Thomas Adair Rossman wrote the following article regarding John Darash and the National Liberty Alliance's proposal to form Common Law Juries throughout the United States. Tom Rossman is an emerging global thought leader in improving political and economic decision making. He is the author of The Synthesis Revolution: New Thinking for a New Era of Prosperity, released in November 2012 by Eudaimonia Publishing and currently serves as Vice-Chair of the Libertarian Party of Queens County:
"If I were to tell you that a God-fearing, patriotic American
was proposing the single greatest exercise in social engineering since
Maoist-Leninist-Marxism became the ruling dogma of China in 1949, your initial
instincts would be opposed to such a movement. However, if I wrapped the message in the seemingly beneficial cloak
of ‘liberty’, appeals to amorphous
natural law, individual sovereignty, and threw in some ‘Great Awakening’
language, topped off with a biting critique of the current U.S. political system, you might be
more amenable to considering it. No?
The National Liberty Alliance strikes me as a well-meaning
group of people who do not fully grasp the last three and a half centuries of
political history. I am in complete
agreement that our current system of government is in need of serious and deep
reform, however, we have a mechanism in place to effect such change that has
developed and adapted over the past several centuries called the ballot box and
constitutional amendment. It is far from
perfect, but it has provided the foundation for the enormous success of the United States .
The National Liberty Alliance Mission Statement claims that, “To take
political power is to control our elected representatives, by bringing them
into obedience through fear of the people.” For the last 230 years, we have done exactly that through electing
representatives and kicking them out when they failed in their duties. After
all, what puts fear in the heart of a politician more than being voted out of
office? We can all agree that is a
flawed system, but next to the radical tectonic shift the National Liberty Alliance is
proposing, it has the benefit of hundreds of years of testing and
experiment. Their Mission Statement
says: “To take judicial
power is to control our courts by understanding jurisdiction and bringing into
subjection all government officers and officials using common law courts by
opening courts of record and executing "people" authority, it's that
simple!” To replace our entire
state legal system with an alternate system controlled by the National Liberty Alliance,
based on the exceedingly vague “people authority” is to replace something that
is known, flawed, but proven by something that is completely unknown and
unproven. This smacks of Rousseau and
Robespierre in the mission to “force men to be free”.
What they are advocating is a coup! A group of citizens who share the same
subjective beliefs they do, taking control from officials elected by the people
who do not. Their followers, according
to the website, “first
seek the blessings from the "GOVERNOR
OF THE UNIVERSE" and build our endeavor upon Him and
His principles (1) HONOR, (2) JUSTICE, and (3) MERCY. This is the only sure foundation, any other
will succumb to tyrants.” What if a
citizen doesn’t believe in a ‘governor of the Universe’ or has a different
interpretation of the terms honor, justice and mercy? Technically, if these individuals are not
willing to take the National Liberty Alliance’s theocratic oath, then they would not
qualify to take part in this new and improved world order and do not constitute
part of the ‘people authority’.
Their
ideas further collapse in on themselves when one begins to unwind the logistics
of their movement. They claim that,
“Only the People can stand up and defend the Constitution because the
Constitution cannot defend itself, and bureaucrats will never do it.” But at the same time, in the Common Law jury
system, “Each county should eventually find four people (administrators) who
will work full time (paid positions) to administrate and orient the
jurist.” So a set of state-paid
administrators who are essentially “bureaucrats” who will never defend the
constitution, according to their own declaration, will now be in charge of the
county grand juries across the country. Keep in mind that even though the Alliance
claims all of this is universally self-evident, completely obvious, and the
true law of the land, no legal scholar or Constitutional thinker of any note
has openly advocated for such an alternate system.
But, aside from the contradictions and the complete lack of
basis in anything we know or have experienced in the Modern era, the most
flawed aspect of their thinking is their atavistic interpretation of ‘individual sovereignty’. This cornerstone of modern democracy has been
widely debated for centuries and if the National Liberty Alliance has their way, the
last 350 years of debate on this issue would be wiped away in one fell
swoop.
It was in the mid-17th century, in the midst of
intense religious wars in England
and across Europe , that Thomas Hobbes first
effectively made the case that ultimate sovereignty lay with the
individual. Prior to that, the dominate
form of “natural law” in Europe , held that
Kings and the Church were supreme, not individuals. This is why Hobbes’ Leviathan was so revolutionary in inverting the power structure to
make the government the servant of the people. At the same time, Hobbes believed that without the strong rule of an
absolute monarch, day-to-day life would be so chaotic that it would return to
the ‘state of nature’ in which conditions were “continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of
man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Thankfully,
the advancement of political ideas didn’t end with Hobbes and John Locke picked
up the torch of liberty with a more positive mission. It was Locke, in providing the ideas behind
the Glorious Revolution in England, a model for the American Revolution a
century later, who asserted it was not just a right, but an obligation for
individuals to work together to improve the way that they were governed. Since that time, the Anglo-American political
tradition has been to find the best possible way to govern ourselves in the most
effective manner available. Granted, just as many of the men who contributed to
this development, often flawed in execution, but were noble in intention.
You
can’t have your cake and eat it too which is why the preamble of the
Constitution sets out the recognition that, “In Order to form a more perfect Union.”
we must work out our differences through an electoral system with checks and
balances, division of powers through the branches of government and the freedom
of choice of the individual citizen/voter. For example, before the Constitution was even ratified, it had already
been widely agreed that ten new amendments, the Bill of Rights, would be
added.
I suppose if I believed as John Darash, one of the leaders
of the National Liberty Alliance, does, that the United States was on the edge of
imminent demise, that all diseases can be cured through natural homeopathic remedies, and that the world is controlled by
a few, select wealthy families, than I would be more pre-disposed to a radical
re-writing of our entire social contract. However, since the leaders of this radical movement can offer no evidence of such things, and appeal purely to a
vague assumption that all of these assertions are “proven facts”, I have no
choice but to stand with John Locke, the Framers of the Constitution and most
of the other Founding Fathers in asserting that the case has not been made for
such a revolutionary proposed course of action.
We must keep in mind that one of the reasons the American
Revolution was such a success and the French Revolution a dismal failure, was
that Americans had been largely ruling themselves for more than a century when
the brave Sons of Liberty began to push for the formalization of
self-rule. In fact, it was 1619 when the
first elected body in America began the long journey of collecting the
experiences to effective self-rule, as a practical matter of survival, not an
abstract one of ‘rights’. To push for
such a radical departure from the system the Framers established and the
changes and adaptations that have evolved to that system over time, is to repeat
the mistake of the radicals of the French Revolution, the Communist revolutions
of the 20th century and to make a mockery of one of the core values
that the Framers and even the National Liberty Alliance claims to espouse, that of real
world experience and change through adaptation and adjustment over time. That is actually one of the core principles
of Common Law.
The bottom-line is that the National Liberty Alliance is very far
from making a cogent argument that their Common Law Jury system, animated by
the appeal to abstract and non-universal principles would even work, let alone
be superior to our current system. That
still leaves us with the pressing need to reform our current political system,
so let the debate continue, unabated."
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