WND EXCLUSIVE

JAMES DOBSON: TIME TO RISE UP AGAINST DEEP STATE

'Unelected bureaucrats' have led feds' 'invasion' into private lives

James Dobson, a counselor to five presidents, author of dozens of books, founder of both Family Talk and the James Dobson Family Institute and member of the National Radio Hall of Fame, is urging Americans to do their duty, rise up and confront the “deep state” in Washington.

He describes the problem without using the term “deep state.” He speaks instead of “unelected bureaucrats” and “activist judges” who are widely considered to be the core of the problem.

And he explains the nation’s Founders provided the answer, in Article V of the Constitution, where allows for a Convention of the States.

It’s the alternative to proposing amendments to the U.S. Constitution that must be ratified by two-thirds of the states.

In a statement released Monday by the James Dobson Family Institute with Tim Clinton and Jenna Ellis,  Dobson says:

“Unfortunately, an insidious power grab has been underway in our nation’s capital for many years and it has inflicted great damage upon our constitutional republic. 

Unelected bureaucrats, activist judges, and the ever-expanding scope, reach and invasion of the federal government into the lives of all Americans has far surpassed what our Founders ever intended.”

Clinton, the institute’s executive director and co-host of Family Talk, is a licensed counselor who has authored or edited nearly 30 books. 

Ellis, director of the Dobson Policy Center, is a constitutional law attorney and a contributor to the Washington Examiner, Daily Wire and the Federalist.

“Thankfully the drafters of our Constitution built in safeguards to restore the size of government to its proper limits through amendments as outlined in Article V of the U.S. Constitution,” the statement says.

“Of the two paths an amendment can travel, all 27 have thus far been initiated in Congress. 

A Convention of States is the second path, which doesn’t allow a rewriting of the Constitution as some have suggested, but rather allows the state legislatures to propose needed amendments to restrain the federal government when Congress fails to act.”

Dobson, who is on President Trump’s Faith Advisory Board and has been called by the New York Times “the most influential evangelical leader in the country,” also co-founded the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council, two organizations with high profiles in the battle for religious rights and America’s Christian heritage.

The statement says the “genius of our Founding Fathers is on full display in the Convention of the States Article V process, which empowers ‘We the People’ at a local level to continue preserving and protecting the fundamental rights of every individual and keeping America’s limited government in check.”

“Thirty-four states must call a convention to order and already 12 have passed the petition. A Convention of the States can and should be called,” it says.

“This Constitution Day, Monday, Sept. 17, in recognition of the 231st anniversary of the adoption of one of the world’s greatest and most influential documents ever drafted, we encourage every American to visit ConventionofStates.com and add their name to a growing list of citizens calling for a return of federal power back to the states. 

Let us raise our collective voices and challenge the entrenched powers in Washington by finally, for the first time, calling for a Convention of the States,” the statement says. 

The idea of an Article V convention has been endorsed by figures such as Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky. who has condemned the “years of abuse and overreach” by government, and Ben Sasse, R-Neb., Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and former Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. Others included Ben Carson, Morton Blackwell, Mark Levin, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

WND columnist Thomas Sowell explained in 2016 that while the left has been hostile to the convention idea, no one “has messed with the Constitution more or longer than the political left, over the past hundred years.”

“This began with progressives like Woodrow Wilson, who openly declared the Constitution an impediment to the kinds of ‘reforms’ the progressive movement wanted and urged judges to ‘interpret’ the Constitution in such a way as to loosen its limits on federal power,” he wrote at the time.

Sowell said that activist judges have been amending the Constitution piecemeal in a leftward direction for generations so that today government officials at the “local, state or national level can often seize private property in disregard of the Fifth Amendment’s protections.”

And, he said, “the Supreme Court has been evading the 14th Amendment’s provision of ‘equal protection’ of the law for all, in order to let government-imposed group preferences and quotas continue, under the name of ‘affirmative action.'”

He pointed out that two-thirds of the states would have to call for the convention and the result would have to be approved by three-quarters of the states.

In recent years, 12 states have approved a request for such a convention.

Coburn noted in a June 2017 interview that the offenders are a class of career politicians in Washington who have assumed power the Founders never intended.

“I left Washington because I didn’t see we could fix it there, and our founders gave us this opportunity for state legislatures to re-exert their authority to restore the Constitution to its original intent,” said Coburn. 

“How do we muzzle the alligators in the swamp? By reducing their authority back to what it was originally intended to be.”

At an Article V Convention, states would choose delegates who would review the submitted applications. 

Proposed amendments would go back to the state legislatures for ratification, and they would not become part of the Constitution until three-fourths of the states had ratified them.

Read more at https://www.wnd.com/2018/09/james-dobson-time-to-rise-up-against-deep-state/#1Dx9ccJfdqTxeXX7.99