Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

On Ransacking the Penumbrae

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

Friday, July 11 2014

When confronted with the prospect of a devolution into tyranny, most Christians are clear on the nature of such tyranny, and the fact that it is bad, but are unclear on their liberty to oppose and disregard it. No, I should say more — on their duty to oppose and disregard it.

The evangelical baker and the Roman Catholic flower arranger who are hauled off into sensitivity training for refusing to strike an insufficiently celebratory pose over same sex mirage are being abused, no question. But . . . what about Romans 13, and the lions, and the coliseum? Shouldn’t we just take it?

Well, yes and no. If we were in the position of the early Christians, building a new civilization from scratch, we should do exactly what they did. When we are not starting from scratch, we should live up to what we have attained. And one of the things we have attained — because the Spirit has been at work in the world on this particular project for two thousand years now — is the rule of law.

Our current system of administrative rules, regulations, laws, and penalty kicks, is not just a bad system of governance, although it is that. It is — all of it — profoundly unlawful. Most of it has gone well past the point of being unconstitutional, and is now overtly anti-constitutional.


The system of governance we are operating under today is the very kind of governance that our constitutional system was designed to preclude and prevent. Administrative law, hidden for a time under the executive, is the assertion of the old absolutist prerogative. What Obama has been doing is taking the dictatorial impulse that has been running riot in the agencies for some time now, and exercising it out in the broad light of day, along with an invitation to “sue me.”

The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and the outlaws are those who are violating it. The outlaws are not those who want to live by it. Should I go over this again?

But — and here is where a knowledge of the American War for Independence is necessary — what if the authorities designated by the Constitution to determine whether such things are constitutional say that everything is a-okay? What then?

We really need to work through this stuff. We defend our freedoms, in the first instance, not by bombing Bedouins, but by besting the bureaucrats, swarms of which have been sent to eat out our substance.
In the English Constitution, the king was the executive. He was the executive for different nations and colonies, and those nations and colonies had their own legislatures. A shared executive did not mean that there was a shared legislature.

There was also a remaining feudal relationship between the king and his vassals. The king owed the vassals protection, and the vassals, in return, owed him allegiance. When Parliament began exercising direct control over the colonies, they were doing something profoundly illegal, and it was the king’s responsibility to prevent it. The reason the king did not prevent it is that there had been a revolution in England, in 1688, one that radically altered the relationship between king and Parliament. After James II was removed, and William and Mary installed, Parliament had a lot more power in England than previously. They assumed that this simply extended to the colonies — which it did not. The colonies had been on the other side of the ocean, operating with their own charters and legislatures for over a century — longer in some cases, in other words, than Idaho has been a state.

So, back then, being taxed by Parliament directly, if you lived in Massachusetts, was tantamount to someone today who lives in Indiana receiving a tax bill from the legislature of California. What legal authority does that have? None, and you may round file it with a clean conscience. And the amount of the tax does not matter. It might be less than a dollar, but you would have an obligation to not pay it. To pay such a tax would be unlawful. You would be joining in with the disobedience. You would be violating Romans 13 — when we are told to obey the existing authorities, this does not mean the pretend authorities.

Allow me to illustrate with an absurd example. Sitting here at my computer, the notion has seized me to declare myself the emperor of all who read my blog, and so “I command thee” to touch your nose with your finger three times. I see you there, hesitating . . . but I have an argument. Romans 13!

But what if a bunch of people thought it had legal authority? What if the king is going along with it? Well, the king is responsible to protect against such usurpation, and when he does not, the responsibility of reciprocal allegiance is gone. This is why, although Parliament was the presenting problem, all the complaints in the Declaration were directed against the king. The king had an obligation, by his terms of office, to prevent such things.

Our president, by his oath of office, taken in public, with the world listening, has an obligation to defend and protect the Constitution. He has no responsibility whatever to turn it on its head. We wrote the Constitution down for a reason, and that reason was not so that legal scholars could take it into a back room to ransack its penumbrae. Obama might argue — and most certainly would argue — that he is a constitutional lawyer, and that this, and all the foregoing, is not his interpretation.

Ah, but it is ours.