The Founders' True Spirit?

As we celebrate our independence this week, liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne would instruct us all as to "The Founders True Spirit."   Interesting, but I have a few questions for Mr. Dionne.

He writes:

It's entirely appropriate that the week of our July Fourth celebrations should coincide with a moment when the Supreme Court's health care decision has prompted intense debate over the purpose of our government and what the Constitution allows it to do. 

We are a more philosophical people than we give ourselves credit for. Constitutional questions enter the political conversation in the United States more than in most countries because our diverse nation is bound by our founding principles, not by blood, race or ethnicity.

Might it also be the case that we refer to the Constitution so much precisely because we were founded  as a constitutional republic, and whether or not were were also bound by blood, race, or ethnicity is immaterial?

He continues:

This has advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantages are our openness and the fact that we tend to argue on the basis of high principles. The biggest disadvantage is that differences over policy are often disguised as differences over whether a preferred choice is constitutional or not. When we should be addressing pragmatic questions -- Will this approach work? Will it solve the problem it's designed to solve? Is this a problem government should do something about? -- we instead fall back on rather abstract discussions of whether a given idea violates the Constitution.

Could it be that those "rather abstract discussions" occur because absent the constraints on government afforded by the Constitution, the policy differences among us would too often be decided simply by the raw power of the majority to impose its will on the minority, and to do so whether or not the policy will indeed work or solve the problem?

 

There's more:

It's not a recent habit. When Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton proposed that the federal government establish a Bank of the United States in 1790, his idea was strongly opposed by James Madison, his partner in writing both the Constitution and the Federalist Papers that defended it. 

Madison wasn't just against the bank. Setting a pattern for the future, he insisted that its creation would be unconstitutional. Those who claim we can be so certain of the "original" intentions of the Founders should take note: If two of the original authors of the Constitution came to such a stark point of disagreement so quickly, what exactly does "originalism" mean?

Does Dionne mean to imply (and whether he realizes it or not this is where his logic inevitably leads him) that because even the Founders sometimes disagreed about the Constitution's original meaning, that it never had an original meaning at all?  Is it not possible that Madison or Hamilton or both were wrong about its original meaning?  Might not their partisan passion for their own policy preferences have blinded them to that meaning?

 

Finally:

The genius of the Founders is that they created a government designed to act, and so I'd propose a new patriotic ritual involving an annual reading of the preamble to our Constitution:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." 

Yes, the first word of the Constitution is "we," and its purposes include establishing justice and promoting the general welfare. Before we expend enormous energy deciding how many angels can dance on the head of the Commerce Clause, we would usefully keep in mind the broader objectives of our great experiment.

Does Dionne not understand that the Founders, to a man, maintained resolutely that the larger purposes of any good government could only best be achieved precisely by constitutional government?  Moreover, does he not know that the "we" of the very first sentence implies not simply that a mere majority, nor even a super-majority, but rather that the people consented unanimously?  And, that they, and we also, consented unanimously to establish only "this Constitution", not just any constitution, not the constitution of our independent imaginations or convenience, and certainly not no constitution at all?

If our Constitution gets in the way of our government from time to time, it's because the Founders intended for it to do just that, both in spirit and in truth.

Reflecting on Liberty

It's the Fourth of July after all and I just read with some interest a short New York Times piece on the costs and benefits of liberty.

With respect to liberty, the writer identifies the 1960s as a watershed in American history:

What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won. 

From the beginning, the American idea embodied a tension between radical individualism and the demands of the commonweal. The document we’re celebrating today says in its second line that axiomatic human rights include “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — individualism in a nutshell.

While I'm usually first in line when it comes to blaming so many of that decade's "triumphs" for what is currently wrong in America, I don't think the author has it quite right.

For two-hundred years and more, no sensible person ever saw a serious tension between the liberty of the individual and the "demands of the commonwealth."  Instead, the liberty enshrined in the Declaration was understood to mean that the individual, regardless of station in life, could, by right, fully participate in attending to those demands.  What happened in the Sixties was a conflation of liberty with narcissism.  In an earlier, more sane period, the latter would have been immediately recognized for the servitude it actually is.  That is, to be a narcissist is to be a slave to one's passions.

No one has ever seriously celebrated selfishness, not even Ayn Rand, I'd argue.  No one has ever maintained that "greed is good" and no one has ever thought that bragging about one's wealth was anything but gauche.  These charges and countless more like them are but the strawmen constructions of those that would in the name of balancing the costs and benefits of liberty, eliminate it altogether.

On the other hand, genuine liberty, liberty born of self-discipline and self-reliance, is perfectly consistent with attending to the "demands of the commonwealth,"  And oh what a commonwealth it would be if it were populated with a majority of just such genuinely free men and women.

Happy Fourth of July everyone! 

Let's Be Clear

Since the Supreme Court ruled last week that Obamacare was constitutional after all, I've been reading and hearing from many quarters that what most upset conservatives about the ruling is that as a result a law we find objectionable will stand.  Not so.

Look, since the Republic was founded we've been saddled quite often with foolish laws.  And, as long as we, or a majority of us, persist in electing politicians who are similarly foolish, not to mention dense, vain, venal, power-hungry, or worse, we'll continue to be saddled with them from time to time.

The problem with the Court's ruling for conservatives is not that it upheld a foolish, perhaps an even disastrous law.  Rather, the problem is that the law it upheld was clearly unconstitutional.

Andy Griffith, RIP

With this blog's title, you just knew I had to comment on this unhappy piece of news, didn't you?

The fictional sheriff "Andy Taylor" of the fictional town "Mayberry" has died at 86.  This is indeed a sad day for Andy Griffith's closest friends and family and it's a sad day for America as well, and should be.

The real actor Andy Griffith and the real town of his youth Mount Airy were always something very different than the TV show's character and setting.  Griffith, a political liberal, supported Obamacare of all things.  But while we knew they were different, we, most of us anyway, nevertheless wanted oh-so-much for them to be the same.  Why?  

The show's abiding appeal is often attributed to baby boomer nostalgia, but I think it's something deeper than that.  Even in the early to mid-1960s when it was first produced, the program was deliberately, even self-consciously nostalgic.  But, and this is key, it was so without guile or even a hint of irony.

Whether it'll withstand strict scrutiny or not, we all seem to need to remember a childhood, a founding, that was simpler not because it was simple, but because it was purer.  In the context of contemporary America, few figures have successfully met that need, recalling "the better angels of our nature": Norman Rockwell, Jimmy Stewart, Ronald Reagan.  "Mayberry", a happy assemblage of innocents, was and remains the Garden of Eden we've lost and desperately want to find again, or, for sanity's sake, at least to remember well.

To be sure, Griffith was an accomplished actor who always could play more than just an easy-going small town sheriff.  If you've never seen it, I'd recommend you watch him in Elia Kazan's still edgy A Face in the Crowd.  But it is for creating "Mayberry" that he'll always be remembered best and for which he rightly earned in 2005 the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

RIP.

The Jury's In, cont.

Imagine that the congressional Democrats and the President had passed Obamacare as a tax, but the Chief Jutice had argued that, no, it was really a mandate after all, and then joined the conservative justices to overturn it on those grounds.

Would the chattering class have been just as effusive in its praise of his cleverness?

The Jury's In, cont.

By the way, if Chief Justice Roberts thought his ruling would earn him a reservoir of good will from Democrats, the American Left, or the left-leaning elite media, then, and there's no gentle way to put it, he's a fool.

The Jury's In

I think Chief Justice John Roberts' "switch in time" will achieve precisely the opposite of his reportedly intended effect.  That is, rather than serving to re-establish what he believed to be was the sinking legitimacy of the Court, this ruling will only further discredit it. 

I supppose no one but Roberts himself can say for sure, but the news media is replete with stories that Roberts reversed himself at the eleventh hour, applying head-shakingly clever or crazy, legal or political reasoning to arrive at the result he wanted to begin with which was to uphold the consitutionality of Obamacare.

To be sure, he has his conservative defenders, but I fear they may have fallen victim to the abiding temptation of all "insiders", that is, to value and applaud cleverness over common sense.  Anyway you cut it, to, with a straight face, call a cat a dog, a "mandate" a "tax", is an affront to common sense and as such the Court will only be viewd by the public with an increasingly jaundiced eye.