Last Updated on August 20, 2022 by Constitutional Militia
“Oath or Affirmation” of Office
Every government official is personally liable for each and every violation of the Constitution.
“Oath or Affirmation” of Office (Article VI, Clause 3)
The very existence of the Oath[s] or Affirmation[s]” that officeholders are required to take as a condition of their offices excludes the possibility of immunity from punishment for any officeholder who perjures or otherwise forswears himself. For example, when a member of Congress or State legislator knowingly, with willful blindness, or in reckless disregard of the consequences of his action votes for a statute that unconstitutionally suppresses the Militia, or supplants them with a garrison or police state; or when the President or State Governor knowingly refuses to veto such a statute, and instead excuse it; or when a “Judge[ ], either of the supreme and inferior Courts”[1] of the General Government, or of any State, knowingly declares such such a statute valid and enforceable—each and every one of them violates his “Oath or Affirmation of Office”.[2]
The Constitution itself provides for one and only one “official immunity”, in its allowance that, “for any Speech or Debate in either House [of Congress], [Senators and Representatives] shall be questioned in any other place”.[3] Talk alone by those officers in that particular setting only is thus absolutely privileged, no matter how obnoxious, because thoroughgoing “Speech or Debate” should dissuade any honest member of Congress from voting for an unconstitutional statute. But, as the Constitution plainly implies, the action of so voting, and the ultimate untoward effects of a statute so enacted are quite different matters. Self-evidently because the Constitution recognizes only this lone official immunity from liability for misuse of public office, no other can be interpolated into it for any other officeholder or any other official action. Inclusio unius exclusio alterius.[4]
An implied constitutional power for public officials to create “official immunities” for themselves would allow them to negate the express requirement that they shall be “bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution”—and therefore cannot enter public office in the first instance, or act under color of it thereafter, without first taking and then continually abiding by such “Oath or Affirmation”. So even if by some twisting of words, such an implication could be imputed to some other part of the Constitution, it would fall afoul of the rule that if “an asserted construction of any one provision of the Constitution would, if adopted, neutralize a positive prohibition of that instrument, then * * * such asserted construction is erroneous, since its enforcement would mean, not to give effect to the Constitution, but to destroy a portion thereof”.[5] The Constitution, after all, is not self-contradictory. So the affirmative words “shall be bound by” are are plainly “negative of other objects than those affirmed’; and “an exclusive sense must be given to them, or they have no operation at all”.[6]
No official can be “bound by [his] Oath or Affirmation” unless someone can hold him legally accountable for violating it. This of course is the entire theory behind the entire Bill of Rights too.[7]
[F]or any public official to create or assert a purported “official immunity”, for himself or any other official, is itself a violation of his “Oath or Affirmation”! And because the creation or assertion of such a purported immunity is unconstitutional, the immunity can have no force or effect, other than as evidence of its creator’s or asserter’s own wrongdoing.[8]
With no direct oversight and enforcement mechanism to contain temporary office-holders to a lawful standard of behavior, WE THE PEOPLE are ushering in a “government” limited by its own rhetoric. Only through revitalization of “the Militia of the several States” can THE PEOPLE assert their legal authority over rogue government officials, which is why “[a] well regulated Militia” is “necessary to the security of a free State” (Second Amendment).
