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On today’s episode of The National Security Hour on the America Out Loud Talk Radio Network with Colonel Mike and Dr. Mike, we interviewed Mr. Paul Engel, who is a true expert on the U.S. Constitution and hosts a program called “The Constitution Study” on America Out Loud each weekday afternoon from 4 to 5 pm ET.
Mr. Engel opened by saying that he went to twelve years of public school and, on reflection, can only conclude that he was taught precious little about the U.S. Constitution, and what was taught was incorrect. As an amazing example of the federal government’s endemic unconstitutionality, Mr. Engel noted that there are more than 630 federal agencies in the federal government, and almost none of them are authorized by the Constitution. Many of those agencies make use of “administrative courts” to illegally apply federal laws.
We spoke about the Constitution’s attitude toward war and the declaration thereof. There is, of course, not a word in the Constitution that could be construed as giving the president the power to declare war. In addition, the Constitution gives the Congress no wiggle room regarding its sole responsibility for declaring that America was at war. The current use of the Congress’s Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which gives the president the ability to go to war without a Congressional declaration, is clearly unconstitutional. Even the commonly used argument for the president being a warlord that “these are modern times and things move too fast” is a piece of nonsense.
The president is always constitutionally authorized to immediately act to defend America against invasion or attack. The record of unconstitutional wars now extends from the surrender of Japan to this day. In all the wars that America has been engaged in since 1945, it has been the president and his advisers who have taken America to war. Not a single one of these occasions was a situation in which the president acted to defend the country from attack or invasion.
Notwithstanding that we live in “modern times where time moves fast,” on every occasion America has gone to war since 1945, Congress has had ample time to discuss the issue and decide whether or not to vote for a declaration of war.
In the face of the federal government’s nearly constant unconstitutional behavior, Mr. Engel suggested that the road to returning constitutionality to America’s government is for the people to retake the power that has always been theirs alone, to know their Constitution’s meaning and to use that knowledge to elect men and women who pledged to obey it as it was written. The Constitution is the most readable and understandable of the world’s scores of constitutions and does not take much work to master.
The study of the Constitution is much more important than the study of international law, which is made up of not facts but instead of the “opinions” of judges. Armed with a working knowledge of the Constitution, it is the citizens’ responsibility, as President James Garfield said in the late 19th Century, “Now, more than ever before, the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption.”
Today, the American people’s “ignorance” of the Constitution obviously has given the republic a Congress of the dreadful type Garfield described. To begin rectifying this “ignorance,” there may well be no better place for citizens to start than Paul Engel’s daily program, “The Constitution Study,” at 4 pm ET on America Out Loud Talk Radio.
Paul’s website: https://www.constitutionstudy.com.
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