Sixty two year old George Mason was a Virginia delegate to the Constitutional Convention. This wealthy planter aristocrat had served in the House of Burgesses, authored the Fairfax Resolves of 1774, greatly influenced the Virginia Constitution of 1776, and was the principal author behind the Virginia Bill of Rights.
His opposition was no small matter; it made Virginia’s ratification of the Constitution a close run thing.
Constitutional Convention Ping!
Fascinating article, thanks for posting.
Happy Constitution Day, guys!
These men had an uncanny ability to see into the future. Without doubt some of the most intelligent men to ever walk this land.
He had excellent foresight on this matter. The Founders should have passed something akin to the Ayn Rand amendment to prevent this.
Wasn't this later changed so that only the House can originate appropriations?
Sometimes I wonder if gentlemen such as Mason, Patrick Henry, George Clinton, James Winthrop and all the other Anti-Federalists were correct. It is too bad that Thomas Jefferson was in Paris as the first US Ambassador to France at the time of the writing of the Constitution; his input could have made a great deal of difference.
It is not that the Constitution is flawed per se, it's just that there were so many compromises made, and so little of it dealt with the extraordinary rights of the people, and too much dealt with the rights and balances of power of the different branches of government.
If this was not so, there would not have been a need for the Bill of Rights, that is, the first 10 amendments, which several states insisted upon, and would not join the the Republic until they were added.
Therefore, of course, those amendments became part of the Constitution. And now, 220 years later, we have a federal judiciary that concludes the Commerce clause has more authority than the 10th amendment. Dang it, both are part of the Constitution, and since it was deemed necessary to AMEND the document with items such as the 10th, it should always be given more consideration, not less.
The biggest problem with the Constitution turns out to be just as Mason said—the men who “follow” it. They've made a mess out of it, and have to often got it wrong in giving power to the government rather than to the people and the states.
Thank you for posting this. I often wish that Thomas Jefferson had written letters stating that there was and should be a wall of separation between economics and state as he did with the letter about the “wall” between church and state and that it was given the same weight. I think the laws governing trade and production should be simple enough to fit on a few pages. It is unlawful to steal, to initiate physical force or to defraud. That’s it. Everything else involved with trade should be off limits to the government. If a product or production method harms someone such as with pollution and a real objective harm can be proved handle it in the courts, which are a legitimate function of a proper government. So many of the laws and agencies meant to solve problems are themselves much more damaging to lives and liberty than the original evil they were instituted to fight.
The relative uselessness of the office of Vice President has been a feature of the system from the very beginning and a perennial source of humor. Placing that individual as President of the Senate was a threat to the latter body that in the case of persistent deadlock the Executive would make up their collective mind for them, a deliberate risk with a specific end in mind. I'd call it a very interesting bit of systems feedback in today's terms. It was meant to be a rare circumstance and has proven so.
Changing the ratio of House members from one for every 40,000 people to one for every 30,000 only delayed the inevitable certainty that as the country grew one of two things would happen: either the House would grow so large that debate would be impossible or the ratio would grow so large that representation would become far less direct than originally intended. Madison called that one and so did Jefferson. The federal government was always intended to be distilled through the intermediary of state government, a role that had steadily diminished even before the events of the Civil War, was exacerbated by direct election of senators, and now is atrophied, simultaneously with the growth of the inability of the federal government to provide direct representation by itself. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that the federal government has become an unwieldy, unresponsive, bull-headed dictatorial monster in the absence of this means of citizen input. But I don't think that it was ever a role that the federal government could do very well from its very design. There are just too many people in the country to admit it. The most workable alternative, in my view, is to re-empower the state governments because they're the only ones who can, by their size and distribution, be close enough to the citizen to allow for the direct representation that was always the intention of the Founders.
And it may be that the country is now to big to allow that, in which case the principle of a distributed government suggests that the county and city governments may now be the proper repositories of direct representation. The challenge then will be the methods chosen to force both state and federal governments to be responsive to them. It can be done, but not without a deliberate, long-term, concerted effort that will be resisted fanatically by those for whom centralization of power without accountability is desirable. These are not our friends.