Is America A Democracy?

There is a famous story, that when Benjamin Franklin was walking out of the Constitutional Convention after it had ended, a woman called out to him “What did you give us, a republic, or a democracy?”

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

In America we began as a republic. But what is a democracy? Is it not another word for republic? Well, it seems that the founding fathers did not agree on that score.

“The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest… Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.”¹

That is to say, in a democracy, the people rule, while in a republic, the representatives rule with the consent of the people. If they rule poorly, then out they go, and again join the voting class.

The difference between a Democratic-Constitutional-Republic and a pure Democracy is that the law is above the people in the one, and the people are the law in the other. There is little protection for the minority is such a situation. If 51 percent want something, 49 percent can do nothing about it. Thus we have a tyranny of the mob, which is a dreadful prospect. Tyranny of the majority will lead in the end to tyranny of the one, because from the civil war will come a savior of the people.

Pure democracy is not a good idea. It is a bad one. In such a case, what 51 out of every hundred men and women want is law. If the will of the people is one day to kill all six year olds than under pure democracy we must do that. Any higher law than the people is under pure democracy a terrible and unjust thing, for it stifles personal liberty. I might mention as a case of democracy Paris, at the time of the French Revolution. If pure democracy is 51 percent, than why not a 51 percent police force? It “cuts out the middle man” as it were, and makes more certain that the will of the people will be obeyed. We are not yet a democracy, thank God; we are a republic, can we keep it? That is for you to decide.

Through His Strength We Will Conquer,

Andrew C. Abbott

Notes:

1: Madison, 1787.

Political Parties: Do We Need Them?

Future president James Madison, after stating that political parties are “sinister” and dangerous says in Federalist Paper 10:

“The latent causes of faction (synonymous with political party) are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good…The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.” (James Madison. Federalist Paper 10. Parentheses Added.)

Almost no one today holds to the above view, which reflected that of many of the founding fathers, that political parties were a bad and destructive thing. However, this view did not long remain true even with them, and even those that argued against them eventually joined them, Hamilton, another author of The Federalist Papers, and himself speaking of the their dangers, became the head of his own party, the Federalists.

In modern America we are stratified, on the main, into two political parties. Democrats, who are known as “the left” and the Republicans, who are slightly to their “right.” There are other parties, the Green, the Constitutional, the Libertarian, but these have, taken in all, no substantial power. The two “great parties” have much of the funding, advertisement, and power. Many watch it for entertainment, much as they would a prize fight.

Many say “I am a republican,” or “I am a democrat” but few have ever really even read their own party’s platform, they vote either as their parents voted, or they vote for their favorite candidate who says he will do the best in the current political atmosphere, and after he is gone they continue on with his party. So they vote for the one who has the D or the R beside his name. Many vote based on one or two speeches-Or they do not vote at all.

When we look out upon the political ocean of troubled seas, we find we are on the opposite side of a vast ocean from righteousness and justness. Each party attempts to persuade us to climb aboard their ship, they give us a speech on the greatness of their ship, on its comforts, its benefits. “Ask not what your country can do for you” should end “rather ask your party”. We all saw that the navigation charts of the Democrats were off by a ratio of about 3,000,000 to 1, so we climbed aboard the other ship, and laughed and shouted and had a grand time. But then more and more people began to join the Democrats, the Republicans realized that to hold to power they needed to alter their course. Now we find the ship we have climbed onto is not taking us to the destination it has promised us, but in the direction it once said was folly. Is it still folly? Or is it only folly when it is not popular? Is power so important? I hold it that truth is more so.

You may cry out “Are you not a Republican?” I would reply I stand for principle, not party. A ship is nothing but a vehicle of transport, a catalyst to carry us to the proper place, but if it does not do that, or if they are racing for the rocks, then I will disembark from their ship, and let it perish before America does.

For now there is some hope, in the party that calls itself “the right” there is still some right. How long it will be there I do not know. I will not abandon a ship at the first sign of trouble, but when they continue towards the iceberg it may be time-no, it is time to disengage.

These were not the first parties, and they too may fall as others before them, such as the Federalists, have done. A monolith is only as large as the people allow it to be. Wal Mart could never be a gigantic store if no one shopped there. So do not say the parties are too big to fail. We have toppled many, the Tyranny of England, the Threat of Germany, the Communism of Russia, why may not this also pass?

But by abandoning the party, may we not lose power? I ask, what is power, if you cannot use it for right? If you must compromise to rule, why rule at all? Let those that truly believe what they say lead, they will do it more sincerely, and with less hurt to their conscience. To sit at the top of the mountain, and yet to sit there without being in the right is a hollow power. I say with the great speech maker and Congressman Henry Clay “I would rather be right than be president.”

If the ship is being driven in the wrong direction, than we may either mutiny and take back our party, or we may need to build our own. That is for the people to decide. George Washington once said “Let us raise a standard to which all those wide and honest can repair, the event is in the Hand of God.”

Through His Strength We Will Conquer,

Andrew C. Abbott

Gideon v. Wainwright : 50 years

Proverbs 31:9 Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.

Between midnight and 8:00 a.m. on June 3, 1961, at the Bay Harbor Pool Room in Panama City, Florida, someone broke open a door, smashed the cigarette machine and a record player, and stole some money from a register. Later that day, a witness reported that he had seen Clarence Earl Gideon in the pool room at around 5:30 that morning leaving with a wine bottle and money in his pockets. Based on this accusation police arrested the suspect and charged him with breaking and entering with intent to commit petty larceny.

In the court case that followed. the following exchange tool place.

The COURT: Mr. Gideon, I am sorry, but I cannot appoint Counsel to represent you in this case. Under the laws of the State of Florida, the only time the Court can appoint Counsel to represent a Defendant is when that person is charged with a capital offense. I am sorry, but I will have to deny your request to appoint Counsel to defend you in this case.

GIDEON: The United States Supreme Court says I am entitled to be represented by Counsel.(1)

He was still denied, his complaint was not heard, he was convicted of the crime and sentenced to five years imprisonment.(2)

Using the prison library Gideon wrote a handwritten appeal. His argument that the sixth amendment, which gives the right to council, applied to state cases, not just Federal, this was in contrast to an earlier Supreme Court Decision (Betts v. Brady) that this was not a necessary right, and therefore did not belong to those in merely state trials.(3)

Thus, the court had in the past concluded that the right to council was not a fundamental right, although in special cases council could be appointed if the judge deemed it necessary, such as with a young defendant.(4)

On January 15, 1963, Gideon had his case heard by the Supreme Court in Oral Arguments. Gideon won his case. The court, after listening to the case, ruled on March 18, in part:

"The right to be heard would be, in many cases, of little avail if it did not comprehend the right to be heard by counsel. Even the intelligent and educated layman has small and sometimes no skill in the science of law. If charged with crime, he is incapable, generally, of determining for himself whether the indictment is good or bad. He is unfamiliar with the rules of evidence. Left without the aid of counsel, he may be put on trial without a proper charge, and convicted upon incompetent evidence, or evidence irrelevant to the issue or otherwise inadmissible. He lacks both the skill and knowledge adequately to prepare his defense, even though he have a perfect one. He requires the guiding hand of counsel at every step in the proceedings against him. Without it, though he be not guilty, he faces the danger of conviction because he does not know how to establish his innocence." (5)

“The Sixth Amendment stands as a constant admonition that, if the constitutional safeguards it provides be lost, justice will not 'still be done.'"(6)
Afterwards, Gideon's original case was retried with benefit of council, which he also won.

Notes:

1: 372 U.S 337

2: ibid.

3: ibid. pp. 342

4: ibid. pp. 344

5: 287 U.S. at 287 U. S. 68-69. (quoted: 372 U. S. 345)

6: Johnson v. Zerbst, 304 U. S. 458, 304 U. S. 462 (1938)

"Evidence" for Evolution

If one reads modern books, peer reviewed articles, or watches documentaries on science, it will quickly be seen almost everything is given a date. The “age of the dinosaurs” was 65 million years ago, there was the tertiary age, the Cambrian, and the carboniferous. These names and dates are taken from the types of rocks, layers, and fossils found in them. Although not all of the ages date back millions of years.

Think of it this way. In the rocks there are different minerals, that, slowly, over time, turn into other minerals; such as rubidium to strontium, potassium to argon, and samarium to neodymium. Each of these parent isotopes, (rubidium, potassium etc.) has a half-life of a certain amount of time, varying from many years to hours or even minutes,while slowly part of it turns into the daughter isotope. If you think of it as an hour glass, with the parent isotopes in the top and the daughter isotopes at the bottom, and see sand in the top slowly going down to the bottom, you would propose that, to find how long the glass has been turned you would count the amount at the bottom, and measure how fast the sand is currently falling, and then come up with you time frame. The time frames they come up with are almost always on the scale of millions to billions of years.

If this method is used for radioactive decay rates in rocks, (and it is) then it should be accurate, or so some would say. However, that is not the case. Of course we must begin with assumptions. That the rate is constant throughout history and that the rock began with no daughter isotopes, etc. This is difficult and usually impossible to prove. We cannot be certain there was no contamination, and this method only works with slow and gradual processes, which are sometimes ruined by large catastrophes, such as a worldwide flood. Since we cannot look at the past, we cannot say that the radioactive rate of decay has always been constant.

On May 18, 1980, in Washington State, at Mt. St. Helens, after the mountain’s eruption, a new lava dome began to form from October 26 onward within the volcanoes crater. In 1986, a K-Ar date yielded about 350,000 years for the whole rock, and the constituent minerals yielded dates up to 2.8 million years.(1)

In other words, rocks only about 6 years old dated at about 2.8 million-reliable? This is not an isolated incident. It is, again, impossible to tell the past history of the rock, and the many assumptions made in dating always give largely inflated numbers. In fact, diamonds have yielded dates older than the earth is supposed to be old, even from an evolutionary standpoint.(2)

The RATE project, done by ICR, found that radioactive crystals called zicrons have small amount of U238 in them, which is slowly changing into lead, however, as they do, they emit small amounts of helium. However, in the crystals examined, there is still a great deal of helium, too much for the earth to be not 4 billion years old or older.(3)

The following quote comes from an evolutionist, professor Brew. If a… date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a foot-note. And if it is completely ‘out of date’ we just drop it. (4)

 Not necessarily fair and reasonable science with an objective attitude. However, protected theories are difficult to dissuade people from, because that would be allowing a Divine Foot in the door.
 

Through His Strength We Will Conquer,

Andrew C. Abbott

Notes:

1: Snelling, 2009.
2: ibid.
3: Humphreys. 2003.
4: quoted by Snelling, 2009.