by Randall White
We the people are the creators of government. We know this from the language our Founding Fathers used in the Preamble to our national Constitution. It says,
'We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, 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.'
We the people create government for the purpose of serving and protecting our rights and interests. Government is our property. We own it, and we are responsible for managing it.
Our Declaration of Independence asserts that we have natural rights coming from God, and that to secure these rights, we create government. Accordingly, we are the source of the public powers that we delegate to representatives to exercise on our behalf.
Our national government is a constitutional republic, which is a form of representative democracy where the people are the sovereign. ‘Democracy’ means ‘people rule’, and ‘sovereign’ means ‘top authority’. We the people are the top authority in government, and the individuals that we elect and appoint to represent us in various capacities have a known legal duty to observe and obey our constitutions, laws, policies, and public will.
The representative part of our government exists on the state and national levels, and the democracy part resides within our counties, in the form of traditional English common law participatory governmental institutions.
These participatory governmental institutions consist of citizen committees, elections, ballot initiatives, public militias, grand juries, and trial juries. These institutions are vitally important to us because they embody essentially all of our public powers and civil rights, and are the most direct means through which we express our political voice.
The American colonists governed themselves democratically through county participatory government for over 150 years before they created the United States. Let this thought sink in or penetrate our consciousness. The American colonists successfully governed themselves democratically through county participatory government for over 150 years before they created the United States.
When our Founding Fathers drafted the United States Constitution, they did not include a mechanism for holding representatives accountable to our public will because it already existed within the jurisdiction of county government.
Our Founding Fathers attempted to protect the rights embodied in county government by adding the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, but it failed to articulate and protect the participatory governmental institutions themselves. This oversight occurred because—at that time—participatory government was not under attack, thus the issue did not arise. This same defect exists in all of our state constitutions.
In the early 1900s, special interests embracing globalist and Marxist ideologies and agenda exploited this political weakness in our constitutions for the purpose of undermining the functionality of county government, which they deemed necessary before they could successfully suborn our representative government to implement the unconstitutional policies they wanted, which would extract wealth from the American citizens and redistribute it to international financiers, industrialists, and bureaucrats. Their agents convinced Congress to pass the Federal Militia Act of 1903 creating the National Guard, and to offer state governments federal money if they would ‘federalize’ our public militias. By 1906, nearly all of our state legislatures cooperated with the federal militia scheme by reducing the functionality of our public militias to mere ‘state defense forces’ that no longer fulfill traditional public militia roles, including conducting our elections, protecting the integrity of our juries, protecting citizen access to a grand jury for reporting public corruption, protecting our communities, upholding our constitutions, and protecting our civil and political rights.
This diminished functionality of our public militias resulted in a severe lack of representative accountability, precipitating an unprecedented rise in unconstitutional policies, unchecked public corruption, an unelected administrative state bureaucracy, and predatory policies and practices undermining the American Dream. In this context, Congress converted our public powers of money creation and banking to establish the Federal Reserve System—a privately-owned banking cartel that feeds boom and bust cycles (such as the 2000s Mortgage Crisis, which precipitated the Great Recession) and permits Congress to borrow, fund wars, and create national debt without the consent of the governed—the destructive monetary policy that ultimately forced President Nixon to eliminate the $35 per ounce gold backing of the U.S. Dollar—thus further undermining the value of our currency, which is stealing away our wealth through inflation.
Amending our state and national constitutions to fix these political problems is an onerous task and unnecessary. Instead, we can easily restore fully-functioning county participatory government by adding a Declaration of Political Rights to our county charters through local county ballot initiatives. This Declaration will create county constitutions that effectively correct the deficiencies in our state and national constitutions. Amending our county charters in this manner is the necessary and proper means to improving the structure and functioning of all of our political institutions because—in spite of our presently bloated federal bureaucracy—for 400 years, Americans have always primarily administered government through our counties, including our elections, our public records, our courts, our juries, and state law enforcement through the county sheriff.
A template for this Declaration is already written, and included in my civics education textbook, County Constitutions.
The legal substance of this Declaration lays the political foundation for totally restoring and modernizing county participatory government, and restoring the proper structure and functioning of our representative government.
The language in this Declaration facilitates citizen participation in:
1. Fully restored, fully-functioning county public militias that fulfill their traditional roles in protecting election integrity by conducting our elections, protecting the integrity of our juries, and protecting our communities, constitutions, and rights
2. Citizen-generated county ballot initiatives to create public policies and standards for public conduct, then forcing these policies and standards upwards to our state and national legislatures to become enacted as public laws
3. Fully restored, fully-functioning county grand juries and trial juries, including fully-independent grand jury investigations and prosecutions by presentment, grand jury judicial review, and grand jury articles of impeachment followed by trial by jury impeachment proceedings to enforce representative compliance with our constitutions, laws and policies, and accountability to our public will
4. Legally reversing unconstitutional policies, prosecuting public corruption, restoring justice to our courts, radically reducing the size of the federal administrative state bureaucracy, enforcing fiscal responsibility, and rebuilding the American Dream
5. Picking up where our Founding Fathers left off in the late 1700s in their effort to establish a properly-functioning republic, including representation by both population and by political unit
This straightforward plan is how we the people can establish ourselves as the ultimate policymakers guiding our government and controlling its outcomes. Restoring good government is an essential prerequisite to rebuilding our society, including establishing good ethics, sanity, prosperity, rewarding relationships, and a high level of happiness.
The first step in this direction is empowering ourselves with knowledge about participatory government. This kind of civics education is available at