It seems to me that the key thing in standing, and lacking in most discussions, is the fractional ownership, that is our share, of a property. What used to be called the King’s Peace is now our peace of course, and the largely obsolete crime of disturbing the peace is not a victimless crime, but a crime against us all. Without this general peace, you cannot take your child to the park, nor walk with your spouse, nor enjoy a meal at a restaurant. Yet no individual has standing to claim injury unless they can demonstrate actual harm, it seems. I don’t know; I have not researched this in depth, and I am speaking only of principles. But I have spoken of these principles before. Over at Ricochet, I used to argue the logitarians about this, asking “Does an American have a right to America?”
We have a property in citizenship, or else we are serfs. We are not supposed to belong to government, but it is supposed to belong to us. This land is ours, this country is ours, this government is ours, and this border is ours. The border now seems to belong exclusively to the government, and the citizens seem to have no property in it. When the government erodes the value of citizenship by extending its protections to non-citizens, we are diminished. As the government actually smuggles illlegals into airports in the interior of the country “to keep border numbers down” this is a crime against the people so egregious as to justify war to restore our way of life. Yet nobody wants this except perphaps the government, as a close second to simply wiping out our properties in society without a shot.
“The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen,” the saying goes, and we are diminished by the devaluation of those things we have a share in, the diminishment of that share by dilution, and the questioning of the validity of that share.
“Disturbing the Peace” now sounds trivial, a small and petty offense like jay-walking which is beneath the notice of serious people in these times of rampant corruption and violence. Yet the violence *and its precursors* are exactly what disturbs the peace, while the defining down of other crimes and the kid-glove approach to charging, prosecuting, and punishing these crimes is the corruption which frankly promotes and rewards this destruction of our peace.
As a supposedly free people with rights to assemble, to petition, to own and dispose of property, to speak, to worship, to be secure in various things, and to arm ourselves, we should be able to secure our own peace. Yet we are told that maintaining this peace is inconsistent with, or at least must defer to, the rights of other supposed citizens to police our speech, our spending, our “counter-protest”, and to use the government to do it via inspection of our homes, our accounts, our communications, and our religious doctrines.
It’s worse than it appears. Our Constitution is not neutral among points of view, not merely mechanical. It is itself a point of view with embedded instructions for its maintenance. The XVIIth amendment may have solved a real problem in its time (I say that it did), but at the expense of the proper functioning of the government. By devolving the power to select senators from the legislatures of the several states to the people of those states, the people were not strengthened, but weakened by the same logic which finds pure democracy hostile to the retention of amny rights by those same people. It made the government more capricious, more swayed by fads and outrages, by making it more responsive to topical concerns at the expense of timeless truths.
Now the government, which is largely free of the Constitution anyway, is hostile to the original point of view and actively works against the idea that a free people should be self-governing with only a limited government.
I have written before of a “doctrine of proximity” which should outweigh a recency bias of precedent — nothing should make a new stance which is less consistent with the original Constitution a stronger precedent than an old stance which is more consistent with the Constitution. Part of the runaway government problem is the runaway of case law, of precedent, wherein a string of decisions supposedly connects as neighbors the Constitution and a recent decision which are no longer within driving distance. Without an amendment, it should be impossible to “interpret” new meaning into a Constitution which clearly meant the old thing.
We know that the Constitution does not make much of citizenship and borders, but there are good reasons for this. Citizenship itself was fraught at the time. How was a new rebel government to rely upon documentation? Borders escape srcutiny for a different reason — because of the thundering obvious necessity for borders, without which there is no country. The Founders demonstrated throughout their own lives a keen awareness of both citizenship and borders as absolutely required concepts. The supposed scholarship which points out the slight references to these ideas in the Constitution is akin to reading aloud the labels in the supermarket and claiming to have fed the masses.
Dennis Prager years ago said that really, there is only one crime, and that is theft. This is because every crime may be reduced to a kind of theft. This means that every murder, rape, assault, intimidation, disturbance of the peace and even jaywalking have offended against a citizen’s (or many citizens’) property in a thing.
Each of us has a fractional property, a share in the common goods. This does not give nonse of us standing. Standing resides in this fact and should be recognized for each of us. There is no contrary right to invade this country, or to intimidate people going about their business.
How do we assert these rights to property against the steady infringement of government-backed thugs?
