I have a lot of favorite gripes when it comes to the federal government. At the moment, pending fiscal disaster should head the list for every American – probably every human being alive that isn’t starving. As is always the case, politicians and their partisans protect themselves from the tar and feathers by changing the subject. Why are we such patsies that we always let them get away with it?
Still, life isn’t always so neat and tidy that there is only one important thing that we should worry about. Many of us wait with great anticipation the SCOTUS decision on Obamacare. Underlying the current argument about the law are the Constitutional issues of limited government, enumerated powers, individual liberty, “the greater good” and the meaning of American democracy itself. Some of us truly believe that the federal government has grown too big and too invasive over the decades since the war – that we’ve grown complacent about the Constitution and think decades of common practice represent legal precedent.
Among my favorite gripes are the continued delegations by Congress of its duties to the Executive Branch and Congress’ partisan, supine acceptance of the President exceeding the office’s authority. If Congress or the President wants to invade a foreign nation, Congress should have to follow the Constitution and declare war. If the Congress wants to run our lives, they should pass laws doing so, not hand Congressional authority to the Executive Branch to write the rules that will run our lives. “But we’ll have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it …” said Nancy Pelosi about the 3,000 page Obamacare law.
My oldest grandson has signed up with the progressive school regarding the Constitution – he sees it as an ancient, out-of-date document that that has no relevance to current policy making and governance. He may even have succumbed to the growing view among far too many Americans that democracy is more important than individual liberty. Don’t such folks have any knowledge of history or even the most basic understanding of how Hitler and Mussolini rose to power? Do they remember what happened as a result? Do they think it can’t happen again or can’t happen here? Populism is a bad thing folks. Government by referendum is un-American and leads to chaos.
These days – starting with President Obama – American exceptionalism is seen as a dirty little, politically incorrect, piece of arrogance. But of course what the Founders understood – to be a little blunt – is that we the people are dumb and selfish. The Founders created a nation based upon individual liberty and structured the government such that there were so many safeguards that it would be difficult for tyranny to ever emerge in America. Naturally they were thinking about kings and dictators but that was not the threat foremost in their minds. The big threat they warned about and used their genius to control was the tyranny of the majority. That’s what American exceptionalism means: that individual liberty is supreme – even though that means individual responsibility – and that government is structured to protect that liberty against the tyranny of the majority and to force as much government as possible to be local not national. No other nation goes this far – we are the exception – and many more liberal nations deride us for it. In some circles we are a laughing stock because we are at an impasse in Congress but that is what the Founders intended – that the system would be slow to change and require deliberation and compromise. Even more importantly, the Founders intended that the federal government not involve itself in any but the enumerated powers. Some of our most unresolved arguments in government are about things the Founders never intended to be federal issues.
Democracy is of course the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried. It works best in the smallest groups deciding issues that involve only those present. As we move from the family at the kitchen table to the county, town, city, state and finally the feds, things get progressively more muddled on an exponential scale. Who needs strangers from another place telling us how to run our local institutions? How could they ever get it right?
Of course we do need a strong federal government for many things and we want one for many more. History shows us that we need national defense; we know we need a common currency even though most folks can’t remember why; and things like controlling disease and preventing tyranny are good things for the feds to do. What’s good and what’s bad is hard to determine sometimes and people often do the most harm while intending some greater good. Thus we have the separation of powers, the bill of rights, enumerated powers and the commerce clause. Taken together, the Founders intended that the feds do as little as possible – putting the burden on the states and the people – making the system difficult to defeat and thus cumbersome and slow moving so as to be deliberative rather than populist.
Above all, the Founders were protecting individual liberty which inextricably comes with individual responsibility. The Founders would not have been concerned – from a federal government standpoint – that 30 million people have no health insurance. Instead, they would have worried only that every American has the same ability to earn the money to buy insurance if they wanted to. That the federal government might have the power to order its citizens to buy insurance would have been appalling to them and, as we will soon see the Supreme Court reaffirm, the Founders wrote Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution to prevent just that by specifically enumerating the feds’ powers. If it ain’t there, they can’t do it.
The argument that if the Founders were here today they would write the Constitution differently and give the Feds more power and therefore, we should ignore the Constitution and “do the right thing” is anathema. Read the Federalist Papers; the Founders thought no such thing and in fact specifically thought the reverse and established a system of government to prevent exactly that kind of action. The Founders specifically wanted the states to worry about most of the stuff that the feds are trying to force on us today.
Today, no federal legislator will take a dump without considering an opinion poll. That is wrong, wrong-headed and un-American. So is the movement to do away the Electoral College and select Presidents by popular vote – wrong, wrong-headed and un-American. That’s not what one nation means; it’s one nation indivisible, meaning a Republic formed of independent states. Why should small states have as many Senators as large ones? Because every state is an equal member of the Republic and the tyranny of the majority is specifically prevented from changing that unless we all agree to change the Constitution. Far too many Americans today are challenging our right to be stupid or to accept the consequences of our actions; some are now even challenging our right to be “poor”.
We need to fire a few high school civics teachers; they are failing to get the message across. And if I had ever studied Constitutional law under Professor Obama, I might be demanding my money back from the University of Chicago.
In this present crisis, government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem …” -- Ronald Reagan
I liked these columns today:
Court guards U.S. -- Against Itself
Newsday, June 14, 2012
By Lane Filler
Sunday, Jun. 24, 2012
The Immigration Bombshell: Naked Lawlessness
By Charles Krauthammer - Washington Post
All the President’s Privileges
By Ross Douthat
NYT, June 23, 2012
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