YEARS OF DARKNESS - HOPES OF LIGHT

June 10, 2004 - We will preserve for our children this last best hope of man on earth or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.

That last best hope of which Ronald Reagan spoke so eloquently four decades ago is still with us though our vision of it is fading in the first glimmers of the dawn of this new millennium. That hope  does not lie in the might of America’s armies, their machines and manpower arrayed to sweep across a weakened world. It does not lie in America’s ability to impose its will on the people of a struggling world driving them as cattle into a pen guarded by America’s might. Mankind’s last best hope lies in America’s heart; in the willingness of its people to live by the credo that has been with us from America’s birth. All men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.

.At the moment of the nation’s birth; when the Constitutional Convention had completed its work Benjamin Franklin remarked that throughout that hot Philadelphia summer he had contemplated the carving decorating the back of the President’s chair speculating whether it represented a rising or a setting sun. We are called upon in this dawn of a new century; at the brink of a new millennium to engage in a similar speculation as we choose whether to turn to meet a sunrise or continue toward the gathering twilight of a setting sun. 

America is faced with a choice of pathways and it is increasingly a choice between pursuing the shining hope lighted by her founding principles or turning from that path toward an uncertain future only dimly perceived in a gathering storm. It is a choice between passing confidently into the light of a new dawn or turning into the darkness of a deepening night.  Our central and most cherished principle is that mankind should be subject to the rule of law not subjected to the arbitrary caprice of the tyranny of the powerful.  It is central to America’s being and her promise of freedom and liberty to the world that those who are entrusted to exercise our awesome power are strictly restrained in their employment of that power by the principled order imposed by our system of constitutional representative democracy. 

 Each four years we select one of our own number to exercise power in our name and temporarily delegate to that person the awesome task to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.  We do not vest the person selected with the sovereignty of the United States.  That quality is reserved to the people themselves and is expressed through their representatives in Congress.  The President of the United States is neither a king nor potentate; is no tyrant nor dictator but an officer of the people bound to faithfully execute and act within the limitations of the laws of the United States. 

 Recently we are reminded of how fragile that hope embodied in our founding principles may be.  We have been threatened and assaulted by spectral enemies who slip like ghosts among us.  We must meet that threat firmly and with resolution while remaining dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  If we fail in our dedication neither this nation nor any nation conceived and dedicated to liberty will long endure.  In our resolve we must always remember who we are as a people.  We must remember that the President of the United States is not a monarch set over us by God whose dictates we must observe at the peril of our souls but rather he is our delegate who must faithfully serve us and observe our laws at the peril of his own.

 Yet today in the darkest corners of the closets of government, sealed away from the light of a public dawn, subordinates suggest that the President is immune from the restraint of law and free of the strictures of the Constitution upon which we ground our liberty and freedom.  If we accept that proposition then we accept that our system of ordered liberty expressed through a representative democracy is at an end and that our Constitution of the United States is but an artifact of history; a curiosity and nothing more by which our grandchildren may remember that once there was a nation dedicated to freedom, but that it has perished from the Earth.