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Our Founders understood government and its dangers to our liberty. They feared it above all other threats and tried to create a system of self government through which we could protect ourselves from its tyranny. When their warnings are ignored we get Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and a government of lies, oppression and national bankruptcy.

The only way to understand the pronouncements and actions of this administration is if we consider ourselves a conquered people and the Washington-centered oligarchy as an occupying power. We, the silent majority who labor, innovate, and produce are treated as subservient beasts of burden needed and appreciated more for what can be extorted from us than for who we are.

The Constitution was from day one an instrument to consolidate Federal power and expand it. The Constitution has proven to be a weak reed in every attempt to slow down the expansion of Federal power. It has proven utterly impotent to roll Federal power back as little as a decade, ever.

The president certainly can’t derive the authority to bomb Libya from the commander-in-chief clause. As Hamilton explained in Federalist 69, that provision merely indicates that the president is the “first General and admiral” of US military forces. Important as they are, generals and admirals don’t get to decide whether and with whom we go to war.

We can’t spend our way to prosperity. We can’t borrow our way to solvency, and we shouldn’t condemn our descendants to a life of limited opportunity crushed under the debt for the entitlements we wanted but couldn’t afford.

How long did the limits last? The Anti-Federalists were still active in politics as the warnings they gave were realized and the children of the Revolution took their first steps down the road to tyranny.

Thomas Jefferson said, “The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the only legitimate object of good government.”

The Progressives explicitly repudiated the Founders’ vision of limited government. They argued that government needed to redistribute property, to take money from one group of citizens to help others, and to regulate economic activity in ways previously considered unconstitutional. The Constitution, they said, was a “horse and buggy” document, suited perhaps to the simpler society of the 18th century, but dangerously out of date in a complex industrial society which could not expect ordinary citizens to make their way without government guidance and assistance. They were acting, they said, in the interests of the people. Their critics said they were acting out of hunger for power.

What Jefferson Wrought – The author of the Declaration laid the philosophical bedrock of the American republic.

Obama has long seen the U.S. Constitution as an obstacle to what he considers progress.