Other than the passage of the 17th amendment the action of the Senate yesterday to strip the rule of minority consent, sold by the media under the obfuscation term of “the filibuster rule”, nothing has been so stark as to destroy the very foundation from our republic.
To justify the usurpation the White House tweets this message:

Everything you need to know about why today’s #filibuster rule change is a really big deal: http://t.co/Sl4lKRMxpe, pic.twitter.com/69aLdZ8kpL

— White House Archived (@ObamaWhiteHouse) November 22, 2013

Understand the severity – The “minority consent“, now dispatched in rather willy nilly fashion, by Majority Leader Harry Reid is the thread which binds the very fabric of the constitution.
There is NOT one mention of the word “Democracy” in our constitution – NOT ONE.  The absence of the word democracy is specifically intentional.
The exact phrase which sums up our united states charter is:

“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government.”

The “Consent of the Minority” was not merely a substantive point of constitutional construction.  It was -by intentional construct- the very binding substance which created the parchment before a single word was penned.
“Minority Consent” was the beginning, the middle and the end of all consideration.
Minority consent was the precise and exact litmus test, from which every single decision, thought and consideration about how to frame our form of governance was established.
Minority Consent was not just part of the constitutional framework, it was, and is, the actual embodiment of the constitution itself. Period.

• Virginia’s Edmund Randolph participated in the 1787 convention. Demonstrating a clear grasp of democracy’s inherent dangers, he reminded his colleagues during the early weeks of the Constitutional Convention that the purpose for which they had gathered was “to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and trials of democracy….”
• John Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, championed the new Constitution in his state precisely because it would not create a democracy. “Democracy never lasts long,” he noted. “It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself.” He insisted, “There was never a democracy that ‘did not commit suicide.’”
• New York’s Alexander Hamilton, in a June 21, 1788 speech urging ratification of the Constitution in his state, thundered:

“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”

Earlier, at the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton stated:

“We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy.”

• James Madison, who is rightly known as the “Father of the Constitution,” wrote in The Federalist, No. 10:

“… democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths.“

The Federalist Papers, you’ll recall, were written during the time of the ratification debate to encourage the citizens of New York to support the new Constitution.
• George Washington, who had presided over the Constitutional Convention and later accepted the honor of being chosen as the first President of the United States under its new Constitution, indicated during his inaugural address on April 30, 1789, that he would dedicate himself to “the preservation … of the republican model of government.”
• Fisher Ames served in the U.S. Congress during the eight years of George Washington’s presidency. A prominent member of the Massachusetts convention that ratified the Constitution for that state, he termed democracy “a government by the passions of the multitude, or, no less correctly, according to the vices and ambitions of their leaders.“
On another occasion, he labeled democracy’s majority rule one of “the intermediate stages towards … tyranny.” He later opined:

“Democracy, in its best state, is but the politics of Bedlam; while kept chained, its thoughts are frantic, but when it breaks loose, it kills the keeper, fires the building, and perishes.”

And in an essay entitled The Mire of Democracy, he wrote that the framers of the Constitution “intended our government should be a republic, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism.“
But the most direct and deliberate deconstruction of President Obama and Senator Harry Reid comes from Dr. Benjamin Franklin himself.

“Mr. President, I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions — even on important subjects — which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

“The older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. Most men, indeed as well as most sects in religion, think themselves in possession of all truth — and that, wherever others differ from them, it is so far error.

“When you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests and their selfish views. From such an assembly, can a perfect production be expected?

“Thus I consent, sir, to this constitution. The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good.

“If every one of us, in returning to our constituents, were to report the objections he has had to it and endeavor to gain partisans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received — and thereby lose all the salutary effects and great advantages.

“Much of the strength and efficiency of any government in procuring and securing happiness to the people depends on the general opinion of the goodness of the government, as well as of the wisdom and integrity of its governors. I hope, therefore, that we shall act heartily and unanimously in recommending this constitution.

“On the whole, sir, I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the convention who may still have objections to it would, with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility — and to make manifest our unanimity.”

Franklin looked at an image of the sun painted on the back of convention President George Washington’s chair.
Over the last four months, he said, he had often looked at that sun and wondered whether it was rising or setting. “Now, at length, I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun,” Franklin said.
Upon Ben Franklin’s exit from Independence Hall, Mrs. Powel asked:

“What have you given us?”

Benjamin Franklin replied:

“A Republic, if you can keep it.”

How long the American sun will continue to rise might depend on whether defiance or cooperation is seen as the best symbol of an enduring Republic.    It is time for the minority to stand directly in opposition to this usurpation.     Our nation MUST demand it.

God Bless.