Trump Reinstates Program to Turn Police into the Standing Army Our Forefathers Warned Us About

Washington, DC — On Monday, the Trump administration lifted a ban on military surplus hardware being transferred to police departments across the United States. The controversial 1033 program became a source of citizen outrage after images of police armed with military grade weaponry, including grenade launchers and armored MRAPs, were beamed into people homes across the country during the battlefield-style police response to the rioting in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.

As many Americans noted, Ferguson, Missouri looked like a war zone, with police kitted out in Marine-issue camouflage and military-grade body armor, toting short-barreled assault rifles, and rolling around in armored vehicles — virtually indistinguishable from US soldiers.

Shortly after the American public became widely aware, and largely outraged, over the extreme militarization of their local police forces, President Obama signed an Executive Order (EO) that blocked large-caliber weapons, armored vehicles, grenade launchers and other heavy military hardware from being repurposed from battlefields across the globe to small town USA.

This was one of very few notable pro-liberty moves by the Obama admin, and now it’s gone.

The new Trump plan goes into effect immediately and completely rolls back the EO that blocked state, county, and local police departments from obtaining military weapons of war. Unsurprisingly, drug warrior extraordinaire, Attorney General Jeff Session led the charge to reinstate the program.

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The administration’s action, first disclosed by USA TODAY, would restore “the full scope of a longstanding program for recycling surplus, lifesaving gear from the Department of Defense, along with restoring the full scope of grants used to purchase this type of equipment from other sources,” according to an administration summary of the new program recently circulated to some law enforcement groups.

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Civil rights advocates were quick to warn that the 1033 program’s reinstatement threatened to inflame tensions in minority communities where such equipment has been deployed in the past.

“It is both exceptionally dangerous and irresponsible for the administration to lift the ban on the transfer of certain surplus military equipment to state and local law enforcement organizations,” Janai Nelson, associate director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told USA Today. “Just a few summers ago, our nation watched as Ferguson raised the specter of increased police militarization. The law enforcement response there and in too many places across the country demonstrated how perilous, especially for black and brown communities, a militarized police force can be.”

In addition to Ferguson, the extreme militarization of police was clearly on display in Standing Rock, as police looked and acted more like a military contingent than peace officers sworn to uphold the law.

“We’ve seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like they’re an occupying force, as opposed to a force that’s part of the community that’s protecting them and serving them,” Obama said in announcing the ban in 2015.

The ban on military gear was a policy recommendation from a White House advisory group which formed after the rioting in Ferguson. The Task Force on 21st Century Policing, chaired by former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and Laurie Robinson, a former assistant attorney general, called on law enforcement officials to “minimize the appearance of a military operation” when policing mass demonstrations.

“Avoid using provocative tactics and equipment that undermine civilian trust,” the task force urged.

According to the USA Today report:

The previously-banned equipment also included tracked armored vehicles, bayonets and grenade launchers.

The Obama order did allow for the limited use of other surplus — aircraft, wheeled tactical vehicles, mobile command units, battering rams and riot gear — on the condition that such equipment was approved by the federal government.

The surplus sharing agreement, also known as the “1033 program,” was created by Congress nearly 30 years ago as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. It was originally intended to assist local law enforcement in drug investigations.

The program was expanded in 1997 to include all local law enforcement operations, including counter-terrorism. Since then, according to the government, more than $5 billion in gear has been transferred to state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies.

Make no mistake that America has been quietly arming its police for battle with its own citizens, under the guise of the drug war, since the early 1990s.

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As part of its misguided “war on drugs,” US policy makers decided that if police were to act like drug warriors, they needed to be equipped like warriors. Since that time, almost $5 billion in military hardware was transferred from the military to law enforcement, according to a report by the ACLU. By giving military hardware to law enforcement, the NDAA and 1033 program encourages police to employ military-like tactics and weaponry against the American public.

According to a Newsweek report:

1033 procurements are not matters of public record. And the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which coordinates distribution of military surplus, refuses to reveal the names of agencies requesting “tactical” items, like assault rifles and MRAPs — for security reasons, a spokesperson for DLA told Newsweek via email. One can only trace “tactical” items as far the county of the requesting agency. In the case of Ferguson, that means St. Louis County.

To give you an idea of the absolute absurdity of the 1033 program, police in Watertown, Connecticut, (population 22,514) acquired a mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle (sticker price: $733,000), designed to protect soldiers from roadside bombs, for $2,800. To date, there has never been a landmine reported in Watertown, Connecticut.

Police in Bloomington, Georgia, (population: 2,713) acquired four grenade launchers through the program, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

Police in small towns in Michigan and Indiana have used the 1033 Program to acquire “MRAP armored troop carriers, night-vision rifle scopes, camouflage fatigues, Humvees and dozens of M16 automatic rifles,” the South Bend Tribune reported.

These are just a few out of hundreds of examples of the overkill this program not only allows but promotes.

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The proclivity to treat policing in a militarized manner is inherently dangerous. Given the proliferation of military hardware and military training among police agencies, law enforcement’s inability to de-escalate dangerous situations, and instead respond to these situations by escalating force, is no surprise.

The founding fathers warned of the dangers of a standing army – and police are increasingly looking like the standing army they cautioned us against. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.

“The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”  – James Madison

The Anti-Federalists Were Right

On the eve of the federal convention, and following its adjournment in September of 1787, the Anti-Federalists made the case that the Constitution makers in Philadelphia had exceeded the mandate they were given to amend the Articles of Confederation, and nothing more.

The Federal Constitution augured ill for freedom, argued the Anti-Federalists. These unsung heroes had warned early Americans of the "ropes and chains of consolidation," in Patrick Henry"s magnificent words, inherent in the new dispensation.

At the very least, and after 230 years of just such "consolidation," it’s safe to say that the original Constitution is a dead letter.

The natural- and common law traditions, once lodestars for lawmakers, have been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute. However much one shovels the muck of lawmaking aside, natural justice and the Founders" original intent remain buried too deep to exhume.

Consider: America’s Constitution makers bequeathed a central government of delegated and enumerated powers. The Constitution gives Congress only some eighteen specific legislative powers. Nowhere among these powers is Social Security, civil rights (predicated as they are on grotesque violations of property rights), Medicare, Medicaid, and the elaborate public works sprung from the General Welfare and Interstate Commerce Clauses.

There is simply no warrant in the Constitution for most of what the Federal Frankenstein does.

The welfare clause stipulates that "Congress will have the power … to provide for the general welfare." And even though the general clause is followed by a detailed enumeration of the limited powers so delegated; our overlords, over decades of dirigisme, have taken Article I, Section 8 to mean that government can pick The People"s pockets and proceed with force against them for any perceivable purpose and project.

Today, Federal courts are in the business of harmonizing law across the nation, rather than allowing communities to live under laws they author, as guaranteed by The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In American federalism, the rights of the individual are secured through strict limits imposed on the power of the central government by a Bill of Rights and the division of authority between autonomous states and a federal government. States had been entrusted with the power to beat back the federal occupier and void unconstitutional federal laws. States" rights are "an essential Americanism,” wrote Old Rightist Frank Chodorov. The Founding Fathers as well as the opponents of the Constitution agreed on the principle of divided authority as a safeguard to the rights of the individual."

Duly, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison perfected a certain doctrine in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. "The Virginia Resolutions,” explains historian Thomas E. Woods, Jr., “spoke of the states" rights to "interpose" between the federal government and the people of the states; the Kentucky Resolutions used the term nullification — the states, they said, could nullify federal laws that they believed to be unconstitutional." Jefferson," emphasizes Woods, "considered states" rights a much more important and effective safeguard of people"s liberties than the "checks and balances" among the three branches of the federal government."

And for good reason. While judicial review was intended to curb Congress and restrain the executive, in reality, the unholy judicial, legislative and executive federal trinity has simply colluded in an alliance that has helped to abolish the Tenth Amendment.

You know the drill, but are always surprised anew by it. Voters pass a law under which a plurality wishes to live. Along comes a U.S. district judge and voids the law, citing a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment"s Equal Protection Clause.

For example: Voters might elect to prohibit government from sanctioning gay marriage. A U.S. district judge voids voter-approved law for violating the Fourteenth Amendment"s Equal Protection Clause. These periodical contretemps around gay marriage are perfectly proper judicial activism heralded by the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet not even conservative constitutional originalists are willing to cop to the propriety of it all. If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government — the Fourteenth Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be. Put differently, matters previously subject to state jurisdiction have been pulled into the orbit of a judiciary.

The gist of it: Jeffersonian constitutional thought is no longer in the Constitution; its revival unlikely.

As ardent a defender of the Constitution as constitutional scholar James McClellan was — even he conceded, sadly, that the Constitution makers were mistaken to rely on the good faith of Congress and their observance of the requirements of liberty, to rein in an Über-Presidency in the making. Nor has Congress prevented the rise of a legislating bureaucracy (the Deep State?) and an overweening judiciary — a judiciary that has, of late, found in the Constitution a mandate to compel commerce by forcing individual Americans to purchase health insurance on pains of a fine.

Meanwhile, John G. Roberts Jr., a “conservative,” rewrote Barack Obama"s Affordable Care Act, and then proceeded to provide the fifth vote to uphold the individual mandate undergirding the law, thereby undeniably and obscenely extending Congress"s taxing power.

“[B]uried in the constitutional thickets” are “huge presidential powers,” conceded historian Paul Johnson, in his History of the American People. The American president “was much stronger than most kings of the day, rivaled or exceeded only by the ‘Great Autocrat,’ the Tsar of Russia (and in practice stronger than most tsars). These powers were not explored until Andrew Jackson’s time, half a century on, when they astonished and frightened many people.”

These days, the toss-up in any given election is between submitting to the Democrats’ war on whites, the wealthy, and Wal-Mart, or being bedeviled by the Republicans’ wars on the world: Russia, China, Assad and The Ayatollahs. Or, suffering all the indignities listed — and more — in the case of candidates like Hillary Clinton.

The words of Republican office seekers notwithstanding — for most promise constitutionalism — a liberty-lover’s best hope is to see the legacy of the strongman who went before overturned for a period of time. In the age of unconstitutional government — Democratic and Republican — the best liberty lovers can look to is action and counteraction, force and counterforce in the service of liberty.

Having prophesied that Philadelphia was the beginning of the end of the freedoms won in the American Revolution, our Anti-Federalist philosophical fathers fought to forestall the inevitable. For that we must salute them.

"Young Virginia Democrat" Sentenced To Prison For Registering Dead People To Vote

Last October, we wrote about "Young Virginia Democrat" Andrew Spieles, a student at James Madison University, and apparently "Lead Organizer" for HarrisonburgVOTES, who got caught registering dead people to vote.  At the time, the founder of the organization, Joseph Fitzgerald, told reporters that he had no knowledge of Spieles’ actions and no idea "what his motivations were".   

“He’s smart, and he understands the [political] process,” Fitzgerald told the Daily News-Record of Spieles. “Who the hell knows what his motivations were?”

And while we agree it"s always difficult to be 100% sure about anyone"s motivations, we said at the time that we would be willing to put money on it having something to do with registering a bunch of dead people and then having them all vote for Hillary in November....just a hunch.

Now, it appears that the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia has agreed with our initial assessment and has sentenced Spiels to prison time for his efforts.  Per a local CBS affiliate, Spiels will spend 100-120 days behind bars.

James Madison University student Andrew J. Spieles, 21, of Harrisonburg, pled guilty Monday in the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia. As part of the plea agreement, Spieles agreed to a prison sentence of 100 to 120 days.

Spieles worked for Harrisonburg Votes when he committed the crime, according to acting United States Attorney Rick A. Mountcastle.

Harrisonburg Votes is a political organization affiliated with the Democratic Party.

Here is how it all played out according to the U.S. Attorney"s office:

“In July 2016 Spieles’ job was to register as many voters as possible and reported to Democratic Campaign headquarters in Harrisonburg,” a U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesperson said. “In August 2016, Spieles was directed to combine his registration numbers with those of another individual because their respective territories overlapped. After filling out a registration form for a voter, Spieles entered the information into a computer system used by the Virginia Democratic Party to track information such as name, age, address and political affiliation. Every Thursday an employee/volunteer hand-delivered the paper copies of the registration forms to the Registrar’s Office in Harrisonburg.”

Later that month, someone at the Registrar’s Office called police after another employee saw a name they recognized on a registration form.

The name was the deceased father of a Rockingham County Judge.

“The Registrar’s Office discovered multiple instances of similarly falsified forms when it reviewed additional registrations. Some were in the names of deceased individuals while others bore incorrect middle names, birth dates, and social security numbers,” the spokesperson continued. “The Registrar’s Office learned that the individuals named in these forms had not in fact submitted the new voter registrations. The assistant registrar’s personal knowledge of the names of some of the individuals named in the falsified documents facilitated the detection of the crime.

“Spieles later admitted that he prepared the false voter registration forms by obtaining the name, age, and address of individuals from “walk sheets” provided to him by the Virginia Democratic Party, fabricating a birth date based on the ages listed in the walk sheet, and fabricating the social security numbers. Spieles admitted that he created all 18 fraudulent forms himself and that no one else participated in the crime.”

Silly Spieles, he was just too young to realize that only experienced, professional politicians can get away with crimes like these.

* * *

For those who missed it, here is our original post from last October.

Just yesterday we wrote about an FBI investigation into potential voter fraud in the critical swing state of Virginia after it was revealed that 19 dead people had recently been re-registered to vote (see "FBI Investigating More Dead People Voting In The Key Swing State Of Virginia").  While the Washington Post caught wind of the investigation, it was not known who was behind the operation...until now.  

Meet, Andrew Spieles, a student at James Madison University, and apparently "Lead Organizer" for HarrisonburgVOTES.  According to the Daily News-Record, Spieles confessed to re-registering 19 deceased Virginians to vote in the 2016 election cycle. 

While this should come as a surprise to precisely 0 people, Spieles just happens to be Democrat who, accorded to a deleted FaceBook post, apparently recently ran for Caucus Chair of the Virginia Young Democrats. 

It"s too bad really, sounds like Spieles had all the right "special talents" required to be very successful politician...he just forgot the most important first rule: "Don"t get caught."  

The 19 applications of deceased citizens were submitted by Spieles through an organization called HarrisonburgVOTES. According to the organization"s "About Us" page, HarrisonburgVOTES is a "non-partisan" voter registration organization in Harrisonburg, VA and the surrounding areas.

As the HarrisonburgVOTES webpage points out, the sole goal of the organization is to raise the number of registered voters in Harrisonburg to 25,000...though it"s unclear what percentage of that goal was intended to be filled by dead voters.

The sole goal of HarrisonburgVOTES is to increase the number of registered voters in Harrisonburg and the surrounding areas to increase and encourage civic engagement.

Harrisonburg has the lowest percentage of voting age population (VAP) registered to vote among Virginia localities. Very roughly, about 17,000 people are registered to vote and about 18,000 are voting age and not registered.  The goal of HarrisonburgVOTES will be to overcome these issues and raise the number of registered voters to 25,000.

HarrisonburgVOTES was founded by Joseph Fitzgerald who, "shockingly", is also a prominent democrat in Harrisonburg.   Fitzgerald is currently Chairman of the Sixth Congressional District Democratic Committee in Virginia and the former Mayor of Harrisonburg. 

Fitzgerald told reporters, of course, that his organization had no knowledge of Spieles’s actions and fired him immediately after his confession.   

“He’s smart, and he understands the [political] process,” Fitzgerald told the Daily News-Record of Spieles. “Who the hell knows what his motivations were?”

While we agree it"s difficult to be 100% sure about anyone"s motivations, we would be willing to put money on it having something to do with registering a bunch of dead people and then having them all vote for Hillary in November....just a hunch.

James Madison, Too? Petition Would Ban Founding Father’s Name From High School

A Wisconsin high school student has launched a petition to remove the name of the father of the U.S. Constitution from her school – and it’s gaining quite a few signatures.

The name of James Madison Memorial High School must be changed because the Founding Father owned slaves, according to the student.

“Hello, my name is Mya Berry and my school is named after a slave owner,” Mya Berry wrote on Change.org. “James Madison, the 4th president of the United States was an owner of over 100 black slaves. The significance of this name in association with my school has a negative effect on Memorial’s black students.”

Berry’s petition to Madison Metropolitan School District in Madison, Wis., had received more than 1,500 signatures as of June 5.

Turn Drive Time Into Fun-Filled, History Time With Your Kids!

James Madison is known as the Father of the Constitution because he drafted the first 10 amendments to the document. His work includes the First Amendment, which grants Berry the right of free speech to demand the name change.

Berry blames Madison’s name for what she sees as an unsafe environment of racism at her school, The Capital Times reported.

“The lack of representation I feel in this school makes me feel more than unsafe,” Berry wrote on Change.org “I do not feel supported by the majority of staff at Memorial, especially considering the fact that I’ve gotten called ‘n word’ multiple times, along with having an individual threaten me by telling me they would lynch me.”

“So my thought to leave you with is: with all the injustice I and others face in James Madison Memorial High School, do you truly think it’s appropriate to glorify a man that enslaved my ancestors?” Berry wrote.

James Madison was one of 12 presidents who owned slaves.

There is a growing movement to remove the names and statues of slaveholders from public places. The City of New Orleans removed statues of Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and General P.G.T. Beauregard from public squares in May.

The city of Madison, Wis., also is named for the fourth president.

Do you think Madison’s name should be removed from the high school? Share your thoughts in the section below:

Why The Bill Of Rights Is Failing

225 years ago today, the first ten amendments were added to the new Constitution of 1787. Those amendments have come to be known as the Bill of Rights, and taken as a whole, these amendments represent what can only be described as one of the few parts of the Constitution worth applauding today. 

While most of the Constitution is concerned with centralizing government power, raising tax revenue, protecting the institution of chattel slavery, and hammering the independent states into a consolidated political union, the Bill of Rights, on the other hand, was concerned with limiting government power: 

Bizarrely revered by many as a "pro-freedom" document, the document now generally called "the Constitution" was originally devoted almost entirely toward creating a new, bigger, more coercive, more expensive version of the United States. The United States, of course, had already existed since 1777 under a functioning constitution that had allowed the United States to enter into numerous international alliances and win a war against the most powerful empire on earth.

That wasn"t good enough for the oligarchs of the day, the crony capitalists with names like Washington, Madison, and, Hamilton. Hamilton and friends had long plotted for a more powerful United States government to allow the mega-rich of the time, like George Washington and James Madison, to more easily develop their lands and investments with the help of government infrastructure. Hamilton wanted to create a clone of the British empire to allow him to indulge his grandiose dreams of financial imperialism. 

Fortunately, there were some who stood in the way of the people we now refer to as "the Founding Fathers." They were the anti-federalists — the good guys who stood against Washington and his friends — and who demanded a Bill of Rights before they would even consider ratifying the new Constitution. 

In the end, however, the Bill of Rights was far weaker than it should have been. It was, essentially, just a bone the Federalists threw to the opposition in order to get the new Constitution ratified. The anti-Federalists, after all, couldn"t even conceive of a federal government as enormous, bloated, and powerful as the US government is today. Living in a world where the individual state governments were both highly democratic and powerful in relation to the central government, the anti-Federalists figured they had enough tools at their disposal to prevent the sort of centralization that has taken place over the past two hundred years. The optimistic anti-Federalists were, unfortunately, wrong. 

But, there was much more than could have been done had the anti-Federalists insisted. William Watkins offers some insights today into what could have been: 

The state conventions that ratified the Constitution suggested over 200 amendments to the Constitution to cure structural problems. For example, Virginia offered a lengthy amendment on the judicial power. The proposal, in the main, would have limited the federal judiciary to the Supreme Court and various admiralty courts established by Congress. State courts would serve as the trial courts of the Union with the possibility of appeal to the Supreme Court. Virginians rightly feared that the federal judiciary would become an engine of consolidated government and sought to limit its power.

Massachusetts feared the new power of taxation in the federal government. Massachusetts, through the pen of John Hancock, offered a proposal that would have prohibited Congress from levying direct taxes ... As a check on the national government, Massachusetts wanted the states to retain some control on Congress’s demands for revenue.

Massachusetts also proposed an amendment dealing with concerns about inadequate representation. Massachusetts asked that the Constitution be amended to guarantee “one representative to every thirty thousand persons . . . A ratio in excess of one representative for every 30,000 people would not, in Massachusetts’s opinion, be a true and viable representation. How disappointed would Hancock and Company be to see that today we average 1 representative for about every 750,000 person. Do we have truly representative government? Not in the eyes of the patriots from Massachusetts who understood that true representation can only take place on a human scale.

Rather than sitting back today and mindlessly celebrating the “high temple” of our constitutional order, Americans should dust off copies of the substantive amendments proposed by the state ratifying conventions but ignored by Madison and the Federalist majority in the first Congress. (Massachusetts’ Amendments, Virginia’s Amendments, New York’s Amendments, North Carolina’s Amendments). 

The Bill of Rights Means Nothing Without the Liberal Ideology The Produced It 

Better, more limiting, and more numerous amendments may indeed have been helpful. 

But, no law written on parchment can control the size and scope of government if the population is willing to accept more state control over their lives. 

The fact remains that the American public generally tolerates countless violations of the Tenth Amendment, the Ninth Amendment, the Sixth Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, and the Second Amendment. The federal government routinely seizes private property without due process, fails to provide for speedy trials, passes federal gun control laws, and invents powers for itself that are reserved to the states and the citizens alone. Even the First Amendment is now being targeted by the feds who are the throes of limiting freedom of speech and freedom of the press by labeling objectionable ideas as "fake news" and thus not so-called protected speech. 

These attacks will be tolerated if the public is willing to go on doing so. After all, the Bill of Rights itself never actually limited government power. Government power — to the extent it has actually been limited — was limited because citizens valued the ideas reflected in the Bill of Rights. 

Once the public abandons the ideology behind the Bill of Rights, then the Bill of Rights will cease to mean anything, even if it still ostensibly remains in force. 

Not surprisingly, as the public ideological views have changed, the Constitution has failed to limit the power of the central government. Murray Rothbard observed this long ago when he wrote: 

From any libertarian, or even conservative, point of view, it has failed and failed abysmally; for let us never forget that every one of the despotic incursions on man’s rights in this century, before, during and after the New Deal, have received the official stamp of Constitutional blessing. 

Rothbard was echoing Lysander Spooner who wrote:

But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

From a legal standpoint, this state of affairs was easy to bring about because in practice the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, means whatever the Supreme Court says it means. But, even the Court is limited by the public"s ideological views and the public"s willingness to tolerate the Court"s rulings. If the public is willing to accept the seizure of private property in the name of the War on Drugs or the War on Terrorism, then we should not be surprised when government agencies do so. If the public is willing to grant the federal government powers that are clearly not found in the Constitution itself, the fact that the Bill of Rights legally prohibits such things will be of little consequence. 

As written, the Bill of Rights is a beneficial summary of many of the limitations that should be placed on government power. Without a public rooted in an ideology that supports and demands respect for the Bill of Rights, however, the words will ultimately mean nothing at all.