You’ve sure got that right. I am not seeking as much to convince anybody that what I’ve laid out is correct as I am trying to get somebody to convince me it’s wrong.
“…have the right to hand over to the federal government any of those individual (or states’) rights that they deem fit to hand over…”
That doesn't capture my thought. I’d say “have the right to task the Federal Government in its capacity as their agent-employee-servant (it’s supposed to work for us, not the other way around) to do their will absent any prohibition. That last is important. While the people might want to task the government to install Arnold Swarzenegger as president, that is prohibited by the Constitution because he is foreign born. On the other hand, I can’t recall where the Louisiana Purchase was specifically authorized in the Constitution, but I don’t see that it was specifically prohibited if the people wanted it. (And if the Louisiana Purchase was not authorized at all, are the States formed from it legally established as such and are the inhabitants legal citizens? No need to respond, that’s just a thought.)
Holding fast to the amendment process, as it was originally defined and intended, would most likely have prevented the erosion of individual liberty, and the commensurate growth of federal tyranny.
Maybe, but I’m not so sure of that because of “either short-sightedness on the part of our Founders, or mass stupidity on the part of their descendents (with the latter being much more likely).” The Constitution has been amended. Originally, the States selected individuals to represent them at the national level in the Senate That provided a “check and balance” between those representatives and the individuals elected by the people to represent them in the House. But that was changed by Amendment 17. Now all those individuals are elected by the people. Of late I have wondered if Amendment 17 was such a good idea. Then there was Amendment 19. Prohibition certainly worked out well. And then there’s Amendment 26 in which people who are not considered old enough to drink or buy a hand gun or whatever, are considered old enough to vote. I guess if we had held fast to the amendment process we might be better of than we are now, but we’d be headed down the same road because of “…a public ignorance of the Constitution, and a public willingness to allow those rights that were so fervently defended by our Founders to be abdicated…” We’d just have more amendments and many of them would probably be bad.
Jefferson himself had major reservations about the constitutionality of the Louisiana Purchase. And, IMO, he overlooked those reservations because the idea of doubling the land area of this country, and seeing to it that such a large contiguous land mass did not fall into the hands of another, held more appeal than did the constitutional question. But, more than a quarter of a century later the Supreme Court (strangely) affirmed the constitutionality of his decision, ruling that the government could purchase new territory under its constitutional power to make treaties. They argued that the Constitution grants the government the powers of making war and of making treaties; consequently, that government possesses the power of acquiring territory, either by conquest or by treaty (and we think modern Supreme Court decisions are nebulous and often unfounded?)
Whether we agree or not (and I certainly don’t, although the Purchase was an extraordinarily good thing), the point is that both the President, and the Court, were of the opinion that the Constitution afforded the federal government this right. They didn’t affirm the constitutionality of the Purchase on the grounds that the people wanted it. They affirmed it on the grounds that it came under the powers granted the federal government.
As opposed to today’s countless unconstitutional ‘we have to do it for the good of the people’ laws. There’s a world of difference in that specious philosophy, and disrespect for the rule of law, have completely taken the place of the question of the constitutionality of anything. The government simply has to convince the people that the law will be working in their best interest, and bam! You’ve got a new (generally socialist) law on the books.
Nowadays, the question of constitutionality isn’t even brought up. Did the President or Congress have any (meaningful) discussion about the constitutionality of the recent prescription drug bill? Or did they simply sign it into law, because of some nebulous (as they always are) precedent set by the myriad of other unconstitutional federal entitlement programs?
I agree completely with your last paragraph. All three amendments (17, 19 and 26) are scourges. And, as I suggested in my original post, and you affirmed in yours, they represent the stupidity of the Founders’ descendents – and, as a consequence, the stupidity of their elected representatives. But that doesn’t mean that the constitutional process should be ignored. There are bad laws. And there are bad amendments. But I would rather see three bad amendments tacked onto the Constitution than the library full of unconstitutional federal laws that are on the books (few of which would be, if an amendment -- good or bad -- were required to place them there).
~ joanie
Prohibition was not only a disaster as a law; including it in the Constitution was an outrageous offence to everything else in the Constitution. The framers were probably rolling over in their graves.
The Constitution is a legal expression of the most basic ideology of the people of the United States. It is not a place for making trendy laws about things of minimal importance. It is a place to set forward the method by which the country will be run. While I want very much to make some changes to the Constitution, they are all on subjects already covered to some degree in its text.