Posted on 08/11/2016 2:07:54 AM PDT by Jacquerie
When various objections to the draft Constitution arose in the fall of 1787, James Madison asked his fellow citizens to shun despair. The future was bright if Americans did not listen to those who claimed our problems were insurmountable. In similar fashion, America 2016 can avoid disunion if the sovereign people utilize Article V to meet their problems head-on.
From the last portion of The Federalist #14, by James Madison:
I submit to you, my fellow-citizens, these considerations, in full confidence that the good sense which has so often marked your decisions will allow them their due weight and effect; and that you will never suffer difficulties, . . . to drive you into the gloomy and perilous scene into which the advocates for disunion would conduct you.
Hearken not to the unnatural voice which tells you that the people of America, knit together as they are by so many cords of affection, can no longer live together as members of the same family; can no longer continue the mutual guardians of their mutual happiness; can no longer be fellow citizens of one great, respectable, and flourishing empire.
Hearken not to the voice which petulantly tells you that the form of government recommended for your adoption is a novelty in the political world; that it has never yet had a place in the theories of the wildest projectors; that it rashly attempts what it is impossible to accomplish. No, my countrymen, shut your ears against this unhallowed language.
Shut your hearts against the poison which it conveys; the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defense of their sacred rights, consecrate their Union, and excite horror at the idea of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies. And if novelties are to be shunned, believe me, the most alarming of all novelties, the most wild of all projects, the most rash of all attempts, is that of rendering us in pieces, in order to preserve our liberties and promote our happiness.
But why is the experiment of an extended republic to be rejected, merely because it may comprise what is new? Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? To this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the example, of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favor of private rights and public happiness.
Had no important step been taken by the leaders of the Revolution for which a precedent could not be discovered, no government established of which an exact model did not present itself, the people of the United States might, at this moment have been numbered among the melancholy victims of misguided councils, must at best have been laboring under the weight of some of those forms which have crushed the liberties of the rest of mankind.
Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society. They reared the fabrics of governments which have no model on the face of the globe. They formed the design of a great Confederacy, which it is incumbent on their successors to improve and perpetuate. If their works betray imperfections, we wonder at the fewness of them. If they erred most in the structure of the Union, this was the work most difficult to be executed; this is the work which has been new modelled by the act of your convention, and it is that act on which you are now to deliberate and to decide.
End.
Just as Madison asked the nation not to dismiss the Constitution because it was novel, and subsequently bring about disunion, America 2016 should not dismiss, but rather embrace the opportunity afforded by Article V to amend and save our Constitutional union.
We are the many; our oppressors are the few. Be proactive. Be a Re-Founder. Join Convention of States.
For your reading enjoyment...
The Anti-Federalist Papers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Federalist_Papers
Too late, there is no longer America...she was killed.
Those who wantonly ignore the words of the Constitution will not be persuaded by adding, changing, or removing words in it.
The Constitution is practically perfect as is.
Professor Randy Barnett addresses the two views of the Constitution:
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