And yet the Senate  — including a number of Senate Republicans — believes it is within its legislative bailiwick to alter a Constitutional amendment to the Bill of Rights without going through the amendment process, and with zero public deliberation, based on a simple up or down vote, something Mark Levin rightly and righteously condemns.

This is what tyranny looks like.  But if you need a little nudge to get the point, I suggest you not picture these insulated, smug, arrogant temporary politicians holed up in smoke-filled rooms in expensive shoes, sipping single malt scotch making casual decrees about which of your unalienable rights you will be allowed to keep  — because while that’s accurate  it’s also largely cliched to American audiences — but instead, picture them as they really are, unvarnished, unpolished, wearing military fatigues and holding riding crops, sporting thick bristly mustaches through which they bark propaganda from balconies as their beneficent police force surrounds the crowds of the sovereign’s subjects, the masses, the wards of the state, the little people for whom the ruling elite daily sacrifice their time, championing them with endless programs and schemes to keep them fed and safe.

Because this is what we’ve become.  It’s the ruling class vs the rest of us, as I’ve been writing here since long before it became fashionable to do so, back when it was deemed unhelpful, extreme, fringe,  worthy of excommunication from the class of right-leaning opinion driver —  an embarrassment to “our” side, who needs to show graciousness in defeat and pretend, having lost elections to a bunch of thugs, that these Marxists and New Leftists posing as Democrats (and a few Republicans) are in fact good people who have the nation’s best interest at heart, this despite their outward support for wealth redistribution, for fundamental transformation, for divisive identity politics, for race-baiting, and their contempt for the “flawed document” that is our Constitution, which they see as an outdated document, a constraint on their grand vision for remaking society as they’d like to see it remade, a roadblock to progress, to that Great Leap forward! that Obama and his radical cabal envision.

With each hill we refused to die on — worried that we’d look like poor losers or would alienate “moderates” and independents — we surrendered more and more leverage, emboldened the statists in both parties to run roughshod over law, over checks and balances that, should politicians not commit to enforcing, showed themselves to be toothless.

We find ourselves here because we felt unsophisticated speaking in full-throated support of our founding principles; we felt we needed to prove that we could govern “pragmatically” — that the era of Reagan was over and what we needed to do, to compete with Democrats, is prove our “compassion” by way of expanding government, by insinuating government more and more into the daily lives of the citizenry, by becoming efficient technocrats whose role it was not to limit government, but to make it run more smoothly and efficiently as it grows.

So it’s really not surprising to those of us here on the fringes that we have government increasingly unmoored from the rule of law that has empowered itself to become not a  government representative of the people, but rather a self-serving band of ruling class despots who use democratic tyranny to rob us of our liberties, casually, naturally, easily, and with a dripping contempt for those who question their power or motives.

We must resist them.  If we value liberty, we must defeat them.

(h/t Glenn)