I like the writings of Brutus. I’m printing it up and headed for a corner of a coffee shop.
Great work, Publius and Billthedrill (who is either a Dentist, a Marine DI, or Oil man?).
LOL! No, merely a poor sap who did not reflect sufficiently on how long this place might be around when he picked a nom de FReep out of thin air. The reference in my nick is to the President of the time's sexual proclivities. Young FReepers, let this be a lesson to you...choose wisely...BtD chose...poooooorly...
A BTT on a brief check-in before carping that old diem. The anti-Federalist sentiments are beginning to coalesce around several themes - that the government to be will be too powerful and submerge those of the States, that the government cannot be powerful enough to govern all that territory without becoming a despotism, unresponsive to the people, or both, and that such innovations as a standing army will be temptations toward that same end of autocratic behavior.
It will be easy enough to see certain modern characteristics of government as validating these sentiments, which to a degree they do. It will be far less easy to imagine what improvements might have been made in the original document to avoid them. It will be easy enough to say that we need to return to the original interpretation of this remarkable plan. It will be less easy to understand that the original interpretation did, in fact, give way to its grotesquely transformed modern version due to real internal deficiencies or conflicts. Some of these were foreseen, some perhaps inevitable, and some may still be recoverable.
Coming to the fore is the necessity, and the disadvantages, of a federal Bill of Rights. These seem so integral to the Constitution now that it takes some effort to picture them truly as Amendments. Would we have been better off without them? That debate is about to rage.