Justin Raimondo on the Republicans and Ron Paul
It’s sad, really, to see the decline of a once great party: a party that has presided over the biggest expansion of government since the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, the biggest explosion of federal spending in modern times, and the most serious assault on our constitutional liberties since the imposition of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. Here is a party that once stood for decentralized government asserting the theory of presidential supremacy, in which the power of the executive is exaggerated and mystified until it becomes a monstrous growth of precisely the same sort feared by the Founders, who warned against the return of royalism to America – and wrote a Constitution in which the authority of the other two branches of government served as vital checks and balances against the tendency of the executive to usurp power and throw off restraints.
How did this happen? How is it that the conservatives of today advocate precisely the opposite of what they advocated yesterday? How has the dream of a free America turned into the nightmare of the Homeland Security State, where government can search our homes, read our email, spy on our legal and constitutionally protected activities, all without a warrant or even a nod to anything remotely resembling a legal procedure?
