More on South Carolina Republicans Suing for Closed Primaries

The people filing this suit wrote an advocacy piece in today’s local paper.  I took offence and wrote a response – I don’t recommend either.

http://www.thestate.com/2011/03/16/1737766/earle-closed-primary-opponents.html

However, in writing my response I came across this bit from President George Washington’s 1796 farewell address.  It seems so especially relevant to today’s dysfunctional government, held in the stranglehold of radical political factions, that I just had to reproduce it.

“This government, the offspring of our own choice, uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the distribution of its powers, uniting security with energy, and containing within itself a provision for its own amendment, has a just claim to your confidence and your support.

All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency.  They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force;  to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

The man was not just a great leader but a visionary.  Today’s political parties repeatedly thwart “the delegated will of the nation” and “usurp for themselves the reins of government.”

Here’s one place to read the entire address:

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp