Tweedledee and Tweedledum | News, sports, jobs

WASHINGTON – My family and friends are angry with me because I won’t tell them who I plan to vote for for president.

I haven’t voted for Republican or Democrat for president since 1984, when I happily voted for Ronald Reagan. Since that time, Democrats have gravitated toward big government principles that would make FDR blush, and Republicans have abandoned all principles.

I give the Democrats credit. They do not believe that the Constitution limits the federal government. That’s what they say, and they act on it. They believe that Congress is a general legislature that can right any wrong, tax any event, regulate any conduct, and infringe on any relationship, so long as there is a national political will for them to do so.

Most Republicans believe the same thing, but don’t admit that they believe it for fear of sounding like the Democrats they claim to hate. All the growth in warfare, taxation, spending, regulation, and suppression of civil liberties over the past 25 years has been bipartisan. The only exceptions are the libertarian Republicans and the progressive Democrats – the Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders types.

Everyone else – that’s about 90% of Congress – agrees on the issues that matter most: war and peace, debt, personal freedom.

The two major party candidates for president are an example of this.

Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump support war against countries and peoples that pose no threat to the national security of the United States. They even favor war on behalf of countries with which the US does not have a treaty that obligates America to help them – and they do so because it seems popular domestically or financially beneficial to their campaigns.

Both Trump and Harris prefer to spend trillions more per year than the feds collect in taxes just to keep certain people happy. Some of those people are the unfortunate have-nots, and some are the wealthy bankers and gun manufacturers.

Both candidates believe in expanding the reach of the federal government far beyond the bounds of the Constitution, making it completely unrecognizable to those who created it 250 years ago. They both believe in giveaways to the poor, tax breaks for the middle class, bailouts for the rich and bribes to the states just to keep themselves and their parties in power.

Neither believes in the values ​​underlying the Constitution.

One of them wants to change the First Amendment – which guarantees freedom of speech – so that Congress can criminalize flag burning. When the Supreme Court last looked at this, the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the flag itself represents the right to express one’s political views by destroying it. A flag is an infinitely reproducible piece of cloth, he wrote, about which anyone can express any opinion they wish—that is, until the First Amendment is amended.

The same candidate wants to change the Fifth Amendment — which guarantees due process before the government can take away the life, liberty, or property of anyone — to allow local police and federal agents to administer corporal punishment at the scene of a crime.

It doesn’t matter that they might single out the wrong person, let alone completely misinterpret events that happened before they arrived on the scene, let alone that the one man’s punch in the gut could be the kiss is on another man’s cheek, this candidate wants the Constitution to allow this “rough justice.” Where will that lead us?

The same candidate wants to deport all foreign-born persons – even those living here legally – because this candidate believes they pollute the bloodstream of the country. The US has no bloodstream.

For this candidate, rights are not natural to all, but are granted by the laws of the place where the mother was physically located at the time of one’s birth. Tell that to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who, in drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, emphasized the inalienable property and natural origins of personal freedom.

One of the candidates wants to change the 14th Amendment – ​​which guarantees equal protection – so that mothers and their doctors can kill babies in the womb as a matter of convenience until the moment of birth. This candidate somehow equates killing babies with personal autonomy, and even calls this killing one “right.”

This candidate must understand that the greatest human right is the right to live, and this is the gift of the Creator who loves all life. The other candidate would also allow the killing of babies, but only up to sixteen weeks’ gestation. Killing a baby at any point should be unfathomable.

One candidate wants to put Walmart, Costco, Target, Amazon, Apple and Mercedes-Benz out of business by imposing a 200% tax on all goods imported from outside the US.

Both candidates have a notable antipathy to the Fourth Amendment. That amendment guarantees the right to be left alone – privacy – except when a judge determines that the existence of probable cause of a crime justifies a search or seizure of your property and issues a warrant.

Yet both Trump and Harris agree that this amendment doesn’t really mean what it says, and that the FBI should be able to listen to the phone calls, record the keystrokes, and examine the bank accounts, legal papers, and medical records of all to surveil individuals without search warrants – without probable cause or even suspicion.

Both candidates want to spend more on the Pentagon than the next ten countries combined spend on their militaries.

Does it matter who is president? Oh, emotionally yes – but not constitutionally. Both Harris and Trump will kill innocents, borrow trillions and crush freedom just to please their supporters and stay in power. Where are you, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison? A nation turns its lonely eyes on you.

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For more information about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit