[MathGeek]

Last night, my lovely wife brought home Mark Levin's The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic. She and my daughter had spoken eagerly of it the night before, having heard a pitch on the radio, so I was intrigued. I read his earlier book, Liberty and Tyrrany, earlier in the year, and I'd found it compelling, though it had left me longing for more detail.

Levin's basic message in The Liberty Amendments is that even though the US is currently a post-Constitutional republic due to the expansion of Federal power and running roughshod over the Constitution, the situation may be fixable with suitable amendments to the US Constitution, and this book proposes and makes a case for what those amendments need to be. I tend to agree with Sean Hannity's characterization of Mark Levin as "the great one" as seldom have I heard such an astute or insightful legal and political mind (though Thomas Sowell is awesome as well).

One of the early chapters discusses a Constitutional amendment enacting term limits of 12 years total (House and Senate combined) for members of Congress. I had previously never liked the idea of term limits, because these seem to me to limit who the voters can select rather than enforcing boundaries of governmental power, and I did not buy into the stock arguments on entrenched power of incumbants in Congress.

I also really liked my Congressman Doug Lamborn in Colorado Springs, and I disliked his Republican challenger in 2012, Robert Blaha, whose main point in campaign ads was that he wasn't Lamborn. However, Lamborn has been recognized as the most conservative member of the House of Represetatives, and routinely supports great positions like defunding NPR, shrinking federal power, and protecting RKBA. In addition to an incredible conservative voting record, Doug Lamborn is an incredibly hard working and humble man who seems to me like everything the founding fathers would have wanted of a Congressman. I'd hate to see term limits end the tenure of a man like Lamborn in favor of a candidate like Blahah.

But Levin's case for term limits is more compelling than I've read before. Notably, he points out that in addition to the low pay and general expactation in the 18th century that public servants would return to private life, life expectancies were much shorter and fewer politicians would live long enough to become entrenched. Even in the 19th century, being a Congressman was a significant burden, and very few representatives served more than two terms. My wife and I joked that God himself had imposed Congressional term limits.

Other amendments Levin proposes include a legislative override for Supreme Court folly, limits of Federal spending and taxing, limits on Federal bureaucracy, promotion of free enterprise, protection of private property, and butressing of state powers against federal intrusion. On the whole it seems like an honest approach to returning to the original intent of the US Constitution, before it was hi-jacked by an ever growing authoritarian behemoth we know today as the Federal governement.

Highly recommended, we'll probably be adding this book to our home school curriculum (if we can keep the kids from reading it long enough, they loved Liberty and Tyrrany).