By: Paul Nally
The query has been posed, “Which Liberty may you yield and still claim to be free?”
The Second Amendment is an archaic hold-over from a time when ideas such as security and justice necessitated its use. Today it is useless as a means to such ends. Try using it to enforce an individual’s, or his family’s, security from an oppressive government agent or to enforce your, or your neighbor’s, right to speak and be heard. Immediately you’re labeled a terrorist. Then all your neighbors think you a fool and a criminal.
Any threat to that right, though, does serve to divert the attention of most voters away from other, more devastatingly real, and evil, deprivations. The reason for this is simple. This particular threat to this particular right is successful in that it relies upon two obvious shortcomings of man (the common herd, the peasant, the peons, as most all politician view their constituents, even those with PhDs) … their indifference to their ignorance and their irrational passions.
Corruption in any government can only exist through the violation of a criminal statute. If that violation is immediately brought to the attention of “those vested with the power of government” for a redress of that grievance, how could corruption perpetuate itself, how could it grow? It could not. All that would be required to stop corruption in its tracks would be for one person to exercise his right to be heard and his right to speech in the form of his testimony and his evidence to those empowered to order a trial of the accused.
The common notion for prosecuting crime is to report it to the sheriff or the police, but there are other methods still available. For example; you could tell your story to a judge who could issue a warrant, or you could tell a district attorney who could launch an investigation possibly leading to a warrant and a trial. But those are minor routes to the ending of corruption. There is one greater, however, which has been with us from the Common Law stretching back to at least 1368 in the reign of Edward III.
Though we, as ordinary citizens, tend to keep a mental image of our local elected officials as fine upstanding people who have dedicated themselves as public servants, the reality is, and both present circumstances and history teach us, that there are occasions when that is not the case. Sadly, if left untreated, corruption grows to be so pervasive that even an otherwise good and well-intentioned person must yield or suffer the consequences. The next thing you know, you have corrupt county executives, law enforcement officers, district attorneys, and judges. Then where do you go to end the corruption … The Second Amendment?? After all, that was tried in Athens, Tennessee back in 1946. Though initially successful, it just didn’t have a lasting effect.
There is, however, yet another way, and as a matter of constitutional and statutory law it supposedly still exists. When one studies the law, the history and evolution of the Common Law, one soon realizes that our founding fathers had the wisdom to leave the ultimate power of government in the hands of the people. They adopted it from the Common Law, and made it a part of the Supreme Law of the Land, and it may rightly be termed The Fourth Branch of Government. Virtually every Supreme Court of every State has acknowledged that Branch as the “Conscience of the Community”
In performing the duties of this Fourth Branch, that power and its exercise is never in the same hands all the time. Every citizen is subject, absent legal excuse, to service therein for a period of time set by law which varies among the jurisdictions. That Fourth Branch, though not addressed in a separate Article of a Constitution, is referenced in virtually every other Article or is made applicable to them, its duties made plain in both Constitutions and the Statutes.
But, what most citizens don’t know, even some practitioners of the legal profession, is that this Fourth Branch, in Georgia and 3 other States, is acknowledged in those Constitutions, as having a power so great that tyrants the world over writhe in envy that they do not possess it. The depth, the breadth, the sheer magnitude of this power strikes fear in every office holder in every other branch of government, at least, in those who understand that power.
That is the power “to judge the law” in criminal matters, not just the facts!
Imagine for a moment that the language of a law passed by Congress creates a requirement that every citizen pay a tax for which not all citizens receive a benefit (Affordable Health Care seems to be one recent example). In such a case, that “law” would create an unlawful taking in violation of Georgia’s Theft by Taking statute, O.C.G.A. 16-8-2. Since Congress has no authority in the Supreme Law of the Land to take any property without just compensation, they would have a problem. If a local grand jury in Georgia should hold that the language of such a law was an instrument of plunder, and therefore a violation of the lawful powers of Congress, that Grand Jury could notify the President and/or the Speaker of the house, and the Justices of the Supreme Court, that if that law were not repealed and all monies returned, that Grand Jury would issue a special presentment indicting every politician who voted it into law, signed it into law, or subverted the laws of practice and procedures in an attempt to give such a law the appearance of propriety and bind them all over for trial in a Georgia Court on a charge of Felony Theft!
If a Grand Jury in this State should have evidence derived from their own inquiry or a case presented to them alleging acts of corruption on the part of any elected official (President or Governor, State or Federal Legislator, State or Federal Supreme Court Judge) and that official should claim an immunity under the law, that Grand Jury has the power to invalidate that law of immunity and proceed to inquisition and indictment through a special presentment if the facts permit a finding of probable cause. And, in Georgia, no court has the authority to rule otherwise. Only a Grand Jury and a criminal trial jury have the power to “judge the law”!!! Any court judge attempting to overturn that power would immediately face a presentment and indictment to trial, and would probably go to jail for such an attempt. Any wonder that a fully informed Grand Jury is such a feared body in this Republic?? In the proper performance of their sworn duties, they answer to none, and all, without exception, answer to them.
United States v. Williams, 504 U.S. 36, 47, 112 S.Ct. 1735, 118 L.Ed.2d 352 (1992), “… the grand jury is an institution separate from the courts, over whose functioning the courts do not preside, we think it clear that, as a general matter at least, no such “supervisory” judicial authority exists, …” … “[R]ooted in long centuries of Anglo-American history,” Hannah v. Larche, 363 U. S. 420, 490 (1960) (Frankfurter, J., concurring in result), the grand jury is mentioned in the Bill of Rights, but not in the body of the Constitution. It has not been textually assigned, therefore, to any of the branches described in the first three Articles. It “`is a constitutional fixture in its own right.’ “United States v. Chanen, 549 F. 2d 1306, 1312 (CA9) (quoting Nixon v. Sirica, 159 U. S. App. D. C. 58, 70, n. 54, 487 F. 2d 700, 712, n. 54 (1973)), cert. denied, 434 U. S. 825 (1977). In fact the whole theory of its function is that it belongs to no branch of the institutional Government, serving as a kind of buffer or referee between the Government and the people.
And, with the case of In Re: Lester, 77 GA 143 on page 148 we read that every citizen has the authority to stand in the place of a State’s prosecutor. “It is the right of any citizen or any individual of lawful age to come forward and prosecute for offenses against the state, or when he does not wish to become the prosecutor, he may give information of the fact to the grand jury, or any member of the body, and in either case, it will become their duty to investigate the matter thus communicated to them, or made known to one of them, whose obligation it would be to lay his information before that body.”My God, how wonderful thy Works!
How awesome the power left in the hands of the peasants!!! With the magnitude of that power, coupled with their oath of office to “diligently inquire and true presentment make of all matters touching upon their present service”, what use has any free people for a Second Amendment??
Because of a Grand Jury’s power to judge the law and its absolute independence from control by a District Attorney and a Judge and its power to present anyone who obstructs its inquisitorial power in the proper performance of its duties, there is no force in any of the other Branches which might overcome or obstruct their inquiry and presentment rendered in compliance with their oath of office.
Sadly, though, the other branches have seen to it, and most effectively, that this generation has been educated to the maximum level of acceptable ignorance, and because of it, present day Grand Jurors are dumber than dirt as to the power they possess and the bastion of Liberty that they are. They willingly allow judges and district attorneys to lie to them, to treat them as mushrooms, keeping them in the dark and feeding them manure; doing only what they are told and taking no initiative. If a citizen seeks to inform the Grand Jury in this State, that citizen is set upon by the corrupt judges, district attorneys and sheriffs; and all of this proving again for history that the people are plainly to damnably ignorant or just plain cowardly to govern themselves, that they are willingly giving their lives over to government control from cradle to grave, that they are sheep to be shorn and slaughtered at the whelm of any willing to satiate their desires fueled by avarice.
And, so it goes into history, another lesson to follow the democracy of Athens and the republic of the Romans; and now the United States. We have squandered our birthright given by God, our gift of insuring freedom from the enemies within.
To what fate have we consigned our progeny? It looks like the Second Amendment, or perpetual slavery, even if we are kept for a time in gilded cages!
This 4th of July shall be no time to celebrate that which we have yielded for a want of the courage to possess.
And corrupt Presidents, legislators, commissioners, judges, sheriffs, and district attorneys, our Constitutional inferiors, simply smile.