Posted on 07/29/2011 5:24:35 PM PDT by Schatze
Our fourth president, James Madison, has been called the father of the Constitution for considerable reasons. He was highly educated, widely read, and well regarded. Ever the prescient student of history, Madison was able to describe in February 1788 the precise reasons why his beloved republic would fare so badly 223 years later in 2011. In Federalist No. 62—his explanation of the Senate—we find an amazingly clear prediction of how badly Washington, D.C., has gone off track. Madison understood that democratic governments like our own often suffer from the malady of unfaithful elected officials.
“It is a misfortune [sic] incident to republican government,” Madison wrote, “that those who administer it may forget their obligations to their constituents, and prove unfaithful to their important trust.”
The writers of the Constitution intended the Senate to help keep the federal government on track, serving as a “salutary check on the government.” The Senate, they proposed, would serve as a check on the populist passions of the House of Representatives and possibly an overzealous president. It would slow the wheels of government and keep the interests of the states alive in the halls of Congress. It became known as the “most deliberative body in the world” exactly for this reason.
Originally, senators were appointed by state legislatures in order to represent the interests of the states. Since the members of the House were elected by state voters to represent their interests, electing senators seemed duplicative. After all, with the whole of the people electing the president and the individual voters of each district electing their representative, it seemed the voters got plenty of representation. The states needed their interests protected and so senators were appointed by state assemblies.
That delicate balance ended in 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment altered the original plan and made provisions for voters to directly elect members of the Senate just as they do their House members. No more were the states represented in Washington, and as each decade passed into the future, politicians began more and more to “forget their obligations to their constituents,” as Madison so lamented.
Noting that any person that is “inconstant to his plans, or perhaps to carry on his affairs without any plan, at all is marked at once” as a “victim to his own unsteadiness and folly,” Madison insisted that governments that act similarly forfeit “the respect and confidence” of everyone.
Every nation, consequently, whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability, may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of their wiser neighbors.
Madison is right that nobody likes or trusts a flighty fool. But Madison was not merely waxing philosophically. He saw his own fledgling nation treading that destructive path under the feckless Articles of Confederation, a path the new Constitution would correct.
But the best instruction on this subject is unhappily conveyed to America by the example of her own situation. She finds that she is held in no respect by her friends; that she is the derision of her enemies; and that she is a prey to every nation which has an interest in speculating on her fluctuating councils and embarrassed affairs.
Prior to the ratification of the Constitution, the United States was floundering due to its ineffective national government. Madison saw the Articles of Confederation as a complete failure offering no stability for his nascent nation. But as he went on to explain why the Constitution would be better than what they had in the Articles, Madison seems to be describing exactly the situation we are confronted with today.
Today, we are faced with a government that no one can count on. It is capricious, constantly changing, and grabbing new power for itself nearly every month. Businesses cannot make plans for the future as they live in fear that those plans will be ruined by the next government power grab. Greedy politicians are more interested in power for themselves and their party than they are about governing us. They exhibit a supreme arrogance that only comes from those who feel they are accountable to no one but themselves. Additionally, as these oppressive government tendrils reach further into our lives, we find the only ones who benefit are lobbyists who skillfully guide the next set of rules. Sadly, the people are either the last to benefit or don’t benefit at all.
Read, then, Madison’s description of a failed state and compare it to our predicament.
The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessing of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?
Madison noted other consequences of these calamitous failures:
Another effect of public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uniformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any way affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few, not for the many.
Do these passages sound familiar? Remember when Nancy Pelosi insisted we had to pass Obama’s budget-bloating healthcare bill so that “we could know what’s in it”? We have senators and members of the house insisting they can’t be expected to actually read the bills they are voting on. We have dozens of bills floating from one unaccountable committee to another until no one is sure what is at what stage of consideration. We have government convening in the dead of night to slip things past the people. We have thousands of documents dumped on Friday evenings so that no one sees them. We also have federal agencies issuing reams of new regulatory changes every month with little, if any accountability. Madison’s description of a calamitous government poisoning the blessing of liberty is no exercise in philosophy. It is a precise description of our current governing climate. Were it not for their elegance, one would think Madison’s words were ripped from today’s news.
Madison continued:
The want of confidence in the public councils damps every useful undertaking, the success and profit of which may depend on a continuance of existing arrangements. What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not but that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed? In a word, no great improvement or laudable enterprise can go forward which requires the auspices of a steady system of national policy.
The end result is that the people themselves no longer have a bond of affection to their government.
But the most deplorable effect of all is that diminution of attachment and reverence which steals into the hearts of the people. No government will long be respected without being truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.
With approval ratings of congresses and presidents at all-time lows and voter turnout a trickle of what it should be, who can’t see that the people have lost reverence and attachment to their government?
But, we must ask ourselves, what is the solution to our ills? Is Madison’s Constitution itself at fault? Of course not, for we have not had Madison’s Constitution for well over a hundred years. We’ve allowed his blueprint to become bastardized, warped, and made a shadow of its former self. And we’ve strayed far from our founding principles, refusing to heed the warnings outlined in the Federalist Papers.
The only solution is to begin a systematic trimming of government. Scores of federal employees and their departments need to be summarily eliminated. Pensions must be canceled. Programs must be ended, departments snuffed out. We need to force our politicians to adhere to the Constitution and insist they justify their policies by pointing to the specific clause telling them their actions are constitutional. We need to begin impeaching judges far more than we do. In short, we need to start taking government out of our lives, not involving it more. But above all we need to change attitudes. Today, our politicians think we are their servants. We need to remind them of who controls whom. We need to remind them as James Madison would have reminded them.
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago-based freelance writer and has reported on national and local politics for a decade. He has appeared on several major television and radio programs, and his work has appeared in some of the nation’s top newspapers, and he currently writes for conservative Internet mogul Andrew Breitbart.
Very good!
The “[sic]” is not required. That’s how they wrote back then.
bump
>>>>The end result is that the people themselves no longer have a bond of affection to their government.
This is why they came up with the tripartite division of checks and balances - they knew what was coming.
Sometimes I think that the entire American experiment is a holding action against a tide of evil, designed solely to enable survival until a certain time is reached. A delaying action, if you will, until reinforcements arrive.
Outstanding piece of analysis. Unfortunately, not one in ten Americans will get it.
Is Madison’s Constitution itself at fault?
(courtesy ping)
in·ci·dent/ˈinsidənt/
Noun: An event or occurrence: "several amusing incidents".
Adjective: Liable to happen because of; resulting from: "the changes incident to economic development".
The end result is that the people themselves no longer have a bond of affection to their government.
And that is the goal of the democrats in order to
“transform” America into their vision of a classless
socialist state. But of course such a being cannot
in truth exist.
BUMP!
They warned especially of the threats to liberty from deficit and debt, the very topic which is the headline today.
At this moment, it is "the People," as represented by the movement called the "TEA party," who may be responsible for whether liberty is preserved for future generations.
These brave citizens are intelligent, resourceful and have studied the ideas of liberty. They understand that America can no longer be free, if the philosophy of Mao/Marx/Lenin and Keynes is allowed to prevail over the philosophy of Washington, Adams, Madison, Jefferson and Adam Smith.
Can you cite any authority on either economics or freedom who is more eloquent than Thomas Jefferson on the question of the ideas of liberty or of the consequences of debt and deficit?
"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:39
"I deem [this one of] the essential principles of our government and consequently [one] which ought to shape its administration:... The honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith." --Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801. ME 3:322
"I sincerely believe... that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816. ME 15:23
"[With the decline of society] begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia [war of all against all], which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:40
Your Party's control of the Congress since 2006, and of the Presidency for the last 3 years, along with any Republicans who have been coopted to go along with the Democrats' policies have brought us close to the kind of "wretchedness and oppression" spoken of by Jefferson.
Thank God for technology and the so-called TEA party movement! Else, future generations would never know that there were those in 2012 who stood for liberty, not "servitude."
Good article.
Got to love Madison.
In Federalist 46 Madison pretty well crushes the
notion that the Second Amendment refers only to
the National Guard. For those who have never read
it I highly recommend that you look it up. The per-
tinent passage starts somewhere around the ninth
paragraph.
“It is a misfortune [sic] incident to republican government,”
Whoever thought that was a mistake probably thought the word needed to be “incidental” to be used as an adjective. Perfectly ok in Madison’s time, though.
“In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
We can't say we weren't warned.
Our enemy is not government. Our enemy is the individual, the socialist. Identity the socialists in government. Root them out.
Above all, if you wish to be strong, begin by rooting out every particle of socialism that may have crept into your legislation. This will be no light task.
Bastiat 1801-1850, The Law
Usually the “[sic]” goes after the thing you’re pointing out.
One more quote...(The Law - Bastiat)
You would use the law to oppose socialism? But it is upon the law that socialism itself relies. Socialists desire to practice legal plunder, not illegal plunder. Socialists, like all other monopolists, desire to make the law their own weapon. And when once the law is on the side of socialism, how can it be used against socialism? For when plunder is abetted by the law, it does not fear your courts, your gendarmes, and your prisons. Rather, it may call upon them for help.
To prevent this, you would exclude socialism from entering into the making of laws? You would prevent socialists from entering the Legislative Palace?
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