(CNS) --As the United States Senate begins its trial of the President of the United States, the nation must watch the two branches of the Federal Government drag each other through the muck and mud of republican politics, revealing for all to see, the weaknesses of the republic as a system of government. One astute senator mentioned this, when he said that not only is the president on trial, but the entire system of government is on trial.

The most compelling evidence of the influence of the republic on politics is the strident partisanship that drives it. The republic has turned politics into little more than a street fight. Important issues get ignored, in favor of photo-op politics, politics of appearance. The police state dressed up as the humanitarian. Rockefeller dressed up to be a philanthropist, the velvet glove over the iron fist. As the trial of the president proceeds, the republic's jails and prisons hold over 1.8 MILLION American nationals, more per capita than any other nation on the Earth. While high level politicians complain that the process in the Senate is depriving the president of due process, district attorneys are accepting perjured testimony from police across the country, to incarcerate patriotic Americans who are otherwise innocent.

Regardless of the outcome of the trial of the President, the confidence of the American people in the republic has been irrevocably shattered. If the President is removed, his supporters will say he got a raw deal; if he is acquitted, his accusers will feel cheated of justice. Either way, the nation will not be united, and the ability of the presidency to lead in the future will be impaired. After the trial, the President will be a pariah with the Congress, which will be almost permanently divided and polarized as a result of the impeachment process, which was conducted as a virtual scorched earth military campaign. This will leave President Clinton's presence as President in the last two years of his term as a virtual ghost. A lame-duck long before his time.

The republic's ardent supporters, of course, will elect a new president in the year 2000, the 2000 campaign season having already begun, because the traditional way the republic has purged itself of unpopular episodes has been by the process of rotating a new politician into the presidency every four years. The media goes into a virtual orgasm of patriotism, in order to convince the American population that it really makes a difference for ordinary individuals to join the system and vote for the president, who will "re-make" the government, so that all the unpleasantness of the last president shall be forgotten. Then in time, "presidential historians" paint a halo around them, and future generations are raised with a new crop of fictions that sanctify the failed system of government.

The republic has two means for obtaining the cooperation of the American people, bribes and coercion. Those who believe in the republic on an ideological basis are regularly shocked to find out how limited their rights really are under the regime of the republic. Uncounted millions buy and use illegal drugs, and most probably realize that these drugs are illegal, but all function from the notion that they have a right to control what drugs they ingest into their own bodies, a right the republic refuses to admit they possess.

The republic's police-state tendencies are no where more vivid than in the so-called War on Drugs. By creating mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, crimes that once brought probation are now receiving life sentences (and in the Federal prison system, there is no parole). The only way out is for the individual to become an informer, turning over other people to the police. In turn, these other people can be prosecuted solely on the word of these informants, regardless of whether the information is true or not, and without any actual evidence of a crime.

America is a nation of the dispossessed. The republic is a public corporation that is an umbrella for the private corporations that own and control the majority of property in the United States; and that property that is not owned by the corporations, is kept out of private hands by its ownership by the Federal Government. The people of the United States, on the other hand, who are the ostensive "owners" of all public property, gain absolutely no benefit from it. Instead, they are hounded for taxes which are based on income, giving the republic a pre-text to invade the privacy of every American citizen.

Then every four years Americans are made to feel obliged to enter the political system of the republic, to "choose" a president, a new supreme leader. Yet the supreme leadership no longer has the same luster it possessed during the Cold War, when the world needed a supreme war lord. The Powers, however, have never left the choice of the presidency entirely up to the population; the Powers are the hereditary owners of property, the unelected rulers who use the elected officials of the republic as a front. Faceless, they own the majority of the stock in the leading corporations, and they control all the non-profit apparatus through financing, so that they completely dominate the U.S. economy, and much of the international economy. The president has a tremendous amount of power. As the Commander in Chief, and chief law enforcement officer of the republic, he is the senior policeman the owners of property turn to for enforcement of their possession, and they cannot allow that position to fall into the hands of anyone who might actually think that he has a responsibility to the American people, over the interests of the billionaires.

The two party system is completely controlled by the Powers, in order to guarantee that all potential successors to the presidency shall also be controlled. This is done by the contribution of money to both political parties, and the candidates of both parties. Thus no matter who wins, the victors understand that they are being allowed to ascend to power on the condition that they agree to be bound to the political status quo. Which is why the government stays the same, even though new politicians have been elected to office on promises of change.

The corruption runs even deeper, however, because the officeholders under the republic are all temporary. The civil service runs the government, and the leaders operate in a murky world in which they never know who is loyal to their interests. The bureaucracy of the republic is completely out of the control of the president, as is now on display for all to see, as a president goes on trial in the Senate, something that was unthinkable not so long ago. Yet for all those who allege that what makes the republic superior to monarchy is that the president can be impeached and removed from office, the truth is that this is only true in THEORY, because no president has ever been removed.

The trial, in essence, is challenging that the president failed to carry out his oath of office, an oath all officials of the republic must take, by which they swear to "protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic." What exactly is a domestic enemy? In the context of the Constitution of 1787, would that not include a royalist, who would be compelled by his conscience to be an enemy to a republican constitution? Does this oath not call upon the officers of the republic to virtually take up arms against any American who does not believe in the Constitution of the republic? This may conflict with other privileges granted to the citizens in the Bill of Rights, but the president is being prosecuted for the violation of his oath, to protect the Constitution from its domestic enemies.

The Constitution of 1787 constituted a virtual coup de etat. It was written in secrecy by the most powerful men in the country, to the effect that it overthrew the previous government, and imposed a new state without any kind of democratic process. The popular reaction to the first taxes it imposed, on whiskey, was a rebellion, which it brutally suppressed. This new republic not only did NOT guarantee freedom to poor whites, women, native Americans, or blacks, but in its early years it was actually financed from a tax on the slave trade. The Constitution of 1787 says not ONE WORD regarding the rights or liberties of the American national, instead it enumerates in great detail all those powers and privileges that are to be vested in the Federal Government. In fact, the federalists opposed any kind of Bill of Rights, which is conveniently left out whenever pundits argue over the intentions of the Founding Fathers. The Bill of Rights only came to be adopted because in the majority of states where local powers opposed the adoption of the Constitution of 1787, the adoption of a Bill of Rights became a bargaining chip to win over their support.

Ironically, the enjoyment of the "rights" contained in the Bill of Rights is subject to the very institution that is supposed to protect them, and when it decides that individuals under certain circumstances have refused to comply with the supreme power of the government, these same rights are revoked. The legal fiction of the republic is that it is the source of the "civil rights" of individuals, so that they are dependent upon the republic for their freedom. The problem with this, however, is that it converts rights (which are inalienable), into privileges.

The ancient constitution of America, the pre-1776 constitution, on the other hand, does not claim to be the source of rights. Instead, the ancient constitution is called into existence as a result of the pre-existence of the rights of individuals, which individuals are born with, which they inherit as a folkright. This is the true meaning of the term inalienable, implying that rights are immutable. Governments that observe the rule of law are obliged to recognize these rights, but the republic was designed to cut off the American people from their customary rights and liberties, the very rights they were told they had fought the American Revolution to protect. Instead, law became what Congress dictated the law to be, imposing an alien positivist interpretation of law upon the whole country.

Those who practice law in the United States understand this best of all, for ever since Marbury VS. Madison, the 1803 decision of the Supreme Court that created the doctrine that the Supreme Court can rule legislation of Congress unconstitutional, it has been understood that when constitutional provisions conflict with the rule of law, (the principles of law of the ancient constitution), the rule of law must submit to the constitutional provision. Thus the ancient constitution is overthrown, and the rights of individuals are converted to the privileges allowed by the Federal Government. This is why every controversy amounts to men sitting around conjecturing what the Founders intended by this or that phrase.

Americans are handicapped by their experience with the republic, for they have been deprived of genuine constitutional institutions, and they cannot fathom how a legal government would function, and what a difference that would make upon the American society. American society is not a unified culture, but is instead a group of separated ethnic groups that the republic was designed to keep separate in order to perpetuate itself. Its leaders have gone to great lengths to avoid any integral change, from freeing the slaves to allowing women to vote. The plantation slavemaster mindset is deeply embedded into the political system of the republic, which is dominated by an institutional memory of an obedient and servile population. Concessions to the underclass have been made not in order to uplift the republic, but to avoid genuine social disorders that threatened to undermine the control of the republic on American life.

The republic represents a departure from the ancient laws that America was founded under, and only the restoration of that law will save the country from a future of dissolution. As the president goes on trial at the bar of the Senate, the republic is put on trial, for every failure of the president -- of every president -- is a failure of the republic. And every failure of the Congress is also a failure of the republic. The sign of this failure is the incarceration of 1.8 million Americans in a prison system that rents them out as slave labor. While every system of justice calls upon the government to incarcerate violent criminals, we often fail to understand the pathology that leads to violence that is endemic. Property interests always outweigh civil rights, and in the process the entire underclass is forced into a world of virtual indentured servitude.

In the arguments both for and against the impeachment and removal of President Clinton, esteemed politicians and constitutional scholars attempt to prophecy the intentions of the Founding Fathers. The Federalist Papers are cited, along with speeches and platforms and legislation, as if they were quoting the Bible. Yet few, if any, individuals stop to really ponder the intentions of the Founding Fathers, in the fullness of their beliefs. For it would shock the sensibilities of modern people to understand that what men like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton sought after was a police state to protect their property, some of which consisted of human beings.

What goes over the heads of most Americans is the fact that the Founders had to invent the Constitution of 1787 out of thin air. One senator referred to the United States Senate's "ancient rules of impeachment," when in reality, there are no ancient Senatorial rules of impeachment. The entire American impeachment process under the republic is contained in the Constitution imposed by the Founders, and references to British precedents are academic at best. Legal pundits lamented the fact that the impeachment process is not a genuine legal process, with the rights of a defendant in court, but instead the subject of impeachment is faced with a political process. But the only reason that this is so is as a result of the arbitrary decisions made by the Founding Fathers at the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Indeed, the impeachment process has been driven by the outrage of the President's enemies regarding his conduct, but it remains that his conduct was indiscreet, displaying remarkably poor judgment. This destroys the prestige of the republic as a means for selecting politicians for leadership roles in the nation. In the past the low caliber of the republic's leadership did not effect its stability because the political parties retained a polite adversarial rivalry. But the structure of the republic, which pits the parties against each other for supreme power, laid the foundation for the all out war that is now threatening the President's term, and the republic's legacy.

The imposition of the Constitution of 1787 was never put to the people to decide by a democratic vote, but now that Constitution is on trial, along with the President. This is the case of "The People of America VS. The Constitution of 1787," and the violator is the Constitution of the republic, in the form of its chief executive, the President of the United States. Now we shall see the full depravity of this system of government, as it shakes and rattles, and spits up compromises that forces principles into exile. The President struts like a rooster, inflaming the opposition, not anticipating a future wherein even though he survives in office, the Congress will refuse to work with him.

The President's public support as expressed by opinion polls is high, but this kind of opinion is in flux. When asked if the public liked Mr. Clinton, only 31% said that they supported him because they like him. The remainder support him solely on the basis that he is the president of the country, and there is a sense that he is being attacked. Public sentiment always tends to go to the underdog. However, as the politicking for and against impeachment closed with the impeachment of the President, his defenders could no longer declare that the President's actions did not constitute "impeachable offenses." By the mere fact that he had been impeached by Articles of Impeachment, those acts were indeed, impeachable offenses. Suddenly the defense that the President's only wrong was a personal wrong, that the offenses amounted to no more than sex, no longer seemed relevant as the trial focused not on the personal acts the President denied under oath, but the fact that he knowingly testified falsely in a lawsuit, and caused others to perjure themselves to protect him.

Even some of the President's loyal supporters, when faced with the chain of evidence unveiled in the Senate chambers, found their loyalty wavering. President Clinton will never be taken seriously again. When historians refer to the Clinton administration, what will dominate the reference will be the fact that he was the first elected president to be impeached for sexual misconduct in the White House, with a 22 year old intern, because he lied about it in a civil rights lawsuit brought by another former employee, who accused him of uninvited sexual advances. A new president will be elected in the year 2000, and all the institutions of the republic will put on a happy face, and act like the Clinton presidency never happened, but the American people on the street will never view their government the same again.

The decline of the presidency parallels the overall decline of the republic, as its three branches spend the majority of their resources investigating and prosecuting one another. The leadership of the president is a mask to cover official indifference, and corruption that results in the neglect of vital public interests, while political affiliations are rewarded with all the treasure of the nation. This is causing a power vacuum, that has only accelerated the war between the bureaucracies of the government. Inevitably, this leads to a condition of lawlessness, for when the government is locked into internal struggles, it fails to govern. It fails to give the people justice.

As the President goes on trial, millions of average Americans will be pondering the state of justice in America under the republic. Senator Moynihan referred to the Clinton scandal as a "crisis of the regime." Even though the majority of Americans do not want to witness the removal of a sitting president, they are also not so sanguine about the prospect of future presidents. While the mass media is very careful to suppress any royalist sentiment on the part of the American public, the ancient royalist constitution remains the only true alternative facing the American people, should they decide that the republic has outlived its usefulness. How much further down into the mud must the politicians of the republic go, before they go too far, and compel the American people to the alternative? We do not know. But after the republic goes on trial, the nation will have to take a real look at itself, and nothing will ever be the same again.