Former U.S. Sen. Robert Morgan has had an interesting career – trial lawyer, Naval officer in World War II and Korea, Harnet County Clerk of Court, legislator, director of the State Bureau of Investigation, N.C. Attorney General and senator from 1974-1980.
Now 82 and living on the banks of the Cape Fear River in Lillington, he has lamented what he sees as the loss of freedoms in the name of preserving freedom. Our Bill of Rights, he said in the written text of remarks prepared for delivery Friday morning at Charlotte Law School, “is under attack and being torn asunder in the name of ‘national security.’ This is not a new thing. My concern is the pace at which our protections are being dissolved.”
His talk, prefaced on a question posed by a Roman poet named Juvenal, asked, “Who will guard the guardians?” He noted that the oaths of office for the presidency, members of Congress, Cabinet members, judges, state legislatures and even members of the armed forces focus on supporting the Constitution of the United States. They ask the office holder to swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic....”
In his written text, Morgan noted a subtle change in wording lately. A speaker told graduates of West Point last year that their job was “to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Not the Constitution, as the oath requires, and the United States by extension, but skipping mention of the Constitution entirely.
That’s a small but telling change, Morgan wrote – a “seismic” change in words used. Defending the Constitution, he wrote, means “you must be particularly wary of attacks on it from within.”
Freedoms have eroded with passage of the Patriot Act enabling warrantless searches of phone calls, e-mails, bank accounts and other areas of routine life.
“I would say to you that if the powers being exercised by our ‘Guardians’ (Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA and others exercising police powers) are not enumerated in the Constitution or Bill of Rights, if the powers are anathema to the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, then the blood of Americans spilled on every battlefield from Concord to Normandy is now in vain.”
