The transfer of power, per the Constitution, has taken place. President Obama peacefully and gracefully ceded power to President Trump. Huzzah! Three Cheers for the United States of America!
It’s worth noting that while Mr. Obama was passing power to Mr. Trump, troops from Senegal and Nigeria were moving to Ghana, preparing to remove the obdurate President Yahyeh Jammah of “the Gambia;” who had refused to leave office; (he left the country 24 hours later.) That’s how transfers of power often happened, until George Washington – per the Constitution – reset the standard by calmly handing power to John Adams in 1797. (Washington actually handed over power gleefully; Washington had to be cajoled into not resigning more than once during his 8 years in office, dearly wishing to shed his office and return to his beloved Mt. Vernon.)
If you listened to President Trump’s speech you noticed the key point Mr. Trump made: this is really a transfer of power from the Washington DC political establishment back to the people. It’s a nice tag line, but the difference is Mr. Trump means it. Not that it’s original to him. After all, it’s right there in the nation’s instruction manual, the Constitution, which begins: “We the People…”
What will that translate into?
The obvious things certainly; everything promised repeatedly during the campaign, and mentioned again Friday: not simply a government responsive to the citizenry, but also spending less; fixing healthcare and unraveling “Obamacare;” securing the border; and in a grand sense, putting America first in all things.
The media seem to enjoy pointing out that Mr. Trump is just a man, he’s not perfect. True. Nor should we expect him to be perfect. None of us are, not even the media who vilify him.
But that’s why what he said is so important. By making the point that power comes from and belongs to the people, Mr. Trump has made the simple but vital point that the real effort, the real work, the real America isn’t the President, it isn’t Congress, and it isn’t the far from perfect federal bureaucracy; America is the people, to include the 95 million Americans of working age who can’t find a job, and who in the last 8 years were no longer even recognized by the Department of Labor.
There’s also a subtle point here, one the mainstream media misses, one the mainstream media would suggest the average American is incapable of understanding –one that Mr. Trump clearly understands: the underpinnings of Western Civilization are safeguarded by the Constitution.
The Constitution, and its integral role in the culture and the society it creates, is at one and the same time straightforward and subtle.
Unfortunately, the Constitution has been turned in on itself like a pretzel by judges who felt free to interpret the Constitution in any manner comfortable to them, at odds with the equally valid understanding by the majority of the citizenry (after all, it is our document), and thereby altering, sometimes dramatically, the society desired by the citizenry, and stripping power from the citizenry and shifting it to the bureaucracy.
Yet, despite the portrayal by many in the media of the average citizen of ‘flyover country’ as an uncivilized rube, the ‘flyover citizens’ understand this complicated relationship between the Constitution and the society and culture around them, and the impact of “pretzel making” by federal judges.
For many, perhaps most, of those who voted for Trump, this issue of “judicial legerdemain” became the critical issue. They understood that selection of the next Supreme Court Justice, and selection of more than 100 other federal judges, will change many subtle but vitally important facets of our nation. Not only facets of our economy and politics and various regulations, but also, and more importantly, facets of the culture and society that define the United States, and Western Civilization as a whole.
It is, I would suggest, why they elected Mr. Trump, because they saw that he understood this relationship as well, and understood the need to protect our society and culture with the right judges. It’s why, perhaps more than any other single point, Mr. Trump is now president. It’s why, as Mr. Trump so eloquently pointed out, that he is transferring power to “We the People.”
God Bless Mr. Trump as he begins this monumental effort, and God Bless the United States of America.
Copyright 2017 Arrias
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