short time, it became clear that he was in the early days of his dementia. When it became clearly visible during his ill-fated debate, they rudely and undemocratically tossed him aside, like an old warhorse, ready for the glue factory. They did this unilaterally without consulting his convention delegates, who were near unanimous in their vote for the president. 

One can easily add their additional scheme of increasing their voters roster by recruiting millions of illegal aliens who have literally invaded our Southern borders. Since Democrats do not reproduce their numbers naturally, they need to rely on illiterate migrants, who know virtually nothing about our political history, language or culture. This is, in itself, is an existential threat to our existence. Many thousands have already been signed up to vote. Sadly, many of our public school students would fall into that bin of ignorance.

Democrats periodically wheel out the January 6th protest action of the Trumpian crowd against the Capitol that went badly. There is zero proof that Trump was the direct cause of the excesses of the crowd or exhorted them to physical violence. To date, the government has failed to release the complete tape of the entire event.

Personally, I think it has been overblown for political reasons. As for the loss of human life, the fact of the matter is of the five deaths only one was violently. A Capitol policeman had a heart attack while another killed himself the next day. A Trump protestor died of a stroke, while another was apparently crushed or suffocated by the huge crowd. Ony Trump protestor, Air Force veteran, Ashli Babbitt was shot to death by a Capitol guard, who later touted himself as a hero. 

The entire incident would not have happened had those responsible for the Capitol’s safety, Nancy Pelosi and Dick Schumer, the leaders of the respective Houses, had provided the extra security that Trump asked for. He knew his crowd would be excessively loud and angry. But they refused. This sounds suspiciously familiar. Some people can reason that just maybe the President had been set up. 

Contrast this with the Democrats excusing the violence of Black Lives Matter, who burned down large areas of downtown Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. Kamala Harris when so far as to pay to release those jailed in Minneapolis with the full support of Governor Tim Walz, possibly the next vice-president.

New York Times critic, Jennifer Szalait, hinted at the true motivation behind the press’s constant charges against former president, Donald Trump and other Republicans in her recent essay Is the Heart of America Threatening Democracy? 

At the core of her opinion is abortion rights. She falsely believes Trump’s appointment of three conservative justices to the SCOTUS took away a fundamental right. The truth is Roe was not only bad law, and unconstitutional but seriously undemocratic since it took the right of choice from all the voters of 50 states. Yet its repeal was a threat to Democracy?

At the heart of the fierce debate is the bold fact that for decades there have been competing constitutional philosophies vying for control of the judiciary. Since the Courts of Chief Justices, Earl Warren and Warren Burger, the court has instituted the living constitution, which gave rise to an unconstitutional function, where the justices created new rights, including the bogus right to an abortion, found in the shadows of law. They focused on the needs of the times, ignoring the original meaning of the Founding Fathers. This is tantamount to illegally amending the Constitution without the consent of the people.

Three liberal judges, Harry Blackmun, William O. Douglas and William Brennan created this specious right, which was discovered in the right to privacy. While abortion was never considered by the Founding Fathers, since human life was considered much more valuable 250 years ago, so to make it a right they have to cleverly twist the language of the document so it could be more inclusive. Justice Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion of the 7-2 vote, said he found it in the penumbra of the right to privacy. Penumbra means a shadow. To date this bloody shadow has claimed 65,000,000 unborn babies.

After years of claiming that Trump wanted to dispense with our Constitution, the New York Times now believes that Trump owes his political ascendancy to the Court and the Conservatives on it, making him a beneficiary of a document that is undemocratic and, in this day, and age, increasingly dysfunctional.

Democrats have taken issue with two sections of our Constitution, namely the Electoral College (Article II) and the Supreme Court (Article Three). These articles are sacrosanct and designed to prevent presidents from assuming absolute power and establishing tyrannical governments, which will end all true democracy. This explains why they are on the Democrats’ hit list.

While there may still be elections, they will be as democratic as those in the former Soviet Union and now Russia and communist China, where usually there is little opposition and if there is, they have to flee the country or wind up in prison or even worse. and the winner’s margin is 95-98%.

Our forebears founded a Republic which was designed to keep the masses at arm’s length from the operations of power. To do this they had to provide for the democratic allocation of electoral zones, based on individual state populations. While this favored the larger states, the significant number of smaller ones protested. To settle their grave differences between the Southern and Northern colonies they arrived at the Connecticut Compromise where the big states like Virginia and Massachusetts had their own House of Government, which was divided proportionally while the smaller states, such as Rhode Island and New Jersey had the Senate where each state had an equal number of Senators (2).

This Compromise had served us well until 2009. I am willing to wager that the separation of powers and the Electoral College are foreign concepts to the vast majority of American voters. Without an educated voting population, the country becomes more prone to electing a real tyrant who will evaporate their individual rights.

While the Supreme Court in its past has stretched the Constitution to its limits, the John Roberts Court now has a conservative edge to it and it has used its Constitutional power of the separation of powers to keep the other two branches in line. The division was devised so that no one section could be ascend to unilateral control.

Unfortunately, since Barack Obama, the power of government has gravitated toward an executive tyranny. Both presidents Obama, and Biden have found the legislation and rulings of the Supreme Court and a Republican House inconvenient to their unbridled amalgamation of Federal power. 

Just as the SCOTUS cannot legislateneither can the president. While the Biden administration and the Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer have threatened to do away with the filibuster and pack the Court are not unprecedented, they bring another element of the Democrat’s plan to eliminate the constitutional concept of the division of powers and move us to a Blue Tyranny. If Kamala Harris becomes president on November 5th, I believe every Democrat who can carry a tune will be humming La Marseillaise.

William Borst

WILLIAM A. BORST has taught at virtually all levels of education from elementary school through university, published commentaries in many local and national publications, and hosted a weekly talk show on WGNU radio for 22 years. Having recently served as editor of the Mindszenty Report, Dr. Borst is the author of two prominent books: Liberalism: Fatal Consequences (1999) and The Scorpion and the Frog: A Natural Conspiracy (2005). He holds a PhD in American History from St. Louis University.