Our orphaned Constitution

The U.S. Constitution has been orphaned by President Bush and Congress. The Founding Fathers would weep over the abandonment of their brilliant creation featuring checks and balances and muscular protections against government abuses.

An Aug. 2, 2007, executive order issued by Mr. Bush that blocks property of persons who present a risk of acting in a way that could undermine the sovereignty of Lebanon or its democratic processes or institutions is emblematic of the Constitution's orphanage.

The order was authorized by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a statute that delegates vast legislative powers over national security affairs. IEEPA empowers the president to impose a financial death penalty upon persons in circumstances which he pronounces create an "unusual and extraordinary threat" to the foreign policy of the United States. Among other things, the president may block assets or void financial transactions.

The Founding Fathers would have frowned on Congress abdicating its national security powers. James Madison, father of the Constitution, worried that foreign threats would be exploited to undermine domestic liberties, especially by a president in times of war or conflict.

To look back and state that the US would not have been around is something of an overstatement

I'll grant you that, it is an overstatement on my part. But it would have been a prefectly rational thought for any President of the US to have, and to fight for. That's why (Virginian) President Madison fought against a New Englander's secesionist movement, and why (south carolinian) President Jackson threatened to send troops to forcibly put down South Carolina's secessionist grumblings.

Yes, 4 million lives was a horrific price to pay for all this. But the scale of casualties was due more to the changing nature of warfare than to any political cause. See: Crimean War, WW1, etc.

It would have been a perfectly rational thought to consider that the Union would cease to exist, but I have a very hard time justifying the use of force where a majority within a geographic region wishes to secede. Granted that the enfranchised voters in the South were not representative of the whole population. And granted that the whole population might not have wanted to secede from the Union. But it's not as though the enfranchised in the North were all that different from those in the South.

And I wonder if the South had been allowed to peaceably secede if those states in whole or in part would not have rejoined the Union by the end of the 19th Century anyhow.

I'm aware that the Crimea and the trench warfare of WW1 were markedly different from prior wars and also that the US War Between The States was terra nova in many regards. But it is really hard to justify the preservation of the Union in exchange for so many lives. I wonder if one could in theory put the question to J Davis and to A Lincoln: "You can win the war, but it will cost x million lives, do you still wish to proceed?" who would have answered "Yes!" and at what cost in lives?

It is particularly surprising that so many in the North wanted to preserve the Union at such a high cost given that the War of Independence was also a war of secession.

I probably would have been a Tory in the 1770s and a Copperhead in the 1860s. Of course I never would have thought that as a schoolboy from reading the standard American History textbooks. But in light of further reading, it strikes me that the path previously chosen is in retrospect often sold by historians as the best path or the only path that could have been taken or both when, in fact, the paths not chosen remain forever a matter of speculation. Yalta springs to mind.

jas3

>>
The U.S. Constitution has been orphaned by President Bush and Congress.
<<

No, actually it has been exiled. Indeed, the concept was used as a point around which to pivot a (kind of) question to Judge Roberts at his confirmation hearing by Senator Biden. My take on the question was to beg Roberts to indicate that the Constitution is more “living” than constant.

“...
BIDEN: And once again, when it should be even more obvious to all Americans we need increased protections for liberty as we look around the world and we see thousands of people persecuted because of their faith, women unable to show their faces in public, children maimed and killed for no other reason than they were born the wrong tribe; and once again, when it should be obvious we need a more energetic national government to deal with the challenges of the new millennium — terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, pandemic disease, religious intolerance — once again our journey of progress is under attack.

And it’s coming from, in my view, the right. There are judges, scholars and opinion leaders who belong to this group of people, who are good, honorable and patriotic Americans. They believe the Constitution provides no protection against government intrusion into highly personal decisions like the Schiavo case, decisions about birth, about marriage, about family, about religion.

There are those who would slash the power of our national government, fragmenting it among the states in a new reading of the 10th and 11th amendment.

Incredibly, some even argue, as you well know — people won’t believe this — but some are arguing today, in this constitutional exile group, who argue that the national government has no power to deal with what’s going on in the Gulf at this moment.

Judge, I don’t believe the Constitution — I don’t believe in a constitution where individuals could, for very long, have accomplished what we did had we read it in such a narrow way....”

from:
http://www.savethecourt.org/site/c.mwK0JbNTJrF/b.1035617/k.1407/Transcript_of_Democratic_Senators_Opening_Statements_at_Confirmation_Hearing_for_John_Roberts.htm

[My comment goes further. Liberals are busy constructing and maintaining their own Camelot, where nothing Bad ever occur, where policies are judged on their intentions and not on their results, where the First, Second, Fifth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments are just to limiting and must be easily reinterpreted if not reconstructed so they support our ever-changing fashion and passion and don’t get in the way. So, the constant words of the Real Constitution have been sent away, in some cases like the Second Amendment, very far away into exile and the concepts expressed by those words have been crafted over the years to bring Camelot closer than ever before. Senator Biden is a citizen of this Camelot.]

Little Ray:
It can be argued (and was actually in West Point text books before the Civil War) ...

jas2:
3.8 million people died in the Civil War along with States Rights.

Agreed, except that the United States has not yet had a civil war, with two factions fighting for control of the same government. But history is (re)written by the victors. In my Mother's memory, no history textbook in the South referred to the War Between The States (or, the War of Northern Aggression) as a civil war.

And I remember when no Republican could be elected dogcatcher in the South because of "reconstruction."

Slavery was, at best, merely a single issue and was certainly not sole or even the main issue behind secession. Remember, over 95% of the free population didn’t own slaves.
As for representation, remember they counted slaves as 3/5’s. Given that, for some idiotic reason, we insist on fully counting illegals for the purpose of state representation, slaves should have been fully represented...

The issue was about the Constitution being a dead letter. Someone said TR killed it; I said Lincoln did; somebody else trumped me with a Supreme court case from 1792 about ex post facto laws not applying to civil laws. Then SOMEBODY hijacked it into a Civil War thread.

Slavery was, at best, merely a single issue and was certainly not sole or even the main issue behind secession.

Puh-leeeze. That's just an after-the-fact pro-confederacy argument to rationalize why they would risk war and the destruction of the US to protect such an evil institution. A reading of all the contemporary newspaper articles of the time shows that the reasons or secession were: protecting the institution of slavery, expanding the institution of slavery, protecting the freedom of white men (to own, buy and sell black slaves), and "keeping your pure white daughters from deciding between death and the hellish lusts of the buck ni**er" [direct quote]

The issue was about the Constitution being a dead letter

Read my post #34. The Constitution certainly was a dead letter, and like I wrote there, it was the southern politicians who killed it, all the while paying transparent lip-service to states rights and strict constitutionalism.

The theory of state primacy and secession is theoretically compelling, but I agree with several southern leaders - including one RE Lee - that it was not only unconstitutional (I can't seem to find any article that describes the procedure), but also morally bankrupt, because it holds the nation politically hostage to the whims of a minority while threatening the very existence of not only the union but also each state, and that it would invariably lead to war because no government that allowed such a thing could survive. Not my words, but Gen Lee's. On this, I agree with him.

Funny that saying that TR or Lincoln killed the constitution does NOT constitute a "thread highjacking", but saying that Jeff Davis killed it does.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.