"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."
Chief Justice John Marshall was correct in McCullough v. Maryland: this is a social contract between the people of the United States as a whole and the Federal government; the states are not even directly mentioned in the Preamble. It was sent to the states for ratification historically because the Articles of Confederation which preceded the Constitution were entirely state dependent. The states had to agree to relinquish power to the People as a whole and the Federal Government for the Constitution to take effect.
A two tier system of law, one tier for rich and the other for the rest of us dooms our republic every bit as much as any dictator or foreign invader. We must learn to study the history of our nation and its founding documents in order to understand their real meaning, not the meaning we would like for them to have to fit our personal preconceptions and prejudices. We must look with a skeptical eye at everyone and every thing from which we receive information, including myself. Accept nothing at face value: investigate the sources and find if they are being quoted and used accurately, or is someone "cherry picking" information (or even creating it from whole cloth) as Dubya did with the WMD information in Iraq.
Democracy is not spectator sport. It demands that its citizens at least keep themselves informed. At the most it still demands the price expressed in Jefferson's words, "the blood of patriots and tyrants." The former reduces the need for the later. So I beg of you, my friends: become informed, and stay informed.
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