An important..........................

 

.........................................history lesson.

Please.........................

 

America may have a sick political system and an economy that does not work well for many, but it is distinctly different, and in many ways better than its prime competitors. Our legacy, and our future, lies in large part in preserving that system without falling into the trap of centralized autocracy.

-Joel Kotkin, from this edition

a merger of stability..................

 

     As early as 1826, there were proposals to amend the Constitution by members who saw the legislative elections as fraught with corruption and delay.  At the start of the twentieth century, William Jennings Bryan and others pushed for direct elections, and many argued that the Senate was " a sort of aristocratic body too far removed from the people, beyond their reach, and with no special interest in their welfare."  It was an interesting argument, since that was precisely what it was designed to do.  The framers wanted to merge the stability of oligarchic and democratic systems.  This marriage was perfectly captured in a House with short terms of popular-election members and a Senate with longe terms of legislatively selected members.  That changed in 1913 with the Seventeenth Amendment specifying that senators would be chosen, like House members, in direct elections.  While there were clearly good arguments for direct elections to make senators more accountable to the voters, the change removed arguably the most important control of states in Congress.  With the expansive interpretation given interstate commerce, states would face increasing federal authority and decreasing political control.

-Jonathan Turley, Rage and the Republic:  The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution

Ah, history..................

 

     In America—a constitutional republic that build barriers, checks and balances, and the separation of powers within the construct of the national government and between and among the national and state and local governments—the Constitution was established for the explicit intent of defending against the failed experiences of past republics, such as Athens and Rome, as well as the tyranny of the monarchy, such as Britain, or the mob, such as the French Revolution.  Nonetheless, even the best minds, armed with the most noble and prudent of purposes, are unlikely to birth a republic forever safe from the relentless manipulation, deceit, and plotting of tyrannical minds and forces.  The threat from within is real and always present.  I wish it were not so, but experience and history point otherwise.

-Mark R. Levin, On Power

The world has always been messy................

 

The aging Sultan Abdülhamid II convened his cabinet in a crisis session on 23 July 1908.  The autocratic monarch faced the greatest domestic threat to his rule in over three decades on the throne.  The Ottoman army in Macedonia—that volatile Balkan region straddling the modern states of Greece, Bulgaria, and Macedonia—had risen in rebellion, demanding the restoration of the 1876 constitution and a return to parliamentary rule.  The sultan knew the contents of the constitution better than his opponents.  One of his first measures on ascending the Ottoman throne in 1876 had been to promulgate the constitution as the culmination of four decades of government-led reforms known as the Tanzimat.  In those days he was seen as an enlightened reformer.  But the experience of ruling the Ottoman Empire had hardened Abdülhamid from reformer into absolutist.

-Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East

About those good intentions............

 

Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.

-Daniel Webster, as culled from here

History worth looking at...........

 

 Franklin’s central point was that everyone needed to adjust their expectations, that neither political perfection nor moral purity was ever in the cards at the Constitutional Convention.

-Joseph Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

via

Ah, the Constitution........................

 

In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture of heterogeneous powers: the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man: not such as nature may offer as the prodigy of many centuries, but such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy. War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

-Alexander Hamilton

a sacred instrument...................

 

For myself, therefore, I desire to declare that the principle that will govern me in the high duty to which my country calls me is a strict adherence to the letter and spirit of the Constitution as it was designed by those who framed it. Looking back to it as a sacred instrument carefully and not easily framed; remembering that it was throughout a work of concession and compromise; viewing it as limited to national objects; regarding it as leaving to the people and the States all power not explicitly parted with, I shall endeavor to preserve, protect, and defend it by anxiously referring to its provision for direction in every action. To matters of domestic concernment which it has intrusted to the Federal Government and to such as relate to our intercourse with foreign nations I shall zealously devote myself; beyond those limits I shall never pass.

-Martin Van Buren, from his 1837 Inaugural Address

Ah, democracy...................

 

A “democracy” where unelected bureaucrats have effective veto power is not a real democracy. 

-as cut-and-pasted from here

Ed. Note:  The history major in me bristles when I hear people talking about the U.S. as a democracy.  I suspect the Founding Fathers would share my bristles.  They created, and we should still be considered, a constitutional republic, which is a very different animal from a democracy.  Having said that, if you substitute "constitutional republic" for "democracy" in the above quote, the quote is still true.

Probably a good thing..........................

      In truth, to the rest of the world, even as the American Founders boldly harbored utopian visions of the perfect republic, and as theyir wondrous ideas propounded in the Constitution fanned exuberantly outward, across the oceans, into the courts of the world's great powers, the United States remained little more than "revolting colonies," a fringe republic, an obscure land on the margins of Western civilization.  As Bernard Bailyn trenchantly reminds us, America was a "small, unsure, preindustrial borderland" filled with "provincials."  One European diplomat, the Comte de Montmorin, summed it up this way: "the united States," he sneered, were "the laughingstock of all the powers."  So, while Americans now groped forward to wrestle with their numerous inconsistencies—there were many—and their unresolved problems and seemingly insoluble dilemmas (they were numerous as well), the eyes of the world were not on these rustics.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800

Polybius............................

 In London, meanwhile, John Adams composed his best-known work, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, the sole piece of writing he finished that is longer than an essay. . . .

     In this rambling constitutional study, Adams surveyed all sorts of governments in the ancient and modern worlds, and concluded, as others did, that the most effective and sustainable form is one that is "a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, extolled by Polybius."  That ancient Greek historian had tired in his work to explain the rapid rise of the Roman Republic.  Polybius wrote that he intended to analyze how "it came about that nearly the whole world fell under the power of Rome in somewhat less than fifty-three years."

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

Ohio is voting on......................

 

............a proposed amendment to our State's constitution.  The question being asked in this special election (it is the only issue on the ballot) is should we make it more difficult to amend the constitution.  The amendment would raise the threshold for passage of a constitutional amendment from 50.01% to 60%.   Reasonable people might conclude that it should be difficult to amend a constitution.  Reasonable people might also conclude that the Ohio legislature has a history of embarrassing itself, and we the people deserve the right to pull on their chain from time to time.  My recommendation would be, if you are eligible, vote.  The process, at least in Licking County, is painless and easy.  Vote.

vague and blurred.................

       But it was the intellect that brought Calhoun down.  Or maybe it was the ambition, disguised as intellect.  Calhoun's political strength was his base in South Carolina, yet his strength was also his weakness.  Other states insisted on what they considered their sovereign rights vis-a-vis the national government, but none were so vigilant and quick to take offense as South Carolina.  The founders had left deliberately vague where the boundary lay between state and national authority; similarly blurred was who would determine the boundary and how it would be enforced.  They knew that any explicit answer might wreck their experiment in self-government before it got fairly started; they left to their heirs to find a solution the country could live with.  The task had been the work of Calhoun's—and Clay's—lifetime.

H. W. Brands, Heirs of the Founders:  The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster

Making a magnificent structure fit for use..........

 Powerful and ingenious minds, taking as postulates that the powers expressly granted to the government of the Union are to be contracted by construction into the narrowest possible compass and that the original powers of the States are retained if any possible construction will retain them may, by a course of well digested but refined and metaphysical reasoning founded on these premises, explain away the Constitution of our country and leave it a magnificent structure indeed to look at, but totally unfit for use. They may so entangle and perplex the understanding as to obscure principles which were before thought quite plain, and induce doubts where, if the mind were to pursue its own course, none would be perceived. In such a case, it is peculiarly necessary to recur to safe and fundamental principles to sustain those principles, and when sustained, to make them the tests of the arguments to be examined.

-Chief Justice John Marshall, as he concludes the majority opinion in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)

melting......................

      America, which survived a gory civil war among political and geographical factions, has become so far one of history's few exceptions.  The ultimate rationale of America's unique Constitution led Americans eventually to define themselves by their shared values, not by their inconsequential appearances.  Eventually, most who were willing to give up their prior identities and assume a new American persona were accepted as Americans.  The United States has always cherished its universally applicable melting-pot ethos of e pluribus unum—of blending diverse peoples into one through assimilation, integration, and inter-marriage in the manner that diverse colonies united to become one nation.

-Victor Davis Hanson:  The Dying Citizen

On the perils of not knowing...........................

John Adams warned us about this when he said democracy couldn’t work if people weren’t paying attention: “A frequent recurrence to the fundamental principles of the Constitution, and a constant adherence to those of piety, justice, moderation, temperance, industry, and frugality, are absolutely necessary to preserve the advantages of liberty, and to maintain a free government,” Adams said, adding, “this crap carnival is gonna get outta hand if voters don’t know anything.” At least I feel he said that, and feelings must be at least as important as facts. That’s in the Ninth Amendment, I’m pretty sure.

-Kyle Smith, from this article about the worrisome tendency of people not knowing things

Ed. Note:  The ninth amendment:  The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The Founders did not like to waste words.

The Second Amendment and "gun control".......

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

On December 15, 1791 the Bill of Rights (the given name for the first ten amendments to the Constitution) was ratified.  Many a debate has been had over the interesting way the Second Amendment was worded.  We are in the midst of another one.

Seems from here that the Framers of the Constitution built into their system the solution to gun control.  Don't like what the Second Amendment offers you?  Get Congress to approve the wording of a new amendment and have 75% of the state legislatures ratify it.  

Difficult to craft an amendment that a vast majority of the citizens and states of the U. S. of A. will support?   Absolutely.  So do the hard work anyway.  It is the only way.

About the Constitution.......................

     The makers of the Constitution earned in a manner the full praise that has ever since been bestowed on them.  But they did not, as it has often been suggested they did, create a sort of archetype and pattern for all governments that may hereafter partake of a federal character.  Nor has the curious machine which they devised—the balanced opposition between two legislative chambers, between the whole Legislature and the independent executive power of the President, between the governing power of the moment and the permanent expression of the people's will embodied in certain almost unalterable laws—worked conspicuously better than other political constitutions.  The American Constitution owes its particularities partly to the form which the State governments had naturally taken, and partly to sheer misunderstanding of the British Constitution, but much more to the want at the time of any strong sense of national unity and to the existence of a good deal of dislike to all governments whatsoever.  The sufficient merit of its founders was of patient and skillful diplomatists, who, undeterred by difficulties, found out the most satisfactory settlement that had a chance of being accepted by the States.

-Lord Charnwood,  Abraham Lincoln:  A Complete Biography

Constitutionalism.....................

     Madison took care of his reputation in other ways (think of his convention notes), but his real monument is not them, or any other item or thing—not even originals of the Constitution or Bill of Rights, or first editions of The Federalist.  The English architect Sir Christopher Wren was buried in one of his creations, St Paul's Cathedral, where he has a famous epitaph:  if you seek his monument, look about you.  Madison's circumambient  monument is American constitutionalism—the laws of doing and not doing, and all the debate and revisions they have generated (debating and revising are among the laws;  some of the most important ongoing debates—over the power of the federal government, and of the courts; over free speech and freedom of religion—go back to Madison's lifetime).  Many other people helped build constitutionalism, including enemies of his, and he would be the last person to deny his collaborators.  But he played a major role.

-Richard Brookhiser,  James Madison