The Nine of the Eight: A Study in Constitutional Revivalism

The situation stands thus.  The office of the US presidency has been hijacked in the most cynical, undisguised, arrogant, unprincipled, often dilettante, and sometimes thuggish manner imaginable.  And it has been thus hijacked in broad daylight, so to speak.  Ballot-counting in several locales was shut down for hours—and when it resumed, the candidates’ relative numbers had been turned topsy-turvy.  Software was employed in the process which had been specially developed to steal elections in foreign “banana republic” settings.  Paper ballots appeared by the truckload from nowhere long after midnight had rung out November 3.  Signatures, dates, and other basic information, when patently inconsistent, were nevertheless passed over—and checking crews often featured bullies who kept their opponent-arbiters from participating, even during formal recounts.  Vital data that would have documented the corrupt process were wiped clean or otherwise permanently destroyed, in flagrant violation of the law.  Governors and other state officials either ordered much of this criminal subterfuge or looked the other way as it happened.  Whistleblower witnesses to cases of fraud have been physically threatened and, occasionally, sent to the hospital by a round of “persuasion”.

Mathematically, the proffered “results” parade one absurdity after another past us.  More people voted in some areas than were registered to vote.  More people voted across the nation for the most lackluster, invisible, and gaffe-ridden (when briefly visible) candidate in history than voted for the charismatic Barack Obama in either of his victories.  Candidate Strawman scored dominant triumphs over the President in key counties where down-ballot Democrat candidates nevertheless plunged to defeat.  Counties whose tally wasn’t crucial to the overall outcome, one way or the other, never appeared to feature such anomalies.

And to this day—to this moment—none of the abominable outrages just described rises to the standard of a newsworthy event in mainstream media coverage.  The blind among us remain blind.  Members of the President’s party meanwhile rush toward the other sideline to shake hands, although the clock shows several crucial seconds yet to play.  Supposed rightwing journalists abandon ship and beg to be hauled aboard by their adversaries.  Agencies entrusted with investigating high crimes on the order of electoral fraud, subversion, and treason sit on their hands.  The leader of the Justice Department irresponsibly and inanely announces to the press that his crack troops have found no evidence of fraud.  The invincibly corrupt Supreme Court bows out of any obligation to let a possibly horrendous attempt at subversion receive a full and fair public review.  Captained by the irredeemably compromised John Roberts, egomaniacal prima donna and frequent traveler on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express, the high court—off the record—seems to give primary consideration to such overriding constitutional issues as whether Antifa and BLM may riot if the “right” ruling isn’t handed down.

Let it stand, then, that our “nation” (to confer a verbal reality on a non-entity) will have a non-president at her helm (and not the same one for long: Strawman’s Alzheimer’s will force him to an exit by July 4) who was elevated to that position in open defiance of the people’s will.  The propaganda-cycling media, the conspiratorial bureaucracies of the Deep State, the globalist nihilists of the Republican Party itself… all have collaborated with socialist ideologues and Chinese Communist operatives to tell the American public, “You didn’t just see that.  There was no murder.  There is no body.  There are no tapes of the incident—they’ve just come back from a routine weekly scrubbing.  You saw nothing.  You see what we tell you to see.”

Very well.  What do pockets of constitutional republicans do as anarchy slouches toward totalitarianism?  My suggestion: reassert the Constitution.  In these few paragraphs, I will promote one idea which I have no particular reason to suppose feasible… other than that it makes complete and perfect sense to me.  I realize that such a criterion is shaky ground for proposing a legal or political remedy.  Consider this an exercise in thinking out loud.

Say that the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and… and we’ll throw in the fickle Tennessee… say that their legislatures collectively decided to be ruled by the Constitution.  Scarcely a rebellion, is it?  To that end, say that they create a supreme judicial body consisting of nine jurors, each of whom must be approved by the legislatures of all eight states, with staggered terms ending after nine years.  No panel of political hacks, ideological beauty queens, and depraved royal lackeys would be acknowledged as holding sway over this court, and no subordinate system of careerist buccaneers assigned to the bench from far-off Washington as a pay-off would overrule the Nine of the Eight.

Am I floating the notion of secession?  Not at all.  In taking this measure, the South would not have seceded in any formal or militantly consequential sense: she would simply have opted to reconstruct from the ground up what could not be reassembled from useless fragments.  Inasmuch as the Beltway band of anarcho-tyrants has already advertised its eagerness to pack the existing Supreme Court, no reasonable observer could maintain that the Nine of the Eight had brutally raped legal convention.  Conventions—legal, political, social, moral—are precisely what the 2020 Election Pantomime has just brushed aside, and what our eight conservative states will wish to revive.

Imagine, then, that our regionally appointed Supreme Court reaches a decision distinctly at odds with decrees emanating from the emerging totalitarian state’s parody of a high court.  Let’s say that the justices presiding over the eight states rule that no governor or mayor or even a president of the republic may confine citizens to their homes indefinitely without their having been convicted—or, indeed, charged—with any crime.  Let us further say that the Nine of the Eight invalidate any effort to force gear onto the faces of citizens that impedes healthy breathing.  Basic human rights clearly expressed in the Constitution are herein defended: there’s really no room for dispute.  Yet the totalitarians have their own “constitution”, which is written by their whimsy upon each day’s contingencies.  They don’t like the “rebel court’s” defense of rights and intend to put a stop to it.

How, we must ask?  By calling out the National Guard?  But manhandling citizens at gunpoint over such fundamental freedoms would be so grotesquely brutal a response that it would surely ignite outrage among other, more “loyal” states.  It would also require for the totalitarians to be confident that local Georgia or Alabama police would take their side (and to ensure that this is not the case would be a critical early obligation of the eight legislatures and all the municipalities arranged beneath their authority’s aegis).  More likely, the dictatorial center would try to bring the rebellious fringe to heel by withholding tax moneys.  Federal grants to research universities, public works projects, health and educational infrastructure, facilities for the arts… the number of enterprises on which the free-flowing federal spigot could be turned off would certainly grab any recalcitrant state’s attention.  And the states could hardly respond, I think, by refusing to channel their revenues to the federal reservoir.  The dynamics of doing so would be infinitely complicated, and would also expose individuals to punishment by the IRS.  (It’s always hard to keep communal spirit at a fighting pitch when the prospect of single collaborators here and there, allowed to keep their freedom and retain their possessions, so generously feeds the sentiment, “Why should I go to jail if they’re not going to jail?”)

A far better counter-measure, I believe, would be to recoup lost revenues by inviting foreign companies to American shores, where they would to do business with us, employ our residents, and pay our state and local taxes.  Not a dime of tax would necessarily trickle into federal coffers: state bureaucracies, at any rate, wouldn’t lend a helping hand.  The arrangement would include only the two parties, and the feds would have to pry their way in somehow.  Faced with such intrusions, federal authorities could hardly protest that potentially hostile influences were being allowed to participate in the US economy—not when their own manifest policy is to hand over the American marketplace lock, stock, and barrel to China.  I recall that, a few years ago, Germany opened up a BMW plant somewhere between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham.  Mississippi could invite India to develop computer software in Jackson; Arkansas could invite Israel to manufacture next-generation drones in Little Rock.  No, the centralizing totalitarians wouldn’t like this kind of thing one bit… but how could they carve their pound of flesh out of such enterprises when the avenues physically to obstruct or blockade state-to-nation collaborations would be so high-maintenance?  And how could they grumble with a trace of righteous indignation when their own policies had thrown open many states to unwanted deluges of foreign labor and influence for decades?

Frankly, I think a community of states that enforced constitutional government with its own revived institutions would create such a prosperous, optimistic, and vibrant atmosphere (as in the case of outlawing mask mandates) that productive citizens would pour in, bringing their talents, energy, and resources.  Big Brother’s efforts to stifle this prosperity would be bound to fail.  For instance, if Major League Baseball (its bureaucracy as subservient to PC objectives as all the other multi-billion-dollar sporting industries) agreed to ban the Atlanta Braves and the two Florida franchises from their elite circle of play due to their location among the notorious Eight, a new and effectively rival league would simply form, enlisting teams from Nashville, Winston-Salem, and so on.  The amusement would be more thrilling and the quality of competition more spirited.  Human beings respond favorably to freedom.  Force them to innovate by sealing up well-worn corridors, and you will soon find that they have generated a product far superior to the previous stale standard.

I’ve written frequently before now about how the breakup of our society and political system might proceed.  In this post, I’ve tried to avoid the dramatic and emphasize that the revival of freedom could prosper down numerous corridors that don’t involve rioting in the streets.  The totalitarians are not really very smart.  Their overweening arrogance, at any rate, tends to deprive them of whatever shrewd forethought and keen perceptiveness they might possess.  They don’t anticipate microcosmic developments because they’re preoccupied with their own macrocosmic designs for the universe.  They’re not intellectually well equipped to become the ruthless dictators they are so inclined to be by temperament.  We can give them more than they bargained for if we stay focused on detail.

I don’t know when I’ll be posting again after today.  Next week I begin an intensive program of studying and bringing under control my somewhat rebellious prostate cancer.  Maybe I’ll have time to put a few ideas together, and maybe I’ll welcome the opportunity to distract myself from treatments and therapies.  We’ll see.  Wish me luck.