Simple Utah Mormon Politics

Ronald Reagan haters ascribe malice to nearly all of his actions during his eight years as President. That ascription is especially made for his supposed involvement in what came to be known as the Ira-Contra Arms for Hostages scandal. In reality, though, Reagan's biggest mistake was, in his attempt to make things right, to trust people who didn't deserve to be trusted.

I have a dilemma regarding Glenn Beck.  He's bombastic, and--as he admits--he's a rodeo clown.  But he's also very intelligent.  His latest book, although poorly named, is full of interesting truths and insights.  Many people hate Glenn Beck.  They challenge his personality and some of the causes that he (jokingly) advocates, but they seldom challenge his facts. Beck can be very uncivil.  But he speaks the truth.  Is that enough reason to keep paying attention to him?

If you didn't know that the man-made global warming theory was an elaborate hoax, there exists no question about that fact now.  With the uncovering of thousands of e-mails that identify the gyrations that supposed scientists went through to hide real data and to deceive the public, the days of faux scientists promulgating lies about man-made global warming are numbered.  Al Gore, the two-bit, filthy rich snake-oil salesman should be required to return his unearned Nobel Peace Prize, and he should be made to walk as a pariah about the earth until the end of his days.

The predominant belief among the Founding Fathers was that the General Welfare clause of the Constitution did not allow the federal government to perform any act or collect any amount of money for whatever it deemed to be the general welfare. That belief, though, was not unanimous among the Founders. However weak the case might be, nonetheless a case can be made, based on the beliefs of such Founders as Alexander Hamilton, that very broad powers are granted to the federal government when it comes to providing for the general welfare. This reality requires us to defend the "limited" view of General Welfare powers not just as a matter of Constitutional principle, because those who make the opposing case do so using the same Constitution and the words of other Founding Fathers. Those who make the opposite case see our "principle" as mere dogmatism. Our case is made much stronger, then, if we can defend the limited view of the General Welfare Clause from a pragma...

Ronald Reagan did some wonderful things as president.  But he was far from perfect.  Reagan presided over some of the worst moments in American history.  The worst thing about Ronald Reagan, however, was not anything Reagan himself did, but rather his distorted "legacy," created by those who wished to profit from his popularity.  This so-called legacy, embodied in the two-term presidency of George W. Bush, has given both Reagan's supporters and his detractors a far different idea as to who Ronald Reagan really was. They were very dissimilar.  Ronald Reagan was an imperfect statesman.  George W. Bush was a political freak.

Ezra Taft Benson saw it firsthand.  Ronald Reagan knew it was there.  Decades of Soviet Communism could  not quench it.  For what they saw, Reagan and Benson have been reviled.  Reviling does not, however, change the truth.  Through decades of the dark slavery of Soviet communism, the Russian people, along with their fellow Warsaw Pact slaves, illustrated that a firm belief in God cannot be suffocated. In the Fall of 1959, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, along with family and staff members, toured the Soviet Union.  From the moment he arrived, Secretary Benson requested to be able to visit any  Christian church in Moscow, all the while fearing that his KGB handlers would never allow such a thing to happen.

Everything has a law built into its nature.  Our ability to recognize and obey such law is the basis of Natural Law.  Good government ensures that man-made law adheres to natural law.  Government which makes unnatural law in order to benefit one class of citizens (usually the elite) will invariably create more unnatural law in an attempt to pretend that it is righting (or hiding) its previous wrongs. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States both satisfy the predicates of Natural Law.  Natural law realizes its limits and stops there.  The current United States government doesn't.  Natural law finds its equivalent in our founding documents.  Our current national government is natural law's antithesis.

The Constitution will "hang by a thread". It has been prophesied. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will play an instrumental part in saving the Constitution. That has also been foretold. But how will it be saved? Through provident living and civility.

The Constitution is very clear on how the United States must go about making commitments to other nations. Every such accord must be ratified by a two-thirds majority of the Senate in order to take effect. This, specifically, is called a treaty. In the last several decades, this requirement has been skirted more and more often. Now, nearly always, an "agreement" is used instead. Sometimes the agreement between the President and another country doesn't even get voted on in congress. Up until tonight, I had thought that the North American Free Trade Agreement was really a treaty, but that the acronym NAFTT just didn't have quite the right ring to it. The reality, however, is that NAFTA is a mere "agreement", which doesn't have the force of Constitutional validity. The 61 votes that NAFTA received in 1993 did not constitute enough votes for it to become a "treaty". Article VI of the Constitution says that This Constitution, and the Laws of th...

Alexander Hamilton at one point in his political career seemed to have held a very limited view of the federal government's powers, believing that such things as "agriculture and manufacture" were under the purview of state governments. Not long after taking such a stand, he advocated the federal government's role in funding such pursuits. Did Hamilton change his tune? It does not appear so. On the one hand, Hamilton seemed to be advocating that the federal government should have no legislative control over things for which no power had been granted to it, while on the other he seemed to believe that it was okay for congress to appropriate moneys to all of the states generally to fund such pursuits, because funding of such endeavors was within the parameters of the Constitution's General Welfare Clause. Just two days before Hamilton was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, he revealed who had written each of the Federalist Paper essays. That day, Hamilton appear...

It is absurd to imagine that the former colonists, who abhored British attempts to continually centralize governmental power over them, would in turn create a federal government that possessed the same abusive powers. Yet this is exactly what some opponents to the Constitution of the United States were fearful of. It was only after careful assurances that the government's powers were limited and that a Bill of Rights would be the first item of business for the new Congress that several of the largest states ratified the Constitution. Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York, some of the largest states in America at the time of the state constitutional ratifying conventions, came rather close to not ratifying the Constitution. They wanted assurances that the General Welfare Clause, as written, did not mean that the new federal government could raise moneys through taxation for essentially anything that the government happened at the time to deem as being for the general welfare. ...