Newsletter | February 9, 2023
Counting the electoral vote after the contested 1876 Tilden Hayes presidential election February 1877.
The electoral college has become one of the most controversial features of our political system. Because it is a mechanism for sharing power between large, typically liberal urban areas and sparsely populated parts of America that tend to be more conservative, coastal elites want to eliminate the electoral college in order to dominate our country.
That ambition, driven by the insatiable hunger for power, was anticipated by our Founding Fathers. As we’ve seen the last few weeks in our newsletters’ exploration and discussion of The Federalist Papers, its authors — Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay – were very sensitive to the dangers of exchanging the tyranny of a British king for the tyranny of powerful and wealthy factions.
Instead of direct, or absolute democracy, in which majority factions would hold unmatched power, the authors of the Federalist Papers opted for representative democracy, where the people would elect representatives to vote on laws. This legislative body was one of three separate and independent branches of government in a system of checks and balances. The question Hamilton wrestled with in Federalist No. 68 was how to select the head of the executive branch, the president.
One plan proposed was that the chief executive would be chosen by congress. Another argued that state governors should elect the president. Madison believed that the people should choose the commander-in-chief directly, but he also recognized that since the southern states were less populous, they’d have little say in choosing the president.
The differing opinions resulted in a compromise: the electoral college. Voters would choose the electors who would vote for the president.
As Hamilton explains in Federalist No 68:
The electoral college is yet more evidence of the genius of our founding fathers, who designed a political system that used different mechanisms to mediate power. Thus, it comes as no surprise our increasingly oligarchic political and corporate elites have targeted the electoral college — to acquire yet more power.
We at America’s Future encourage you to stand with us in the ongoing fight to preserve our God-given liberty and stand against tyranny. You were chosen to wage this battle, the fight of our generation, and one that will be told for generations hence. Spread the word, and get others to join the battle — we are blessed to be living in this meaningful time!
Please participate in our Reader’s Survey on the topic raised in the article above.
Your insight and thoughts are important to us to learn what is on the minds and in the hearts of our fellow Americans. We read them all and share some of them every Monday at 9 a.m. during America’s Future live broadcasts with our Executive Director Mary O’Neill on America’s Mondays With Mary. Thank You!
Protect Our Children – The Promise of America
Every child has the right to be loved, nurtured, protected, and to always feel safe. Yet, since the start of this year, from January 3 through February 7 – 36 days – over 120 criminal cases, in various stages of our justice system, of child exploitation, trafficking, and abuse have been reported in states across the country. From Maine to Idaho to California and everywhere in between, the suffering of children as young as four months old has taken place in the United States. These depraved violent crimes against the most precious and vulnerable in our society by predator monsters cannot be understated…and the monsters must be exposed.
Children are central to the strength of families and the future of America. Our children hold the dream and promise for this nation, for they will be charged with passing the torch of freedom from their generation to the next.
America’s Future mission is guided by certain principles, one of which is to build, promote, and preserve strong American families as vital to the success of our communities, society, and the Republic. Our Project Defend & Protect Our Children (PDPC) is one initiative focused on exposing and eradicating child exploitation, abuse, and trafficking through education. For America to thrive and survive as a free nation, American families must be its strength and backbone.
Hundreds of citizens in states across the country have joined America’s Future in this war against children. Please consider getting involved with our Project by visiting PDPC.AmericasFuture.net to learn more, read and download our flyer on what you can do in your local community today, and sign up to be a part of this grassroots community effort and stay informed.
Sixteenth Amendment – Enabling Big Gov to Squander Your Hard-Earned Money
Welcome back to our series surveying the 27 constitutional amendments ratified over the course of our history as a sovereign nation, a Constitutional Republic. Each amendment revises our Constitution, alters the course of history, and, in one way or another, advances America closer on her path to Exceptionalism. In the last five editions of our newsletter, we covered the Eleventh Amendment through the Fifteenth Amendment, which brings us to the Sixteenth Amendment this week. Readers can find our examination of the first ten Amendments of the Constitution – the Bill of Rights – in the online version of our book, Exploring America’s Founding Documents, by clicking here. If you would like to receive a free print copy, please do so by clicking here.
Constitutional authority to tax the American people arises out of Article I, Section 8, which granted Congress the power to “lay and collect Taxes. . .to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States.” Under this authority, however, there were mandates in place, including a requirement for taxes to be imposed based on state population.
By all accounts and reason, the Sixteenth Amendment is an anomaly. Its text outright broadens the federal government’s power to regulate, impose, and collect taxes on the hard-earned money of Americans and grants the feds exceeding authority far outside the scope of the Constitution. The Amendment undermines not only the text of Article I, Section 8, but is an affront to the very essence of our Constitution, bedrock doctrine of a limited national government.
The constitutional revisions of the Sixteenth Amendment include: (1) adding the ambiguous phrase, “from whatever source derived,” and (2) removing the mandate that taxes must be imposed proportional to the population of the states. The resulting text favors big government and is considered the foundation of today’s out-of-control corrupt federal government. The Amendment states,
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
Passed by Congress in July 1909 and ratified by the states in February 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment was a congressional response to a Supreme Court decision that invalidated Congress’s attempt to tax the income of citizens without regard to state’s population. The Amendment essentially overturned the SCOTUS decision by materially revising Article I of the Constitution to include the following language: “incomes, from whatever source derived…without apportionment.” This language in the Sixteenth Amendment paved the way for the current federal income tax system. Further, it catapulted governmental taxing powers of the feds to levels likely unfathomable at the time the Amendment was ratified.
The consequences of this amendment are so far-reaching that most scholars agree it forever changed the foremost traits and cardinal tendencies that distinguished our federal government from all others throughout history, from a restrained and unassuming national government to today’s authoritative, brazen, and corrupt government that has been emboldened to claim powers never conferred unto it. Unrestricted federal powers were never intended and should not have been declared or permitted, but the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment emboldened the federal government to press for more authority over citizens.
Like a dog with a bone, the federal government is willing to use any means necessary to satisfy its bottomless thirst for more power even conjuring up additional powers it never possessed, usurping the powers retained by the states and violating individual rights of liberty and freedom. The feds are relentless when it comes to their desire to swell in size and power. Illustrative of this point is the fact that the first Tax Code in America, the 1913 Revenue Act, adopted to support the Sixteenth Amendment (having just been ratified) was no more than a few hundred pages, whereas today’s Tax Code, the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) has swelled to over 70,000 pages, an astounding increase in regulations.
Shop ‘Til You Stop @ the AF Store
For this Valentine’s Day special gift for the special people in your life, head over to America’s Future newly designed online store.
You’ll find more selection of colors, sizes, and styles of tees and totes, hoodies and hats, and other accessories like coffee mugs, and even various commemorative trophy baseball bats especially created in honor of our Board Chair, General Mike Flynn.
The new store layout includes easy-to-find, high-quality adult and kids clothing with the America’s Future and FightLikeAFlynn trademarked brands, along with our Project Defend & Protect Our Children signature mark, and so much more.
So this week, next week, and every week, Shop ‘Til You Stop @ America’s Future online store and you will be supporting our mission and work to never quit the fight for freedom for all Americans. Thank you!
The Justice Department’s Prosecution of Pro-Life Activists
This is the sixth entry in our expanded IN FOCUS section addressing corruption in the U.S. Department of Justice and the self-destruction of the FBI. Readers will find the compilation of the complete series of articles at Unequal Justice Under Law.
Our nation’s charter, the Declaration of Independence, begins with the recognition that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Although no effort to set out a complete list of those rights is made in that document, three rights are specifically identified: “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The Declaration explains that it is “to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men….” Thus, the lawyers at the U.S. Department of Justice work for a government that was formed to secure the right to life, but now they have come to act as the enforcement arm of the abortion industry. Not only do these government prosecutors show no respect whatsoever for the Right to Life, they are conducting a shameful war against Life and those who seek to defend it.
At 6:45 on the morning of September 23, 2022, pro-life activist Mark Houck, a father of seven, awakened to a hammering on his door. When he opened it, he saw 10-15 marked and unmarked cars, and five federal agents with assault rifles. “They said they were going to break in if he didn’t open [the door]. And then they had about five guns pointed at my husband, myself, and basically at my kids,” recalled Houck’s wife, Ryan-Marie. “Okay, I’m gonna open the door. Stay calm. I have seven babies in here,” Houck urged the agents. “The kids were all just screaming. It was all just very scary and traumatic,” Ryan-Marie said.
Houck was arrested at gunpoint. When Houck’s wife asked for the arrest warrant, “We’re taking him with or without a warrant.” Houck was “shackled at the waist and feet once he arrived at ‘the federal building.’”
The raid occurred despite Houck’s attorney, former federal prosecutor Matt Heffron, having offered U.S. Attorney Anita Eve: “[i]f the government decides to go forward…I will accept a summons on my client’s behalf, rather put Mr. Houck and his family through needless disruption.” But the federal prosecutors wanted disruption. They wanted to put Mr. Houck and his family through the terror of an early morning raid. And even more importantly, they wanted to use the Houck raid to instill fear into the hearts of pro-life activists.
The lawyers at the Justice Department charged Houck with violating the “Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act” (FACE), which was introduced by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and then-Congressman Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and signed into law by President Clinton in 1994. In the Senate, 17 Republicans voted for this vague and dangerous bill, including current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
What terrible conduct must Houck have engaged in to deserve the type of treatment formerly reserved for drug kingpins and members of organized crime? In court, 14-year-old Mark Houck, Jr. testified of the events for which his dad was charged. Abortion clinic escort Bruce Love repeatedly harassed Mark, Jr., as he and his father peacefully protested outside a Philadelphia abortion “clinic,” telling him, “Your dad’s a bad person and your dad’s harassing women.” Court documents revealed that Love “repeatedly initiated profanity-laced verbal confrontations with Houck and his son, Mark Houck Jr.” At one point, Love tried to provoke Houk by telling the Roman Catholic Houck, “Why don’t you go home and masturbate? Go be with your pedophile priests.” When Love approached Mark, Jr, his father, Mark, Sr. finally shoved him away. For that “assault,” the DOJ raided and prosecuted Houck — almost a full year after the incident occurred.
Twenty-two members of Congress wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, denouncing the “excessive level of force,” and attacking the DOJ’s “extraordinary overreach for political ends.” Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX), who spearheaded the letter, charged that “Attorney General Merrick Garland oversees an increasingly politicized FBI that seems hell-bent on making examples of average American citizens who don’t align politically with the administration.”
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) also sent a letter to Garland, noting the DOJ’s vast disproportion in enforcement, given that the DOJ “turned a blind eye to the epidemic of violence across the country by pro-abortion extremists against pregnancy resource centers, houses of worship, and pro-life Americans – violent acts that are prohibited by the very same law” under which Houck was charged.
“Biden’s DOJ…treated Mark like a domestic terrorist because of his faith. This type of intimidation has no place in America,” said Congressman Andy Biggs (R-AZ).
When Houck’s case went to trial, the jury reached a unanimous “not guilty” verdict. “This is a win for Mark and the entire pro-life movement,” said Peter Breen of the Thomas More Society, which defended Houck. “The Biden Department of Justice’s intimidation against pro-life people and people of faith has been put in its place.”
Houck has announced he would sue the FBI for the abuse he suffered, but the courts have made such suits extraordinarily difficult.
An editorial in the Washington Examiner decried the Biden Justice Department’s “anti-religious bigotry and its willingness to stretch the law to meet its ideological ends.”
The Wall Street Journal denounced Houck’s prosecution as “a case that never should have been brought,” noting that “The FBI’s decision to arrest Mr. Houck as though he were John Dillinger also suggested a political stunt.” Even the trial judge asked the DOJ prosecutor if federal law didn’t “seem to be stretched a little thin here.” The Journal noted that “the raid appeared calculated to send a political message…less than two months before the midterm elections.”
Now that the House Republicans’ newly created “Weaponization Subcommittee” has promised to investigate the DOJ’s out-of-control terror tactics, we shall see if Congress does something more effective than letters and press releases.
But the real lesson of the Houck case is that DOJ prosecutors cannot get convictions unless juries cooperate. In this case, the trial was held in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and the jury refused to believe DOJ prosecutors who tried mightily to convict an innocent man. The trials of January 6 defendants in Washington, D.C. courts have almost uniformly shown that D.C. juries seem to hate Donald Trump so much that almost always they will do whatever told to do by Biden prosecutors — hardly the type of “impartial jury” guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. In trials held outside of D.C., results may be very different.
While we can hope that the House Republicans will reign in a weaponized Department of Justice, the hope that is within our control is that the People will realize that prosecutions initiated by the Biden DOJ are often political persecutions, and in such cases, the duty falls on jurors to acquit.
To read the entire series of articles, please click here.
Reminders & Updates
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