Why Are We Being Taxed On Our Labor?

Political Resources. com | January 29 2007

The crime uncovered by Banister is summarized as follows.

As a fundamental starting point, it must be stipulated that the U.S. Constitution does not, and more importantly – can not – authorize Congress to impose a direct tax on human labor.

If a 1% tax on a person’s labor were to be held constitutional, a 100% tax on labor would also be constitutional, subject only to the whim of the political majority or the desire of government bureaucrats. In other words, the Constitution does not, and cannot, authorize Congress to use its limited taxing power to force the People to labor for the government.

In 1909, the meaning of the word “income” did not mean money received by a worker in direct exchange for that person’s human labor. It meant money derived from capital or labor or both, as, for example, money (profit) derived by Wal-Mart or Merrill Lynch from the labor of its workers. At the turn of the previous century, it was well understood that the legal term “income” did not mean the wages or salary earned by the worker for his own labor.

Today, due to the well-packaged web of lies that has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, most people today incorrectly believe “income” means not only money derived from someone else’s labor, but also money earned by workers in direct exchange for their own labor. 

In 1909, the U.S. Congress passed a proposed “income tax” Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the purpose of which was simply to clarify the fact that Congress had the power under the existing clauses of the Constitution to tax income derived from real estate, stocks, bonds and other forms of capital, without apportioning the tax among the taxpayers — that is, without requiring every taxpayer to pay the exact same amount.

So far, so good. There was nothing untoward about Congress proposing an Amendment to the Constitution for clarification purposes. 

The crime and the cover-up began in 1913 with actions taken by both the Executive and Legislative branches.   

In 1913, just thirty days before he was set to leave office, the U.S. Secretary of State, Philander Knox, declared by his certification that the proposed Amendment had been legally and properly ratified by 3/4ths of the state legislatures, despite the well documented fact that he had been informed by his solicitor general that the Amendment had not come close to being ratified.  The Congress adopted the Amendment as the 16^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  

Within months of the fraudulent declaration by Knox, Congress crafted and passed the Income Tax Act of 1913, which included a definition of “income,” that stretched the meaning of the legal term “income” well beyond the constitutional meaning and well beyond the documented intent of the framers of the Amendment, as recorded in every official and professional document of the era: the Congressional Record, congressional committee reports, law reviews, journals of political science, newspapers of record and so forth.  

With its statutory, unconstitutional definition of “income,” Congress improperly broadened the definition of “income” to include money received by a person in direct exchange for that person’s labor. In technical terms, Congress included a “non-apportioned, direct tax” on the salaries, wages and compensation of all American workers.

Even though the Act exempted from the tax those workers earning less than $4,000, the government soon began to receive so much money from the “income” tax that its revenue increased from about $380 million in 1914 to more than $3.7 billion by 1918. 

The Income Tax Act of 1913 also instituted withholding at the source and the tax return, Form 1040. 

With these features, the Income Tax Act of 1913 provided the government with a stream of revenue that enabled it to spend large amounts of money before it had it. The central government not only had much more money to spend, it could now do whatever it wanted to do, even if it did not have the money to do it.

At its heart, the Income Tax Act of 1913 enabled the government to pledge, as collateral, the labor of its citizens to secure its debt. The government could now guarantee the repayment of borrowed money by forcefully taking bread from the mouths of labor. Slavery has always been the ultimate form of lender security.

However, the still-standing Constitution prohibited a tax on labor. The Income Tax Act of 1913 was soon tested in Court. In 1916, the Supreme Court brought the unconstitutional labor tax to a screeching halt.

The Supreme Court ruled in Brushaber v. Union Pacific, 240 U.S.1 (and the cases bundled with it, including Stanton v Baltic Mining Co., 240 U.S. 103), that wages are not income within the meaning of the income tax Amendment to the Constitution, or any other provision of the Constitution.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Brushaber soundly rejected the government’s self-interested interpretation of the definition of “income” within the meaning of the Constitution, and specifically limited “to whom” and “where” the income tax could apply.

The Brushaber court explicitly concluded that the 16th Amendment gave Congress no new powers of taxation, meaning that direct taxes on wages, salaries and compensation received by workers in direct exchange for their labor fell outside of the meaning of the 16^th Amendment, and still must satisfy the fundamental requirement of apportionment as a direct tax, if, indeed, the government could overcome the slavery issue.

The Brushaber decision forced Congress to consider changing the statutory definition of “income,” to bring it in line with the Constitution.

However, true to form and consistent with the nature of governmental power, the government was loathe to relinquish the spoils and booty that flowed from its direct tax on labor, and the power and control that came with the tax (and its enforcement mechanisms).

The crime continued in the halls of Congress and in the White House with the adoption of the Income Tax Act of 1916 (amended in 1917).  Although the 1916 Act ended withholding of wages, salaries and compensation, and ordered the money that had been withheld from workers to be returned to those workers, and the Treasury Secretary issued Treasury Directive 2635, and saw to it that the money withheld was returned, the 1916 Act failed to define the legal term “income.”

While the act carried over the definition of “income” from the 1913 Act, Congress specifically qualified in Section 25 of the Act that the “income” subject to the 1913 Act was not the same “income” to be taxed under the 1916 Act. No further explanation was provided in the Act.

In other words, after the Supreme Court’s explicit ruling in Brushaber, the government adopted a revised tax law that said, in effect, “the meaning of the word ‘income’ has changed, but we are not going to tell you how.”

Confused or ignorant of the law, and too patriotic and engaged with World War I to question their government, workers toiling above the $4,000 exemption level kept sending in their Form 1040’s and paying a tax on money earned by them in direct exchange for their own labor. As the years went on, the tax rates went up, the exemptions dropped, and more Americans succumbed to the popular belief that the law required them to file and pay.

During the great Depression, the crime deepened.

While the more wealthy workers were unwittingly continuing to pay a tax on money earned in direct exchange for their labor, not just on their passive income, Congress and the President, again acted without constitutional authority, and in defiance of the now numerous (and consistent) rulings of the United States Supreme Court (the latest ruling coming in 1920 in Eisner v Macomber, 252 U.S. 189).

In 1933 the government adopted a law forcing all workers to pay an “income” tax by another name, on money earned in direct exchange for their own labor. The new labor tax was called a “Social Security” tax. Along with this new unconstitutional labor tax, withholding was re-instituted in America.

During World War II, the crime deepened further.

Once again, in defiance of the Constitution and the rulings of the Supreme Court, the Congress and the President instituted still another labor tax on all Americans, not just the wealthy, calling it a, “Victory Tax.” Along with the “Victory Tax” came withholding of the “Victory Tax” at the source.

Drunk with power, taking advantage of the People during times of strife, the government was “piling on” one direct labor tax after another, calling them “income” taxes, without ever statutorily defining the term “income.” The “Victory Tax” was a tax on the money people earned in direct exchange for their own labor. The People were told that “Victory Tax” would expire with the conclusion of the War. It didn’t. Neither did withholding. The Victory Tax continued unabated, becoming the Federal Income Tax of today.

In 1965, the crime deepened even further.

Once again, in defiance of the Constitution and the rulings of the Supreme Court, the Congress and the President piled on yet another direct tax on the labor of all working men and women, calling it a “Medicare Tax.” Along with the “Medicare Tax” came withholding of the “Medicare Tax” at the source.

The Bottom Line

Since 1916, Congress and the Executive, with the cooperation of the lesser courts, have been relentlessly tightening the yoke of slavery on all Americans as they have imposed, and enforced an increasing number of unconstitutional direct taxes on the salaries, wages and compensation.

Beyond this, our institutions of government have, by duplicity, threat and force,  coerced the businesses of America into collecting these labor taxes by withholding them at the source – i.e., from the paychecks of American workers.

As the final interpreter of the Constitution, we, the People believe the Supreme Court got it right – a tax on labor – regardless of its label or beneficent intent — is a “slave tax,” and is a violation of not only fundamental, human Rights, it is patently unconstitutional.

Most Americans, covered with a blanket of propaganda, believe they are free as they pledge allegiance to their country, a Republic, but follow the dictates of a government run by elected and appointed officials whose first allegiance is to their Party.

Make no mistake: money earned in direct exchange for labor is being seized by the government, without rightful authority, from the workers of America by force — that is, by violence — to be distributed, with its opportunities for profit, influence and corruption among our elected and appointed public officials — political henchmen and party workers, and those that seek to keep them in office for their own benefit.

Bush OKs Grants To Preserve Japanese Consentration Camps In U.S… Are They For Us?

The Japan Times | December 2006

    U.S. President George W. Bush signed into law a $ 38 million grant program to preserve notorious internment camps where Japanese-Americans were kept behind barbed wire during World War II.

The money will be administered by the National Park Service to restore and pay for research at 10 camps. The objective of the law is to help preserve the camps as reminders of how the United States turned on some of its citizens in a time of fear.

The camps housed more than 120,000 Japanese-American U.S. citizens and residents under an executive order signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942, when the country still was in shock over the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

At the time, there were fears that Japanese-Americans were loyal to Japan, and Roosevelt’s order prohibited such people from living on the West Coast in a position possibly to help an invasion force.

Thousands of families in California and parts of Washington state, Oregon and Arizona were pushed from their homes and into camps surrounded by armed guards. The sites named in the legislation are in California, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Idaho.

The last of the camps closed in 1946, and President Ronald Reagan signed a presidential apology to Japanese-Americans in 1988.

Cosponsors of the bill included the two current members of Congress who spent time in the camps as children: Democratic Reps. Mike Honda and Doris Matsui of California. Matsui was born in the Poston camp in Arizona.

The National Park Service already operates facilities at two of the 10 camps: the Manzanar National Historic Site in California and the Minidoka Internment National Monument in Idaho.

U.S. Military Drafted Plans to Terrorize U.S. Cities to Provoke War With Cuba

ABC News | David Ruppe |Novemeber 7 2001

N E W  Y O R K, May 1 — In the early 1960s, America’s top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba’s then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

America’s top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” and, “casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.”

Details of the plans are described in Body of Secrets (Doubleday), a new book by investigative reporter James Bamford about the history of America’s largest spy agency, the National Security Agency. However, the plans were not connected to the agency, he notes.

The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.

“These were Joint Chiefs of Staff documents. The reason these were held secret for so long is the Joint Chiefs never wanted to give these up because they were so embarrassing,” Bamford told ABCNEWS.com.

“The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will, and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants.”

Gunning for War

The documents show “the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government,” writes Bamford.

The Joint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn during the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war with Cuba, the documents show.

Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, they wrote, “the objective is to provide irrevocable proof … that the fault lies with the Communists et all Cuba [sic].”

The plans were motivated by an intense desire among senior military leaders to depose Castro, who seized power in 1959 to become the first communist leader in the Western Hemisphere — only 90 miles from U.S. shores.

The earlier CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles had been a disastrous failure, in which the military was not allowed to provide firepower.The military leaders now wanted a shot at it.

“The whole thing was so bizarre,” says Bamford, noting public and international support would be needed for an invasion, but apparently neither the American public, nor the Cuban public, wanted to see U.S. troops deployed to drive out Castro.

Reflecting this, the U.S. plan called for establishing prolonged military — not democratic — control over the island nation after the invasion.

“That’s what we’re supposed to be freeing them from,” Bamford says. “The only way we would have succeeded is by doing exactly what the Russians were doing all over the world, by imposing a government by tyranny, basically what we were accusing Castro himself of doing.”

‘Over the Edge’

The Joint Chiefs at the time were headed by Eisenhower appointee Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, who, with the signed plans in hand made a pitch to McNamara on March 13, 1962, recommending Operation Northwoods be run by the military.

Whether the Joint Chiefs’ plans were rejected by McNamara in the meeting is not clear. But three days later, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer directly there was virtually no possibility of ever using overt force to take Cuba, Bamford reports. Within months, Lemnitzer would be denied another term as chairman and transferred to another job.

The secret plans came at a time when there was distrust in the military leadership about their civilian leadership, with leaders in the Kennedy administration viewed as too liberal, insufficiently experienced and soft on communism. At the same time, however, there real were concerns in American society about their military overstepping its bounds.

There were reports U.S. military leaders had encouraged their subordinates to vote conservative during the election.

And at least two popular books were published focusing on a right-wing military leadership pushing the limits against government policy of the day. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee published its own report on right-wing extremism in the military, warning a “considerable danger” in the “education and propaganda activities of military personnel” had been uncovered. The committee even called for an examination of any ties between Lemnitzer and right-wing groups. But Congress didn’t get wind of Northwoods, says Bamford.

“Although no one in Congress could have known at the time,” he writes, “Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge.”

Even after Lemnitzer was gone, he writes, the Joint Chiefs continued to plan “pretext” operations at least through 1963.

One idea was to create a war between Cuba and another Latin American country so that the United States could intervene. Another was to pay someone in the Castro government to attack U.S. forces at the Guantanamo naval base — an act, which Bamford notes, would have amounted to treason. And another was to fly low level U-2 flights over Cuba, with the intention of having one shot down as a pretext for a war.

“There really was a worry at the time about the military going off crazy and they did, but they never succeeded, but it wasn’t for lack of trying,” he says.

After 40 Years

Ironically, the documents came to light, says Bamford, in part because of the 1992 Oliver Stone film JFK, which examined the possibility of a conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy.

As public interest in the assassination swelled after JFK’s release, Congress passed a law designed to increase the public’s access to government records related to the assassination.

The author says a friend on the board tipped him off to the documents.

Afraid of a congressional investigation, Lemnitzer had ordered all Joint Chiefs documents related to the Bay of Pigs destroyed, says Bamford. But somehow, these remained.

“The scary thing is none of this stuff comes out until 40 years after,” says Bamford.  

Is U.S. Hyping The Terror Threat In Africa?

Reuters | Mark Trevelyan | November 16 2006

 

BAMAKO (Reuters) – The question made the Malian army officer laugh out loud.

After four years of counter-terrorism training from the U.S. military to tackle what Washington sees as a militant Islamist threat, did this West African nation feel part of the global war on terror?

“No, not at all,” came back the reply.

So what about the U.S. argument that al Qaeda or its offshoots could find sanctuaries in countries like Mali, just as Osama bin Laden took refuge in Sudan and Afghanistan in the 1990s?

“No, no, I don’t believe this, no.”

It was a rare departure from the official U.S. line — loyally supported by other Malian commanders in interviews this week — that Mali and its neighbors on the fringe of the Sahara desert risk becoming destabilized by militant Islamists.

A senior U.S. military official said Washington is set to channel some $600 million over the next five to seven years into the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership, a program to boost security ties with nine countries: Mali, Chad, Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Niger, Senegal, Nigeria and Tunisia.

“Broad expanses of marginally governed areas can become havens for terrorists and criminals and have become … attractive to terrorist groups increasingly denied sanctuaries in Afghanistan and the Middle East,” Gen. James Jones, head of United States European Command (EUCOM), said earlier this year.   Continued…

FOX NEWS INTERNAL MEMO: “Be On The Lookout For Any Statements From The Iraqi Insurgents…Thrilled At The Prospect Of A Dem Controlled Congress”…

The Huffington Post | November 15 2006

Huffington Post has obtained an internal Fox News memo written by the network’s Vice President of news. The memo details Fox’s game plan the day Democrats won control of both the Senate and the House.

Student Shot With Taser By UCPD Officers

The Daily Bruin | November 16 2006

UCPD officers shot a student several times with a Taser inside the Powell Library CLICC computer lab late Tuesday night before taking him into custody.

No university police officers were available to comment further about the incident as of 3 a.m. Wednesday, and no Community Service Officers who were on duty at the time could be reached.

At around 11:30 p.m., CSOs asked a male student using a computer in the back of the room to leave when he was unable to produce a BruinCard during a random check. The student did not exit the building immediately.

The CSOs left, returning minutes later, and police officers arrived to escort the student out. By this time the student had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack when an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, at which point the student told the officer to let him go. A second officer then approached the student as well.

The student began to yell “get off me,” repeating himself several times.

It was at this point that the officers shot the student with a Taser for the first time, causing him to fall to the floor and cry out in pain. The student also told the officers he had a medical condition.

UCPD officers confirmed that the man involved in the incident was a student, but did not give a name or any additional information about his identity.

Video shot from a student’s camera phone captured the student yelling, “Here’s your Patriot Act, here’s your fucking abuse of power,” while he struggled with the officers.

As the student was screaming, UCPD officers repeatedly told him to stand up and said “stop fighting us.” The student did not stand up as the officers requested and they shot him with the Taser at least once more.

“It was the most disgusting and vile act I had ever seen in my life,” said David Remesnitsky, a 2006 UCLA alumnus who witnessed the incident.

As the student and the officers were struggling, bystanders repeatedly asked the police officers to stop, and at one point officers told the gathered crowd to stand back and threatened to use a Taser on anyone who got too close.

Laila Gordy, a fourth-year economics student who was present in the library during the incident, said police officers threatened to shoot her with a Taser when she asked an officer for his name and his badge number.

Gordy was visibly upset by the incident and said other students were also disturbed.

“It’s a shock that something like this can happen at UCLA,” she said. “It was unnecessary what they did.”

Immediately after the incident, several students began to contact local news outlets, informing them of the incident, and Remesnitsky wrote an e-mail to Interim Chancellor Norman Abrams.

Saginaw Man Tasered At City Council Meeting

ABC12.com | Terry Camp | Noverber 7 2006

SAGINAW (WJRT) – (11/07/06)–Saginaw’s City Council meeting featured a shocking incident Monday night. A Saginaw Valley State University student was TASERed after he became unruly after being asked to take off his baseball cap.

There is a new rule at Saginaw City Council meetings. Men are required to take their hats off. Evidently, they are pretty serious about this new rule.

The man was wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers hat. Officer Doug Stacer of the Saginaw Police Department asked him to remove the hat. The man raised his voice and did not remove the hat.

As the officer tried to grab the hat and then tried to grab the man, the man with the hat tried to kick Saginaw Police Chief Gerald Cliff, who was coming to help out.

At that point, Stacer TASERed the man, which sends 50,000 volts into a person’s body. Cliff and Stacer got help from Saginaw County Sheriff Charles Brown hauling the man off to jail.

A few people stood up and watched the event; the meeting resumed a short time later.

The man faces possible charges of alarming and harassing conduct — a misdemeanor — and assaulting a police officer. That’s a felony. He was not arraigned Tuesday.

They Rule

They Rule

They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 500 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations.

A few companies control much of the economy and oligopolies exert control in nearly every sector of the economy. The people who head up these companies swap on and off the boards from one company to another, and in and out of government committees and positions. These people run the most powerful institutions on the planet, and we have almost no say in who they are. This is not a conspiracy. They are proud to rule. And yet these connections of power are not always visible to the public eye.

Karl Marx once called this ruling class a ‘band of hostile brothers.’ They stand against each other in the competitve struggle for the continued accumulation of their capital, but they stand together as a family supporting their interests in perpetuating the profit system as whole. Protecting this system can require the cover of a ‘legitimate’ force – and this is the role that is played by the state. An understanding of this system can not be gleaned from looking at the inter-personal relations of this class alone, but rather how they stand in relation to other classes in society. Hopefully They Rule will raise larger questions about the structure of our society and in whose benefit it is run.

Coalition Provisional Authority: What Happened To Iraq’s Money?

The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was established as a transitional government following the invasion of Iraq by the United States, United Kingdom and the other members of the multinational coalition which was formed to oust the government of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Citing UN Security Council Resolution 1483 (2003), and the laws of war, the CPA vested itself with executive, legislative, and judicialauthority over the Iraqi government from the period of the CPA’s inception on April 21, 2003, until its dissolution on June 28, 2004.

The CPA was also responsible for administering the Development Fund for Iraq during the year following the invasion. This fund superseded the earlier UN oil-for-food program, and provided funding for: Iraq’s wheat purchase program, the currency exchange program, the electricity and oil infrastructure programs, equipment for Iraq’s security forces, Iraqi civil service salaries, and the operations of the various government ministries.

This is one of the main reasons why the invasion of this country has been such of a failure.  The most basic needs of the Iraqi people were never met.  The funds to provide the Iraqi people with good clean hospitals, schools, electric, sewage etc. has been carelessly wasted.  Many of us in the US wonder why they hate us so much; we wonder why Iraq has become a breeding ground for “terrorist”.  We had the ability to show these people how much better things could be without having Saddam in power, but we have created a more horrible picture.  We are the cause of the Iraqi resistance.  We invaded and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi people, and swindled away the billions of dollars that should have been used to provide resources for the people.  What happened to Iraq’s money?

The Death Of Our Nations Constitution

CBS News | Oct 24 2006

  Suddenly, the most sacred text in America is under attack from all sides. The Constitution was never meant to be a “suicide pact,” says eminent judge and author Richard Posner. It’s “undemocratic,” says University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson. In this time of terror we need a new one — an “emergency Constitution” — says Yale Law School guru Bruce Ackerman. And Richard Labunski, in his fine and timely book about James Madison, pretty much destroys the myth that the Founding Fathers were motivated solely by noble impulses when they crafted the new government’s guiding light.

These unsettling theses are a measured distance from the roiling debate in legal circles these days over the Constitution’s “original intent” and whether it alone should guide constitutional interpretation. That debate is over how the document should be construed by modern jurists. The debate entered into by the literary firm of Posner, Levinson, Ackerman and Labunski is all about whether and to what extent the document itself deserves the legal and political reverence it receives today. During a time of terror, when writers write lofty words about the need for a strong Constitution, the bright men identified above are talking about taking it apart.

7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard A. Posner, a Reagan appointee, argues in “Not a Suicide Pact: the Constitution in a Time of National Emergency” (Oxford 2006) that in a terrorism-induced choice between individual freedoms and collective security, the Constitution was never intended to side with the first at the expense of the second. Maybe it’s Judge Posner’s bitter reaction to what he perceives as judicial overreaching in constitutional decisions. Or maybe it’s his professed disdain for “civil libertarians” whom, he says “are not always careful about history.” Whatever the case, Judge Posner is ready to make malleable the protections contained in the Constitution; he’s ready to have bedrock individual rights and protections ebb and flow along a sliding scale depending upon the scope of the crisis.

But at least the good judge is not calling our sacred text “undemocratic,” which is as far as Professor Levinson is willing to go. In his new book, “Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong” (Oxford 2006), Levinson argues that it’s time for us all to convene another constitutional convention (this time, with air conditioning) to undertake wholesale changes to what he says is an unworkable Constitution. “If I am correct,” Levinson writes, “that the Constitution is both insufficiently democratic in a country that professes to believe in democracy, and (emphasis added) significantly dysfunctional, in terms of the quality of government that we receive, then it follows that we should no longer express our blind devotion to it.” Them’s fighting words!

Professor Ackerman, the Yalie, also doesn’t want to be “blindly devoted” to the document we all are taught in public school to be blindly devoted to. All he argues for, in his new book “Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism” (Yale 2006), is that we come up with an “emergency” Constitution (really a series of new constitutional provisions) that will help guide us when the next terrorism attack surely comes. We need a new baseline law, Ackerman writes, “that allows for effective short-term measures that will do everything plausible to stop a second strike — but which firmly draws the line against permanent restrictions.” Our existing Constitution isn’t good enough for Ackerman because it is so vulnerable to cynical manipulation by our politicians and to neglect by average Americans.

Which brings me to the best book of them all — and the only one of the four worth remembering — and that is Labunski’s unheralded “James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights” (Oxford 2006). The University of Kentucky journalism professor offers in mind-numbing detail Madison’s efforts first to prevent a bill of rights from being incorporated into the text of the Constitution, and then his real politic realization that the Constitution itself only would be accepted by his fellow Founders if in the end it did include a bill of particularized rights and freedoms. To absorb the Madison book is to understand that the Constitution is neither the Ark of the Covenant (as Thomas Jefferson once famously said) nor a mere legal guidepost along the American way that ought to be dispensed with in difficult times.

It is instead, as Labunski laboriously points out, a document conceived and drafted by rich white men during the political moment of their lives; a document brilliant mostly for its ambiguities and its ability (thanks to generations of judges as polished and as responsible for our rule of law as any of Madison’s gang) to foresee the potential, indeed, the destiny, of a changed and changing world. The Constitution is not an undemocratic document — indeed, it is as schizophrenically and unsatisfactorily democratic as the rebels were then and as we are now. It does not need to be replaced, even temporarily, by an “emergency” document that would leave to far lesser men (and women) the task that Madison achieved. And it certainly deserves better than to be manipulated, by zealous and unchecked executive branch actors, in the name of “national security.”

I blast modern-day politicians all the time for lazily enacting vague and ambiguous legislation — essentially pawning off the most difficult policy choices upon judges, who then are criticized for making the policy choices that our legislators were supposed to make in the first place. But Madison and Company purposely, and I think with great forethought, pushed through an often vague and ambiguous Constitution and then a Bill of Rights not just because it was the best they could do given the political conflicts of the era but also because they had a certain faith that those of us living in future generations would manage the document with wisdom and care.

Their faith has been rewarded many times before, in eras darker than our own. It is important for esteemed scholars to try to scale mountains, even ones as high and mighty as the Constitution itself. And clearly the document isn’t nearly as perfect or as ideal as we all have been taught to think it is. But it usually works. And if we were to suddenly discard it or its core principles now, literally under the gun, we’d be conceding a huge battle in the war against the terrorists. Now is not the time to attack the Constitution. Now is the time to defend it.

By Andreew Cohen