By DEXTER DUGGAN
Reclaiming the Republic: How Christians and Other Conservatives Can Win Back America, by Robert G. Marshall, TAN Books, Charlotte, N.C., ISBN 978-1-5051-0940-5, 311 pages, hardback, $24.95, 2018.
Bob Marshall, who passed a lot of years in the Virginia House of Delegates, serving 13 two-year terms, covers a lot of territory in this valuable political how-to book, from the Founders’ philosophy to precinct door-knocking, and from unacceptable judicial supremacy to voter-registration forms kept handy in the car to hand out.
Whether the reader wants to know what the U.S.’s early architects thought about the three co-equal branches of government, or how effective Barack Obama was at voter contact in Virginia for the 2008 presidential election, Marshall, basically an exemplary pro-life GOP conservative, has that word in Reclaiming the Republic: How Christians and Other Conservatives Can Win Back America.
He has a warning for Republicans and conservatives in this mid-term election year.
Left-wing Democrats have become energized, and they successfully tested a strategy for 2018 that included sending him down to defeat in Virginia’s 2017 state elections. But did part of the Democrats’ winning ways occur thanks to Republican voters dispirited by the typically apologetic, passive performance of the national GOP’s majority in Congress, not at all in tune with brash Donald Trump?
Virginia “Republicans failed to turn out for Republican candidates perhaps because the Republican Congress failed to keep its promises to repeal Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood, or follow through on any number of policy intentions,” Marshall observes. “Democrats were prompted, in part, by their anti-President Trump animosity.”
Exit polls, he says, found 41 percent of participating Virginia voters were Dems, 30 percent were Republicans, and 28 percent were independents.
If leftists capitalize on strategy they’ve learned, Marshall says, that could mean their winning the congressional majority and empowering impeachment of the president. “You and I must take this larger threat seriously. Inaction, imprudence, or timidity on our part in the face of this growing threat is morally unacceptable, politically unwise, and socially suicidal.”
Marshall’s foes flooded his district with sexually confused volunteer workers who seem to be part of the usual Dem shock troops these days, as well as money and the customary media spinners.
Voters need to understand what’s at stake in elections, Marshall says. But the Dems’ media allies won’t scare voters into alarm with needed reminders.
“I predict our public schools will provide transgender counseling and tax-funded birth control and abortion pills behind parents’ backs. More institutions will embrace euthanasia as a duty and cost-saving measure. This is not far-fetched. It is the proud ideology and agenda of the political Left,” Marshall says.
It’s a fight, but a fight worth winning. “The children of Israel were not brought out of Egypt on magic carpets….Should Christians decide instead to withdraw from civic affairs or to just roll over for the progressives, we will clearly be targeted for social irrelevance,” he says.
Marshall justifiably devotes considerable attention to what the imperial judiciary has done to assault America, a flexing of power unthinkable to the Founders. Clearly today the courts are comfortable in telling the other two branches, legislative and executive, what they can and cannot do, as well as safeguarding judges’ own prerogatives.
However, Marshall cites Founders James Madison and Thomas Jefferson inveighing against judicial supremacy. Madison “held that appointed judges could never be superior in power and authority to elected representatives,” while Jefferson wrote that allowing judges to decide what is constitutional, “not only for themselves in their own sphere of action, but for the Legislature and Executive also, in their spheres, would make the judiciary a despotic branch.”
In a separate statement, Jefferson, hardly a friend of the hidebound, also said:
“It is a very dangerous doctrine to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions. It is one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. . . . The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become mere despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.”
Decades later, with the Supreme Court having shown it was far from infallible with its pro-slavery Dred Scott decision, Abraham Lincoln said that if the High Court was able to irrevocably establish government policy, “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”
The Library of Congress prepared a volume for each congressional office, Marshall says, that documents, from 1808 through July 1, 2014, the Supreme Court reversed itself 233 times on the meaning of the Constitution. What had been held constitutional later was declared unconstitutional, or the other way around.
Not so very long ago, in 1986, Marshall recalls, the court upheld criminal anti-sodomy laws, but in 2003 did a backflip and declared them unconstitutional. It was only 12 years after that, in 2015, that the court ordered society to regard sodomy as constitutionally protected “marriage equality” that takes precedence over everyone’s conscience and virtually all of history.
Who possibly could take seriously a court such as this, or owe it any deference? Why has not Congress — or, failing that, the people themselves — simply sent moving vans to haul away all the lordly judicial pretension at 1 First St., NE, in the nation’s capital, to submerge in the Potomac River? Oh, I forgot, that would poison the fish. The Environmental Protection Agency might not like that.
Of course, of equally astounding judicial arrogance was the court’s overnight discovery on January 22, 1973, that every single one of the 50 states had misunderstood the Constitution on permissive abortion, which had to be implemented right away. The so-called judicial respect for precedent was tossed in favor of the utterly unprecedented.
This wasn’t constitutional law, or any pretense of being so. Yet for nearly a half-century this nation’s corrupt elite — judicial, medical, and media — have insisted this abortion of the law must continue to provide for the abortion of tens of millions of innocent, defenseless lives.
Marshall cites the 1979 book by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, where justices privately dickered just how to legalize the mass slaughter. The authors wrote: “There was something embarrassing and dishonest about this whole process. It left the court claiming that the Constitution drew certain lines at trimesters and viability. . . . As a constitutional matter it was absurd.”
Who Is Sovereign?
The latest insanity — until something even more surreal comes along — is, of course, gendering and all the psychobabble that entails. Marshall quotes Harvard University’s Office of BGLTQ Student Life as saying: “Sex assigned at birth, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, hormonal makeup, physical anatomy . . . are not necessarily related. There are more than two sexes. . . .
“Gender is fluid and changing, and can be affirmed and/or expressed in many ways. . . . Self-understanding can change from day to day. . . . Transphobic misinformation is a form of systemic violence. Fixed binaries and biological essentialism, manifest in gendered language, misgendering someone . . . threaten the lives of trans people,” saith the Harvard office.
In his chapter on understanding how things work, Marshall recalls for us, “According to the Declaration of Independence, the people are sovereign, not the elected representatives, and certainly not appointed officials.”
It’s no secret that Trump emerged successfully when all the professional politicians on the Republican side, from obeisant Paul Ryan to profane John McCain, seemed utterly unable to stop, or want to stop, the elite’s garbage culture eating us alive, while Democrats smacked their lips over the decay.
So many people are looking for someone to shout “Stop it!” and mean it. When that person and day arrive, Marshall will have seen his, and our, goal achieved.
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