Tweedledee and Tweedledum

My family and friends are angry with me because I won’t tell them for whom I plan to vote for president.

​I have not voted for the Republican or Democrat for president since 1984, when I happily voted for Ronald Reagan. Since those days, the Democrats have gravitated to principles of big government that would make FDR blush, and the Republicans have abandoned all principles.

​I will give the Democrats credit. They do not believe that the Constitution restrains the federal government. They say so, and they act upon it. They believe that the Congress is a general legislature that can right any wrong, tax any event, regulate any behavior and intrude upon any relationship so long as there is a national political will for them to do so.

​Most Republicans believe the same but don’t acknowledge believing it for fear of sounding like the Democrats whom they profess to hate. All the growth in warfare, taxing, spending, regulation and suppression of civil liberties in the past 25 years has been bipartisan. The only exceptions have been the libertarian Republicans and progressive Democrats — the Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders types.

​All others — that’s about 90% of Congress — are in lockstep on the issues that matter most: War and peace, debt, personal freedom.

​The two major party candidates for president exemplify this.

​Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump favor war against countries and peoples who pose no threat whatsoever to the national security of the United States. They even favor war in aid of countries with which the U.S. has no treaty obligating America to aid them — and they do so because it appears either domestically popular or financially beneficial to their campaigns.

​Both Trump and Harris favor spending trillions more per year than the feds collect in taxes, just to keep certain folks happy. Some of those folks are the unfortunate have-nots, and some are the wealthy bankers and arms manufacturers.

​Both candidates believe in increasing the reach of the federal government so far beyond the confines of the Constitution as to make the government utterly unrecognizable to those who crafted it 250 years ago. They both believe in giveaways for the poor, tax breaks for the middle class, bailouts for the rich and bribes to the states, just to maintain themselves and their parties in power.

​Neither believes in the values that underlie the Constitution.

​One of them wants to amend the First Amendment — which guarantees the freedom of speech — so as to enable Congress to criminalize flag burning. When the Supreme Court last looked at this, the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the flag itself stands for the right to express one’s political views by destroying it. A flag is an infinitely reproducible piece of cloth, he wrote, about which anyone can express any opinion one wishes — that is, until the First Amendment is amended.

​The same candidate wants to amend the Fifth Amendment — which guarantees a fair trial before the government can take the life, liberty or property of any person — so as to permit local police and federal agents to administer corporal punishment at the scene of a crime.

​Never mind that they might beat the daylights out of the wrong person, never mind that they might completely misinterpret events that occurred before they arrived on the scene, never mind that one man’s punch in the gut is another man’s kiss on the cheek, this candidate wants the Constitution to permit “rough justice.” Where will that lead us?

​The same candidate wants to deport all foreign-born persons — even those here lawfully — because this candidate believes they are polluting the nation’s blood stream. The U.S. doesn’t have a blood stream.

​To this candidate, rights are not natural to all persons but are granted by the laws of the place where one’s mother was physically located at the time of one’s birth. Tell that to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who, in crafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, underscored the inalienable possession and natural origin of personal liberty.

​One of the candidates wants to amend the 14th Amendment — which guarantees equal protection — so as to permit mothers and their physicians to kill babies in the womb up to the moment of birth, for reasons of convenience. This candidate somehow equates baby-killing with personal autonomy, and even calls this killing a “right.”

​This candidate needs to understand that the greatest human right is the right to be alive, and this is the gift of the Creator who loves all life. The other candidate, too, would permit baby-killing, but only up to 16 weeks of pregnancy. Killing a baby at any time should be unfathomable.

​One of the candidates wants to put Walmart, Costco, Target, Amazon, Apple and Mercedes-Benz out of business by imposing a 200% tax on all goods imported from outside the U.S.

​Both candidates have a remarkable antipathy to the Fourth Amendment. That amendment guarantees the right to be left alone — privacy — except when a judge determines that the existence of probable cause of crime justifies a search or a seizure of your property and issues a warrant.

​Yet, both Trump and Harris agree that this amendment doesn’t really mean what it says, and the feds should be able to listen to the phone calls and capture the keystrokes and surveil the bank accounts, legal papers and medical records of all persons without search warrants — without probable cause or even articulable suspicion.

​Both candidates want to spend more on the Pentagon than the next 10 countries combined spend on their militaries.

​Does it matter who is president? Oh, it does emotionally — but not constitutionally. Both Harris and Trump will kill innocents, borrow trillions and crush liberty just to please their supporters and stay in power. Where are you, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.