Justine Sharrock has written a slightly puzzling profile of a movement of civil libertarian law enforcement officers who’ve pledged to uphold the Constitution and resist illegal and unconstitutional orders from their superiors:
He laid out 10 orders an Oath Keeper should not obey, including conducting warrantless searches, holding American citizens as enemy combatants or subjecting them to military tribunals (a true Oath Keeper would have refused to hold José Padilla in a military brig), imposing martial law, blockading US cities, forcing citizens into detention camps (“tyrannical governments eventually and invariably put people in camps”), and cooperating with foreign troops should the government ask them to intervene on US soil. In Rhodes’ view, each individual Oath Keeper must determine where to draw the line.
David Barstow of the New York Times has written about the Oath Keepers in similarly alarmed fashion (the articles are so similar that one wonders if Mother Jones felt the need to rush the piece onto the web after Barstow’s report appeared last week), and he cited the vision of one of the group’s backers:
Mr. Mack shared his vision of the ideal sheriff. The setting was Montgomery, Ala., on the day Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat for a white passenger. Imagine the local sheriff, he said, rather than arresting Ms. Parks, escorting her home, stopping to buy her a meal at an all-white diner.
Granted, some members of the Oath Keepers might strike Sharrock and Barstow as eccentric. But either I’m missing something or the Oath Keepers are an indication that a pretty large minority of Americans really care a lot about their constitutional liberties, and are cognizant of the fact that some elected officials on the right and the left aren’t driven by the same constitutional zeal.
Sharrock describes the political vision of another founder:
Rhodes’ vision is simple—”It’s the Constitution, stupid.” He views the founding blueprint the way fundamentalist Christians view the Bible. In Rhodes’ America, sovereign states—”like little labs of freedom”—would have their own militias and zero gun restrictions. He would limit federal power to what’s stated explicitly in the Constitution and Bill of Rights; any new federal law affecting the states would require a constitutional amendment. “If your state goes retarded,” he says, “you can move to another state and vote with your feet.” The president would be stripped of emergency powers that allow him to seize property, restrict travel, institute martial law, and otherwise (as the Congressional Research Service has put it) “control the lives of United States citizens.” The Constitution, Rhodes explains, “was created to check us in times of emergency when we are freaking out.”
Note that Sharrock could also have written, “He views the founding blueprint the way radical lovers of The Smiths view The Queen is Dead,” but the association of the Oath Keeper worldview with a belief in Biblical inerrancy helps set the mood. While I don’t agree with every tenet of Rhodes’ vision, I consider it compelling in some important respects. Among other things, I think that curbing the powers of the presidency and a more robust form of competitive federalism are preferable to the current constitutional consensus.
Then again, I also favor an All-Volunteer Force and would probably have defended left-of-center draft resisters during the Vietnam era as people who didn’t deserve to be called terrorists or traitors, so I’m comfortably outside the mainstream.
P.S. A reader asks:
If they would not hold American citizens as enemy combatants, what on earth would they have done with prisoners of war in the American Civil War?
This is a good question.