The Constitution Is Dead. Long Live the Constitution!

To restore peace, liberty, and prosperity, we must resurrect the United States Constitution

“In a land where liberty once took its stand,
Constitution’s word was the law of the land.
By the people, for them, or so was the plan,
Now, in shadows dark, these ideals are damned.”

“Secrets”, The Frontier Man

Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States by Howard Chandler Christy (1940)

The United States Constitution, a precious gift of liberty and moral clarity from the Founding Fathers, lies not defeated by the sword of tyrants, but slowly bled to death by the hands of those who swore to preserve, protect, and defend it. US Presidents, members of Congress, and judges have, over decades, by their actions—or failure to act in accordance with their sacred oath—dismantled the US Constitution clause by clause, replacing the constitutional rule of law envisioned by the Founding Fathers with a totalitarian, unaccountable police state.

This essay is a eulogy—but also a call to action. The Constitution may be dead in practice, but its soul lives on in the hearts of the American people and to restore liberty, peace, and prosperity in America, we must do all we can to make the Constitution the law of the land again. If we act with love, conscience, intelligence, and courage, we can leave our children and grandchildren a gift of constitutional, non-intrusive, transparent, accountable, well-managed, honest, humane, and intelligent government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

The Constitutional Collapse

A Sacred Legacy in Ruins

The US Constitution is not merely a legal document—it is a precious legacy of the Founding Fathers, a moral covenant forged in revolution. Born of resistance to monarchy, forged in fire and blood, it promised liberty by restraint: not what government must do, but what it must never do.

The Preamble to the Constitution makes this clear: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

This mission statement reveals that the ultimate authority lies with "We the People," and not with any governing institution. The government derives its power not from itself, but from the consent of the governed. That consent, however, is contingent upon the government’s fidelity to the constitutional boundaries laid down to prevent abuses of power.

Article I, Section 1 vests all legislative powers in Congress. Article II commands that the President shall "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," not ignored. Article III delineates the judicial power and confines the courts to interpreting the laws, not making them.

These structural separations—legislative, executive, and judicial—were designed precisely to thwart tyranny. Each branch would serve as a check on the others, limiting their ambition and preserving liberty. But when these checks fail, so does the entire constitutional order.

This principle of constitutionally limited government is what made America’s promise special. It drew lines that no branch of power could cross. But over time, those lines were intentionally destroyed.

Fear—of terrorism, pandemics, economic collapse, or political instability—has become a constant excuse for the systematic dismantling of the US Constitution. This fear is often intentionally and unnecessarily stoked by corrupt politicians and fueled by the compliant mainstream media. In the face of each manufactured crisis, the public has been persuaded to trade their rights for security, and our leaders have taken advantage of that fear to expand their wealth and power at the public’s expense.

Today, our institutions operate well outside the bounds set for them by the Constitution. The result is not merely a deviation from the Founding Fathers’ vision, but an intentional and pervasive betrayal of the great American experiment.

The Unconstitutional Presidency

Imperial Power and the Death of Restraint

The clearest textual expression of congressional supremacy in military affairs is found in Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution, which states: "The Congress shall have Power... To declare War." The Framers intentionally placed this power in the hands of the legislative branch, ensuring that the people's representatives—not a solitary executive—would decide whether to commit the nation to war.

Yet since the mid-20th century, Presidents have ignored this limit repeatedly. In 1950, President Harry Truman deployed US troops to Korea under the guise of a United Nations "police action," despite never seeking a declaration of war from Congress. In the 1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the Vietnam War based on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a vague and open-ended congressional measure that allowed the use of force without a formal war declaration.

The list of unauthorized wars only grows more grotesque with time. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada with virtually no consultation with Congress. In 1999, President Bill Clinton ordered a 78-day NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo, ignoring Congress after it failed to approve the use of force.

President Barack Obama launched the 2011 air war in Libya without congressional approval. In 2014, Obama began a sustained bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria against ISIS under the absurd pretext that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)—passed to go after al-Qaeda—applied to a terrorist group that didn’t even exist at the time.

President Donald Trump ordered missile strikes against Syrian government targets in 2017-2018, bypassing Congress entirely. Until recently, Trump continued and deepened US involvement in the Yemen war, even vetoing bipartisan efforts in Congress to end US support.

These precedents have allowed the Executive to wage war at will, hollowing out Article I’s grant of war powers and centralizing deadly authority in the presidency. The result is a de facto imperial presidency, where accountability to Congress and the people has all but vanished, and where violence abroad is unleashed by unilateral presidential decree, not democratic consent. These guardrails have not merely eroded—they have collapsed under the weight of decades of bipartisan abuse, rendering the constitutional checks on waging wars non-existent in practice.

Extrajudicial Killings and Due Process Violations

The Fifth Amendment guarantees that "No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." This clause is a fundamental barrier against arbitrary government violence.

Nonetheless, in 2011, President Obama authorized a drone strike in Yemen that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen. There was no trial, no indictment, no opportunity for defense. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, also a US citizen, was killed in a separate drone strike. These targeted killings of Americans were carried out in secret, with no judicial oversight or public justification.

Supporters claimed national security required swift action, but the Constitution does not allow its protections to be waived in the name of expediency. Even war does not authorize the federal government to kill its own citizens without trial. These acts violated the Fifth Amendment in its most literal and horrific form.

Further eroding due process and civil rights, the No-Fly List allows the Executive Branch to exclude American citizens from commercial air travel without any formal accusation or trial. The affected individuals are often not told why they have been blacklisted and are given no meaningful way to challenge the decision—another direct assault on due process.

Surveillance State and the Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment provides that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated... and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause..."

However, the surveillance infrastructure of the modern national security state has rendered this protection largely meaningless. In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) was engaging in warrantless mass surveillance under the legal cover of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001.

Under the so-called PRISM program, NSA, via the “Big Tech” large technology giants, collects emails, messages, photos, videos, chat records, and browsing histories of American citizens without a specific court order. The NSA also conducts bulk collection of telephone metadata, tracking whom Americans called, when, and for how long. These unconstitutional programs continue to operate without warrants, ignoring the constitutional requirement of probable cause entirely.

Congress Against the Constitution

The Constitution vests all legislative authority in Congress. Article I, Section 1 states unequivocally: "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States..."

Yet Congress has gradually surrendered this power. Since World War II, Congress has not issued a formal declaration of war. Instead, it relies on open-ended measures such as the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. This statute has been used to justify military action in countries far removed from the original perpetrators, including Yemen, Somalia, Niger, and Syria.

Legislative Assault on Liberty

Congress has not only failed to protect constitutional rights; it has actively undermined them. The USA PATRIOT Act, passed just weeks after 9/11, vastly expanded surveillance powers, allowing federal agents to conduct searches without notifying the targets and collect personal data without showing probable cause.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012, specifically Section 1021, authorized the indefinite detention of American citizens suspected of terrorism-related activities. These individuals can be held without charge or trial, in clear violation of both the Fifth Amendment due process clause and the Sixth Amendment right to a speedy and public trial.

Civil asset forfeiture, a practice enabled by federal law, allows law enforcement to seize property suspected of being connected to crime, without ever charging the owner with a crime, undermining property rights and turning the presumption of innocence on its head.

Suppression of Dissent and Free Speech

The First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." Yet throughout history, Congress has passed laws that do precisely that.

The Sedition Act of 1798 criminalized criticism of the federal government. During World War I, the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918) were used to imprison individuals for anti-war speech.

In recent decades, federal agencies such as the FBI have surveilled journalists, political leaders, religious groups, and dissidents under the banner of national security. The line between safeguarding the nation and suppressing its citizens has virtually disappeared.

Perhaps most disturbing are the cases where Congress has shown active hostility to the Constitution's guarantees. For instance, Congress has repeatedly granted immunity to telecommunications companies that collaborated with the NSA in illegal surveillance programs, shielding corporate complicity in Fourth Amendment violations. In 2008, the FISA Amendments Act retroactively legalized warrantless wiretapping and protected corporations from lawsuits brought by American citizens who had been spied on. This set a precedent that not only tolerated constitutional breaches, but rewarded them.

Members of Congress routinely pressure social media platforms to remove constitutionally protected speech. Though couched in language of public safety, this amounted to government-orchestrated censorship through private proxies—a blatant circumvention of the First Amendment. The ongoing litigation in Missouri v. Biden lays bare a disturbing pattern of federal government’s suppression of dissent, including criticism of public health policies, election integrity, and foreign policy.

Lastly, the legislative branch has turned a blind eye to executive lawbreaking, refusing to conduct meaningful oversight. When the CIA destroyed videotapes documenting torture of detainees, Congress issued stern press releases but no real consequences. When intelligence officials lied under oath—as when former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper falsely testified to Congress in 2013 that the NSA was not collecting data on millions of Americans—Congress did not prosecute the perjury.

The truth is stark: Congress has not merely failed to act. It has enabled lawlessness, shielded corruption, suppressed truth, and helped dismantle the very Constitution it was sworn to uphold.

The Supreme Court’s Abdication

The Founding Fathers envisioned the judicial branch as the guardian of the Constitution—a final bastion against the encroachments of executive and legislative overreach. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 78, declared the judiciary to be the "least dangerous" branch because it possessed "neither Force nor Will, but merely judgment." Yet that judgment was supposed to be unwavering in its defense of constitutional liberty.

Instead, the modern Supreme Court has abdicated this role time and again. It has not been a bulwark against tyranny, but often a facilitator of it.

Historically, the Court has upheld some of the most appalling violations of human dignity. In Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), the Court affirmed the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Despite the blatant racial discrimination and lack of individualized suspicion, the Court ruled the internment a "military necessity." The decision remains one of the most disgraceful in American legal history, even if it was later formally denounced.

In more recent decades, the Court has failed to protect Americans against invasive surveillance, unchecked executive power, and arbitrary detention. In Clapper v. Amnesty International USA, 568 U.S. 398 (2013), the Court dismissed a challenge to warrantless surveillance programs on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not prove they were being monitored—even though the secrecy of such programs made such proof impossible. This decision effectively denied standing to challenge the constitutional validity of mass surveillance.

Equally troubling is the judiciary's deference to government claims of "national security," which has become a magic phrase capable of suspending constitutional scrutiny. In case after case, courts have accepted the executive branch's claims without requiring evidence or transparency. This trend has allowed systemic violations of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, particularly in the context of Guantanamo Bay and secret military tribunals. Many detainees remained imprisoned for over a decade without charges or trials, a mockery of constitutional due process.

The Court's abdication has not been confined to isolated moments of crisis. It has become a systemic pattern of timidity, deference, and indifference to the erosion of the Constitution and our liberties. The Justices often appear more concerned with institutional legitimacy than with justice itself. They often issue narrow rulings that avoid difficult constitutional questions, leaving fundamental rights in a legal limbo.

When high-ranking officials lie under oath, when whole populations are surveilled or detained without cause, when bureaucracies rule with impunity, and when the people's rights are stripped away by executive fiat or legislative cowardice, the courts are supposed to say "No." Too often, they say nothing.

The Constitution’s survival depends not on its words, but on our will to enforce them. When those entrusted with its defense choose instead to enable and facilitate its undoing, the Republic stands on the brink.

The Supreme Court, far from fulfilling its role as the final defender of liberty, has allowed itself to become a passive observer and in some cases facilitator of the constitutional collapse.

The Constitution was not destroyed in a single moment, but eroded gradually through a persistent drift—justified by crises, normalized by institutions, and tolerated by a weary public. This drift stems from the dangerous idea that constitutional rights and limits are flexible during emergencies.

From Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus to mass surveillance after 9/11, each crisis has expanded government power permanently. Presidents now rule by executive order, Congress passes unconstitutional laws and avoids accountability, and courts defer to state authority in the name of security, often in disregard of the Constitution.

Over time, violations become precedent. When everything is permitted in a crisis and nothing is rolled back, constitutional boundaries fade. The press, schools, and public increasingly accept unconstitutional, totalitarian lawlessness as governance. This cultural surrender—where rights are seen as conditional and power as unchallengeable—marks the real death of the Constitution.

To reverse this drift, Americans must stop accepting secrecy, overreach, and violations of their constitutional rights as normal. Liberty survives only when citizens demand it, defend it, and live it. The Constitution must again become not a relic, but a real living supreme law of the land, working “for the people”.

The Tyranny of Secrets — Classification as a Tool of Control

In a free society, all truth must be public and government power must be transparent and accountable. Yet the modern American government operates increasingly in the shadows, shrouded by a vast, bloated, and secretive classification system that obscures its actions from the very people it claims to serve. This pervasive regime of secrecy is not a safeguard of national security, as it is often claimed—it is a systemic apparatus of deception, evasion, and control.

Today, the federal government classifies tens of millions of documents annually. By some estimates, the United States creates over 50 million classified documents each year. Many of these documents carry designations such as “Confidential,” “Secret,” or “Top Secret,” but there are even more obscure classifications—“Sensitive Compartmented Information” (SCI), “Special Access Programs” (SAPs), “Controlled Unclassified Information” (CUI), and more—each with varying levels of restriction.

Far from narrowly protecting genuine state secrets, the classification system has metastasized into a fortress of bureaucratic opacity and a tool of control and corruption. Documents are stamped classified not just to protect troop movements or nuclear launch codes, but to shield government incompetence, corruption, illegality, and political embarrassment.

The Corrupt Motives Behind Classification

The motives for this secrecy are often cynical and corrupt:

• To avoid accountability: Government officials frequently classify documents to prevent exposure of mistakes, abuses, or unconstitutional acts. When the CIA destroyed videotapes of waterboarding detainees, it classified the act to evade scrutiny.

• To manipulate public opinion: Selective leaks of classified information allow the government to tell only one side of a story. Meanwhile, the full context remains hidden, and whistleblowers who attempt to reveal the truth face prosecution. This leads to misinformed public, lack of informed public debate, and disastrous policy decisions.

• To insulate the intelligence and military bureaucracies from civilian oversight: Congressional committees often receive only redacted versions of critical documents. The result is a pseudo-democracy, in which elected representatives are unable to perform their constitutional oversight duties.

• To intimidate and suppress dissent: Whistleblowers, journalists, and researchers who challenge the official narrative risk prosecution under the Espionage Act—an archaic law never intended to criminalize the act of informing the American people about their own government’s crimes.

The Exorbitant Costs of Secrecy

The impact of this pervasive secrecy regime on society is devastating:

• Democratic accountability collapses. When the public cannot know what the government is doing, it cannot meaningfully approve, object, or demand reform. Elections become hollow rituals, uninformed by truth.

• The truth itself becomes fragmented. When historians, journalists, and investigators cannot access accurate records, our collective memory erodes. Propaganda replaces evidence. Debate becomes uninformed.

• Corruption and abuse thrive in the dark. Trillions of dollars of taxpayer money are wasted and stolen behind this veil of secrecy, making public scrutiny of government spending impossible.

• National security itself is undermined. When everything is classified, nothing is protected. Overclassification dilutes attention from truly sensitive information. Worse, it discredits legitimate secrecy by associating it with deception.

The Case for Radical Transparency

The default assumption of a constitutional republic must be full transparency of the government. Secrecy must be a rare exception—not the rule. The burden of justification must lie with those who would conceal, not with those who would reveal.

To this end, a reformed classification system must rest on the following foundational principles:

1. All government documents shall be presumed public by default and should be published online in real time. Any classification should require a specific and documented justification based on a narrow set of criteria.

2. Permissible grounds for classification should be strictly limited to a short list of exceptional circumstances such as protection of intelligence sources and weapons designs

3. All classified information must be automatically declassified after three years, unless a new and specific justification is formally provided and approved by a publicly accountable panel.

4. A permanent, independent Office of Public Access and Transparency must be created, with full authority to audit, challenge, and override classification decisions across all government agencies.

5. Whistleblowers who disclose classified information to expose illegality or constitutional violations shall be legally protected under a strengthened and explicit federal whistleblower statute.

6. Criminal penalties shall apply to those who abuse classification to conceal unlawful or unconstitutional acts.

Only a transparent government can be a lawful government. Only a transparent government can be a just government. Only a transparent government can be a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

When we are told, “You can’t know what we’re doing, but trust us,” we must reply, “Trust is earned by truth, not withheld by secrecy.” The American people are not children. We are the sovereigns of this Republic. We have the right to know.

Let us end the reign of the secret state.

Because liberty cannot survive in the dark. And neither can the Constitution.

What Have We Lost?

What we have lost is not merely a document or a system of government, but the living soul of a free Republic. The United States Constitution was more than parchment and ink. It was a moral philosophy, a critical check on the abuse of power, and a revolutionary blueprint for individual liberty and the rule of law. That architecture has now been desecrated. The result is a growing sense of lawlessness, distrust, division, and despair.

At its core, the Constitution enshrined the idea that no man is above the law. Not the President. Not Congress. Not the courts. Not the military or the police. Yet today, the rule of law has been replaced by the rule of discretion, favoritism, and fear.

We have lost the central premise of federalism—that power should be decentralized to ensure it remains accountable. Yet in every sector—healthcare, education, surveillance, law enforcement, infrastructure—Washington asserts increasing dominance.

We have lost the sanctity of free expression and dissent, once considered the beating heart of American liberty. The First Amendment has been subverted not only by formal laws, but by informal coercion. Government officials force social media companies to suppress lawful speech. Journalists are surveilled and harassed.

We have completely lost privacy, a critical right enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Our emails, messages, locations, and financial records are swept up by the dragnet of mass surveillance. Our every digital movement is logged, analyzed, and archived 24/7.

We have lost the right to due process, a cornerstone of justice enshrined in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. American citizens are now placed on secret watchlists with no notification, denied travel, held in indefinite detention, surveilled without probable cause, and even assassinated without due process. The presumption of innocence until proven guilty is dead.

We have lost economic liberty. The federal government uses taxation and regulation not merely to raise revenue or ensure fair play, but to control behavior and reward political allies. The dreams of entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency are crushed under bureaucratic red tape and administrative mandates.

We have lost accountability. When intelligence officials lie to Congress, they are not prosecuted. When government agencies violate the Constitution, they are not disbanded or defunded. When courts rubber-stamp abuses, no consequences follow. The Republic suffers not from a shortage of laws, but from a lack of enforcement.

Most tragically, we have lost the idea that liberty is the birthright of every human being. That it is not granted by government, but secured against it. That it is not a privilege, but a promise. That government exists to serve the people, not to rule over them.

This loss is not merely theoretical. It is lived daily by citizens whose rights are ignored, whose grievances are silenced, and whose futures are stolen. The cost is not only constitutional but civilizational. A nation founded on the promise of liberty has become a cautionary tale of how even the most brilliant system of governance can be destroyed by complacency, fear, and corruption.

A Call to the Conscience of America

At this moment in history, the American people face a profound and unavoidable choice: Will we accept the continued decline of our constitutional Republic as inevitable? Or will we rise to our duty and reclaim the gift of liberty entrusted to us by the Founding Fathers?

The death of the Constitution has not been total, because its soul endures—in the language of its text, in the legacy of its defenders, and in the conscience of those who still believe that truth, law, justice, and liberty must triumph over lies, lawlessness, and fear.

This is not a partisan issue. It is not a matter of left or right, of conservative or progressive. It is a moral and civic emergency. The Constitution is not dead because a single administration defied it, or because a single court ruling went astray. It is dying because too many Americans have stopped expecting it to be honored. It is dying because silence has replaced protest, and resignation has replaced resistance.

But it does not have to remain this way. The future is unwritten. The Founding Fathers entrusted to us not a perfect union, but a perfectible one. Their Constitution was not a self-executing document—it was a framework of liberty whose preservation requires each generation’s attention, devotion, and courage.

The first step in our renewal is personal. Every citizen must look within and ask: Do I value liberty more than comfort? Do I cherish truth more than ideology? Do I believe in a future for our children that is worth fighting for?

This is not just a legal matter. It is a spiritual one. The Constitution reflects a profound vision of human dignity—that we are not cogs in a machine, nor subjects of a ruler, but sovereign individuals endowed with unalienable rights. This vision must be reawakened.

We must become again a nation of free people who demand that government serve, not rule. Who remember that the price of freedom is vigilance. We must demand complete transparency and accountability from our government.

We must learn to say No when fear is used to rationalize permanent expansions of government power. Laws passed in haste, secrecy, or panic are almost always dangerous. Our constitutional rights are not conditional upon safety. They are especially vital in moments of uncertainty or “emergency”. A free people cannot govern themselves if they are perpetually ruled by fear. The American people must demand a return to slow, transparent, deliberative legislation and governance.

The work of restoration of the Constitution must begin now, and it must begin everywhere: in classrooms and courthouses, in churches and community centers, in state capitals and on street corners, on ballots and in court filings, in families and among friends. The meaning of the Constitution must become familiar to every American.

We should never vote for any candidate for public office who votes for or otherwise supports unconstitutional legislation or executive actions. Any politician who is not willing to honor their sacred oath to protect and defend the Constitution is not eligible for public office. Vote them out!

Censorship—especially the modern kind, performed by corporations under government pressure—must be resisted. Laws that criminalize or chill dissent must be repealed. Platforms that suppress lawful expression must be held to account. Dissent is not disloyalty. It is the highest form of patriotism when the Constitution is under siege.

To restore the Constitution, we must not merely speak of it—we must live it. We must uphold its limits when it is inconvenient. We must defend the rights of others even when we disagree with them. We must model in our conduct the self-government we demand from our institutions. It may take years. But every act of remembrance, resistance, and renewal plants a seed of liberty that will bloom one day.

Let this be our generation’s answer: That we refused to be the last free Americans. That we reclaimed the precious legacy of the Founding Fathers. That we chose not fear or despair but peace, not apathy but truth, love, compassion, and conscious peaceful action.

Let us be remembered not as those who mourned the death of liberty, but as those who brought it back.

For our children. For the soul of America.

Long live the United States Constitution—not merely as a legacy of the past, but as the living guarantee of a free, peaceful, and just society!

“Let the curtain be torn, let the light shine so grand,

Reveal all hidden truths, let them starkly stand.

Restore our rights, Constitution’s command,

Live in truth and in peace, in our beautiful land.”

“Secrets”, The Frontier Man

DISCLAIMER: The author is not a lawyer; therefore, the legal commentary may be incomplete and/or inaccurate. We welcome any clarifications and corrections.