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The author is being astonishingly ironic here. The Left has always hated the Constitution, except when it can be made to serve their purposes. The Constitution is racist. Obama doesn't like it because it outlines "negative rights," and doesn't empower government with a list of must do's. The electoral college is bad. Free speech is bad. The Second Amendment is bad. Using the military is bad.
We are forced to conclude that there is not much of the Constitution that the Left likes. Yet here we have a leftist complaining about the Constitution they hate as being broken, and perpetrated by, you guessed it, the Republicans and Trump. Hmm.
And by the way, the Left wants it broken. If it's broken it can be blamed for society's ills. And if it can be blamed, it must be replaced by a better system, i.e., socialism...
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The system wasn’t supposed to work this way. The Founding Fathers deliberately devised a structure in which someone like Donald Trump — a vain, self-centered, mendacious demagogue — could never become chief executive, (Oh, really? Since the author seems to consider himself a constitutional expert, perhaps he could cite the constitutional provision that would prevent Trump from becoming president?)
and in which the legislature could never be captured by a reckless, ideologically obsessed minority bent on overriding the majority interests of Americans. (Again we would hope the author might cite the constitutional provision that would prevent such a thing.)
Those Founders labored to create an independent judiciary that was not captive to any single ideology or party. They carefully crafted a set of checks and balances in which no single branch of government could overpower another, and in which each held its own prerogatives dearly. In doing so, they thought they had provided posterity with a wise, cautious and magnanimous governmental operation that would serve the larger public weal rather than advantage any particular group or party, and that could withstand the gusts of any given historical moment. (Yes, of course. Exactly right. However, as we previously noted, it is the Left that has been systematically disassembling the Constitution, celebrating court rulings that create law, executive orders that create law, and judicial rulings that overturn duly passed law. It is the Left who has brought us to this place.)
It actually worked surprisingly well for 250 years, which is not to say that it didn’t have plenty of hiccups or that special interests weren’t often privileged. But it doesn’t work anymore, and though I am optimistic enough to believe that we will have a new president and Congress someday who will change policies and perhaps set us back on the road to rationality and common decency (“Make America Good Again”), the Trump presidency and the Republican Congress have nevertheless exposed the flaws in the system itself. (It is the Right who has been complaining about judicial overreach to a chorus of leftist hissing and booing, it is the Right who has objected to executive orders, it is the Right who has shown the spotlight on legislation passed in the dead of night, it is the Right who has complained about congressional rule changes that allow the leftist agenda to proceed. Is the author unaware of his side's promulgation of what he complains about?)
The prognosis isn’t good: These flaws are embedded in the Constitution and cannot be repaired without wholesale change, which isn’t coming. (Waaait. The Constitution is flawed? I thought the problem was the violation of the Constitution???)
These defects are now openly visible for the next demagogue and the next gaggle of political hypocrites and power mongers to exploit. You can forget all the alleged fail-safes. The Constitution was supposed to protect us from this. It was expressly designed to do so. It didn’t.
The system failed because the Founding Fathers did not anticipate anything like the modern Republican Party. (I wonder if he will document claims like this, or note how leftists themselves have set about to negate and dismantle the Constitution.)
On the contrary, they believed that extremism and overweening self-interest of the sort Republicans routinely display could always be quarantined. Were they wrong! Instead of the Constitution circumscribing reactionary populism, reactionary populism has circumscribed the Constitution. That is where we are now. And there is no way out.
The Founding Fathers weren’t naive idealists. They understood the deficiencies of human nature, which is why they felt the need to devise structural defenses against them. “If men were angels,” wrote James Madison in Federalist No. 51, “no government would be necessary.” But men weren’t, so it was. Still, our forebears were comforted by four assumptions that would underpin American democracy — four assumptions that let them believe their Constitution would sustain the new nation.
First, they believed that a national government would attract what John Jay described as the “best men,” men “whose wisdom,” Madison would concur in Federalist #10, “may best discern the true interests of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” In short, they envisioned a government of sagacious men of good will who set aside their own interests for the country’s: the “best and brightest.” Instead, we seem to have gotten the “worst and dumbest.” (Dumb, like Democrat Hank Johnson? Joe Biden? Joe Biden again? Nancy Pelosi? Barack Obama? Howard Dean? Alan Grayson? Harry Reid? Henry Waxman? Marion Berry? These are the best and brightest the author wants?)
Examples abound, and this week’s rollout of the new Republican health care plan, which is likely to deprive at least 10 million Americans of health insurance while further enriching the rich is just another vivid demonstration of how the Founders overestimated the quality of future representation as well as our representatives’ dedication to the larger public good. Paul Ryan, the Republicans’ much-vaunted intellectual, doesn’t even know how insurance works! (The Founders would have defended ACA? That's an astounding claim. James Madison said, "“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” This was the general sentiment of all the founders, who wanted limited, diffused, and a weak federal government where individual liberty and rights bestowed by the Creator could flourish.
If the author bemoans the loss of the Constitution, he might want to read it. He will quickly discover that the Founders were very specific in their limitations of federal government.)
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands. . .may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
— FEDERALIST NO. 47
Second, the Founders separated the three branches of government and assumed that each would check and balance the others as a form of protection against any one branch encroaching on the power of the others. (Which we have documented as the antithesis of the desires of the Left.)
As Madison put in it Federalist No. 47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands. . .may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” The basic idea was that if goodwill didn’t ensure good government, a sense of institutional loyalty — even across party lines — would help.
Again, for most of American history that actually worked reasonably well, despite the expansion of the party system and politicians’ growing allegiance to it. In the 20th century, for example, there was arguably no more popular president than Franklin Roosevelt. But when he sought to pack the Supreme Court by adding new justices after the conservative court had ruled much of the New Deal legislation unconstitutional, there were howls of outrage that he had overstepped his constitutional bounds, and when in 1938, he sought to unseat congressmen in his own party who had opposed him, he triggered an intraparty revolt. Institutional loyalty overrode party affiliation, what Madison had disparagingly called “faction,” which is precisely how the system was designed to work. (But the Left will defend to their dying day the wonders of Social Security and the big government involvement into citizens' daily lives perpetrated by FDR.)
Third, the Founders assumed that extremism could never take root in the government — not because there weren’t any extremists, but because the system had safeguards against their assuming power. (No, they were quite plain in their statements that our government was fragile and that liberty must be defended. In the Declaration, they asserted "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."
(Not incidentally, Madison also observed, in a prophecy of Trump’s rise, that “a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.”) Here Madison relied not on government structures, but on social ones. He thought that the diversity of the country, the sheer number of competing and countervailing interests, would prevent any single faction from riding roughshod over the others, and he adduced the example of religious sects where there were simply too many for one to be dominant. (No, he relied on the People to safeguard their rights when government was at odds with them.)
But not anymore. Establishment Republicans may have griped during the campaign that Trump wasn’t sufficiently doctrinaire for their tastes, but how quickly those congressional Republicans fell in line after the election. Now there is virtually no distance between Trump, Congress and presumably, once Neil Gorsuch takes his seat on the Supreme Court, that institution as well. Separation of powers in a monoparty system is an absurdity because party and power supersede everything else, especially the public good. There is nothing Trump could possibly announce (say, for example, a former president wiretapping him), nothing he or his minions could possibly do (say, consorting with the Russians to tilt the election his way) that would move congressional Republicans to challenge him. We live in a Republican monopoly, and to hell with institutional loyalty or checks and balances. They don’t work. (No complaint from the author when the Democrats wielded the same power.)
Again, Madison was just plain wrong, because on one hand, he subscribed to the notion of a public driven in large part by rational self-interest, and on the other, because he didn’t imagine how fiercely extremists would press their cause. He couldn’t have foreseen how modern tools and technologies of manipulation, like mass media, social media, propaganda and persuasion, have coaxed people to forsake their self-interest. We know, for example, that some of the fiercest opponents of Obamacare are those who have benefited most from it. (That is, the People are too stupid, and they need the Democrats.)
Madison, then, didn’t foresee that a major party could be hijacked by extremists, as the Republicans have been, or that those extremists would then expunge from the party the very diverse elements that Madison had identified as our democratic safeguard. Or to put it another way, the Republican Party monopolized itself before it monopolized our government. Not even the farmers, small businessmen, Rotarians and Wall Street bankers who had formed the core of the pre-Reagan party saw that coming. About one thing, however, Madison was right: Extremists have no interest in democracy. (Good lawd, this man has blinders. It is the Left that demands lock-step orthodoxy, who hate differing opinions, and it is they who want to wipe out all dissent.)
And that brings us to the Founders’ fourth and most important assumption. They assumed that those who aspired to power did so to govern; they didn’t aspire to govern to gain power. But what happens when a major party doesn’t believe in government itself? Republicans profess to love the Constitution. They carry copies in their shirt pockets and wave them at every opportunity. But here is the quandary: The Constitution creates the government, and Republicans profess to hate government every bit as much as they love the Constitution. Indeed, the modern GOP not only arose from the forces of extremism — the Manionites, John Birchers and Apocalyptics. It arose from those who vowed to destroy government as we know it — or, as one recent anti-government Republican, Steve Bannon, promised, “to deconstruct the administrative state.” (A persistent accusation from the Left, that is Right wants no government, However, they do want to dismantle the gargantuan, intrusive, dictating, meddling big government created by the Left. For the Left, any criticism of the failures of big government is synonymous with no government, which the Right has never proposed. The Right is not anarchist.
Just today Rush posted this quote: "The Republicans are not made out of the same stuff Democrats are. I mean, Democrats are born to use government, to take it over, to wield its various levers of power to their benefit. Republicans, conservatives, don't think of government that way. We want to get it to be as invisible as it can and still function.")
You can’t blame the Founders for not having anticipated that the government could be taken over by fanatics who don’t believe in government. No document, no system could have offered protection from this.
So kissing the Constitution is really a neat trick to disguise how little the Constitution really matters now, how pro forma it has become, how its assumptions have been savaged. A government that was predicated on goodwill (Our government was not predicated on good will, it was predicated on limits and restricitons.)
has few practitioners of it and virtually none among the current governing party. A government in which power was subject to checks and balances has virtually none, only party uniformity. A government in which, in the words of one constitutional scholar, it was “almost impossible for a zealous movement to sweep like wildfire . . . and seize control,” has been seized by such a movement. And a government that was designed to provide stability, temperance, deliberation and wisdom is controlled by a party that doesn’t even believe in government, much less those virtues. (It was designed to allow personal liberty and free association to prevail, absent the power to intervene in the private affairs of its people.)
Yes, as I said, others will occupy the White House and Congress and even the Supreme Court. But there is nothing they can do to rebuild the structure the Republicans razed when they tore down the Constitution. What is left is the rubble. (Amazingly, Donald Trump has been in office only a few weeks, and he somehow destroyed the Constitution. How is this possible, unless the systems and techniques he is using is already in place. And who installed those systems and techniques? Well, the Left.
The problem really is that the Left created a monster that they thought they would always be in charge of. Someone came along and used it in a way they don't like. So it's not Trump, it's the system they created, and now it's coming back to bite them. If they hadn't destroyed the founding principles of the government to begin with, Trump wouldn't be able to do anything.)
Still, as John Jay, wrote in Federalist No. 3, once a national government had been established, “the best men in the country will not only consent to serve, but also will generally be appointed to manage it.” These would be people who not only possessed sagacity but also selflessness. They would work for the country, not themselves. Again, this isn’t to say that there wouldn’t be profound disagreements among them, only that people of good will would join forces for the greater good. I certainly don’t need to elaborate what happened to that idea.
Which is why the Founders insisted on a separation of powers.
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The system wasn’t supposed to work this way. The Founding Fathers deliberately devised a structure in which someone like Donald Trump — a vain, self-centered, mendacious demagogue — could never become chief executive, (Oh, really? Since the author seems to consider himself a constitutional expert, perhaps he could cite the constitutional provision that would prevent Trump from becoming president?)
and in which the legislature could never be captured by a reckless, ideologically obsessed minority bent on overriding the majority interests of Americans. (Again we would hope the author might cite the constitutional provision that would prevent such a thing.)
Those Founders labored to create an independent judiciary that was not captive to any single ideology or party. They carefully crafted a set of checks and balances in which no single branch of government could overpower another, and in which each held its own prerogatives dearly. In doing so, they thought they had provided posterity with a wise, cautious and magnanimous governmental operation that would serve the larger public weal rather than advantage any particular group or party, and that could withstand the gusts of any given historical moment. (Yes, of course. Exactly right. However, as we previously noted, it is the Left that has been systematically disassembling the Constitution, celebrating court rulings that create law, executive orders that create law, and judicial rulings that overturn duly passed law. It is the Left who has brought us to this place.)
It actually worked surprisingly well for 250 years, which is not to say that it didn’t have plenty of hiccups or that special interests weren’t often privileged. But it doesn’t work anymore, and though I am optimistic enough to believe that we will have a new president and Congress someday who will change policies and perhaps set us back on the road to rationality and common decency (“Make America Good Again”), the Trump presidency and the Republican Congress have nevertheless exposed the flaws in the system itself. (It is the Right who has been complaining about judicial overreach to a chorus of leftist hissing and booing, it is the Right who has objected to executive orders, it is the Right who has shown the spotlight on legislation passed in the dead of night, it is the Right who has complained about congressional rule changes that allow the leftist agenda to proceed. Is the author unaware of his side's promulgation of what he complains about?)
The prognosis isn’t good: These flaws are embedded in the Constitution and cannot be repaired without wholesale change, which isn’t coming. (Waaait. The Constitution is flawed? I thought the problem was the violation of the Constitution???)
These defects are now openly visible for the next demagogue and the next gaggle of political hypocrites and power mongers to exploit. You can forget all the alleged fail-safes. The Constitution was supposed to protect us from this. It was expressly designed to do so. It didn’t.
The system failed because the Founding Fathers did not anticipate anything like the modern Republican Party. (I wonder if he will document claims like this, or note how leftists themselves have set about to negate and dismantle the Constitution.)
On the contrary, they believed that extremism and overweening self-interest of the sort Republicans routinely display could always be quarantined. Were they wrong! Instead of the Constitution circumscribing reactionary populism, reactionary populism has circumscribed the Constitution. That is where we are now. And there is no way out.
The Founding Fathers weren’t naive idealists. They understood the deficiencies of human nature, which is why they felt the need to devise structural defenses against them. “If men were angels,” wrote James Madison in Federalist No. 51, “no government would be necessary.” But men weren’t, so it was. Still, our forebears were comforted by four assumptions that would underpin American democracy — four assumptions that let them believe their Constitution would sustain the new nation.
First, they believed that a national government would attract what John Jay described as the “best men,” men “whose wisdom,” Madison would concur in Federalist #10, “may best discern the true interests of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” In short, they envisioned a government of sagacious men of good will who set aside their own interests for the country’s: the “best and brightest.” Instead, we seem to have gotten the “worst and dumbest.” (Dumb, like Democrat Hank Johnson? Joe Biden? Joe Biden again? Nancy Pelosi? Barack Obama? Howard Dean? Alan Grayson? Harry Reid? Henry Waxman? Marion Berry? These are the best and brightest the author wants?)
Examples abound, and this week’s rollout of the new Republican health care plan, which is likely to deprive at least 10 million Americans of health insurance while further enriching the rich is just another vivid demonstration of how the Founders overestimated the quality of future representation as well as our representatives’ dedication to the larger public good. Paul Ryan, the Republicans’ much-vaunted intellectual, doesn’t even know how insurance works! (The Founders would have defended ACA? That's an astounding claim. James Madison said, "“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” This was the general sentiment of all the founders, who wanted limited, diffused, and a weak federal government where individual liberty and rights bestowed by the Creator could flourish.
If the author bemoans the loss of the Constitution, he might want to read it. He will quickly discover that the Founders were very specific in their limitations of federal government.)
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands. . .may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
— FEDERALIST NO. 47
Second, the Founders separated the three branches of government and assumed that each would check and balance the others as a form of protection against any one branch encroaching on the power of the others. (Which we have documented as the antithesis of the desires of the Left.)
As Madison put in it Federalist No. 47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands. . .may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” The basic idea was that if goodwill didn’t ensure good government, a sense of institutional loyalty — even across party lines — would help.
Again, for most of American history that actually worked reasonably well, despite the expansion of the party system and politicians’ growing allegiance to it. In the 20th century, for example, there was arguably no more popular president than Franklin Roosevelt. But when he sought to pack the Supreme Court by adding new justices after the conservative court had ruled much of the New Deal legislation unconstitutional, there were howls of outrage that he had overstepped his constitutional bounds, and when in 1938, he sought to unseat congressmen in his own party who had opposed him, he triggered an intraparty revolt. Institutional loyalty overrode party affiliation, what Madison had disparagingly called “faction,” which is precisely how the system was designed to work. (But the Left will defend to their dying day the wonders of Social Security and the big government involvement into citizens' daily lives perpetrated by FDR.)
Third, the Founders assumed that extremism could never take root in the government — not because there weren’t any extremists, but because the system had safeguards against their assuming power. (No, they were quite plain in their statements that our government was fragile and that liberty must be defended. In the Declaration, they asserted "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."
(Not incidentally, Madison also observed, in a prophecy of Trump’s rise, that “a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.”) Here Madison relied not on government structures, but on social ones. He thought that the diversity of the country, the sheer number of competing and countervailing interests, would prevent any single faction from riding roughshod over the others, and he adduced the example of religious sects where there were simply too many for one to be dominant. (No, he relied on the People to safeguard their rights when government was at odds with them.)
But not anymore. Establishment Republicans may have griped during the campaign that Trump wasn’t sufficiently doctrinaire for their tastes, but how quickly those congressional Republicans fell in line after the election. Now there is virtually no distance between Trump, Congress and presumably, once Neil Gorsuch takes his seat on the Supreme Court, that institution as well. Separation of powers in a monoparty system is an absurdity because party and power supersede everything else, especially the public good. There is nothing Trump could possibly announce (say, for example, a former president wiretapping him), nothing he or his minions could possibly do (say, consorting with the Russians to tilt the election his way) that would move congressional Republicans to challenge him. We live in a Republican monopoly, and to hell with institutional loyalty or checks and balances. They don’t work. (No complaint from the author when the Democrats wielded the same power.)
Again, Madison was just plain wrong, because on one hand, he subscribed to the notion of a public driven in large part by rational self-interest, and on the other, because he didn’t imagine how fiercely extremists would press their cause. He couldn’t have foreseen how modern tools and technologies of manipulation, like mass media, social media, propaganda and persuasion, have coaxed people to forsake their self-interest. We know, for example, that some of the fiercest opponents of Obamacare are those who have benefited most from it. (That is, the People are too stupid, and they need the Democrats.)
Madison, then, didn’t foresee that a major party could be hijacked by extremists, as the Republicans have been, or that those extremists would then expunge from the party the very diverse elements that Madison had identified as our democratic safeguard. Or to put it another way, the Republican Party monopolized itself before it monopolized our government. Not even the farmers, small businessmen, Rotarians and Wall Street bankers who had formed the core of the pre-Reagan party saw that coming. About one thing, however, Madison was right: Extremists have no interest in democracy. (Good lawd, this man has blinders. It is the Left that demands lock-step orthodoxy, who hate differing opinions, and it is they who want to wipe out all dissent.)
And that brings us to the Founders’ fourth and most important assumption. They assumed that those who aspired to power did so to govern; they didn’t aspire to govern to gain power. But what happens when a major party doesn’t believe in government itself? Republicans profess to love the Constitution. They carry copies in their shirt pockets and wave them at every opportunity. But here is the quandary: The Constitution creates the government, and Republicans profess to hate government every bit as much as they love the Constitution. Indeed, the modern GOP not only arose from the forces of extremism — the Manionites, John Birchers and Apocalyptics. It arose from those who vowed to destroy government as we know it — or, as one recent anti-government Republican, Steve Bannon, promised, “to deconstruct the administrative state.” (A persistent accusation from the Left, that is Right wants no government, However, they do want to dismantle the gargantuan, intrusive, dictating, meddling big government created by the Left. For the Left, any criticism of the failures of big government is synonymous with no government, which the Right has never proposed. The Right is not anarchist.
Just today Rush posted this quote: "The Republicans are not made out of the same stuff Democrats are. I mean, Democrats are born to use government, to take it over, to wield its various levers of power to their benefit. Republicans, conservatives, don't think of government that way. We want to get it to be as invisible as it can and still function.")
You can’t blame the Founders for not having anticipated that the government could be taken over by fanatics who don’t believe in government. No document, no system could have offered protection from this.
So kissing the Constitution is really a neat trick to disguise how little the Constitution really matters now, how pro forma it has become, how its assumptions have been savaged. A government that was predicated on goodwill (Our government was not predicated on good will, it was predicated on limits and restricitons.)
has few practitioners of it and virtually none among the current governing party. A government in which power was subject to checks and balances has virtually none, only party uniformity. A government in which, in the words of one constitutional scholar, it was “almost impossible for a zealous movement to sweep like wildfire . . . and seize control,” has been seized by such a movement. And a government that was designed to provide stability, temperance, deliberation and wisdom is controlled by a party that doesn’t even believe in government, much less those virtues. (It was designed to allow personal liberty and free association to prevail, absent the power to intervene in the private affairs of its people.)
Yes, as I said, others will occupy the White House and Congress and even the Supreme Court. But there is nothing they can do to rebuild the structure the Republicans razed when they tore down the Constitution. What is left is the rubble. (Amazingly, Donald Trump has been in office only a few weeks, and he somehow destroyed the Constitution. How is this possible, unless the systems and techniques he is using is already in place. And who installed those systems and techniques? Well, the Left.
The problem really is that the Left created a monster that they thought they would always be in charge of. Someone came along and used it in a way they don't like. So it's not Trump, it's the system they created, and now it's coming back to bite them. If they hadn't destroyed the founding principles of the government to begin with, Trump wouldn't be able to do anything.)
Still, as John Jay, wrote in Federalist No. 3, once a national government had been established, “the best men in the country will not only consent to serve, but also will generally be appointed to manage it.” These would be people who not only possessed sagacity but also selflessness. They would work for the country, not themselves. Again, this isn’t to say that there wouldn’t be profound disagreements among them, only that people of good will would join forces for the greater good. I certainly don’t need to elaborate what happened to that idea.
Which is why the Founders insisted on a separation of powers.
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