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To: antiRepublicrat

If it was meant to be that way it would have been put in the Constitution. The founding fathers knew what they were doing. Today’s voters do not.


29 posted on 07/11/2008 8:32:42 AM PDT by kempo
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To: kempo
If it was meant to be that way it would have been put in the Constitution.

There's a lot of stuff that was clearly meant to be by the Founding Fathers who trusted that they didn't need to be so explicit in the Constitution.

Take the monopolies of copyrights and patents. Madison considered them a necessary evil and tried to persuade Jefferson (who was against them) that they wouldn't be abused, "Is there not also infinitely less danger of this abuse in our governments than in most others? ... Monopolies are sacrifices of the many to the few. ... Where the power, as with us, is in the many not in the few, the danger can not be very great that the few will be thus favored."

Then look at copyrights and patents today, completely NOT what it was meant to be, as the "few" are extremely favored at the expense of the "many." Had the founders been prescient enough, I am sure the Copyright Clause would have been worded differently to prevent today's situation.

But to the subject at hand:

"All [reforms] can be done peaceably, by the people confining their choice of Representatives and Senators to persons attached to republican government and the principles of 1776; not office-hunters, but farmers whose interests are entirely agricultural. Such men are the true representatives of the great American interest, and are alone to be relied on for expressing the proper American sentiments." --Thomas Jefferson to Arthur Campbell, 1797.
Here was Jefferson's plan:
"I had proposed that they [senators] should hold their places for nine years and then go out (one third every three years) and be incapable forever of being re-elected to that house. My idea was that if they might be re-elected, they would be casting their eye forward to the period of election (however distant) and be currying favor with the electors and consequently dependent on them. My reason for fixing them in office for a term of years rather than for life was that they might have an idea that they were at a certain period to return into the mass of the people and become the governed instead of the governor, which might still keep alive that regard to the public good that otherwise they might perhaps be induced by their independence to forget." --Thomas Jefferson to Edmund Pendleton, 1776
Career legislators were not the plan, and indeed considered dangerous.
30 posted on 07/11/2008 9:55:03 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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