LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: History repeating itself in 2015

In honor of what our framers did for us, it’s time to share some truth to dispel the distortions, the half-truths that are completed. The battle between Great Britain and America was actually between British people in a civil war against their own country, not America against Great Britain. It was not taxed enough already — spell it out like it was — it was tyrannized enough already. The colonists were maxed out on their tolerance to tyranny, legislation without representation, and parliament didn’t care: they only continued to mock and scorn them, causing a driving force of the people towards independence. The laws passed by parliament only applied to the people and not parliament, without actually giving the people a voice in parliament. Parliament was exempt from the laws being passed, but the colonists were not, stirring revolt and boycott against many things. The origin of the tea party was not about money; its birth was in the Committees of Correspondence that were created in a courtroom where James Otis Jr. argued against the warrantless searches that were being conducted on the people. He argued that these searches were the most arbitrary and despotic things that government could do. May 15, 1764, the Boston record commissioner’s reports record Samuel Adams and James Warren leaving those discussions so supercharged, they formed the Committees of Correspondence, thus, the formation of the tea party. These committees were to educate each other on the tyrannical nature of our government and what we needed to do to dispel British propaganda and communicate truth. The lies were that taxation was only paying your fair share, lies created saying the people were a bunch of seditionists who were greedy and didn’t want to support each other as a kingdom ought. Taxes being your fair share is not something that our government invented; it is the lie of oppressive governments for centuries, and then, pointing out that people who object to the abusive and oppressive nature of out-of-control taxation, or simply don’t want to pay their fair share, is not new, either. This was the argument against our framers. Arbitrary taxation makes slaves out of free people, for if our trade may be taxed, why not our land, why not the produce of our lands and everything we possess or make use of? Outrageous that our wages are taxed, more outrageous our land being taxed, and even more outrageous the produce of our lands, until everything we possess or make use of [is taxed]. This annihilates our charter right to govern and tax ourselves. We are now living in the age of mandated purchases not so different from our framers. Health care purchase forced entirely on the condition of just being alive. We are not so different from our framers, yet, we feel we are different, somehow above the sacrifice necessary to secure the property for our children. “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” (Declaration of Independence) It was not money; it was the king controlling the entire government, the people having no representation, eating away at the separation of powers, coercing Parliament into submission, creating a government ruled solely by the whim of the king, an overwhelming power of Parliament with no representation. How does this compare to this government we see today? “He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasion on the rights of the people. For suspending our own legislature and declaring themselves invested with the power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.” (Declaration of Independence) America now has a Congress that’s unwilling to fulfill their solemn oath to stop our current kingly administration from taking legislative power. Instead, we are subjected to the empty words and political gamesmanship from our House and our Senate, reduced to grovel before the president and beg him to stop stealing legislative power. The problem is, our Congress has never stood with manly firmness, but this kingly administration has dissolved their power through their own cowardice and forced them into compliance through their own negligence. “I will write law when the legislators refuse to write law; I will legislate where they refuse to regulate,” declaring our Congress irrelevant and impotent, and then, when they turn around and act like it has, they have, and then, they really are. We have a king who refuses to protect the people, the same grievance as in 1776: “He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.” (Declaration of Independence) Just trying to show you there is a cause to be fought for!

Robert Duff Smyrna