I sometimes hear comments about Trump serving a third term as President.  The people who’re making the comments appear to be nervous about the idea but, as if they’re whistling past a graveyard, they claim that it’s prohibited by the 22nd Amendment and, therefore, it can’t possibly happen.

The 22nd Amendment provides that “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”  Sadly, the 22nd Amendment prohibits somebody from being elected to the office of the President more than twice, but it doesn’t prohibit anybody from serving in the office of the President more than twice.  Therefore, Trump doesn’t need to be elected again in order to serve another term.  He can be elected as Vice President and then order his lackey in the Oval Office to resign.  Then, he’d be the President for a third term without having been elected as the President more than twice.

Here’s another dodge that he could use. A candidate can be selected as the Speaker of the House of Representatives by a majority of the votes of the members present and voting.  If all 435 members vote, then the number is 218, but a candidate can be selected with fewer votes than that if some members are absent.  So, Trump doesn’t need to be elected again as President.  He can intimidate his stooges in the House of Representatives, get his minions in the Justice Department to threaten anyone else who doesn’t cooperate, and become the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  Then, he can order his lackeys in the White House to resign, and he’s the President.

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During my time in the government schools, I encountered a lot of different teachers.  I remember some of them for one reason or another, and a few of them for their mistakes or misconceptions.   At the Boldtville School, one teacher told us that, after a chicken takes a drink of water, it points its head toward the sky to thank God for the water.  She also told us that, if a tornado was approaching, then we’d all walk across the street to the church.  She said that we’d be safe there because God would never allow a tornado to strike a church.  Later, at the East Central High School, our science teacher was puzzled by a discrepancy in the heat transfer rates in duplicate experiments in our science class.  I suggested that the discrepancy could have been caused by the ice being a different temperature in one experiment than it was in the other.  The teacher seemed to think that I was a dullard, and assured me that ice is always 32°F.  In our biology class, while teaching about cell division, the teacher didn’t know the difference between meiosis and mitosis.  In our English class, the teacher told us that antithesis is the term for a later thesis that’s written in opposition to a previous thesis.  Maybe the definition can be stretched that far, but I’m skeptical.

Some of the mistakes that those teachers made don’t seem as important now as they did then.  My father disabused me of the stupid notion about the chickens, I figured out for myself that ice can exist at temperatures lower then 32°F, and so forth.  Other mistakes, particularly in such fields as history and civics, still seem important.  Since I left the government schools, all of those years ago, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about such things.

The teacher in our high school government class told us that, in America, the citizens control the government.  It wasn’t until many years later, and after a lot of studying on my own, that I understood his error.  The 14th Amendment to the U.S. constitution declares that a citizen is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.  The dictionaries inform us that jurisdiction means power and control.  Thus, the citizens are subject to the power and control of the government.  Therefore, the citizens don’t control the government.  The

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government controls the citizens.  Worse yet, and also according to that same amendment, the alleged obligation to that power and control arises when a citizen is born, an event that happens without his prior knowledge or consent, and when he’s too young to understand or competently consent to any such jurisdiction.  Significantly, in high school, they didn’t teach me anything at all about jurisdiction.  I had to learn that on my own, later.

My understanding that the people don’t control the government eventually led me to the conclusion that elections are nothing more than the latest political scam, following in the footsteps of the divine right of kings.  Governments aren’t controlled by voting.  They’re controlled by bureaucrats and politicians.  Voting doesn’t control either the bureaucrats or the politicians, after they’re in office.  Electing different politicians only provides more of the same.

Aristotle wrote, “...those who carry arms can always determine the fate of the constitution.”  It seems to me that the statement is as true now as it was when Aristotle made it, 2,300 years ago.  Even then, it might already have been old knowledge.  It’s a fact that the so-called rule of law works the same under a democracy as it does under a king.  Elections merely give the leaders a more appealing excuse for exercising police state powers.  Whatever form of government exists, it uses whatever force is available to control the people.  That’s what govern means — control.

In 1991, in my essay Anarchy, Monarchy, Malarkey, I wrote, ”If the establishment of government is inevitable and irreversible, then the next best answer is to make it as small as possible.  Any small government, whatever its form, is better than any large one....  The question is how to keep it small.”  In the May 2023 Frontiersman, I wrote, “Any society or community that’s too large for its members to gather in one place, all at the same time, and vote by a show of hands, is too large to be a democracy.”  In 1990, in my perpetual union essay, I advised that the U.S. government should be discontinued and replaced by politically independent American states, or by various alliances thereof.  See my Treaty for an Alliance of American States, written in 1993, and my essays on personal sovereignty, social contract government, and the principles of liberty.

In 1941, the Thorndike Century Senior Dictionary defined fascism as any system of government in which property is privately owned, but all industry and business is regulated by a strong national government.  In 1941, the USA went to war against fascism as it was defined at that time.  In 1941, my mother was 16 years old.  She lived through that war.  Many years later, when I quoted the 1941 definition to her, she sighed sadly and said,  “Yeah, we won the war and lost the peace.”

The 1941 definition falls short of the reality of fascism in the United States today.  The U.S. government doesn’t regulate only industry and business.  It also regulates people.  It regulates everybody’s behavior and punishes people for merely breaking a rule, whether or not any harm was actually done.  Noncompliance alone is a sufficient reason for punishment.  That’s the modus operandi of a police state.

The USA has become the very thing against which it fought in World War II.  My  mother was misinformed.  Nobody wins a war.

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— editor

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