Treason Remedies
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
— USA Constitution [1]
In the United States of America, the sovereign power is that of the people as individuals [2]. Treason harms us as individuals.
To reduce the harm of treason to us as individuals, what's needed is to interrupt each variant of treason before it snowballs further. We need to reduce the number of identifiable overt actions that give aid and comfort to the enemies of us as individuals.
The enemies of us as individuals are people who don't act to support the Constitution and who instead do act to deprive persons of life, liberty, or property [3].
That's right, the enemies of us as individuals are Progressives, and they are all throughout our governments and government-crony organizations [4].
Criminal Punishment
One approach is criminal punishment.
Criminal conviction requires proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt [5].
To get punishments requires convictions by unanimous juries. Jurors, though, are drawn from a pool of citizens, and currently a minority of citizens don't support the Constitution.
Before cases are brought before juries, cases must be prepared by prosecuting attorneys. Currently the Department of Justice consists of activists who don't support the Constitution and who execute tasks that don't fall under powers enumerated in the Constitution. Biden has budgeted $2.1 billion to infringe people's right to keep and bear arms, $1.6 billion to break even more convicted criminals out of jail than since the December 2018 First Step Act, $1.5 billion to prosecute people who don't embrace Biden's flawed election, $1.3 billion to make local police do what Progressives want, $1.1 billion to surveil citizens, $1.0 billion to politicize alleged crimes based of gender, $0.3 billion to use civil rights pretexts to interfere further with elections, $0.2 billion to expedite citizenship for illegals and subsequent voting by these people for Democrats, and many millions to increase government coercion using the pretext of a climate crisis [6].
A second approach is impeachment, conviction, and punishment.
The impeachment process doesn't subject people to criminal punishments, it merely withholds a privilege to hold a national-government office in the future. To prevent we the people from experiencing future losses, the impeachment process must be performed quickly and surely. For we the people to be protected from government officers who more likely than not have already violated our trust, the proper standard for impeachment conviction is the preponderance of the evidence, and the proper speed for the overall impeachment process is immediate and summary [7].
To get punishments, though, requires convictions by two thirds of the senators present—in a full Senate, a total of 67. Currently, even on the flawed current bills that are almost all unconstitutional, the number of current senators who manage to choose the more-constitutional side at least half of the time based on Conservative Review Liberty Scores is only 31 [8].
And before people face impeachment trials, people must be impeached. Even here, the fraction of current representatives who choose the more-constitutional side at least half the time is only 42%.
A third approach is firing.
To fire the people who are the most culpable—the elected representatives—requires selecting as candidates, and electing, non-treasonous people.
To fire the people who have less power—the people in the administrative bureaucracies—requires selecting as the presidential candidate, and electing, a person who has the emotional intelligence to use the executive power to fire [9].
To eliminate the administrative bureaucrats' unconstitutional departments and agencies requires selecting and electing congresspeople and presidents who support the Constitution with their actions. People who use their powers against former congresspeople and presidents to repeal their enabling statutes, and who use their powers against judges to evaluate constitutionality for themselves and to take action accordingly, which in both cases is required by their oaths of office.
Once we select and elect majorities of congresspeople who support the Constitution and presidents who support the Constitution, then it may seem more urgent to enact constitutional repeals and to execute constitutional grandfathering-out of unconstitutional programs. If elected representatives could only do one thing at a time, this would be true. But the fact is that it will be immensely easier for constitutionalists to write, pass, and sign repeals and even rights-respecting demolitions of Progressive programs than it has been for Progressives to erect the administrative state.
Even if it doesn't seem urgent, it may seem unnecessary to impeach, convict, and punish, or to indict, convict, and punish for treason. This is incorrect. Broken-windows policing is required by the Constitution. Broken-windows policing mercifully limits the snowballing of crime and victimization. And broken-windows policing is built into the Constitution in multiple ways—through the power of the explicitly-delineated crime of treason; through the power of the impeachment process; through government officers' duties to use these and other offsetting powers to support the Constitution, as required by the officers' oaths of office.
In prosecuting widespread treason, the just way to exercise executive judgment will be to start at the top with the people to whom we the people delegated the most power and who used this power to abuse we the people, and to apply successively-less force to successively-less-powerful offenders.
In punishing cases of treason, the just way to exercise judicial judgment will be to hand down successively-lighter sentences to successively-less-destructive offenders. Sentences depriving offenders of life would be justice for industrial-scale deprivation of life through state-sponsored abortion or through "authorized" undeclared war. Sentences depriving offenders of liberty and property would be justice for systemically depriving we the people of liberty and property through unconstitutional COVID orders and stimuluses.
In no way would it be just, or prudent, to keep turning a blind eye to treason—even to treason that gets disrupted before it causes directly-traceable deprivations of life, liberty, or property. Turning a blind eye to treason is what has allowed treason to become endemic, at pandemic levels.
Life, liberty, and property are secure only when constitutional powers are used against people who would deprive us of these rights, and are secure only to the extent that government people use these constitutional powers.
Limiting governments secures freedom.
USA Constitution, art. III, sec. 3, cl. 1.
Barnett, Randy E. Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People. Broadside Books, 2016.
Anthony, James. "On the Reading of Old Constitutions." rConstitution.us, 9 Oct. 2020, rconstitution.us/on-the-reading-of-old-constitutions/. Accessed 6 Aug. 2021.
Anthony, James. "Who Decides: Cronies, or Customers?" rConstitution.us, 28 May 2021, rconstitution.us/who-decides-cronies-or-customers/. Accessed 6 Aug. 2021.
Newman, Jon O. "Taking 'Beyond a Reasonable Doubt' Seriously." Judicature, vol. 103, no. 2, Summer 2019, pp. 32-.
United States, Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs. "Department of Justice Fiscal Year 2022 Funding Request." Justice.gov, 28 May 2021, www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-fiscal-year-2022-funding-request. Accessed 6 Aug. 2021.
Anthony, James. "Constitutional Impeachment Is Loss Prevention." rConstitution.us, 5 Feb. 2021, rconstitution.us/constitutional-impeachment-is-loss-prevention/. Accessed 6 Aug. 2021.
"Scorecard." Conservative Review, libertyscore.conservativereview.com/. Accessed 4 July 2021.
Anthony, James. "The First 1,461 Days of a Constitutionalist President." rConstitution.us, 8 Jan. 2021, rconstitution.us/the-first-1461-days-of-a-constitutionalist-president/. Accessed 6 Aug. 2021.
James Anthony is the author of The Constitution Needs a Good Party and rConstitution Papers and has written articles in The Federalist, Foundation for Economic Education, American Thinker, American Greatness, and rConstitution.us. Mr. Anthony is an experienced chemical engineer with a master's in mechanical engineering.