Betsy's right: High crimes and misdemeanors means offenses committed while in high office

It's not the severity of the crime which makes it high, but it damn well better be a crime. Democrats haven't been able to come up with one despite turning themselves and the country into pretzels.

And Trump's tax returns from the past and his dalliances from the past and why he named his son "Barron" are all completely irrelevant, as is everything else he's done while not in office. Those things matter only at election time.

Here's Betsy:

At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the framers considered grounds for impeachment. On Sept. 8, George Mason suggested that bribery and treason were too narrow, and proposed adding "maladministration." But James Madison objected, explaining that "so vague a term will be equivalent to" saying the president serves at the pleasure of the Congress. The framers did not want to duplicate the British system, which made the executive dependent on Parliament. Mason's idea was dropped, and the framers instead agreed to the more specific term, "high crimes and misdemeanors," where "high" meant offenses committed while in high office, such as embezzling public funds.

Then most Federalist Society folks are kooky: Senators and Representatives and Judges keep chairs warm for decades while POTUS becomes a lame duck immediately upon re-election

We live under the spendthrift tyranny of the legislative feared by Madison, with its access to the pockets of the people, augmented by a renegade judiciary before which the other two branches remain supine because of Marbury.

Asinine is right: Marketwatch story blames James Madison for bloated tax code

There wasn't an income tax until 1913, for crying out loud, and never was intended to be.

James Madison, of all people, believed in neither an income tax nor a feckless giving to the voters whatever it is they may want. In fact, Madison feared the tyranny of the legislative the most, because the constitution gives it direct access to the pocketbooks of the people.

The story at Marketwatch here is beneath the dignity of any thinking person. It is a laughable farce of a story.

Caroline Baum should be ashamed of it.

James Madison had little faith in a bill of rights, repeatedly violated in "every state" in his own time by the tyranny of the majority

From a letter to Jefferson in 1788:

[E]xperience proves the inefficacy of a bill of rights on those occasions when its controul is most needed. Repeated violations of these parchment barriers have been committed by overbearing majorities in every State. In Virginia I have seen the bill of rights violated in every instance where it has been opposed to a popular current. Notwithstanding the explicit provision contained in that instrument for the rights of Conscience, it is well known that a religious establishment wd have taken place in that State, if the Legislative majority had found as they expected, a majority of the people in favor of the measure; and I am persuaded that if a majority of the people were now of one sect, the measure would still take place and on narrower ground than was then proposed, notwithstanding the additional obstacle which the law has since created. Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents. 

James Madison on parchment's powerlessness to stop the legislative's theft of our money

From Publius, Federalist 48:

Will it be sufficient to mark, with precision, the boundaries of these departments, in the constitution of the government, and to trust to these parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power? This is the security which appears to have been principally relied on by the compilers of most of the American constitutions. But experience assures us, that the efficacy of the provision has been greatly overrated; and that some more adequate defense is indispensably necessary for the more feeble, against the more powerful, members of the government. ... [A]s the legislative department alone has access to the pockets of the people, and has in some constitutions full discretion, and in all a prevailing influence, over the pecuniary rewards of those who fill the other departments, a dependence is thus created in the latter, which gives still greater facility to encroachments of the former. ... The conclusion which I am warranted in drawing from these observations is, that a mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments, is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.

Congress corrected itself in 1795 dropping "natural born citizens" of children born abroad to citizens

"And the children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond Sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born Citizens."

-- Naturalization Act of 1790

"[T]he children of citizens of the United States, born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States, shall be considered as citizens of the United States."

-- Naturalization Act of 1795

Katyal and Clement are completely disingenuous by ignoring the correction in their discussion last March because they know full well that the Act of 1795 repealed the Act of 1790.

h/t Mario Apuzzo, here:

'The authors cite to the Naturalization Act of 1790 and ignore the fact that the Naturalization Act of 1795, with the lead of then-Rep. James Madison and with the approval of President George Washington, repealed it and specifically changed "shall be considered as natural born citizens" to "shall be considered as citizens of the United States."  This is even more a blatant omission given that they argue that the English naturalization statutes referred to persons born out of the King's dominion to British subject parents as "natural born subjects."  They fail to address this critical change made by our early Congress, critical because Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 provides that a “Citizen” of the United States was eligible to be President only if born before the adoption of the Constitution and that thereafter only a “natural born Citizen” was so eligible.'

WaPo claims to be scared Congress has more Tea Party radicals now, but P.J. O'Rourke knows better

And who better to really know than a fellow-traveling Tea Party libertarian?

Here:

[Scott] Brown lost the Senate race to Democrat incumbent Jean Shaheen because Scott once posed nude for Cosmo. “Naked male Republican” is not a thought anyone, Republicans included, wants in his or her mind, even if this particular one happens to be buff.

Most of the Republicans America just elected ain’t. And I’m glad of it. We’re seeing more of the old-fashioned establishment-type Republicans who keep their pants and pantyhose on. And who don’t get them in a wad over every little piece of legislation.

The 114th Congress is not going to be full of people who, every time a bill is brought to a vote, have to go dig up the grave of James Madison and ask Jim if the bill is Constitutional. ...

Never mind that young people, women, Hispanics, and blacks forgot to vote. In two years those young people will have done a lot of growing up. What happens when you’re a grown-up? You vote for someone named Bush. Women will probably forget to vote again. You know how forgetful women are. “Did I lose an earring?” “Where’s my purse?” “I could have sworn I left the car keys right here.” And Republican policies for robust job growth and business opportunity will have moved Hispanics and blacks to the top of the socio-economic ladder. Once you get an in-ground pool, you’re a good Republican.

Anyway, this good Republican can dream, can’t he?

------------------------------------------------------

Ted Cruz and Justin Amash, call your offices.

Republicans stopped growth of representation in the 1920s: Why isn't fixing that the Tea Party's job one?

From the Wikipedia article, here:

In 1921, Congress failed to reapportion the House membership as required by the United States Constitution. This failure to reapportion may have been politically motivated, as the newly elected Republican majority may have feared the effect such a reapportionment would have on their future electoral prospects. Then in 1929 Congress (Republican control of both houses of congress and the presidency) passed the Reapportionment Act of 1929 which capped the size of the House at 435 (the then current number). This cap has remained unchanged for more than eight decades. Three states – Wyoming, Vermont, and North Dakota – have populations smaller than the average for a single district.

The "ideal" number of members has been a contentious issue since the country's founding. George Washington agreed that the original representation proposed during the Constitutional Convention (one representative for every 40,000) was inadequate and supported an alteration to reduce that number to 30,000. This was the only time that Washington pronounced an opinion on any of the actual issues debated during the entire convention.

In Federalist No. 55, James Madison argued that the size of the House of Representatives has to balance the ability of the body to legislate with the need for legislators to have a relationship close enough to the people to understand their local circumstances, that such representatives' social class be low enough to sympathize with the feelings of the mass of the people, and that their power be diluted enough to limit their abuse of the public trust and interests.

---------------------------------------------

All the ancient American debates about this issue argue over ratios of 1 representative for every 15,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 or 50,000 of population. But today because of what the Republicans did in the 1920s, arresting growth of representation and fixing the number at 435, the ratio has soared to 1 for every 728,000!

If you wonder why your representative doesn't represent you today, that is why. He or she doesn't know who you are, or care.

If you want to fix America, fix that. We could start by doubling the size of the House, which means halving all the districts.

That sound you're hearing right now is Congressmen everywhere shitting their pants.

Constitutional parchment was no "practical security" against the US Senate's ObamaCare, was it?

After discriminating, therefore, in theory, the several classes of power, as they may in their nature be legislative, executive, or judiciary, the next and most difficult task is to provide some practical security for each, against the invasion of the others.

What this security ought to be, is the great problem to be solved. Will it be sufficient to mark, with precision, the boundaries of these departments, in the constitution of the government, and to trust to these parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power? This is the security which appears to have been principally relied on by the compilers of most of the American constitutions. But experience assures us, that the efficacy of the provision has been greatly overrated; and that some more adequate defense is indispensably necessary for the more feeble, against the more powerful, members of the government. The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex. The founders of our republics have so much merit for the wisdom which they have displayed, that no task can be less pleasing than that of pointing out the errors into which they have fallen. A respect for truth, however, obliges us to remark, that they seem never for a moment to have turned their eyes from the danger to liberty from the overgrown and all-grasping prerogative of an hereditary magistrate, supported and fortified by an hereditary branch of the legislative authority. They seem never to have recollected the danger from legislative usurpations, which, by assembling all power in the same hands, must lead to the same tyranny as is threatened by executive usurpations. In a government where numerous and extensive prerogatives are placed in the hands of an hereditary monarch, the executive department is very justly regarded as the source of danger, and watched with all the jealousy which a zeal for liberty ought to inspire. In a democracy, where a multitude of people exercise in person the legislative functions, and are continually exposed, by their incapacity for regular deliberation and concerted measures, to the ambitious intrigues of their executive magistrates, tyranny may well be apprehended, on some favorable emergency, to start up in the same quarter. But in a representative republic, where the executive magistracy is carefully limited; both in the extent and the duration of its power; and where the legislative power is exercised by an assembly, which is inspired, by a supposed influence over the people, with an intrepid confidence in its own strength; which is sufficiently numerous to feel all the passions which actuate a multitude, yet not so numerous as to be incapable of pursuing the objects of its passions, by means which reason prescribes; it is against the enterprising ambition of this department that the people ought to indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their precautions. The legislative department derives a superiority in our governments from other circumstances. Its constitutional powers being at once more extensive, and less susceptible of precise limits, it can, with the greater facility, mask, under complicated and indirect measures, the encroachments which it makes on the co-ordinate departments. It is not unfrequently a question of real nicety in legislative bodies, whether the operation of a particular measure will, or will not, extend beyond the legislative sphere.

On the other side, the executive power being restrained within a narrower compass, and being more simple in its nature, and the judiciary being described by landmarks still less uncertain, projects of usurpation by either of these departments would immediately betray and defeat themselves [don't laugh, he really wrote this]. Nor is this all: as the legislative department alone has access to the pockets of the people, and has in some constitutions full discretion, and in all a prevailing influence, over the pecuniary rewards of those who fill the other departments, a dependence is thus created in the latter, which gives still greater facility to encroachments of the former. I have appealed to our own experience for the truth of what I advance on this subject. ...

The conclusion which I am warranted in drawing from these observations is, that a mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments, is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.

-- James Madison, 1788 (Federalist 48, emphases added)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Repeal the 17th Amendment.

What The Country Needs Most Right Now Is . . .

. . . a new federal holiday!

Your proposals should include someone born in March, April, June or August, to fill in the months missing a federal holiday.

Now, what's the quickest way to add a new holiday to this list?

James Madison, the father of the Constitution, was born in March 1751. Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, was born in April 1743. Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America and defender of both the Constitution and the Declaration, was born in June 1808. Barack Obama, the current president of the United States and the opponent of both the Constitution and the Declaration, was born in August 1961, or so they say.

Seeing that Barack Obama isn't dead, yet, I think your choices are limited to Madison, Jefferson, or Davis. But maybe we should just get all three right now, because the country may not last long enough under Obama to add them all in, slow like.

Evidently Obama Learned Hostility Toward Marbury v. Madison (1803) at Harvard Law

From an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, pointing out there would be nothing unprecedented in the Supreme Court overturning ObamaCare:

In Marbury in 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall laid down the doctrine of judicial review. In the 209 years since, the Supreme Court has invalidated part or all of countless laws on grounds that they violated the Constitution. All of those laws were passed by a "democratically elected" legislature of some kind, either Congress or in one of the states. And no doubt many of them were passed by "strong" majorities.

Read the full opinion rebuking Obama's complaint about judicial activism here.

I don't buy the argument that Obama is ignorant of these fundamentals of the history of American law. I think he's hostile towards them, and wants them all swept away, along with the Constitution.

How About 10,000 US Representatives Instead of 435?

Many people, rightly in my opinion, point to the decline of religious faith, traditional morality and constitutional respect for both as a leading cause of our current discontents. In making this argument, however, some fall prey to an ahistorical understanding of the priority of the 1st Amendment, and miss an important remedy which animated the founding generation just as much did the principle of religious freedom.

The latest example of the myth of the priority of our 1st Amendment to the US Constitution is repeated by none other than John Garvey, president of The Catholic University of America, for The Baltimore Sun (link), whose other observations I otherwise find wholly unobjectionable:

[T]he right to religious freedom — the first freedom mentioned in the Bill of Rights — was of great importance to the framers of our Constitution.

Mr. Garvey operates under the common misapprehension that the 1st Amendment is somehow first because of James Madison's statements in various places about the priority of religious liberty as an unalienable right whose basis is in the creator. Accordingly Garvey quotes Madison, "This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society," as if this proves why The Bill of Rights starts the way it does and that we should therefore insist more urgently that 1st Amendment considerations somehow take the lead in our civil deliberations over contentious issues, especially as affecting institutions of The Church. It is to some extent an appeal to the authority of what has primacy, which one might expect of a Roman Catholic.

If Madison could hear this, however, he would no doubt laugh, because he himself authored what was the original first amendment, and it had nothing to do with freedom of the press, the free exercise of religion, etc.

Mr. Garvey's ignorance of the historical situation is not unusual, inasmuch as most of us, if we are familiar at all with even the basic facts of history, are children of the federalists who prevailed at the founding and wrote the constitution. We do not remember the arguments of their opponents, the anti-federalists, nor the issues which animated them, probably because we were never taught them.

The short version of a part of this very complicated history is that there was a list of at least twelve amendments proposed in 1789, and what we call our 1st Amendment was actually third in that list, which, with numbers four through twelve, was ultimately ratified while the two preceding were not. These go largely unremarked today, which is a pity because they reveal that if anything animated the minds of the founders as a matter of first importance, it was the idea of adequate representation. And it was this which was a chief pre-occupation of the anti-federalists, who viewed the constitution as a federalist conception of a defective republicanism which co-opted and undermined local constituencies and state governments. To the men of the anti-federalist camp, the more the representation, the less the chance of despotism.

As an historical phenomenon, representation's importance in the founding era formed a unity with taxation, as in "no taxation without representation."

This is why the first article of the constitution concerns itself with establishing the legislative authority, which the founders considered the predominating power in the new government, and its power to tax, both of which were to be apportioned to the states by population. Hence the census. But the constitution failed to delimit the maximum size of legislative representation, only that the number of representatives should not exceed one for every 30,000, and thus amendments were proposed.

The original amendments 1 and 2 read as follows:

Article I:

After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred representatives, nor less than one representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than two hundred representatives, nor more than one representative for every fifty thousand persons.

Article II:

No law varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

Because Article I was not ratified, the deficiency of the original constitution's provisions for representation, though hotly debated at the time, was never successfully remedied. The deficiency is that the constitution does not specify the "maximum district size", in the words of thirty-thousand.org (link), which happens to be a veritable cornucopia of scholarship on this problem. Its author points out that our US House of Representatives, if it followed the constitution's original intent, would now consist of 10,000 representatives instead of just 435, a number fixed by the Congress in 1929:

Because this part of the Constitution is still “defective”, Congress can choose to grant its constituents virtually any number of Representatives it deems appropriate. In fact, Congress can choose both the number of Representatives and the algorithm by which they are allocated among the states. In contrast, the role of the Census Bureau is limited to conducting the decennial census and applying, to that result, the apportionment algorithm specified by Congress in order to calculate the allocation of House memberships. 

No one alive today who takes politics seriously can say with a straight face that he feels adequately represented by any politician of any party. Gallup would not report polls indicating the extreme low esteem for Congress that it does were it otherwise. Congressmen are remote and aloof, unresponsive even to their erstwhile supporters. Senators are even worse, to say nothing of the president. This was precisely the future predicted by the anti-federalists.

It might come as something of a surprise, perhaps, to thirty-thousand.org, that the anti-federalists were none too happy even with the constitution's idea that "the number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand." Some of them could not imagine that one man could adequately represent so many people even as that.

Madison's attempt to set the representation progressively, stopping at one per fifty thousand, indicates something of his federalist sympathies, as well the limits of his imagination as to the potential growth of the American population.

In either eventuality, it must be said, Americans today would be better represented with more representatives than the few we currently have, whose nearly impenetrable incumbency makes them a veritable hereditary aristocracy of power and indeed tyranny over the lives of the Americans the founders intended them to represent.

What we have today is representation without representation, which is why Mr. Garvey rightly feels The Church to be under attack. Too much power is concentrated in too few hands, which is just the way the opponents of all that is good, true and beautiful like it.

The last thing they want is a US House of Representatives populated with 2300 Catholics.

By 1875 One Third of Federal Revenues Came From Taxes on Alcohol

According to Daniel Okrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition:

After lapsing in 1802, the alcohol excise was reimposed under James Madison to pay for the War of 1812, suspended in 1817, and then brought back by Abraham Lincoln in 1862 to finance the Civil War. This time the tax did not fade away . . . For most of the next thirty years the impost on alcohol annually provided at least 20 percent of all federal revenue, and in some years more than 40 percent. By the time the excise was doubled to cover the cost of the Spanish-American War, the brewers had finally realized that the tax they had once so strongly opposed might be their salvation, and they patriotically (and shamelessly) declared that they had financed 40 percent of the war's cost.

By way of comparison, tariffs in 1875 funded 55 percent of the federal budget. Seven years after the passage of the Income Tax, tariffs in 1920 funded barely 13 percent of the federal budget.

The significance of Daniel Okrent's recent history of Prohibition is not in the least that it shows how much federal government had depended on liquor taxes in addition to tariffs and property taxes to fund itself.

The perfidy of Prohibition is that it was brought to us by the same folks who gave us the Income Tax in the first place. They knew something would be needed to replace the federal revenue which would be lost when alcohol sales were finally banned. But when Prohibition got the boot, the Income Tax did not.

So the flipside to the Temperance movement is its Intemperance toward the original intent of the constitution, which was to prohibit direct taxation without apportionment by population in favor of tariffs, excises and ad valorem taxes.

Libertarians Are Nuts: Transparent, Principled Representation Is Easily Stopped

Usually by a pair of tits or testicles, or ambition, greed or personal animus.

"Transparent, principled representation—supported by grassroots networks and promoted through social media—is becoming an unstoppable force," says a Republican libertarian would-be star in a fundraising letter.

That's pretty transparent all by itself. Dangle hope, and raise money. Reminds me of a certain prominent Democrat's recent campaign, which is bumping up against the unstoppable force of failure and its discontents.

Like all good ideologies, the libertarian one assumes people are essentially good and will do the right thing more often than not, if the politician but sets a good example and gives everyone all the information. A child of his age is this one, worshipping at the altar of Education, which the more one has, the better one is.

Why, one wonders why the founders bothered separating the powers of government at all, seeing how history teaches us how good men are.

"But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."

-- James Madison, Federalist No. 51

At least my libertarian has declined to run for the Senate. For now.

Having gone from daddy's business to one term in the state House and one term in the federal House, that would be just too obvious.

Besides, it takes millions to run for the Senate, and right now, the coffers are looking a little light for another House run in a redrawn district which will be more Democrat than before.

Which explains statements like this: "I always vote for the side that increases our personal and economic freedoms—regardless of party."

Tracking left, where the votes are, where he belongs.

Walter Williams Skewers Democracy, and Time Magazine's Richard Stengel

Just one of the bons mots:

Stengel says, "If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn't say so." That statement is beyond ignorance. The 10th Amendment reads:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Stengel apparently has not read The Federalist No. 45, in which James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, said:

"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."

Stengel's article is five pages online, and I've only commented on the first.

Read the whole thing here.

America is Not Either Or, It's Both And

Bill Clinton once shot back at black incitement to violence against whites, and wore it as a badge of a non-extreme third way ever thereafter. His critics would say his sincerity was on full display in Waco and Kosovo.

The founders had already discovered a third way of their own, however, and had called it America:

The third model of human nature is found in the thinking of the American founders. “If men were angels,” wrote James Madison, the father of the Constitution, in Federalist Paper No. 51, “no government would be necessary.” But Madison and the other founders knew men were not angels and would never become angels. They believed instead that human nature was mixed, a combination of virtue and vice, nobility and corruption. People were swayed by both reason and passion, capable of self-government but not to be trusted with absolute power. The founders’ assumption was that within every human heart, let alone among different individuals, are competing and sometimes contradictory moral impulses and currents.


Thanks to one of those contradictory moral impulses, the American Revolutionaries shot back using real bullets when Redcoat extremists came to assert the absolute power of the Crown, not unlike the Korean Americans who took to the rooftops in Los Angeles in 1992 to defend their property against rioters. Americans at their best recognize that sometimes absolutism must be met with force, and don't lie about it or apologize for it.

Don't miss the rest of "Human Nature and Capitalism" here.

George Will, National Treasure, Font of American Wisdom

Some excerpts from his address to The CATO Institute in May:

We are not Europeans. We are not, in Orwell's phrase, a "state-broken people."

It is a principle of liberal social legislation that a program for the poor is a poor program.

[D]ependency is the agenda of the other side.

I believe that today, as has been the case for 100 years, and as will be the case for the foreseeable future, the American political argument is an argument between two Princetonians: James Madison of the class of 1771, and Thomas Woodrow Wilson of the class of 1879.

The very virtue of a constitution is that it's not changeable. It exists to prevent change, to embed certain rights so that they cannot easily be taken away.

Madison said rights pre-exist government. Wilson said government exists to dispense whatever agenda of rights suits its fancy, and to annihilate, regulate, attenuate, or dilute others.

We are going to come to a time when America is going to have to revisit Madison's Federalist Paper no. 45, and his statement, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined."

Gridlock is not an American problem, it is an American achievement!

[W]e always have more to fear from government speed than government tardiness.

We are told that one must not be a "Party of No." To "No," I say an emphatic "Yes!"

[T]he most beautiful five words in the English language are the first five words of the First Amendment, "Congress shall make no law."

The Bill of Rights is a litany of "No's."

The American people are, I think, healthier than they are given credit for. They have only one defect. They have nothing to fear, right now, but an insufficiency of their fear itself. It is time for a wholesome fear of what people with a dependency agenda are trying to do. We have few allies. We don't have Hollywood, we don't have academia, and we don't have the mainstream media. But we have two things. First, we have arithmetic. The numbers do not add up, and cannot be made to do so. Second, we have the Cato Institute. The people in this room are what the Keynesians call "a multiplier." And, for once, they are right!

Don't miss the rest at the link!

The Present Day Tea Party's Connection to the Past

The author inhabits the world the Tea Party opposes, but provides a sympathetic accounting nonetheless, which originally appeared here. It is especially useful in that it locates a major break with America's past, not in our times, but in the times of Woodrow Wilson, and that Obama's is an attempt to reassert that revolution. To which we say, Reactionaries Unite!

February 17, 2010

Party Like It's 1773?

By Richard Samuelson

Are this year's "tea parties" really tea parties? What could today's protesters have in common with the "Indians" who dumped 90,000 pounds of tea in Boston harbor in 1773? Quite a bit, actually.

What do today's tea partiers want? According to the Christian Science Monitor, the movement "is about safeguarding individual liberty, cutting taxes, and ending bailouts for business while the American taxpayer gets burdened with more public debt. It is fueled by concern that the United States under Mr. Obama is becoming a European-style social democracy where individual initiative is sapped by the needs of the collective." Broadly speaking, the tea parties reflect a growing anger in America that the government seems to be a closed circle, run by an elite in both parties. These elites, combined with a class of bureaucrats, lawyers, journalists and businessmen, use government power to serve their own ends, and not the public good.

The Boston Tea party was the most famous colonial American protest, but it was by no means the only one. In late colonial America, mass street protests, parades, and other events, often led by the "Sons of liberty," were a formal ritual. Some scholars have even described them as a legal practice. In an age when government was understood to be for the people, but not of or by the people, "out of doors protest" allowed British subjects to participate in the political process, and to shape the actions of government. Government was supposed to serve the common good, and it was supposed to be under law, and yet most colonists had no vote. How could they express their opinion? They could shout, protest, and even riot.

Inevitably, some demonstrations got out of hand, and spilled over into needless violence. Such excess led supporters of the King's government to condemn all protests. They wanted to rule without being questioned by the people. After all, the elites reasoned, they were smarter, better trained, and wiser than the common folk. The patriot response to this line of reasoning was that no one, however smart, well meaning, and wise had the right to rule another without his consent.

After the American revolution, we created a government that was much closer to being of, by and for the people. A little over a century later, however, it came under assault. In the early twentieth century America's leading intellectuals concluded that our constitution was out of date. Woodrow Wilson said quite bluntly that "we are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from the past." The founders, he noted, "speak of the ‘checks and balances' of the Constitution." Such ideas were passe. By replacing checks and balances with a simplified administration, he would update and rationalize the American state. Wilson, we should recall, was our first and only PhD president. The social science PhD was a new invention in his day. Wilson believed that experts, armed with PhDs and law degrees, could make better choices than the common people and the politicians they elected. Armed with expertise, Progressive bureaucrats would rule effectively and fairly. Checks and balances, he thought, were no longer necessary.

Wilson, his friends, and his successors in the New Deal and other Progressives (sometimes cleverly calling themselves "liberals"), did not achieve a full revolution. Anyone witnessing the gridlock over health care in Washington realizes that. That has always frustrated them. When Thomas Friedman, the voice of the establishment, declares that "one-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages," he reflects the goal of Progressive politics since Wilson's day. He also echoes the ideas of the Tories of the 1760s and 1770s. Like the Tories, today's would-be elites claim that better training and education gives them the right to rule, although the Progressives and their children have largely dropped birth and wealth as criterion for rule.

Even if their revolution was incomplete, the Progressives did transform American government. They expanded the role of experts in government at all levels in the U.S. This permanent bureaucracy has taken over sizeable chunks of American life, and has, at the same time, removed many areas of regulation from the political process. Our representatives have been only too happy to delegate broad swaths of power to these, unelected branches of government. That way they can blame someone else when things go wrong. Meanwhile, our courts, have taken away from our elected representatives the right to legislate about various issues. The upshot: even though almost all American adults have the right to vote, their votes matter less. Perhaps that's why fewer eligible voters vote today than was the case a century ago.

Now we can see how today's tea parties resemble those of yesteryear. As more and more government operations are taken off the books, popular frustration rises. Similarly, and ironically, bureaucracies often serve the industries they regulate rather than the public good. When the government is unresponsive to the views of the people, and, beyond that, when our administrative and judicial branches restrict the scope of the people's legislative rights, protest rises. President Obama, an heir to the Progressive tradition, wants to strengthen this unaccountable, administrative state. The response has been altogether fitting.

Richard Samuelson is the 2009-2010 Garwood Visiting Fellow at Princeton University's James Madison Program, and an Assistant Professor of History at California State University, San Bernardino.

Our Rights are Presumed, not Granted

If they are the sort of things which can be granted, permitted, dispensed, or won, then they can also be rescinded, forbidden, withheld and lost. But they are, on the contrary, natural and pre-existing, and therefore inalienable, as in "From my cold dead fingers!"

I say popular confusion about this in our time is all Lee Greenwood's fault, at least since 1984:

And I’m proud to be an American,

where at least I know I’m free.

And I wont forget the men who died,

who gave that right to me.

Nobody "gave that right" to freedom, or to anything else, to anyone. Everyone already has "that right." It is granted by God, or Nature's God if you prefer, by virtue of His will that one exists.

On this subject Thomas Mitchell offers "A Few Reminders for the Constitutionally Challenged," which appeared here and which was the original occasion of this post, which is now kind of an irony because Mitchell's post opens with the words of James Madison: "The right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right."

Why irony? Because as I edit this post today, July 24, 2010, The Las Vegas Review Journal is in the news at wired.com for hiring a lawyer to go after bloggers like me for copyright infringement for reproducing their articles on their blogs.

While we really like Mitchell's idea that The Bill of Rights should be renamed The Bill of Prohibitions, here's a reminder of a little something that predates the current copyright law, Mr. James Madison and the Bill of Rights:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead [men's] bones, and of all uncleanness.

Try copyrighting that.