On his Sunday “Life, Liberty and Levin” broadcast on Fox News Channel, conservative talker Mark Levin debunked a claim from Democrats that the November 8 election was a choice between “democracy and autocracy,” with Democrats alleging they were on the side of democracy while Republicans were on the side of autocracy.
According to Levin, Democrats regularly side with the power of a central federal government as opposed to a decentralized belief held by conservatives and Republicans.
Transcript as follows:
LEVIN: [W]e keep hearing from Joe Biden that the choice is between democracy and autocracy. And of course, he claims to be on the side of democracy and all the rest of us are on the side of autocracy and that has been regurgitated in his media, and it’s been regurgitated by his party and anybody else who supports that ideology.
First of all, if Joe Biden knew anything about American history, the framers rejected democracy, they embraced republicanism. They embraced representative government. They embraced constitutionalism, checks and balances, separation of powers. It is right there in the Constitution. It’s right there in the Federalist Papers. It’s right there in Madison’s notes, but I don’t expect Joe Biden who served in the Senate 36 years and took an oath to uphold this document, served as Vice President for eight years and now is the putative President of the United States to comprehend any of this.
And the reason is simple, ladies and gentlemen. You cannot be a progressive or as I call American Marxist and support the Constitution. And that’s why they’ve spent 120 years scheming to get around it and cut through it.
Woodrow Wilson despised the Constitution. The modern racist movement of today despises the Constitution. The Democratic Party and their media despise the Constitution. Why? Because it puts checks on their power, and the purpose of the Constitution is to protect the individual. The purpose of the so-called progressive movement is to dehumanize the individual, talk about groups of people, and to socially engineer society and centralized government under a relative handful of masterminds. So, the Constitution and their ideology can never function together.
But speaking of the Democrats and Biden and the rest, let’s take a look at our Constitution. They claim to support it. Do they? First of all, one of the central elements of the Constitution is separation of powers. Without separation of powers, we would be a tyranny.
If you look at the construct of the Constitution, you have Article I, Congress; Article II, the executive; Article III, the Courts, and there are specific powers that are provided to each among others.
So what is it that the Democratic Party wants to do? They want to destroy separation of powers, which is one of the reasons that Joe Biden legislates by executive order. I read one piece in which he just said his executive orders in less than two years in the presidency, have resulted in the expenditure of $1.5 trillion, that’s clearly unconstitutional. That’s not what executive orders are for.
What else are they trying to do? Threaten the independence of the Court, and for a second time in modern history, they’re trying to pack the Supreme Court with likeminded ideologues, which means it’s not a Supreme Court. It’s a Democratic Party Marxist Politburo. That’s what they want.
What else are they trying to do? They’ve destroyed the confirmation process, starting with Bob Bork. You can see what they do to smear these individuals to make it very painful for anybody to come forward to even accept such a nomination. They did that.
They also started the filibuster with Justices. That is judicial nominees, which now they oppose, of course, the filibuster, again, that broke with tradition, they don’t care.
They want to eliminate the Senate filibuster, why? They’re the ones who have used the filibuster more than anybody else, not only in history, but in modern history. Well, because they have a temporary majority, and they want to ram through and impose their agenda with a 50/50 Senate and a three or four vote majority in the House on the rest of the nation for good.
Fundamentally alter our voting system and all our systems — this is what happened in California. There was a temporary majority in California and they used the opportunity to fundamentally alter all aspects of that government so the Democrats could never lose.
And look at the State of California. ‘ They want to add four more Democrats seats to the Senate by adding DC and Puerto Rico as States to ensure that the Democrats will have a permanent majority in the United States Senate. To use their phrase, does that sound like supporting democracy or autocracy?
Now, let’s be rather specific. Where do they stand on specific sections of the Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 3. That’s called the Commerce Clause.
And the purpose is for Congress: “To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among several States and with Indian tribes.” That’s it. And now the Democrats, certainly since the New Deal, the Great Society, Obama, Biden, they have destroyed the Commerce Clause.
The purpose of the Commerce Clause was to stop the States from fighting each other and preventing each other from having commerce amongst each other. Now, they have used it to nationalize industries through the back door, to regulate them out of existence, to ban things to impose things. There is almost no limit, there’s virtually unlimited control of our economy now under the Commerce Clause. So, they’ve turned it on its head.
Article II, Section 1, Clause 2: “Each State shall appoint in such manner as the Legislature, thereof may direct a number of electors equal to the whole number of senators and representatives, to which the State may be entitled in Congress.” They hate that clause, because they do not want Republican legislatures and Republican States or purple states to be making the election laws.
And yet, but for that provision in the Constitution, the Constitution would not have been ratified by the States. We have a long history in this country that predates the Constitution, where the States determine the election procedures. And so what’s happened here is the Democrats want their Courts like the State Supreme Court in Pennsylvania, you may remember the State Supreme Court in Florida and other Courts to overturn what the will of the people through the State Legislature are doing or Democrat Governors to overturn what State Legislatures are doing, or Secretaries of State and we saw this in the 2020 election. That’s exactly what they did.
And so a case out of North Carolina is now being brought to the US Supreme Court, and the Democratic Party is furious with this case and they are already trying to intimidate the Justices to rule against North Carolina.
Let’s take a look at Article II, Section 1, Clause 3, the Electoral College. The Democratic Party wants to get rid of the Electoral College, so much for upholding the Constitution. They want to kill it and replace it with a direct national vote for President and Vice President, which means the big cities, and the heavily populated blue states in particular, will control the country. You know, flyover country, the people who produce the food and the beef and the chicken and all the rest, where our oil is produced and processed. All of these geographic areas, they will have absolutely no say in the governing of this nation.
So they want to take the process of the Electoral College and the way it was set up and eliminate it, again, as a power grab. Does that sound like they’re really for our system of government? No, it sounds to me like they’re against it.
Let’s take a look at Article II, Section 3: “The President shall take care that the laws are faithfully executed.” Joe Biden hasn’t done that, he’s done the opposite. Look at our immigration laws. He has defied every single immigration law, every single one in violation of Article II, Section 3.
And by the way, through their national voting bill, they would blow out one, two, three, four sections of the United States Constitution, just blow them out completely.
And so this is where they stand.
Now, let’s take a look at Article VI, Clause 2, the Supremacy Clause. “States are bound constitutionally by legitimate federal laws,” they are bound. So all these sanctuary cities and all these sanctuary states, they’re all Democrat cities and states. They’re violating the Constitution by nullifying the Supremacy Clause, something that’s a throwback to the Confederacy, nullifying — nullifying the Federal immigration laws and nothing is done to stop them except by DeSantis and Abbott, and still they marched forward on the left.
What else? The First Amendment is under attack by the Democrats, freedom of speech. As an example, you don’t have free speech on college campuses. Big Tech working with the Biden administration to shut people down with different opinions and that’s just the beginning. We’ve actually had amendments proposed by the Democrats to blow out free speech.
The free exercise of religion under constant attack. Ask any baker who is an evangelical Christian or an Orthodox Jew and so forth if they are free to decide who they can and cannot give cakes to, or what events they can do.
Freedom of association, which is the right to peaceful protest. Well, that seems to be out the window because they are rounding up people who were peacefully protesting on January 6th. I’m not talking about the violence, I’m talking about the people who were peacefully protesting.
What about the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, under constant attack by the Democrats, constant schemes at the State, local and Federal level to disarm you, to separate you from weapons and yet there it is, in the Bill of Rights, the Fifth Amendment, the Due Process Clause, especially when exercising your Second Amendment rights are under constant attack.
You should be denied the right to own a weapon under a thousand different reasons, right? But none of them, none of them comply with the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.
What about the 10th Amendment? “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” It’s called federalism.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, the Democrats don’t believe in federalism, the Democrats believe in the Federal government, the iron fist of the central government. It’s why they hate the Dobbs decision. That’s a federalism decision where the States make up their minds and so forth and so on. They hate that; unless of course, they can use it to their advantage, like in California and elsewhere, but otherwise, they want a centralized government.
A hundred and twenty years ago, the so-called progressive movement was borne out of Marxism and one of the men that led the effort intellectually and politically was Woodrow Wilson. He hated the Constitution.
He particularly talked about the Constitution as a single organism or organic whole. So, the States know the Declaration of Independence, about your rights, unalienable rights about the nature of law and the law of nature and so forth. No, he said, that is just old thinking. The document needs to keep changing.
FDR felt exactly the same way and bulldozed through the Constitution. Obama and Biden think exactly the same way. They have contempt for the Constitution because it places limits on their ideology and their power. The Democrats in Congress feel exactly the same way.
So for any leading Democrat, to say the choice is between democracy and autocracy, no. The choice is between liberty and tyranny, Republicanism and centralism.
We stand on the side of liberty, they stand on the side of tyranny, and they do it every day. Every day Congress meets; every day Biden’s in office, we lose a little bit more of our individualism and our freedom, and the Federal government gets more and more powerful.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor