Create your own human rights bill. Try it. Sit down. Grab something to write with and jot down what human rights you would expect from the people you interact with every day. What rights would you want to guarantee for yourself? Free speech? Free practice of religion? How about the freedom for like-minded individuals to assemble? Many of the basic rights of individuals are easy. In fact, most of the bill or rights is a no-brainer. This is ironic because the people who are supposedly protected under the ten articles of the constitution known as the bill of rights can’t even name the five freedoms guaranteed by the first amendment. Less than 1% of American citizens, in fact, can’t name all five of these basic human rights1. When this few people can even name the rights that they are guaranteed, it is very easy to take those rights away from them.
The First Amendment is, ironically, the first article of human rights to be purged in the name of sustaining control. Notice that I did not stipulate that the first article of the Bill of Rights to be purged is not the First Amendment. In order for concentrated power to exist, other Amendments contained in the Bill of Rights must be systematically smothered.
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments, namely the provisions that give the citizens the power of legislation outside of the powers of the federal government, will be moot in the presence of a concentrated centralized government. If the federal government grants itself powers and legislates restrictions on the citizens of the country, in such a heavy way, the ability of the people to choose, disappears. It does not take any warming up or stretching to concede this point. The correlation between a super-concentrated power’s control and the rights of individual citizens is most certainly inverse. This is the case on both the right as well as the left. The corruption of power does not discriminate. In fact, the one trait that is decidedly consistent with both the right and the left is their hunger for control.
The concealment of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments is the canary in the coal mine which tells us that our ability to breathe is about to become severely strained. At this point, the federal government and the few people in charge of it can do just about anything to limit the basic rights of the citizens.
Like stated earlier, there is a priority of the governors to insure the success of their plans and agendas. In order to acquire such insurance, the willingness and ability of the citizens to dissent must be minimized. I encourage you now, before it’s too late, to review that list of human rights you thought of. Pay careful attention as they are picked off one by one, flagrantly and systematically throughout history.
The first thing to be pointed out about some civil rights is that there will always be a justifiable reason to abridge these rights, as reported by the governing body. The most simple argument is one that says: if you’re not doing anything wrong, you won’t have anything to worry about. If you’re not a drug dealer, you should worry about your Fourth Amendment rights. If you’re not a terrorist, an infringement on your Fifth, Sixth and Eight Amendment rights should not be met with hostility. And finally, if you aren’t speaking out in dissent of the government, you don’t need to worry about the First Amendment. We should worry, though.
September 11, 2001 gave the controlling powers of the United States unchecked power. In the aftermath of tragedy, the governing elite scavenged on American fear. The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001, is an excellent example of systematic obstruction of the basic and unambiguous rights of humans. The Patriot Act was passed in an overwhelmingly bipartisan effort. The bill was easily forced through congress with a senate vote of 98 - 1. The Patriot Act received a scandalous welcome from both parties, considering the bill was introduced and passed both houses in less than 48 hours. This affirms the need, from both parties, to retain any control they acquire. In fact, the larger of the two houses, the House of Representatives, suspended the rules and passed the bill after only being proposed 14 hours earlier. The 132 page document was passed 357 - 66 at 11:03 am after being proposed at 7:15 pm the previous evening2.
In it’s haste, congress undoubtedly overlooked the serious implications of this brazenly restrictive piece of legislation. Now you can eliminate any hope of having the freedom of speech without persecution or prosecution. Provisions of the still standing legislation include the coupling of the abridgment of habeas corpus and the restriction of free speech; a recipe for oppression. Section 201 and 202 of the bill explicitly give federal agencies the ability to perform “roving wire taps” and perform surveillance of electronic communications. Section 412 gives the Attorney General, through the vague and unconstitutional definition of terrorism as outlined in the bill, to detain indefinitely any person suspected of terrorism. Evidence need not be disclosed in such cases. Reading: no court shall have jurisdiction to review, by habeas corpus petition or otherwise, any such action or decision; habeas corpus is voided3.
In such cases, does a person really need to be a terrorist for the government to detain them? Without any scrutiny or accountability, what is to stop the government (made up of a concentrated few) from absolutism?
In reality, a majority of the bill of rights was gutted by the swift legislation following the September 11th attacks. Remember those five parts of the First Amendment that nearly no one could recall? With the exception of the religious provisions, all of them were vacated. In the vague description of terrorism that was defined in the Patriot Act, speech, press and assembly were no longer free activities. The right to petition was gutted by the indefinite detention of terrorists. The Fourth Amendment was destroyed by “sneak and peek” provisions and “roving wire taps.” As already discussed, the suspension of habeas corpus and any hope for due process nullified the Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments. Why would government “representatives” be so quick to pass a bill that is so clearly in opposition with the bill of rights?
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