Donald K. Allen for President

Top of the Week

May 19, 2008

Where is this country heading? Do most Americans really care? It seems to me that many of us are so comfortable with our lives that we choose not to pay much attention to the workings of our government. Knowing this, those in government are able to move legislation through Congress without the country realizing what is happening.

Take, for instance, the current $193 billion War Supplemental Bill. In the final hours the Senate voted 17-12 to clear an amendment from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to authorize a five-year emergency visa program for foreign agricultural workers. In order to get the funding to support our soldiers fighting the war on terror, we have to allow illegal immigrants to stay in this country under visa for five years. For this reason alone, I would require single issue bills be presented for my signature. Yes, this may mean that Congress would have to put in more than a three-day workweek. It would not allow, however, earmarks such as this to be passed under the cover of a more important issue.

As boring as the politics of Washington may seem to us on C-Span, it is critical that we all spend more time paying attention to this channel. It’s great to come home after a long day at work and just relax watching “American Idol” or “Dancing With the Stars,” but significant actions are underway that will be affecting us all, and especially our children and grandchildren. We all need to become more involved in our government, or we will wake up one day and find that we no longer have any control at all.

People all over the world just want to do their work, provide for their families, and have as little contact with government as possible. In some countries the people just pay their taxes and go on with their lives, never voting or even caring who is running the country or what form of government is in power. They are much more concerned with living from one day to the next.

In the United States of America we have the best form of government in the world, a constitutional federal republic, representative democracy that has outlasted all others. It is because we have a fundamentally nearly perfect Constitution, which was written to provide us with sound guidance throughout millennia. It is only by misinterpretation and corruption of the Founding Father’s words and intent that our government goes astray, as occurred in 1947 when our Supreme Court decided the Everson v. Board of Education case. It was then that a “wall” was created cutting all connections between church and state. From there, our country’s moral and ethical course lost the rudder of religion.

In response to England’s doctrine of declaring a national religion, our Constitution’s First Amendment simply states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” Today, however, it is against the law in some states for a teacher to carry a Bible into school or a child to openly pray. This is a total corruption of the true intent of the writers of our government’s “Bible,” the Constitution. In the times we are now living, we need Divine guidance more than anything else.