A new survey released by Gallup this week may have come as a surprise to some but really oughtn’t shock anybody. Gallup asked respondents to rank their greatest concerns. Inflation didn’t top the list. Immigration didn’t top the list. As usual, climate change didn’t crack the top ten. What do Americans cite as the most important problem? Their own government.
Laughably, the article Gallup posted on its website announcing the poll results cited the fight over the House Speaker position as possibly driving the dissatisfaction with the government. Does anyone even remember that at this point?
Anyway, Gallup conducted the poll Jan 2-22, which saw a sharp uptick in governmental dissatisfaction from previous polls in November and December. On the question of the most important problem facing America, respondents said “the government” at a 21% clip, up from 15% in November and December. Notice that the number was already high in earlier polls, so the speaker fight can hardly account for the results. In the January results, the next highest results in order were for inflation, immigration, the economy in general, and unifying the country.
Again, not to put too fine a point on it, but the fight over handing the gavel to Kevin McCarthy didn’t cause any of those results. In fact, government — in particular, the insane policies of the Brandon Administration — has caused every single one of those problems.
President Reagan was absolutely right when he said, “Government isn’t the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.”
The Framers of the Constitution foresaw a day when government might accrue to itself too much power and use that power unwisely. As the administrative state exerts more control over the lives of American citizens, tyranny grows. Whether it’s insane border policy, insane monetary policy, insane spending, or the insane expansion of the domestic surveillance state and oppression of political enemies, unelected bureaucrats have far too much control over our daily lives.
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This survey reflects a larger sentiment among Americans, one in which we know things are completely out of control. It’s just, simply, not supposed to be like this.
So when the Framers foresaw such a despotic government growing beyond all its intended bounds, they also included a solution in the Constitution. A self-governing people have every right to reclaim their power instead of ceding it to the government. Those solutions are meant to work in concert with each other — state sovereignty, the 10th Amendment, and Article V of the Constitution.
Contrary to what most citizens assume as unlimited federal power, it is the very citizens of this nation who are expected to govern themselves, and when the government grows out of control, we have the means to take it back.
The Framers intended for the people AND the states to wield that power. Indeed, the way the Constitution is set up, those two entities — the people and the states — have all the power, if only they’d utilize it.
The results of this latest public opinion survey only serve to bolster what we already know. Most Americans know the feds are out of control, and most of us want to take that power away from them.
The Constitution provides the solution. Article V of the Constitution — which a certain federal judicial nominee claimed to have no knowledge of — provides two methods to amend our founding document without a full rewrite. We’ve ratified 27 of these amendments.
The amendment method used the first 27 times allows for Congress to propose amendments, which must be ratified by three-fourths of the states to take effect. But there’s another method included in Article V to propose amendments (again, not a full rewrite). Article V also allows for the states to call themselves into convention, without congressional input, to propose amendments.
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Given the results of this survey, another in a long line of surveys showing growing dissatisfaction with the federal government, it’s high time we called a Convention of the States to propose amendments putting the federal government back in the box in which it belongs.
Do we really need another survey to know something just isn’t right with our government?
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