The Enterprise opinion pages are an open forum for our community. We encourage readers to express their thoughts about issues that appear in this newspaper or affect the community. Letters should be brief (with an outside limit of 1,000 words) and must include the writer's address, name, and phone number for verification. The editor may reject letters that have been printed elsewhere. Letters concerning elections will be cut off one issue before the election at the editor's discretion. No unsigned letters will be published. The deadline for letters is Tuesday at noon.
To the Editor:
Last week’s letter by Sara Niccoli (“Challenging ballots is a subversion of democracy”) warrants a response on a key issue.
One would have expected a political operative to know better than to call our form of government a “democracy.” America never has been, and by the grace of God never will be, a democracy. This incorrect characterization has been around so long that Americans now use the term as if there’s no question of its validity. They are egregiously wrong.
We are a constitutional republic, pure and simple. The Pledge of Allegiance does not say, “…and to the Democracy for which it stands,” and Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution proclaims, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government...”
The word “democracy” is to be found nowhere in either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.
The distinction is not a matter of semantics; it is absolutely critical to an understanding of how our government operates and how it protects our Creator-endowed rights under Natural Law.
Ms. Niccoli says, “When we silence a voice, we undermine our democracy and its great potential.”
Consider this: If we were a true democracy, Samuel Tilden and Al Gore would have been elected president, since they took the popular vote but failed in the Electoral College. Voices were indeed silenced.
The Founders considered and summarily rejected establishing a democracy to prevent a “tyranny of the majority.” In a democracy, a simple majority can deny to the minority anything it wishes. No protections against encroachment on individual sovereignty would exist in a system where such impositions are legal.
“Such concerns pressing on Madison, Jefferson, and others led, among other issues, to the separation of powers built into the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights that protects individuals from religious sects or political factions,” wrote Paul Von Ward, author of Dismantling the Pyramid: Government by the People and Gods, Genes, & Consciousness (http://rense.com/general64/madi.htm).
Understand that, in the absence of federalist “anti-democracy” safeguards, we could have had, for example, a state religion and we could have been taxed to support it. Thank the Founders for our republican form of government and for the protections it has afforded us against the tyrannical tendencies of democracy.
The latest partisan political attempt to “democratize” the Senate would overturn the two-century old cloture rule that requires a 60-percent vote to stifle a filibuster. Such a move would disestablish the “super majority” rule and replace it with a simple majority as a means of exercising tyrannical control of the Senate.
The above is purely an attempt to grab power, and it has been tried by both Republicans and Democrats, depending on which holds the majority in the Senate. Both parties have been remiss in their understanding of the Constitution, and have been all too willing to dispense with federalism to gain their selfish ends.
Please think twice before you incorrectly use the term “democracy” to describe our government.
Lastly, in acknowledgement of the particularly “anti-democracy” provisions of the First Amendment, allow me to subvert the tyrannical doctrine of political correctness and wish everyone a merry Christmas. May God bless us all.
Frederick R. Crounse
Conservative
Constitutionalist
Altamont