"The country needs more senators who care about liberty, but if Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms. He needs to know what he’s talking about.” Sen. John McCain regarding the Sen. Rand Paul March 8, 2013 Filibuster
March 13, 2013
By: Linda Case Gibbons
Patrick Henry knew the score.
It was about six months after the First Continental Congress met on September 5, 1774 that Henry gave his famous "Give me liberty or give me death” speech at a meeting of Virginia’s colonial leaders.The thrust of the speech was to forcefully urge Virginia to arm itself with a "well regulated militia” to oppose King George III.
Why? A laundry list of abuses: Parliament had raised illegal revenues; private premises were exposed to search; the power of legislation was assumed without the consent of the colonists; and restraints were placed upon iron mills, hat manufacture, wool and many businesses that the colonists had built themselves.
He, like the First Continental Congress, knew the colonies were in peril from King George III. They had lived through burdensome taxes and the Intolerable Acts, had petitioned and reasoned, had boycotted and protested, and finally they had had enough.
Patrick Henry saw the handwriting on the wall.
He wouldn’t have dismissed it if he had seen the text of a colonial medical care bill "passed” without colonists’ approval, which stood six feet in height with 20,000 pages of rules added on.
He knew an unfair tax when he saw it.
He wouldn’t have dismissed it if -- then unheard of drones -- were flying over his head, checking out not only his moves, but those people in his proximity without his leave or that of his neighbors.
Since Patrick Henry had helped gain adoption of the Bill of Rights, he wouldn’t have looked the other way when the head of a government agency took his oath of office on – not the Bible – but a copy of the U.S. Constitution which did not include the Bill of Rights.
He would have been suspicious of that man and the man who chose that man.
If a minor dignitary – a mayor – of a city in a colony yet unheard of in Patrick Henry’s time, decided to register all law-biding, gun-owning colonists the same as one would register sex offenders, Patrick Henry would have thought that was intolerable – but would also have been suspicious, suspecting this might be part of a political plot by the Crown.
And he would have been puzzled that a person, elected to hold office in the country he loved, could propose banning guns by looking through books and periodicals and saying, "These look nasty. Let’s ban those.”
He knew weapons were so much a part of a colonists’ daily life, both for everyday survival and in the event that a tyrant rose to power, and so he and others made certain they included the right to bear arms into a Bill of Rights.
In those long ago colonial days, a little boy’s party cakes were not confiscated because of the decorations lovingly placed on them by his mother, nor was a seven-year-old little boy scolded and banished because he nibbled one of those cakes into the shape of a musket.
Patrick Henry would have known that was foolish and an invasion of all sorts of privacy.
The colonists were luckier than we are because they knew what they didn’t want. It was crystal clear to them because they had seen it all firsthand.
They did not want the class structure that kept a people locked into "their place” in society as existed in England.
They did not want a restrictive government to have the ability to take over and destroy the businesses that the colonists had built.
They did not want government to hinder commerce by imposing rules and taxes, keeping the colonists poor while enriching those in power.
They knew in the New World they could be as successful as they chose to be. That was why they crossed the ocean to come here, and so they fashioned the documents that would protect this new nation, that would allow it to grow in freedom and that would identify any despots who posed a threat to America’s freedom.
Patrick Henry knew the score, but there were those who did not. But that is nothing new.
Last week when Sen. Rand Paul stood his ground on the floor of the Senate and filibustered, he was defending the Bill of Rights and the rule of law. He was fighting the fight Patrick Henry fought.
And many Americans, across party and societal lines, were energized. But others, on both the left and the right were frightened at the sight.
President Obama reacted by taking 12 Republican senators to dinner at the Jefferson Hotel on the same night of Sen. Paul’s filibuster, using the opportunity to upstage Paul and launch his "Charm Offensive.”
Senators McCain and Graham, who were among the dinner guests, returned the favor by proceeding to ridicule their colleague, Sen. Paul over the next days.
But the people got it. They recognized the criticism for what it was: fear of losing power expressed by the president, two RINO’s and the Republican Establishment. And jokes abounded.
One cartoon suggested that had McCain and Graham been there in 1775, listening to Patrick Henry’s speech, they would have told him to "calm down.” In their arrogance, these senators wouldn’t have seen any danger back then – or now.
The real joke, however, is that the American people liked what they saw when they watched Sen. Paul.
The American people, however, did not like what they heard from Sen. John McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham, such as when John McCain referred to his colleagues, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Justin Amah (R-Mich.) as "wacko birds.”
"They were elected, nobody believes that there was a corrupt election,” McCain said. "But I also think that…it’s always the wacko birds on the right and left that get the media megaphone.”
McCain was angry that the American people were grateful to Sen. Paul for standing up on principle while the usual suspects, including himself and Graham, were spending the American taxpayer’s money on a prix fixe repast at $85 per head, drinks not included, down the street from this important Senate event.
As for Graham, well, he said originally he was going to oppose John Brennan’s nomination for heading up the CIA, finding Brennan qualified, but "arrogant, kind of a bit shifty,” but, he said, after Paul’s filibuster, he was going to vote for the nomination "because it’s become a referendum on the drone program.”
Uh, yeah. That was the whole purpose of the filibuster, Sen. Graham, that and defending our Constitution.
John Brennan is and has been a strong supporter for Obama’s drone program, a program cloaked in secrecy and accompanied by the Administration’s refusal to explain how the program works, such as who and how American citizens inside the United States are chosen as targets for assassination.
Brennan’s the guy who, after you nominated him, Sen. Graham, swore his oath of office on the Constitution sans the Bill of Rights.
But Sen. Graham continued, saying he thought asking if the president has the power to kill Americans on American soil is a "ludicrous question.”
"I do not believe that question deserves an answer,” Graham said.
But Rand Paul thought it deserved an answer. We the people thought it deserved an answer. And I think Patrick Henry would have thought so, too.
Because, believe it or not, Senators, the American people still know what they don’t want, just as in the days of Patrick Henry and anyone who skips dinner and takes the time to defend our Constitution is tops in our book.
Hold the line, America.