Posted on 09/07/2017 4:37:17 AM PDT by Kaslin
In 1913, Woodrow Wilson was the newly elected president. Wilson and his fellow progressives scorned the Constitution and the Declaration. They moved swiftly to replace the Founders' republic with a new regime.
There is widespread agreement that Wilson did not always show good judgment – for example, in his blunders in international relations – but in the project of overturning the Founding, he and the movement he led selected their targets shrewdly. By the time he left office, the American republic was, as they say, history. The fundamentals of the new regime were in place, and the expansion of government under FDR, LBJ, and Obama was made easy, perhaps even inevitable.
Nineteen-thirteen gave us the 16th and 17th Amendments to the Constitution. That year also saw the creation of the Federal Reserve. This burst of changes marks the effective beginning of the Progressive Era in American politics, the era in which we now live. Wilson was to do much more that would once have been considered out of bounds, but these three changes were enough to change everything. In 1913, the fundamental agreement the Founders made with the American people about the relation of the states and the federal government was broken.
Here is the Founders' original bargain, stated by James Madison in Federalist 45:
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
FMCDH(BITS)
what was total gov spending in 1929 ?
1948 ?
Curry sums up what we have for years been discussing on FR though he has not yet arrived at plotting the way forward out of the abyss. Let’s do that for him now.
Repeating here an illustration of how reform of the US Senate may be addressed in the Article V Convention of States:
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AMENDMENT XXVIII (’Federal State Rebalancing’)
To restore the foundational structure of State Legislatures to Congress, the following amendment is proposed:
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Section 1.
Senators in Congress shall be subject to recall by their respective state legislature or by voter referendum in their respective state.
Section 2.
Term limits for Senators in Congress shall be set by vote in their respective state legislatures but in no case shall be set less than twelve years nor more than eighteen years.
Section 3:
The seventeenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
************************************************
Bump to the top
The problem is that once the federal government started consuming money, it became like a crack addict. It kept using more, and growing more. It would not have been possible without the two Amendments and the Federal Reserve. Only a vigilant electorate could have prevented it, but the electorate has never been particularly vigilant.
As for the "big government" liberals; those who have welcomed the growth of Leviathan, try this on them:
Ask them if they know how many people were killed by human action during the 20th Century. That includes war, genocide, homicide, traffic accidents...everything. The answer is anyone's guess but I'll go with 200 million as a nice round number.
Now, of that 200 million, how many of them were killed by a person acting in some official capacity as an agent of the state?
The correct answer is "almost all of them."
One of our worst presidents.
bkmk
I don’t want to imagine a modern day when corrupt State legislators get to hand pick Senators, yuck.
The 16th amendment was passed in 1909, sadly by a GOP Congress, sadly it had wide support from both parties and all 3 major candidates in 1912.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/61-1/h28
This is the House vote, just 14 Republicans and ZERO democrats voted no. In the Senate it was 77-0
But Wilson and his democrat Congress did do a lot of damage, and here’s a fun fact, Wilson and a heavily rat Congress were elected because the GOP vote split in 1912, for anyone that thinks that would be a good idea. Wilson got fewer votes than WJ Bryan did in 1908, and 435 electoral votes.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total_1929USct_17cs5n
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/breakdown_1948USbt_17bs5n
1929, $11.7 Billion, 12.9% of 1929 Real GDP
1948, $55 Billion, 27% of 1948 Real GDP
“I don’t want to imagine a modern day when corrupt State legislators get to hand pick Senators, yuck.”
You have hit on the very reason that the 17th Amendment passed in the first place.
Election by state legislators was just as rife with corruption as you suspect. People need to go back and read the public debate that led to popular election of Senators.
There is no panacea. Just a different brand of poison.
I got the FMCDH. What does BITS mean?
Wait a minute, I don’t think that the GOP of 1909 is the same that it is today.
What about Barack Hussein 0bama?
Woodrow Wilson laid the foundation for all of this progressive spending, debt and changes to tradition and culture. Obama is merely the most recent awful acolyte.
bump
The turning point for Progressivism was 1901 and the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. 1901 was the year that Progressivism had finally captured the White House. Plenty of historians have noted that Wilson's policies were generally duplicates of TR's, and they were. Some specifics of the article include:
16th and 17th amendments:
Both of which Roosevelt supported.
Bypassing the state legislatures
Roosevelt hated the states and was happy to publicly declare so.
Government involvement in healthcare (Article points to HHS)
Roosevelt was the first presidential candidate to call for such intervention.
Not mentioned in the article but it should have been:
Anti-capitalism
Roosevelt is well known for his trust busting.
Environmentalism
Roosevelt nationalized land left and right and put it all into government hands under the guise of conservation.
Today when we want to legitimately cut some wasteful program, what does government do? Shove the Washington Monument out there and in our faces as the first item on the chopping block. They wave it around on purpose. And it all goes back to where it goes back to.
Executive orders bypassing congress
Theodore Roosevelt was the first pen-and-phone president. No previous president issued more than 200 in any single term, yet Roosevelt issued nearly 1100 by the time he was done. That's 145 executive orders per year.
There's also the issue of eugenics. Other examples of his meddling behavior include football reform and spelling reform. Taken by themselves, perhaps a case can be made that these last two don't amount to a whole lot. But taken in total, there is no doubt that the first out of control progressive president was Theodore Roosevelt.
That's the turning point.
And one last bonus item. Who was the first current or former President to call for a body of global governance? I'll give you a hint. He did so when he accepted his Nobel Prize.
A Progressive is a Repressive.
The sad part about the Roosevelt saga...is that the number one choice for McKinley for VP was Elihu Root.
If you ever pull up the bio on the guy....he was probably one of the capable executives that ever existed....bright...very capable. If he had been VP...you would have had a very focused period, and a lot less executive orders. Taft would have been there in 1912, and likely entered WW I by spring of 2015, and the war would have ended earlier.
Roosevelt’s Political party Republican (1880–1911; 1916–1919)
Other political
affiliations Progressive “Bull Moose” (1912–1916)
By the time he became President, he was a full Rino/Progressive Bull Moose.
The Jekyll Island duck hunt that created the Federal Reserve
By Tyler E. Bagwell
http://www.jekyllislandhistory.com/federalreserve.shtml
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