Whose United States of America Is This Anyway?
March 8, 2003
By Lois Erwin

As George W. Bush and his minions work feverishly to deprive us of more and more of our Freedoms and Liberties, they seem to have forgotten who is in charge of the United States government; it is We the People of the United States of America.

We do not enjoy our Freedoms and Liberties at the president's discretion; nor at the discretion of administration officials; those Freedoms and Liberties are ours by right of the Constitution of the United States.

We do not live as American citizens courtesy of the president's permission; we live as American citizens courtesy of the Constitution, given to us by our wise and learned Founding Fathers.

George W. Bush, for the moment, occupies the White House, not by having won an election but by close vote of the United States Supreme Court, which had no Constitutional right to decide a presidential election. Our Constitution specifically states that: "if no person have such majority [of electoral votes], then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President." Our Founding Fathers specifically decided the House of Representatives should make that decision because it is the chamber closest to -- and most representative of -- the people; the Supreme Court decidedly does not fit that criterion.

Nowhere in our Constitution does it state that the Supreme Court should decide a presidential election. Nowhere.

We do not have to please the president, but he has to please us or he will not be re-elected. And, yet, we have as our current president a man who so misunderstands where the power resides in America that he has stated it is for others to explain themselves to him -- that one of the beauties of being president is that he doesn't have to explain himself to anyone.

Wrong.

Or I should say, "wrong again," Mr. President.

The American government, as explained so beautifully to us all by President Abraham Lincoln, belongs to the American people and is a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

We have practiced self-government for more than 200 years, and we have become fairly good at it. There are no dictators in America, and no one can take away our Constitutionally-guaranteed Freedoms, Rights, and Liberties except by Constitutional amendment.

If our president and his administration think otherwise, they need to check a few books out of any public library and read the pertinent passages. I know there are excellent libraries available to them in Washington D. C. It is time -- it is past time -- for our present White House occupant to avail himself of the reading material available on the topic of the Constitution of the United States. Maybe the Library of Congress would be a good place to start. It's free.