Divided loyalties … or just confused?

The hydra-headed monster we call our federal government is not going to be tamed by any one of us - certainly not by me, nor by Rush Limbaugh, nor even by someone as powerful as President Obama.

There are too many levels of deception, too much corruption and way too little respect for the Constitution in the halls of power for any individual citizen to be able to make a difference.

It is written that Benjamin Franklin said of the Founding Fathers, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately." Something similar could be said in these perilous times about the good citizens of the United States: "We must all work together to cut the head off this beast of a government that we have created or it will surely cut off ours."

Everyone can no doubt cite dozens of examples of the government exercising rogue authority over the people, or simply ignoring the popular will, in order to amass greater power to itself. And there is certainly some degree of confusion about just what government should be doing for us when we have become habituated to being fed tender morsels of pork from the public trough. Education, home-loan assistance, health care - just what aren't we entitled to these days?

But that question is easily answered by reading the Constitution and applying a constitutional test to each act of Congress and the president. Unfortunately, it seems as though very few guardians of liberty work for the government, which leaves the job in the hands of "we the people."

The problem is that our public officials seem to have divided loyalties - they are loyal to the voters from the time they announce their intention to run for office until they are elected, and then they are loyal to their political party for as long as practical until their re-election is put in jeopardy. Loyalty to the Constitution seems not to be a factor in the equation.

Consider earmarks. President Obama campaigned on a pledge to reform the earmarks process, but last week he signed an omnibus spending bill that included 8,000 of them.

Of course, he's not alone in finding that earmarks are hard to reject. Sen. Jon Tester of Montana campaigned against earmarks when he was elected in 2006, saying "I don't support earmarks, period. If a project's a good project … [it] could withstand scrutiny in front of the entire Congress. I'm not for earmarks because they don't pass public scrutiny with the transparency that our government and our forefathers set up."

Then, of course, Sen. Tester voted to support the omnibus spending bill with its 8,000 earmarks. Like I said, principles seem to change before and after an election.

Or maybe principles don't really exist at all among politicians. As an example, let's look at the recent vote on the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act. This bill would grant one vote in the House of Representatives to the District of Columbia.

That's certainly a nice, well-intentioned gift to the citizens of D.C. But what it isn't, and never can be, is legal. The Constitution only allows representation in Congress to the several states, and the district is by direct constitutional provision NOT a state. Even the Congressional Research Service advised Congress in 2007 that "it would appear likely that the Congress does not have authority to grant voting representation in the House of Representatives to the District of Columbia."

But that did not stop 61 senators on Feb. 26 from explicitly voting to violate the Constitution. Yes, Senate Bill 160 passed 61-37, and now the only thing standing between you and tyranny is the House of Representatives. If you know a better name than tyranny, kindly send it to me - as the wanton disregard of the rule of law by the legislative body itself would appear to me to meet the test of tyranny.

For the record, Montana's Sen. Max Baucus voted against this abomination. He should be thanked for that. Sen. Tester, on the other hand, voted in favor of bypassing the Constitution for the expedient effect of picking up one more Democrat vote in the House of Representatives. We can be generous and assume he did not understand the vote, so I encourage everyone to write to the senator, and explain that the Congress cannot amend the Constitution without the consent of the states.

These are two small examples of how politicians in Washington do whatever they want or whatever their political parties want - not what is right or what is constitutional or even what they said they would do. If you need more examples, just read this newspaper every day and you will find them. An informed citizenry, as was noted by Thomas Jefferson, is "the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."

n Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake and writes a weekly column. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com