(Author's note: This post had its origin in a speech I gave several years ago, all my notes are lost and some of what comes after the Joseph Sobran quote may be more Sobran than me, but give credit for it all to Sobran if you must, it is truth that matters here, not the credit.)
ALL THROUGH THE SUMMER OF 1787, in Philadelphia, in the Pennsylvania colony, the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention had suffered, not only with the difficulties of debating and writing the Constitution, but from the weather. The flies and mosquitoes that inhabit Philadelphia during the summer season had been particularly bad. The heat made it impossible to keep the Hall, now known as Constitution Hall, closed, and the insects had taken full advantage of the open windows. They feasted on the legs of the gathered delegates, biting right through their silk stockings and making everyone miserable.
More than anyone, the organizer and prime mover of the Convention was the man who would eventually become the fourth president of the United States, James Madison.
He was a small man, some say no more than 5'4" tall with a voice so soft you had to lean forward or cup you ear just to hear him debate. He was described by one of his admirers as "no bigger than half a piece of soap".
But whatever issue was debated through that summer, it was Madison, who possessed one of the finest minds on the continent, who was the best informed man on any point of debate. He earned his title that summer, "the father of the Constitution". We'll hear from him later.
The Convention began May 13, when all 40,000 Philadelphians had turned out to cheer the arrival of George Washington and by September 18, it was done.
The people of Philadelphia had heard the rumors that the great work had been completed and a large crowd of anxious citizens had gathered, milling around outside and waiting to hear what had been accomplished.
The first delegate to emerge was 81 year old Ben Franklin. When the crowd saw him, the buzz of anticipation grew louder. Above the din, a Mrs. Powel, wife of the mayor of Philadelphia, shouted out, "Well Dr. Franklin, what have we got, a monarchy or a republic? Franklin looked at her over his spectacles and responded, "A Republic, madam, IF you can keep it." (emphasis added)
A representative Republic. Something that had not been seen on Earth for almost 2000 years. Not since the Athenians and then the Romans had attempted it. Though the Roman republic had lasted several hundred years, the Athenian democracy survived only 50.
We Americans were given one of the greatest gifts in history that summer in 1787. A government that was limited, severely limited, by the Constitution.
They gave us a Republic because to them one of the most dangerous words in the political affairs of men was one we hear used a lot these days--democracy. A form of government in which the passions of the majority can easily be turned to oppression of the minority. Our founders understood that and wanted to make sure we had a way to subdue those passions and make them subservient to the law. (Yes, I'm aware that the slave compromise was an exception to the idea, but there isn't room to debate that here, although they did write the beginning of the end of slavery into the document.)
As Thomas Jefferson said,
"In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution".
Does the Constitution still bind down the power of men? Do our elected representatives still have the same reverence for the Constitution that they should? Are we still a republic where power is held in check by the Constitution. The questions are rhetorical, of course. The answer to all of them is, unfortunately, not even close.
Our representatives in the Congress today, most of them anyway , with the exception of a few like Ron Paul from Texas , treat the Constitution as an impediment to their servicing of the wants and desires of their constituents. They do not so much deliberately violate it as ignore it and we now look to our representatives, not as guardians of our liberties but as dispensers of political pork and bacon.
So why are we going wrong ? Why does our Congress ignore the limited powers assigned to it ? Why do the Supreme Court and the Congress violate the very principles they swear an oath to uphold?
It might help if we understand that the life span of all great civilizations have an arc to them. An ascent and a descent. For example, who said this?
"The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced. The arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced, if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
Was it George Bush, John McCain, or Newt Gingrich?
No, that was said by Marcus Tullius Cicero in 55 BC. Just before the Roman republic fell to Julius Caesar and the long decline of Rome began.
About the same time the delegates were debating the limited powers of our Republic in Philadelphia, a scholar of the ancient world, Alexander Tyler, warned of the dangers of democracy and the arc of civilizations, when he said this: (the origin of the quote is disputed, but the logic has a razor sharpness.)
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can exist only until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. From that moment the majority always votes for the candidate who promises to give them the most, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship".Where does America stand along this arc today? I wish I could tell you with any degree of certainty. My guess would be somewhere between apathy and dependency.
The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence:
From BONDAGE to SPIRITUAL FAITH, from SPIRITUAL FAITH to GREAT COURAGE, from COURAGE to LIBERTY, from LIBERTY to ABUNDANCE, from ABUNDANCE to SELFISHNESS, from SELFISHNESS to COMPLACENCY, from COMPLACENCY to APATHY,from APATHY to DEPENDENCY and from DEPENDENCY back into BONDAGE."
Why does the American public feel such apathy toward the Constitution, except for maybe the first and second amendment?
Joseph Sobran in his essay "How tyranny came to America" puts the blame on education--or the lack of it, regarding the wonders of the Constitution. He includes both young and old alike as being unschooled in the document. He says that:
"One of the great goals of education is to initiate the young into the conversation of their ancestors; to enable them to understand the language of that conversation, in all its subtlety, and maybe even, in theirmaturity, to add to it some wisdom of their own.
The modern American educational system no longer teaches us the political language of our ancestors. In fact our schooling helps widen the gulf of time between our ancestors and ourselves, because much of what we are taught in the name of civics, political science, or American history is really modern liberal propaganda.
Sometimes this is deliberate. Worse yet, sometimes it isn’t.
Our ancestral voices have come to sound alien to us, and therefore our own moral and political language is impoverished. It’s as if the people of England could no longer understand Shakespeare, or Germans couldn’t comprehend Mozart and Beethoven.
So to most Americans, even those who feel oppressed by what they call big government, it must sound strange to hear it said, in the past tense, that tyranny has come to America. After all, we have a constitution, don’t we? We’ve abolished slavery and segregation. We won two world wars and the Cold War. We still congratulate ourselves before every ballgame on being the Land of the Free. And we aren’t ruled by some fanatic with a funny mustache who likes big parades with thousands of soldiers goose-stepping past huge pictures of himself.
For all that, we no longer fully have what our ancestors, who framed and ratified our Constitution, thought of as freedom — a careful division of power that prevents power from becoming concentrated and unlimited. The word they usually used for concentrated power was consolidated — a rough synonym for fascist.
And the words they used for any excessive powers claimed or exercised by the state were usurped and tyrannical. They would consider the modern "liberal" state tyrannical in principle; they would see in it not the opposite of the fascist, communist, and socialist states, but their sister."
If Washington and Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton could come back, the first thing they’d notice would be that the federal government now routinely assumes thousands of powers never assigned to it — powers never granted, never delegated, never enumerated. These were the words they used, and it’s a good idea for us to learn their language.
They would say that we no longer live under the Constitution they wrote. And the Americans of a much later era would say we no longer live even under the Constitution they inherited and amended.
What’s worse is that our constitutional illiteracy cuts us off from our own national heritage. And so our politics degenerates into increasingly bitter and unprincipled quarrels about who is going to bear the burdens of war and welfare.
The Constitution does two things. First, it delegates certain enumerated powers to the federal government. Second, it separates those powers among the three branches. Most people understand the secondary principle of the separation of powers. But they don’t grasp the primary idea of delegated and enumerated powers.
Consider this.
Not long ago we had a big national debate over national health care. Advocates and opponents argued long and loud over whether it could work, what was fair, how to pay for it, and so forth. But almost nobody raised the basic issue: Where does the federal government get the power to legislate in this area?
The answer is: nowhere.
The Constitution lists 18 specific legislative powers of Congress, and not one of them covers national health care. Liberals and conservatives alike don't seem to understand what the father of the Constitution, James Madison said in Federalist 45:
"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects such as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce. The powers reserved to the several states will extend to all objects which… concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the state."If one of the authors of the Constitution isn't an authority on what it means, then who is... Nancy Pelosi?
As a matter of fact, none of the delegated powers of Congress — and delegated is always the key word — cover Social Security, or Medicare, or federal aid to education, or countless public works projects, or equally countless regulations of business, large and small, or the space program, or farm subsidies, or research grants, or subsidies to the arts and humanities, or... well, you name it, chances are it’s unconstitutional.
We are less free, more heavily taxed, and worse governed than our ancestors were under British rule.
Ponder this:
In the 19th century and for most of history, a slave owed his master half of what he produced. The rest was considered necessary for his own maintenance, so he could continue to produce for the master. Today we pay income tax, property taxes , excise taxes, sales taxes and when we die, an inheritance tax.
If we add up the total of what we create that goes to pay these taxes, you'll find they add up to ----right at 50%. I will leave you to draw your own conclusion as to what the founders would have thought of all that taxation. Much of it is "necessary" because the Congress has to pay for all those unconstitutional programs they say the people want. Now here's the sad thing. They may be right about us "People". Many of us do want those programs and the rest of don't fight hard enough to see that they aren't passed.
Wouldn't it be ironic if Pogo was right and the worst enemies of the Constitution were those of us who don't know enough about it and don't fight hard enough to preserve it.
And it has to be preserved.
The Constitution and the ideals embodied in it are the only wall of separation between us and the tyranny of democracy. It's ideal is liberty and it's greatest asset is the free people who defend it. And we should never forget that freedom is one of the rarest of human conditions and that others before us have let their apathy doom them.
In "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" Edward Gibbon wrote:
"In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all; security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was the freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again."But---all isn't lost. There is a small but mighty group of idealistic patriots and as long as we have any freedom to act and the spiritual faith to persevere we have the opportunity to win.
I can think of two things that we all can do. One, we can make sure that our schools teach the Constitution with the reverence due it or find school board members who will insist on it.
And two, we can refuse to vote for any candidate we have reason to believe doesn't stand on the following statement:
"I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents "interest", I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and in that cause I am doing the very best I can."
That was said by one of the fathers of the modern conservative movement --- Sen. Barry Goldwater. (I've included a photo with President Reagan just because it makes me feel good. And I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the late great William F. Buckley.)
We could use 535 people in the Congress, one in the White House and five on the Supreme Court who believe in and act on Goldwater's philosophy.
Oh, and 300 million citizens who know what the hell he's talking about.
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