INDIANA JONES?

Here is what the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, house, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Now here is what I learned today on my AOL news page:

The FBI is removing thousands of artifacts from the home of 91 year old Donald Miller of Rush County, Indiana.

Miller, a world traveler, has been collecting artifacts for three quarters of a century for display in his homemade museum, which he shows to school children and neighbors in his rural Indiana home.

The FBI’s Special Agent, Drew Northern, told reporters that they were collecting and analyzing the artifacts with the goal of  “repatriation.” He was careful not to say whether they believed that Miller had stolen anything or broken any laws.

Citing  “complex state, federal and international laws’ Patty Gerstenblith, a professor of law at DePaul University in Chicago, noted that some countries, such as Egypt, forbid the export of any cultural objects that have been dug from the ground.

Among Miller’s treasures is a 60 foot long, four foot wide anaconda snakeskin, and a collection of human skulls, one with an arrowhead stuck in it. Upstairs is a pipe organ which Miller plays for visitors.

Donald Miller is a community treasure in his hometown of Waldron, Indiana. An active church member and local philanthropist, he is somewhat of an artifact himself. Claiming, among other things, to have been involved in the development of the atom bomb while in uniform during WWII, Miller regales listeners with tales of meeting such historically significant people as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein and Harry S. Truman.

His tales of artifact collecting adventures mark him as a real life Indiana Jones, the State of Indiana’s own.

Fascinating as Donald Miller’s story may be, what caught my Constitutionally interested attention was the report that the FBI was not claiming that Miller had broken any law, nor were they claiming that a warrant had been issued, or that there was probable cause to suspect that a law had been broken by anyone.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t get it.

Here are swarms of officers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, entering this man’s home, without a warrant, without any particular description of the things to be seized, with absolutely no legal or constitutional authority so far as anyone can tell, except that there are “complex laws” both domestic and international which the FBI is relying on.

And what do they propose to do with the artifacts they are stealing from Mr. Miller?

They are going to catalog them, and then they are going to “repatriate” them.

When I was in law school, I learned about the writ of replevin. When someone had something that belonged to you, you went to court and asked for a writ that would give the sheriff the authority to go and get your stuff.

Whose stuff does Mr. Miller have?  And how is it that the government is taking stuff away from Mr. Miller that they say belongs to somebody else, but they don’t know what stuff or who it might belong to?

I smell a rat. A political rat. I smell a favored Middle Eastern nation expecting our government to jump through unconstitutional hoops just to prove that they can make the United States of America grovel.

It makes me sick.



READ THE BOOK, AND TELL YOUR FRIENDS: www.convdist.blogspot.com

BLOGGING AGAIN

HELLO TO ALL!

I am happy to report that this blog is now officially back to normal.

I haven’t given up on the book. Not at all. The manuscript is finished, all 68,939 words of it.

For those who have started reading it on the mini chapters I posted here, and for those who never quite got around to it, I am pleased to announce that the entire book can be seen at:

WWW.CONVDIST.BLOGSPOT.COM

Don’t expect a professional printing job. Google’s Blogspot has a mind of its own. Sometimes what was typed in 14 point gets printed in 18 point, and vice-versa. It may be a gravel road, but the scenery and the destination are what’s important.

No cost, no obligation, except the moral imperative that you listen to the distress signals coming from Washington and consider becoming a First Responder.

That said, I’ll be checking with Google every few days to see how many people visit the site.

With Michigan claiming to be the 34th State to petition Congress for a an Article V convention, perhaps the possibility of a constitutional convention will start to dawn on the media and people will want to know what its all about.

Tell them to read the Judge’s book. 

In the meantime...

Yesterday, April 2, 2014 was the sixty-sixth anniversary of my first date with Pauline Mary Weinberger. And my first taste of those sweet lips that passed so many words of wisdom, correction, counsel, amusement and devotion in the last two-thirds of a century.

I planned a kind of a date. Polly had a doctor's appointment in Sun City Center, and I found a cutsey Tea Room in Sarasota, for a light supper before the 6:40 showing of God's Not Dead at the AMC 12 in Sarasota. She managed to finale the surprise out of me, and didn't seem all that enthused about a tea room.

Then she got on her Ipad and read about the movie. Of course, she found some anti-Christian egghead reviewer who couldn't wait to give away the surprise ending.

As it turned out, the tea room was closing, and we ended up at an Irish Pub, much to my liking.

The movie was quite good -- and sold out. 

DEAR BLOG READER

Several people have written to say that they would like to see my book. Although completed in a rough draft, the book is sill a work in progress.

It has occurred to me that, taken collectively, my friends, relatives and blog readers are far wiser and better informed than I am, and so I am inviting everyone to lend me hand.

I have broken the book down to a number of short (700 to 1,200 words) chapters, and I propose to publish a few chapters every day for the next couple of months on my blog. They will be seen at www.judgebrennan.com.

I invite all of you to leave comments on these blogs with any corrections – typographical, factual, grammatical, etc. that may occur to you. Comments may be left anonymously. All will be published except any that belong in a locker room.

Don’t hesitate to take issue with the text. If what I have written isn’t defensible, maybe it should be excised.

And I invite you to relay this to anyone you think might be interested in joining in. I need all the editors I can get.

© Thomas E. Brennan 2014

GOD'S SOCIAL SECURITY

Interesting conversation the other night with a Dade City lawyer named Chip. He’s opposed to the income tax. Says you can’t believe how many people in the United States have never filed a tax return. Millions.

I can believe it. The talking heads are always telling us that small businesses are the backbone of our economy. I’m sure they are, but not the way Washington thinks. The household service industry, kitchen, basement and garage based factories, and family businesses, for example, employ millions of people who get paid in cash and never give a dime to Uncle Sam.

For anything. No income tax. No social security tax. No Medicare tax. They don’t pay, and neither do their employers. It’s called the underground economy. It is raw free enterprise. Capitalism at its basic, most natural, most instinctive level.

And no government, least of all a national government thousands of miles away, is ever going to be able to stop it, slow it down or tap into it to pay politicians, bureaucrats, teachers, policemen or soldiers.

Which is why local governments collect real estate and sales taxes. Everybody’s got to sleep someplace and everybody’s got to eat.

We read that the social security system is going to go broke sometime in this century. When FDR invented it, there were dozens of people paying social security taxes for every one recipient of benefits. Not so today, and in a few years there will be only two or three workers for every old timer living on monthly checks from Uncle Sam.

We live in an artificial economy in which children are seen as a luxury and a financial burden. For most of the planet’s seven billion people, children and grandchildren are still assets: God’s social security. The family is the basic economic unit. Kids help on the farm. Child labor? You betcha. Mom and Dad are the bosses. There is no retirement age. People work until they die or until their kids and grandkids can take care of them.

UnAmerican, you say? Uncivilized? Third world living? How wrong you are. It’s natural, instinctive and it is exactly the way the underground economy which supports millions of Americans works. And works better than the intelligentsia are willing to admit.

Which brings me to another exchange I recently had with a correspondent on the Internet. It had to do with the national government requiring employers to compromise their religious beliefs by providing employee health insurance that covers birth control and abortifacients.

My friend’s argument was that religious beliefs give way to sound public policy. It’s a strong argument. The state of Utah was denied admission to the union until they adopted a constitution that prohibited polygamy. If God hadn’t stopped Abraham from setting Isaac on fire, someone would have called the cops.

In our day, we talk about cultural warfare; the conflict between traditional Judea-Christian standards of behavior and the libertarian hedonism that is justified as personal freedom and privacy.

Unhappily, too few Americans realize that culture, like the economy is a layered phenomenon. The smaller the universe of the layer, the more minute are the regulations. The household has rules about when to eat and sleep; the village tells you when you can water your lawn, the county tells you where to vote, and the state makes you get a drivers license.

In a republic, we put up with localized cultural dictates because free men and women can get up and go. The easier it is to relocate, the more regulation by the majority can be tolerated.

Modern communication tends to blur the boundary lines of communities. Facebookers and Facebookettes chat from afar like neighbors, but they aren’t.  Appleton, Wisconsin and San Francisco, California are not interchangeable communities, despite the symbiosis of dozens of teenagers on the Internet.

The great tragedy of our times is the assumption that the United States of America, through its courts, its congress and its executive has proper authority to decide the minutia of human life in the fifty states. What kind of light bulbs you can use, how much water you can flush down the toilet, who can get a driver’s license, a barber’s license or a marriage license are decisions which our constitution never intended or authorized to be made in the national capital.

Not when there were only three million Americans, much less when there are three hundred million Americans.

ROE, ROE, ROE YOUR BOAT

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

Or so it seems to be considered by too many folks in America.

In September, 2009 I wrote a blog about Roe v Wade, and asked the folks to stay tuned. So I am overdue.

Let me begin with this startling statement from a conservative. Every woman has a natural right to abort her unborn child. I do not suggest that women have no moral obligation to protect the unborn. They do. But there is a difference between natural rights and moral obligations.

We all have the natural right to commit sin. The Creator has empowered us to do what we ought not do, what we know we should not do. It is called free will. A woman or man has the right to cut off his or her finger or toe. For any reason or for no reason at all.

To my knowledge, there never was a criminal law in the United States making it a crime for a woman to abort her unborn child. All of the criminal abortion statutes were directed toward another person causing or performing an abortion.

Thus this language:

"If any person shall designedly administer to a pregnant woman or knowingly procure to be administered with her consent any drug or medicine, or shall use towards her any violence or means whatever externally or internally applied, and thereby procure an abortion, he shall be confined in the penitentiary not less than two nor more than five years; if it be done without her consent, the punishment shall be doubled. By `abortion' is meant that the life of the fetus or embryo shall be destroyed in the woman's womb or that a premature birth thereof be caused.

Roe v Wade makes a special point that the decision to abort a fetus is to be made by a woman and her doctor. The Court was not saying that a woman has a right to an abortion; it was saying that a doctor has the right to perform an abortion. Setting aside for the moment the question of whether the fetus is a human life, considering it merely as healthy tissue in the woman’s body, the question must be answered whether a licensed surgeon has the right to remove it based entirely on the choice and consent of the patient?

He couldn’t cut off a healthy toe or finger without some medical necessity. He couldn’t remove a liver or a gall bladder just because the patient wanted it done.

I ask this question of NARAL: does a woman have a constitutional right to have an abortion performed by her teen age boy friend? Or by a mid wife? Or, indeed, by anyone save a duly licensed medical doctor?

If a coat hanger wielding boy friend punctures an artery and kills a pregnant woman does the criminal abortion law still apply?

Or does NARAL concede that the constitutional right of choice only extends to choosing a licensed medical professional?

In the old movies a spiteful spouse would cause herself to have an abortion by strenuous horseback riding. She endangered herself in the process. The law of nature decrees that the life of a fetus is inextricably entwined with that of the mother.

The truth is that a pregnant woman isn’t sick. Pregnancy is not an illness to be cured. The fetus consists of healthy human tissue and its surgical removal is subject to the same standards of medical excision as any other part of a person’s body.

Separation of a fetus from its mother was always an appropriate medical procedure to save the life of the mother. Roe v Wade was a judicial amendment of the statutes regulating the medical profession to permit abortion as an elective surgery that required no therapeutic justification.

It may well be that at some time and in some places the popular culture will approve of amending the medical licensure statutes to permit elective abortions. In a republic that can happen. But there is no call for nine unelected jurists in a distant national capital to dictate morals or mores to a free people.