From the beginning of the American Republic there has been a group of influential people who have devoted their lives and careers to putting more Power In Government (PIGs). As soon as the American Revolution ended Alexander Hamilton schemed to overthrow the first Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and replace it with a document that would legitimize a permanent president who would appoint all the governors and have veto power over all state legislation. He wanted a king, in other words, who could force British-style mercantilism and an imperialistic foreign policy on America without any significant resistance by the citizens of the states. He failed during his lifetime, but that is essentially the system Americans live under today. We now live in "Hamilton’s republic," as his idolaters gleefully remind us.
As soon as Hamilton’s party, the Federalists, gained power, one of the first things they did was to rescind the First Amendment to the new Constitution with the Sedition Act during the presidency of John Adams. Hamilton authored several long-winded reports as Treasury Secretary in which he invented the insidious notions of "implied" powers in the Constitution along with such an expansive interpretation of the General Welfare and Commerce Clauses that the Constitution would become useless as a restraint on governmental tyranny.
Hamilton’s political compatriot, Chief Justice John Marshall, turned Hamilton’s legalistic mysticism into legal precedent during his long tenure on the Court, with many other PIG lawyers following suit over the succeeding generations. And of course Abraham Lincoln established a French Revolutionary/Stalinist-style regime that imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political dissenters, employed an army of spies and informers (on Northern citizens), shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers, illegally suspended habeas corpus, deported an outspoken member of the opposition party, confiscated firearms, illegally created the state of West Virginia, censored all telegraph communication, and myriad other assaults on the Constitution, including waging war on his own country after promising to defend the lives and liberties of the very people he was waging war on.
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