Each day as I read WorldNetDaily or listen to whichever conservative
pundit is getting airtime disproportionate to his or her biomatter’s
worth, I always come across the same arguments being made about the
nature of the 1787 Constitution and the intentions of the “Founders”
who wrote it.
It makes me wonder - who are the Founders and what was their
intention, and why would these things make conservatives so angry?
Think about the Preamble to the 1787 Constitution - the specific list
of reasons for which We the People did ordain and establish this
Constitution:
- to form a more perfect union,
- establish justice,
- ensure domestic tranquility,
- provide for the common defense,
- promote the general welfare, and
- secure the blessings of liberty (for this generation and the ones
thereafter).
Some of these provide reasons that were historically very salient to
those who had sent delegates to amend the Articles of Confederation in
the first place.
A more perfect union: The several states had no reason to coordinate
with each other, and each state was so emboldened by its new found
sense of postcolonial sovereignty that coordination within the union
produced by the Congress of the Articles was impossible. This Congress
required unanimous votes to do literally anything. This was bad news
for all of the reasons that follow in the Preamble of 1787.
Provision for the common defense: The new countries’ league under the
Articles’ legal theory and implementation was very vulnerable. The
national army that had served all the colonies during the Revolution
was severely underfunded, and Congress was powerless to raise money to
support it. More importantly, each state in the Confederation had the
right to conclude treaties with other nations; so, the sovereignty of
individual states made it impossible to have a single foreign policy
for the whole of the Confederation. With the British still heavily
occupying forts they had agreed to relinquish, the French and Spanish
looking to continue their colonization of the Americas on the skeleton
of British North American colonies, and several persistent problems
holding lands from their native owners, this was a severe problem. In
fact, US military historians would find it hard to argue that forming
a better federal government with the ability to tax to support the
army wasn’t a (if not the) main reason for the Constitutional
Convention.
Of course the rest are, by measure, related to the goals and problems
mentioned in the two preceding paragraphs. However, it bares
mentioning that ensuring domestic tranquility, establishing justice,
promoting the general welfare, and securing liberty’s “blessings” are
given equal space to these other issues as reasons to establish the
new republic. So what does that mean?
Establishing justice: While the typical states’ rights arguer feels
that the 14th Amendment was abused by the legal doctrines that would
come out of its “equal protection” clause, this seems spurious at
best. It’s clear that under the states’-rights-first model of the
Articles, there wasn’t “justice” if a new document was needed to
establsih it. The varying legal systems, the unfair ability of small
states to derail national interests, the inability of Congress to make
uniform (therefore, fair) binding laws for all of We the People no
matter which state We were in - all of these come to mind. All of
these things were changed in law by 1787, but we’re still fighting
about the intentions of the Founders when it came to the rights of
states and whether or not “justice” can be unequally distributed or
differently defined within the laws of the US.
Ensuring domestic tranquility: How does this not suggest that perhaps
the Congress is meant to establish laws and the federal bureaucracy
enforce laws whose chief goal is citizen control and mediating
interstate conflicts?
Promote the general welfare: Though “welfare” didn’t have the same
connotation or policy meaning two centuries ago, it did mean pretty
specifically wellbeing. Note it’s “promote” the “general” welfare.
That means helping everyone to be, generally speaking, OK. There’s
really no reasonable small-government-to-hell-with-the-poor way to
read that clause.
Securing the blessings of liberty: One of Glenn Beck’s biggest rants
is that the government is supposed to preserve liberty by standing out
of people’s way - he hates the idea of equality of outcomes in
addition to the equality of opportunity. While it’s often impossible
to imagine what the hell Beck’s talking about, it should be noted that
the government isn’t charged with securing “liberty” as just some
abstract notion of 0 governmental tolerance, but in fact liberty’s
blessings. I.e., the good things about liberty and the good things
that it brings. One might consider the freedom of speech and assembly.
One might need to rethink considering income disparity, ruthless
commerce, uncontrollable/unpreventable gun violence, institutionalized
poverty, the expansion of executive powers, refusal to fund the
government as part of your patriotic duty to it….
The Preamble spells out what we’re supposed to be working toward at
the level of the federal government, and the Constitution enumerates
and secures all “Necessary and Proper” powers to the Congress to
achieve these ends. So what gives? Why aren’t we working toward most
of these ends without a huge conservative backlash?
Because the Constitution, to them, is a fixed, literal document that
says everything it needs to. Except where in sticky situations it
seems like their assumptions are wrong. Then we should turn away from
the perfect, never-changing Constitution to the writings of four or
five people who would make Ron Paul blush, the principal among them
being Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas
Paine. While these men’s soundbytes have made for great cinema and 8th
grade plays for history classes, it’d be interesting for me if we
could hear from other people. I just don’t believe that
strict-constructionist voices were the majority. Why?
Because George Washington authorized the creation of the Federal
Reserve’s grandfather. Because John Marshall made up sweeping new
judicial powers kinda sorta out of wholecloth. Because John Adams was
president numero 2. Because Jefferson bought Louisiana and fought the
Barbary pirates openly acknowledging that he could find no real
constitutional authorization for what he was doing other than the
national interest in his doing so. Because by 1857 Mormons were
forbidden by the federal government to exercise their religion the way
they saw fit. Because when tax protests like the Whiskey Rebellion
happened, big dogs like George Washington put them on ice. How can you
look at that history and say our predecessors were no-tax-levying,
small-government, anti-financial-establishment,
pro-free-to-do-whatever-you-like-for-God types whose vision has been
squashed by a pervasive anti-liberty establishment headed up by evil
writers such as yours truly?
So to hell with the narrow (and in Jefferson’s case, hypocritical)
railings of the few conservative wretches Chuck Norris is always
clamoring for us to keep listening to. Those people were clearly on
the fringe of their own times; why should I accept their advice about
the world we live in now, wherein industrialization and other
developments have made the model they couldn’t even impose when it was
brand new completely impractical and demonstrably devastating?
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