The government spies on all of us all of the time and recognizes no limits to its spying. Its appetite for acquiring personal knowledge about all Americans is insatiable. The government uses the microchips in our cellphones to follow us and listen to us as we move about.
The Constitution expressly prohibits the government from doing this, but the government has written laws that are interpreted in secret by judges who meet in secret and are applied by federal agents who operate in secret and their secret behavior doesn’t even resemble what the laws say they can do.
The feds have seized the content of every text message, email, mobile and land-line telephone call, utility bill, credit card bill and bank statement of everyone in America for the past four years and no law has authorized them to capture this. When asked by members of Congress, in public and under oath, high-ranking officials, at least one with ribbons on his chest and stars on his shoulders, lied about what the government is doing.
The government’s spies have so insinuated themselves into our computers that they can capture every keystroke we press on all of our computers before we hit “send”. The feds have hacked into the servers of every major computer service provider in the country and they know what we have typed before we even make corrections. The feds have a copy of what we have deleted. Our typed innermost thoughts and even second thoughts that were never sent in emails nevertheless reside in the government’s databank.
The contents of this blog now reside in the government’s databank somewhere.
The president knows all this and supports what his spies are doing. He secretly authorized all this, but only admitted to some of it when he got caught. He uses his spies to tell him what he wants to know about those who oppose him.
The president sold Congress and the country a Trojan horse called Obamacare. He promised that under Obamacare you could keep the health insurance you had before Obamacare, and he lied and he knew it. He promised that under Obamacare you could keep the same physicians who treated you before Obamacare, and he lied and he knew it.
Obamacare made insurance coverage so expensive that some people lost their jobs because their employers could not afford to pay for it. Under Obamacare more than 6 million Americans lost their insurance coverage overnight and most haven’t gotten it back yet. This was the president’s plan all along so that he could orchestrate a government takeover of the health insurance industry.
The secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the president one night that our mission in Benghazi, Libya, was under attack by organized al-Qaida troops while the attack was taking place. The president did nothing about it. The president knew the truth about the Benghazi attack, but for three weeks claimed that the attack was just an out-of-control political demonstration by fanatics who were upset about a cheap 15-minute low-grade Hollywood movie that never made it into theaters.
Our ambassador to Libya died in that attack and the president covered up the facts surrounding his death. The president dispatched our U.N. ambassador to all major TV networks to hide the truth. He tried to promote the lying U.N. ambassador to secretary of state.
In five years, the president has borrowed more than $6 trillion and spent it all on his favorite industries and risky bailouts and fruitless wars, and now has nothing to show for it but the debts that will one day come due. The government claims the unemployment rate is 6.7 percent but so many people have stopped looking for jobs that it is really 10.2 percent.
The president alone has increased the number of people on food stamps and increased the amount of money they each receive. Half of the adults in the nation are now receiving material assistance from the government in the form of money the government has borrowed. Generations of Americans as yet unborn will be obliged to pay back the money the president has borrowed and given away.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans simply don’t trust the president’s judgment. The president alone raised the minimum wage to be paid to workers on federal projects. The president has threatened to use his pen and his phone to operate the government in ways the Constitution forbids. The Constitution makes clear and the courts have underscored the truism that the president cannot modify or amend or postpone the effective dates of federal laws. But the president has modified and amended and postponed federal laws so as to help his friends and wound his foes.
The president has tried to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for contraceptive services that they cannot use and that are prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church. The Sisters sued the president and asked the court to relieve them of the burden of paying for contraception, but the president resisted the Sisters’ lawsuit and questioned the sincerity of their religious beliefs. The Supreme Court stopped the president from forcing the nuns to pay for contraception before it even heard their case.
The president knew all of this but discussed none of this in his State of the Union address. The president believes that during his second term in office he answers to no one. The president lives and works surrounded by those who reinforce his beliefs. He has rejected his oath of fidelity to the Constitution. What will he do next? What will we do about it?
An edited down version of an essay by Judge Andrew Napolitano
Virginia Patriot 1776 