(Editor’s note: This letter was addressed to Washington State legislators.)

Many years ago Daniel Webster said: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the Government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the Government.”

It is quite evident that the government has gone way too far in restraining the people and the people haven’t been paying attention. But you, as our representatives, have a fudiciary duty to represent the people and save, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States as well as the Constitution of the State of Washington, whether or not the people are paying attention. And you, and for many years all before you, have failed miserably in that duty.

If each of you would look into your hearts you would see what you have done. You have let special interests (radical environmentalists, socialists, advocacy groups and others) govern your actions rather than doing what is in concert with our constitutions. Through ill-conceived environmental policies you have stripped us of our property rights, our freedom of movement and our freedom of choice.

You have disenfranchised rural landowners and made them victims of your crimes. You and others in government decimated an entire culture of loggers, mill operators and wood product employees in the Pacific Northwest and forced them into bankruptcy and divorce and scattered them to the four winds because of your distorted desire to “save” one stupid owl that was going extinct for natural causes that had nothing to do with logging or loss of habitat.

The real fact is that 99.9 percent of all species that ever lived on Earth are now extinct and the Endangered Species Act is bad legislation for that very reason alone and should be repealed. Your cohorts in crime, the environmentalists, use junk science to win court battles while they extort monies from naive citizens to fund their radical agendas. You aid and abet them. This state’s Growth Management Act is just an extension of all these failed policies and is a travesty to freedom-loving peoples of this once great state.

You, as a legislative body, constantly heap law after law on top of us and remove our right as individuals to govern and be responsible for our own lives, without unwarranted intrusion from government. Thanks to you, those freedoms and choices are gone, probably forever.

Yes, we are partly to blame for letting you do it and we are also partly to blame for asking anything of or from you. But the real responsibility is yours by failing to adhere to the principles that were laid down by great men in a time of turmoil, danger and confusion. Great men who pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honors to defend those principles. Would any of you do the same? I seriously doubt it. Your responsibility is to lead and advise the people as their representative and as the vanguard of our basic principles.

Without a foundation, without principles and without individual responsibility, this state that you lead will flounder in a morass of strangulating laws, regulations, ordinances and restrictions, and as each one is passed, compliance gets less and less. Until finally, lawless will become the norm rather than the exception. God, why can’t you see that?

Ron Ewart

Fall City