Three Senators and a Leper
Douglas Wilson
One of
our great cultural problems today is that Christians do not understand
civics. And by civics, I do not mean the “how a bill becomes a law” kind
of civics, but rather I refer to our very common misunderstanding of
the true nature of our appointed government. We have a particular form
of government de jure, laid out for us in the Constitution, and we have another, very different, form of government, de facto, sitting atop Lady Liberty, strangling her to death.
Actually, it is the reverse. Our responsibility is found in Romans 13, but it requires us to look at this far more closely than we are accustomed to do.
It is not the case that the Federal government simply outranks local officials, the way (we think) a king outranks a duke. In a government of law, the king outranks all others in his appointed duties, and a duke outranks all others in his appointed duties. This is how separation of powers works.
“But when he was strong, his heart was
lifted up to his destruction: for he transgressed against the Lord his
God, and went into the temple of the Lord to burn incense upon the altar
of incense. And Azariah the priest went in after him, and with him
fourscore priests of the Lord, that were valiant men: And they withstood
Uzziah the king, and said unto him, It appertaineth not unto thee,
Uzziah, to burn incense unto the Lord, but to the priests the sons of
Aaron, that are consecrated to burn incense: go out of the sanctuary;
for thou hast trespassed; neither shall it be for thine honour from the
Lord God” (2 Chron. 26:16–18).
So, simple question. Does a king outrank a priest?
The blunt answer is that no, he does not. The law of Israel overarches them both, and tells the king what to do, and what he may not do, and tells the priest what he may do, and not do. These valiant priests who resisted the will of a conceited king were fully within their lawful right to do so. Uzziah was breaking the law, and the priests were not breaking the law by resisting him. In our system, the supreme law of the land is the Constitution. And that Constitution, in what is called the “supremacy clause,” spells out for us what constitutes the supreme law of the land. It is the Constitution itself, laws that are made in accord with the Constitution, and treaties contracted by the government of the United States. That’s it. The Constitution, constitutional laws, and (constitutional) treaties.
Now our Constitution was written down so that everybody could read it. If the powers that be one day simply announced that Massachusetts should have three senators now, and Nevada should give up one, we can all still read, which means that we would know that this, as constitutional lawyers from another era would have said, was “not right.” And if the Supreme Court upheld the travesty, the historical fact of Marbury v. Madison would not alter the plain meaning of the words. The supreme law of the land says that Nevada gets two, and everybody who insisted that the new meaning was the legal meaning would be a lawbreaker. All such people would be in violation of Romans 13.
Go back to the earlier example. Uzziah was the king, and he was the one violating Romans 13. The priests were not the king, but they were defending the law that the king was attacking.
This is not a hypothetical situation, for we are currently living under a regime that is functioning in precisely the ways that our Constitution prohibits. Only Congress has the right to enact binding laws. And Congress is prohibited from delegating its own “rule-making” authority to other agencies, such as the IRS and the EPA. Moreover, such agencies, located as they are under the executive branch, by taking up such legislative authority, manifest a gross disregard of the law. In other words, when it comes to constitutional infractions, we are living under examples that are every bit as absurd as the example given above. And such things don’t cease to be constitutionally absurd just because a lot of people have gotten used to it. That third senator from Massachusetts might be on his third term now.
Issues just like this were the issues of the American War for Independence. The Americans resisted taxes levied by Parliament because taxes placed on the American people were illegal. In that conflict, the Americans were not disobeying the constitution of England, Parliament was. If you live in Virginia, and receive a tax bill in the mail from a county judge in Montana, you have every right to wad it up and throw it away. You are not breaking the law — he is.
Now if you are being mugged in an alley, it is not a sin to hand over your wallet. It is not a sin to be stolen from. But handing over your wallet is not an acknowledgment on your part that the thieves have a right to your wallet. You are being coerced. But suppose you had twenty bucks in that wallet and a thousand dollars in your boot. Are you conscience-bound to tell the thieves about the money in your boot? No, because they are the thieves. Thieves don’t have a right to that information, because they have no lawful right to the money. You might decide to tell them, if you thought that they were going to find it anyway, and that they would then kill you. But at that point you are doing de facto cost/benefit analysis. You are measuring risks, not analyzing rights.
In the same way, and making this very practical, if all your paychecks come to you from businesses and/or employers who report to the IRS, then it would be stupid for you to go on a quixotic crusade against the IRS. You are wired into the system, and they already know about the money in your boot. But say you are cleaning out the attic one day and find $5000 that your grandmother tucked into a shoebox without telling anybody. You were her sole heir — you own that shoebox in other words, and everything in it. You have every moral right to that money. Are you obligated to report that money on your taxes? Are you conscience-bound to treat it as taxable income?
No, of course not. And if pressed for biblical justification of this position, I would appeal to Romans 13.
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