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Introducing The Constitution Restoration Act
-- Say Hello To Taliban America And Goodbye To Godless Judges, Courts And Law.
March 24, 2005
Tired of waiting for the Second Coming to enforce Christ's rule on Earth? Fortunately, so is your Congress and they know
how to "bring it on.".
Just when you thought the corporatist/Christian Coalition had milked the 9/11 "surprise" for all it was worth in
powers, profits and votes, we regret to report that you may have to think again. Just in case you've briefly fallen
behind on your rightwing mailing lists, you might have missed the March 3rd filing of Senate bill S. 520 and House
version is H.R. 1070, AKA the "Constitution Restoration Act" (CRA).
In the worshipful words of the Conservative Caucus, this historic legislation will "RESTORE OUR CONSTITUTION!", mainly by barring ANY federal court or judge from ever
again reviewing "any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local
government, or against an officer or agent of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official or
personal capacity), concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government." [Emphasis demanded - see full text here.]
In other words, the bill ensures that God's divine word (and our infallible leaders' interpretation thereof) will
hereafter trump all our pathetic democratic notions about freedom, law and rights -- and our courts can't say a thing.
This, of course, will take "In God We Trust" to an entirely new level, because soon He (and His personally anointed
political elite) will be all the lega l recourse we have left.
This is not a joke, a test, or a fit of libertarian paranoia. The CRA already has 28 sponsors in the House and Senate,
and a March 20 call to lead sponsor Sen. Richard Shelby's office assures us that "we have the votes for passage." This
is a highly credible projection as Bill Moyers observes in his 3/24/05 "Welcome to D oomsday" piece in the New York Review of Books: "The corporate, political, and religious right's hammerlock... extends to the US Congress. Nearly half of its members
before the election-231 legislators in all (more since the election)-are backed by the religious right... Forty-five
senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the m ost influential
Christian Right advocacy groups."
This stunning bill and the movement behind it deserve immediate crash study on at least 3 different fronts. Its hostile divorce of American jurisprudence from our hard-won secular history and international norms.
To again quote the Conservative Caucus: "This important bill will restrict the jurisdiction of the U.S. Supreme Court
and all lower federal courts to that permitted by the U.S. Constitution, including on the subject of the acknowledgement
of God (as in the Roy Moore 10 Commandments issue); and it also restricts federal courts from recognizing the laws of
foreign countries and interna tional law [e.g., against torture, global warming, unjust wars, etc. - ed.] as the supreme
law of our land."
Re the last point, envision some doddering judges who still revere our Declaration of Independence's "decent respect to
the opinions of mankind," and suppose they invoke in their rulings some international precepts from the UN's Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, the Covenant on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women or, God
forbid, the Geneva Conventions. W ell, under the CRA that would all be clearly illegal and, thank God, that's the last
we'd ever hear from them.
The political implications of replacing "we the people" with a Christian deity as the "sovereign source" of all our
laws.
Imagine hyper-zealous officers or "entities" of the Federal, State, or local government (like a governor, legislature
or school board) that mandate Christian prayers, rituals and/or statuary in public buildings under their control. Were
this to happen, some local Jews, Muslims and/or Buddhists might be moved to hire a lawyer and legally object. But if the
CRA passes, their objection would be beyond any court's jurisdiction and that's the last we'd ever hear of that. It in
fact demands "impeachment, conviction, and removal of judges" who dare to even hear a case that challenges its "Last
Days" morphing of Christian church and state. (Just how our new Sovereign Source of Government's advocacy of public
executions for adultery, gay-ness, contraception and blasphemy will fit into our current corrections system still
remains to be seen.)
The incessant mainstream media blackout on the bill's existence and import.
The potential impact of the Constitution Restoration Act on American life, law and politics is so radical and vast that
you would expect a boiling national debate. Yet just as with the crimes and questions of 9/11, everyone in the media
seems terrifically busy looking the other way. If you want yet another dramatic metric of US journalistic dysfunction,
try Googling "Constitution Restoration Act" in their News category and see what you get. Today, three weeks after the bill was filed, I find a grand total of three throwaway mentions in
Alabama's Shelby County Reporter, the Decatur Daily, and the Massachusetts Daily Collegian. ("Terry Schiavo" in contrast
will net you over a thousand news hits, and "Michael Jackson" just passed 36,000 with a bullet.)
If the Alabama paper interest seems a little odd or sponsor Shelby's name a bit familiar, you should recall that this
old boy AL senator was high among those same wonderful folks who kicked off the 9/11 cover-up. As his Senate bio proudly relates:
"From 1995 to 2003, Senator Shelby served on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In this capacity, he and the
other committee members provided oversight of the intelligence community, and following the September 11, 2001 terrorist
attacks, Senator Shelby served diligently to investigate the intelligence failures that led to those attacks." [Emphasis demanded again.]
Got that? First he "oversees" intelligence for six years before 9/11, then "diligently investigates" its bizarre
"failures" for two years more, and finally finds--in a no-fault judgment--it was all due to "deep institutional defects"
and "systemic miscommunication" that he'd apparently never noticed or heard about before. Having so brilliantly defended
the country before 9/11 and the official story since, some seem to find it comforting that he's now busy defending our
court-harassed Constitution with a legally bulletproofed God. Some, alas, do not -- feel comforted, that is, either by
Shelby's blurry oversight or fundamentalist agenda, not to mention the Orwellian performance of our autistic corporate
press.
In the meantime, however, before the CRA takes force and reduces legal education to a Bible study course, what say we
undertake a little Constitutional defense of our own? To get up to speed on the current Christian right agenda, Moyers'
"Welcome to Doomsday", Katherine Yurica's "The Despoiling of America" and John "The 9/11 Truth Candidate" Buchanan's "Fixing America" are excellent places to start.
None of these analyses offer a silver bullet or paint a pretty picture, but as students of 9/11 now know, spreading the
courage to face the truth is really the only hope we've got.
*************
W. David Kubiak is a Project Censored award-winning journalist and executive director of 911truth.org. He can be
reached at david(at)911truth.org. (He is indebted to John Buchanan for the latest heads-up on this story and the Shelby
office call.)
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