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Trump and Sanders: The Founder's Worst Nightmare
Weekly Standard ^ | 2/10/2016 | John Yoo

Posted on 02/10/2016 8:48:08 AM PST by conservativejoy

Our Framers would despair about the winners of the nation's first presidential primaries in New Hampshire. Though polar opposites with very different ideological starting points, both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders would have set the Framers' hair - or wigs - on fire. They designed the Constitution to moderate the people at home while preparing a president to act quickly to counter emergencies, crises, and war abroad. Instead, the Republicans have a demagogue and the Democrats have an economic radical who promise swift, extreme change.

The men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 to write a new constitution designed it to prevent someone like Donald Trump from ever becoming president. One of their great fears was of a populist demagogue who would promise the people everything and respect nothing. As Alexander Hamilton, the key theorist of executive power during the Founding, warned in Federalist 67: "Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honours of a single state."

Talents for low intrigue. Little arts of popularity. The founder of this newspaper may not have known Trump, but he clearly knew men like him. Insulting braggadocio and self-aggrandizement are not the 21st Century exclusives of reality show hosts and cable news guests.

To prevent mindless populism from seizing the White House, the Founders rejected nationwide election of the president. Instead, they created the Electoral College. States choose electors (equal to the number of their members of the House and Senate), who meet and send their votes to Congress. If there is no majority, then the House votes by state delegation to choose the chief executive.

While the Electoral College today seems Rube Goldberg-esque, it served the important purpose of weeding out emotional passions and popular, but poor, candidates. "The choice of several, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community, with any extraordinary or violent movements," Hamilton wrote, "than the choice of one, who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes." He also praised the separate meeting of electors and the Congress as another brake on rash populism. "This detached and divided situation will expose [electors] much less to heats and ferments, that might be communicated from them to the people," he observed.

The Framers would also be aghast at Bernie Sanders. His calls for a political revolution, fomenting of class hatreds, and desires for a socialist economy also run directly contrary to the Framers design. The Framers believed our Constitution and our government should not view or think of people as economic classes or special interests. They were not naïve - they knew that what they called "factions" were an inevitable product of democracy. "Liberty is to faction what what air is to fire, an ailment, without which it instantly expires," James Madison wrote in Federalist 10. "But it could not be a less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air."

Our Constitution did not address the specter of factions by creating a government so strong that, in the hands of a crusading populist, it could crush special interests. Instead, it creates a decentralized government too difficult for one party to take over. It divides the national government between president, Congress, and the Judiciary. It further keeps federal power narrow and reserves authority over most of daily life to the 50 states. America would never suffer Sanders' political revolution or his wish to transfer the "means of production" (for those who have forgotten their Karl Marx since the fall of the Soviet Union, he is referring to private property and financial and intellectual capital) from private hands to the public. Ask the communist nations of Europe and Asia, with millions of lives lost and millions more oppressed from the 1930s-1980s, how that experiment turned out.

As many European and American intellectuals have lamented, no serious socialist or communist party has ever succeeded in the United States. There is a reason why Bernie Sanders comes from a tiny state and represents a caucus of one. Our Constitution's separation of powers and federalism raises too many barriers for any movement to take over all of the levers of government and impose an ideology on the United States. Even if they get too carried away by the latest intellectual fad or passionate anger, the American people have the handbrake of the Constitution to stop them from making a catastrophic mistake. It is time for them to pull it on Trump and Sanders.


TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: 1stcanadiansenator; clownsforcruz; cruzwhorship; hysteriainteamcruz; losingcampagins; propagandadujour; tds; tedspacificpartners; usualtroll
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To: inpajamas
Everyone else I have carefully scrutinized, judged, condemned, and sentenced.

I understand. You want the best conservative to lead this country away from the suicidal course we are on.

For some reason, Cruz has limited his appeal to evangelicals and the like and doesn't seem to do well with the larger population. At the end of the day, someone is going to be president and at this stage of the game a Democrat is unacceptable.

81 posted on 02/10/2016 1:59:56 PM PST by The Iceman Cometh (Republican Presidential Nominee Marco Rubio!!! How's that sound?)
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To: conservativejoy
to write a new constitution designed it to prevent someone like Donald Trump from ever becoming president

What? Promising to actually enforce existing immigration laws and making sensible trade deals is so horrible? What the heck is wrong with people these days?

82 posted on 02/10/2016 2:02:37 PM PST by Cementjungle
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To: The Iceman Cometh

I hate to say it. But maybe we are past the point of no return. Even if, I would still rather go down with a good captain.


83 posted on 02/10/2016 2:07:09 PM PST by inpajamas (Texas Akbar!!!!!!!)
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To: Ajnin

That is a bad link. You may not understand how the law and the constitution work in this country, so I will share with you some of what I know. In America we have what is called the Supreme Court of the United States. The purpose of this court is to interpret and apply the Constitution of the United States of America. If there is ever a question of if something is constitutional, this court is the final arbiter. Trump did not attempt, nor did he ever violate the Constitution. He simply used the court system exactly like it was intended to be used. Now you can like that, or not. But you are not entitled to apply your personal interpretation of this nations laws and founding documents as you see fit.


84 posted on 02/10/2016 2:19:22 PM PST by JoSixChip (Ted Cruz (R-Goldman Sachs) - DC Values)
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To: JoSixChip

I just read all of you pro Trump facts....oh wait a minute, you didn’t have any facts..
I post facts
You post insults and bullshit


85 posted on 02/10/2016 2:34:44 PM PST by Ajnin (Wolves don't lose sleep over the opinion of sheep.)
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To: JoSixChip

I’m still waiting for all of the evidence that Trump is a conservative. I guess I will be waiting forever because such evidence does not exist.


86 posted on 02/10/2016 2:39:20 PM PST by Ajnin (Wolves don't lose sleep over the opinion of sheep.)
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To: Ajnin

You have all the evidence you need. You are just not capable of thinking anything but what the msm or rush beck tell you to think.


87 posted on 02/10/2016 2:47:44 PM PST by JoSixChip (Ted Cruz (R-Goldman Sachs) - DC Values)
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To: JoSixChip

Whatever...obviously debate is not something you are comfortable with.


88 posted on 02/10/2016 3:56:44 PM PST by Ajnin (Wolves don't lose sleep over the opinion of sheep.)
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To: Ajnin
Whatever...obviously debate is not something you are comfortable with.

I reaaly don't call me spoon feeding you fact after fact that you will ignore debating. At this point I'm happy just to sit back and watch Trump do his magic. But every now and then, I just have to correct the lie that cruz is the most conservative or cruz is not a one worlder.
89 posted on 02/10/2016 3:59:52 PM PST by JoSixChip (Ted Cruz (R-Goldman Sachs) - DC Values)
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To: JoSixChip

I’m ready to debate regardless of your bs. But you can’t debate because you know ultimately Trump is a loser.


90 posted on 02/10/2016 4:04:59 PM PST by Ajnin (Wolves don't lose sleep over the opinion of sheep.)
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To: JoSixChip

There is a possibility that I could be wrong about Trump. None of you Trump supporters have been able to provide any evidence that Trump is a supporter of a constitutional republic


91 posted on 02/10/2016 4:08:56 PM PST by Ajnin (Wolves don't lose sleep over the opinion of sheep.)
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To: conservativejoy
The Founders knew all about Sanders from watching the French Revolution fall inexorably into the class warfare, chaos, and murder of the Terror. Thomas Paine, for example, was an eyewitness to, and his Rights of Man a defense of, the sort of Enlightenment thought that led down that road, for it also lead down a different road to the American War of Independence so long as the resentments, the revenge, and the theft were suppressed in pursuit of a new society. Paine nearly paid with his head for staying just a little too long in that witches' brew of hatred.

Nor were the Founders unacquainted with class divisions within their new country, as Hamilton's frequent invocation of the antique term "yeomanry" to describe the citizen farmer attested. His insistence that a political representative could represent class interests without being a member of that class occurred in several places in the Federalist Papers; while he was correct about it, it also led to the inception of a professional political class populated heavily by attorneys such as himself.

None of this is new in American history; one might say that American History is made up of it.

92 posted on 02/10/2016 4:30:37 PM PST by Billthedrill
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