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Trump can correct Reagan's most tragic mistake By Alan KeyesJuly 3, 2018Ronald Reagan appointed Justice Anthony Kennedy to the U.S. Supreme Court on Sept. 11, 1987. In his nominating speech, President Reagan described the U.S. Circuit Judge Kennedy as "a true conservative – one who believes that our constitutional system is one of enumerated power – that it is we, the people, who have granted certain rights to the government, not the other way around.... Those three words, 'We the People,' are an all important reminder of the only legitimate source of the government's authority over its citizens...."President Reagan proved woefully wrong about then-Judge Kennedy's alleged conservatism, at least in part because his description of what it means to be an American conservative was woefully inadequate. The Constitution of the United States is not premised on the notion that the people are "the only legitimate source of government's authority over its citizens" (emphasis added). When the people of the United States declared independence from Great Britain, they said they were entitled to do so because of "the laws of nature and of Nature's God." They upheld the truth that their unalienable right of liberty (self-government), and of all the other unalienable rights humanity entails, are endowed by the Creator, God.Furthermore, they upheld the truth that "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Now, by the act proclaimed in the Declaration, the people making it abjured the governmental authority of the British monarch. But until their Declaration of Independence, the United States did not exist as such. Therefore, no government of the United States could yet exist to wield power over its people. (The Articles of Confederation were not adopted by the Continental Congress until November 1777 and were fully ratified much later than that.) Thus, at the time the people made their Declaration, the phrase "consent of the governed" made no sense except in terms of the government of God, to whose laws (and lawmaking authority) the people of the Untied States appealed for their right to exist as an independent nation.Read more at: http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/keyes/180703
