Posted on 02/11/2009 6:06:39 PM PST by Kaslin
This is the 200th birthday of the first Republican to win a national election, Abraham Lincoln. It is good for Republicans today to remember Lincoln, not to be antiquarians, but to learn from his principled defense of the Constitution.
By becoming students of Lincoln, Republicans can win elections and would deserve to win by helping America recover its constitutional source of strength and vitality.
The greatest political crisis America faces today is neither the recession nor Islamic terrorism; it's not health care, education, immigration or abortion. It is that the United States Constitution has become largely irrelevant to our politics and policies.
All three branches of government routinely ignore or twist the meaning of the Constitution, while many of our problems today are symptoms of policies that have no constitutional foundation.
If we are to recover the authority of the Constitution and the many ways it restrains and channels government power, someone or some party must offer a principled defense of the cause of constitutional government.
They must understand not only the Constitution, but also the principles that informed its original purposes and aspirations, principles found in the Declaration of Independence among other places.
No one understood that better than Lincoln.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
No, it did not. That was reserved to the States, or to the People.
I can be judgmental, it is true, but not emotional. If you don't like my remarks about your character, don't have that character. I'm sorry if you are offended, but I have not seen many out and out slavery proponents on FR and it is a phenomenon that intrigues me. I have noticed the anti-Lincoln sentiment on FR, but like a lot of things, it might just be a vocal minority. You, however, have taken it to the next level, the pro-slavery contingent. Please do me a favor, and don't stand shoulder to shoulder with me in the coming battle with socialism, because I don't want to restore the Constitution only to have my sacrifices inure to the benefit of the likes of you. Don't hide who you are, flaunt it in public, say it proudly and make sure we understand what you think, so we don't make a mistake of thinking you are on our side. Find a compound in a sparsely settled corner of the desert or the mountains and live your ideals there, and I will pledge to leave you alone (as long as you don't take your slaves with you). I'll stay in America, the real America, where words mean something but not what you think they mean, and I will invent, or write, or work, and save, love, enjoy, live, follow the rules and expect them to be followed, and I won't even notice when the descendant of slaves crosses my path, won't curse under my breath or bemoan the fact that Abe Lincoln decided not to let the south leave and perpetuate that man's great great grandfather's bondage.
Congress would have the authority as administrators of a territory to make regulations concerning a transaction of commerce, just as it would between two regular States.
If the Governor of a territory wanted to trade fish to Virginia for tobacco, the federal government could step in and make it 'regular', or act as an arbitrator between the parties.
Congress does not, however, possess the authority to tell the Governor that he may not trade fish, he must trade fur for tobacco.
That is beyond their legislative ability, because they can only regulate the trade, they cannot say what the trade can be. That's up to the parties concerned.
The people in the southern states felt their economy, their culture, and their way of life was being impugned and threatened by the people of the northern states and by the government in Washington. They also felt that their right to peacefully secede was being denied. What you think or what I think doesn’t mean much. All that matters in this discussion is what Southerners thought and felt. History records that they felt they were living under the rule of an oppressive government. Surely you don’t think they seceded because they were getting too much love and respect from the North.
I can be judgmental, it is true...
Indeed you can as you have very adequately displayed on this thread. All emotion and no fact.
The Constitution was created by representative of the several states. It was the best deal that could be had at the time. Slavery was very much an issue even then. Most of the men in that room abhorred the very idea of slavery but recognized that it was ALREADY a deeply entrenched fact of life and had been so for a very long time. They further understood the impossibility of their trying to both settle the slavery issue and, at the same time, write a ratifiable Constitution.
We got what we got out of that effort and nothing more. Either we believe in it or we don't. If it is to be workable our leaders cannot be allowed to pick and choose what parts they wish to adhere to and ignore the parts they don't. Pointing out where that sort of thing has occurred in our history no more makes one a proponent of slavery than your loud mouth and VERY offensive manner makes you an opera singer.
The NW Ordinance was never 'struck down. If you are talking about the Scott v. Sanford decision, it was not the NW Ordinance, which was moot at that point in time since all of the territory it covered were by then States.
What the Scott decision struck down was the 1820 Missouri Compromise that applied to Federal territories beyond the Mississippi River, and the rational for that decision was every bit as contrived as the discovery of un-enumered 'privacy rights' in the 1973 court used for Roe v Wade. The Stanford decision was not based on the Constitution, precedent, or even history. It was pure hard-ball politics by a handful of unelected judges who thought themselves to be deities.
Activist courts are nothing new in American history. The Taney court stepped into partisan politics thinking they could settle the expansion issue but in reality only made things far worse than anyone could imagine. That's what activist courts and egotistical judges with no respect for the Constitution always end up doing.
So if you liked the Scott decision, you must love the Roe decision, Mama.
BTW. Tell us about Madison's complaint with the NW Ordinance. Some details please.
NOT. You are a crack-up.
Another one enters the arena. I am now judging you. And finding you utterly lacking in understanding of the Constitution, but not worth resuming the discussion. As you said, we have got what we have got, and what we've got is not something that can be settled by discussion. It was settled by war, and your view lost, and arguing about who was right is an exercise in mental masturbation. I refuse to be your Playgirl magazine.
That's funny! Your antics make me laugh out loud!
You are right about one thing however. Your side won and this once great republic dies a long and painful death as a result!
Right, so therefore you believe that slavery should be legal on the federal level, correct? That any state should be able to restore slavery if it so desired.
Don't blame Lincoln for Obama, Marx, Gramsci, the ACLU, red diaper babies, the long march through the institutions or Hollyweird. It's not his fault, and his handywork unified this country and laid the foundation for the great things this nation has accomplished in the past 150 years.
I beg to differ! In my view all of those things you mention were made possible by the extraconstitutinal excursions of Mr. Lincoln. The doors he opened are the very ones those people walked through and continue to be walked through to this day.
Whether you are right or I am is of little consequence however as we are where we are and we ought to be working to figure out how we are going to reclaim our republic IF that is even possible.
Nonsense, many states had already banned ownership in that particular for of property, so property rights were not absolute. As the body responsible for regulating the territories there is no reason why Congress could not place limits on property as well. And once Taney's ludicrous Scott decision had been overturned there is no doubt such controls would return.
No, it may not. I've given you sources stating such.
And I've already mentioned that your source was in the crosshairs and would be under constant attack from the Lincoln administration in the courts. I doubt it would have survived very long.
As of MONDAY, December 24, 1860, South Carolina again became a sovereign State...
Whoop-de-do. Even allowing for the sake of arguement that the action had been legal, Fort Sumter didn't belong to them. It was federal property, built on land deeded to the government free and clear by act of the South Carolina legislature, financed with funds provided from sources in all the states. South Carolina had no legal claims to it, and ownership could only be transferred to it by act of Congress or act of war. Jefferson Davis chose the second solution, and was responsible for all the death and destruction that followed.
Nope, armed rebellion would be only if the People acted against the State.
Rebellion is defined as open, armed, and usually unsuccessful defiance of or resistence to an established government. An accurate description of the rebel efforts.
It is up to the State to notify the federal government if they need assistance for a domestic situation.
Domestic, yes. But Article I, Section 8, Clause 15 says Congress has the power "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions..." Nothing in that says they need to wait for the states. Especially when the states were the ones leading the rebellion in the first place.
That is certainly the current explanation. But Lincoln at the time stressed that he was not going to alter the domestic life of the slave states as he felt bound by the Constitution. For that, he is often reviled today as uncaring toward the issue of slavery. The main blow Lincoln was going to commit against slavery was to stop its spread in the territories. But that was not an unconstitutional assault on the way of life in the old slave states.
As far as peaceful secession is concerned, there is no provision for that in the Constitution. If true provocation and tyranny exists the people have a right to revolution as our ancestors had in 1776. But revolutions, unlike the imaginary Constitutional concept of secession, are usually bloody and perilous and the insignificant complaints of the cotton states were not enough to sustain a successful revolution.
You need to work on your reading comprehension skills. I didn’t say who was right or wrong. I said the South felt those things were happening to them and they did. No lawyering of the facts, and no Constitutional opinions will change that. Give it up.
To avoid errors in reading comprehension we can just say that history proved the secessionists wrong.
For the last time hard head. Did I say the secessionists were right? After reading your diatribes though, I am starting to believe they might have been. Please slink off into your corner know and find a Confederate sympathizer to harangue.
For the first time, I’m telling you that I never said that you said the secessionists were right.
That's ridiculous. Republicans didn't create or support the Progressive Movement, they fought it. Progressives gave us income taxes, prohibition, direct election of Senators, a National bank. Please explain how you tie Lincoln to FDR's New Deal. The Republican Supreme Court had declared FDR's laws unconstitutional. So he threatened to pack the court, and they caved in. The Interstate Commerce Clause means Congress can regulate anything because Dems in the 30s wanted that interpretation, not because of Lincoln.
Lincoln didn't open any doors that LBJ's Great Society walked through, either.
What you have stated is a platitude, not history.
From the link already posted in #176
It falls within the Scope of your enquiry, to state the fact, that there was a proposition in the convention to discriminate between the old and new States, by an Article in the Constitution declaring that the aggregate number of representatives from the States thereafter to be admitted should never exceed that of the States originally adopting the Constitution. ,The proposition happily was rejected. The effect of such a discrimination, is sufficiently evident.
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