The U.S. Constitution was a magnificent document. In that long, hot Philadelphia summer, your Founding Fathers thoughtfully debated the instrument of your freedom – a document that inspires all of us who no longer live in the knowledge that the only people who can impose laws or taxes upon us are those whom we have elected.

In today’s Europe, we are ruled by faceless Kommissars elected by none, accountable to none, removable by none. By contrast, the United States is still, in Walt Whitman’s memorable phrase, “the athletic democracy.” Or, rather, it was.

For your governing class has cravenly abandoned the Constitution. Faced with one of the most flagrant and persisting breaches of that great charter of freedom in your nation’s history, they totter fightless from the field.

This is what your Constitution says:

“No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.”

No ifs. No buts. This is the ancient and sensible ius soli: you are a citizen of the nation on whose soil you were born. Not born here? Go and play president somewhere else.

There is no room in this column to point out all of the obvious defects in Mr. Obama’s transparently forged “birth certificate.” I have summarized them in a briefing for my Peers. Get it from www.moncktononline.com. Forgery has been committed. The fraudsters should be locked up forever.

But the real criminals are those in high office who know Mr. Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery but willfully, sullenly do absolutely nothing about it.

Mr. Romney made a joke of the bogus birth certificate and then, characteristically, flip-flopped and apologized. He should certainly have apologized – not for drawing attention to the issue but for making a joke of it, and for failing to ensure behind the scenes that a credible, properly organized, fully funded legal challenge to the Manchurian Candidate’s right to appear on the ballot against him is vigorously pursued.

But no. Let’s crack a limp joke, limply apologize and limply lose the election.

Those who say the political debate should confine itself to the issues of national bankruptcy, illegal immigration, assaults upon liberty by liberals and attacks upon democracy by “Democrats” are right. Mr. Romney should have acted in private. There was no call for him to say a word in public about his shifty opponent’s shifting allegiances: until 2007 a self-proclaimed son of the Kenyan soil, born in Mombasa; then, in the 2008 presidential race, a natural-born U.S. citizen born in Hawaii, brought up in Indonesia, registered for Social Security in Connecticut (where he has never lived) and holding a Selective Service record with a forged two-digit year-stamp.

In Britain, if the prime minister put a forged document on the Web, the media would give him no mercy until he had been shamed into opening up the original document to independent forensic scrutiny.

Not in today’s America.

I asked a senior Republican attorney what he thought. He became hysterical and said: “Don’t touch the issue. Birthers are pointy-heads. They will draw you in. Your reputation will be ruined. Really.”

Never mind the reputation of his country and yours. Never mind the Constitution he had sworn to uphold. As Sir John Hoskyns, first head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit, used to say: “Nations fail when people find it safer to get on with their mates than to get on with the job.”

It is the job of every presidential candidate to uphold the Constitution and be seen to uphold it. The “Democrats,” who no longer care for democracy and are doing much to destroy it, can be counted upon to exploit the fact that the Republicans no longer care for the republic or the Constitution that defines it.

I made one simple point to my Republican friend. It’s your Constitution. Amend it, or abide by it. Uphold it, or lose it. I asked him, “Are you really willing to insist that your Constitution no longer matters, and to scrap a key provision inserted at the instance of your first president and his friend your first attorney general when on two dozen occasions Congress has decided to keep it?”

“Monckton,” he said, “why is it that every time I argue with you I lose?” And he changed the subject.

I have spoken to many leading Americans about this shoddy affair. Almost without exception, they share the view of my friend the Republican lawyer: The Constitution has had its day; it is merely a faded, irrelevant, historical parchment; nothing to see here – move along, move along into the gloomy twilight of your nationhood.

To all my Republican friends I say this. You will come to regret, and regret bitterly, the day you stood down when you should have stood up and stood to. You should have upheld the Constitution. You betrayed it. Not only you but your nation will pay dearly for your treason by inaction.

The world will miss the U.S. Constitution. You have let the torch in the hand of Liberty flicker and die. Why?

http://www.wnd.com/2012/08/a-sad-farewell-to-the-u-s-constitution/print/