Kokesh for Congress

As Americans, we enjoy the protection of the Bill of Rights in our Constitution that is supposed to serve as a restraint on government power. As human beings, we enjoy rights that our founders knew were God given and inalienable. These are the intrinsic rights we all have by virtue of self-ownership, regardless of any labels that may be applied to individuals or groups.

It is a great moral transgression when any entity claims the power to violate your rights. By exerting control over you, they are making a claim of ownership on you. We now have a government which behaves like it owns us rather than serves us. The American vision of a free society is slipping away. It is up to us to reclaim it.

We have a right to freedom of speech and religion. These rights are protected by the 1st Amendment, but we have allowed our government to violate them. When the government uses a variety of institutions to control communication and personal expression, the right to freedom of speech is violated. This includes the inherent and enumerated right to peaceably “assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

We have a right to privacy. This is protected by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which states, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” More importantly, this restriction on government is founded in the right to live unmolested so long as you do not interfere with the rights of others.

We have a right to self-defense. The founders wrote the Second Amendment to protect this right by specifically enumerating the right to, “keep and bear arms.” Our leadership has forgotten why this was so crucial to our founders. Our right to self-defense has been slowly eroded by unconstitutional laws.

We have the right to own and keep the fruits of our labor. The founders never envisioned a system as insidious and immoral as the current tax code. About half of the average American's annual income goes to the government in one form of taxation or another. The founders thought it unnecessary to give this issue its own amendment because of the all important ninth: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” We have allowed these rights to be violated by the federal government, and it is time to take them back.