by F.R. Duplantier
The former managing editor of the New York Globe, John T. Flynn was a frequent contributor to America's most prestigious magazines, the bestselling author of several books, and the originator of our Behind The Headlines commentaries.
"A socialist society cannot be organized and conducted by the federal government under our Constitution," wrote John T. Flynn in his book called The Decline of the American Republic, And How to Rebuild It, republished in condensed form in 1957 in America's Future's All-American Book Digest. "There is not one sentence in the Constitution," said Flynn, "that would authorize the federal government to socialize our medical facilities, to regulate or finance our schools, to engage in industrial or mercantile enterprise, or to carry on any of that multitude of activities which have, as a matter of record, brought the federal government into almost every kind of business in one degree or another. The great limitations on the federal government were specifically set down in the Constitution."
Flynn pointed out that the Constitution was designed "to bring into existence a government that possessed all the powers necessary to defend the nation from foreign enemies and to guarantee to all the citizens certain great fundamental rights of freemen, and to leave to the states -- the several small republics -- the powers essential to the government of a free people." The Constitution thus stood as an insurmountable barrier to power-hungry socialists -- until Franklin Delano Roosevelt acceded to the presidency. "Despite all the endless care exercised by the framers of the Constitution, and the judgments of the Courts for 148 years," Flynn lamented, "the revolutionary elements in the United States found a way in which to complete their perversion and subversion of the Constitution without submitting these radical changes to the states [which were] the only authority empowered to make changes in the Constitution."
Flynn explained how this was accomplished: "The Supreme Court is empowered, under the Constitution, to 'interpret' the meaning of the Constitution where questions of judicial differences appear," he observed. "It had, according to its time-honored practice, interpreted the Constitution to mean what its framers wanted it to mean. There was, therefore, but one course open to the revolutionary cabal in Washington. It was a plan to change the Constitution, literally to wreck the whole fundamental structure of the American government . . . by judicial interpretation."
And so, the safeguards were discarded, and America got its taste of socialism. "The vast and compulsive apparatus of government had been dismembered by our forefathers and its various parts entrusted to a variety of agencies," observed John T. Flynn, to ensure that our federal government would never have "sufficient power to oppress the citizen." But the power that our Founding Fathers so wisely divided was recombined "by the decisions of a group of judges who were put on the bench in a revolutionary maneuver to give to words in the Constitution wholly new meanings."
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