Recent whining over the fate of killers with low IQ's has caused me to look into the issue of the death penalty and the Constitution. Not the Constitution per se but the Bill of Rights which the Founding Fathers felt compelled to add to the Constitution because in order to get it signed, it needed more limitation placed on the impending Federal Government. Most of the leaders of the various states under the Articles of Confederation and most of the people didn't really trust the idea of a strong central government. So those tasked with plugging up the holes in national government put limits on what it was allowed and not allowed to do. To seal the deal they made sure that any Federal Government would be faced with an armed populace so as to dissuade any wannabe dictators. It all worked pretty well up until the advent of modern liberalism.

Modern liberalism is a philosophy hatched in the middle of the 20th century whose adherents decided that they didn't care what the Founding Fathers thought, what they wrote or what they meant. The only thing important was what the liberals knew to be important for all of us and little matters like Constitutional restrictions and the philosophy of reason was not going to get in their way. It is not the purpose of this column to enumerate all the evidence of this claim of their motives. Any thinking American can look at the bottom line of the Federal Government's current budget and know the truth.

I would just like to spend a moment and speak to this issue of capital punishment and the recent proclamations of the Supreme Court. In the beginnings of our nation, before the advent of modern liberalism, the courts were put in place to interpret the law. At some point the courts usurped the power to create law from the legislative and to enforce law from the executive. Today, the courts have the self-assumed power to replace representative democracy and republicanism with little opposition from the other two branches of government.

The Federal Judges are appointed for life and can only be impeached for breaking the laws that they determine the interpretation of. This is the job to have.

When the Founding Fathers, the last remnants of the enlightenment, crafted the 8th Amendment to the Constitution they wrote: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." The part of this amendment I would address is the "nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." The authors of this amendment had already established the existence of a "capital crime" in the 5th amendment. Further, these men were well versed in the use of the English language.

I would venture to guess that they understood the spoken and written rules of the language better than the modern interpreters of their writings did. The Founders didn't say "cruel or unusual," they didn't say "cruel and/or unusual" either. They said what they meant to say. They said "cruel and unusual" and that is inclusive of both "cruel" and "unusual." Anyone with any familiarity with the native tongue knows this. The exception is Federal Judges.

The reason for this clause of the 8th amendment was to protect people from judges and courts that might feel free to be creative and unequal in their doling out of punishments. The idea was to create a system of consequences for breaking laws that were consistent from one case to the next. If the common punishment for murder was hanging, the 8th amendment sought to prevent someone the judge personally had a grudge against, or someone who had committed a particularly egregious crime from being drawn and quartered or burned alive.