Two eminent scholars, Thomas Woods, Jr. and Kevin Gutzman wrote a book last year with a startling and disconcerting thesis. Their argument is that the Constitution is dead not just dying, and they identified a dozen ways—the dirty dozen—in which all three branches of the federal government have removed restraining elements from federal officials so they can do whatever they want! Number Seven may be the most important and egregious in terms of what it meant spiritually to the nation. From the standpoint of federalism, it was one of the deepest cuts into the states’ exclusive purview ever committed by the Supreme Court. The Court ruling in Engel v. Vitale handed down in 1962 banned prayer from public schools. Other studies show the growth of social pathologies dramatically taking off from that date.

In reaching the decision, the Court reinterpreted the First and the Fourteenth Amendments, changing government’s extant constitutional relationship vis-à-vis religion. As before, this final verdict is the result of accumulated error and the people with eyes glazed over lulled into submission. For right reasoning we have to start with the most basic fact concerning the Bill of Rights. The first ten Amendments called the Bill of Rights were put there in 1791 entirely to protect the traditional interpretation of individual rights enjoyed by the people, as well as those powers traditionally exercised by state governments from encroachment by the federal government. Many of the Founders felt the Bill of Rights superfluous, since they had not given the federal government such authority in the first place. Nevertheless, the Bill of Rights made certain points explicit, for instance the First Amendment, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…." That’s because nine of the states had established churches! The others had religious qualifications and requirements of various sorts. Nobody but nobody wanted the federal government to interfere with the prerogatives of the states or people regarding religion.

Of course the Fourteenth Amendment ratified in 1868 strove to give protections to recently freed slaves, by requiring states to provide equal protection of their laws and also due process of law before depriving persons of life, liberty, or property. Only in 1940 in Cantwell v. Connecticut did the Supreme Court announce that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause made the First Amendment’s religion clauses applicable against states. The First Amendment had been in existence for 149 years and the Fourteenth Amendment had been in place 72 years, and this was an entirely new doctrine made out of whole cloth. Indeed, it is called the Doctrine of Incorporation, which has since inverted the entire American federal system. The fox is now in charge of the henhouse, because the federal government began to use the precedent and to make the Fourteenth Amendment a convenient way of subverting the restrictions placed on it by the Bill of Rights. In so doing, the federal government now interprets its own powers instead of abiding by the explicit limits, which were established by the Bill of Rights and intended as such by the Founding Generation.

In 1937 the Court also abandoned attempts to limit violations of the Commerce Clause or enforce the Tenth Amendment vis-à-vis Congress or the president. Given the horrid constitutional situation following the New Deal and World War II, wherein the application of the Bill of Rights is reversed from being a restriction on the federal government to being restrictions on states, it was a matter of time before logic played out in the fateful decision of 1962. According to Woods and Gutzman, "Justice Potter Stewart in dissent noted that he could ‘not see how an official religion is established by letting those who want to say a prayer say it.’ He went on to note that the inclusion of religious lyrics in ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ did not make designation of that hymn as the national anthem an establishment of religion, and that adding ‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 had not made recitation of that oath an establishment, any more than putting ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’ on American coinage was an establishment." The majority of the people could not see it either, and Americans at large found the decision lamentable. It remains the case, however, that the legitimate amendment process outlined in Article V of the Constitution is far more difficult to enact than the illegitimate Supreme Court arrogation of the amendment process to itself. Though multiple assassins wielded weapons at the Constitution, the Supreme Court leveled a deadly aim through creative destructive "interpretation." No one can say the Constitution is qualitatively what it once was, despite having very few amendments to the text.

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