Posted on 01/13/2014 5:18:25 AM PST by Kaslin
Consider George Washington.
Led the Continental Army. Presided over the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Elected unanimously to serve as the first President of the United States. Elected unanimously to serve a second term. Endearingly titled “father of his country” even during his own lifetime.
Like many leaders, George Washington was a powerful man. A great man. A popular man. Ultimately, though, he knew how to do something that so many revolutionary leaders do not. He knew how to relinquish power. He did so twice, both after his leadership of the Continental Army and after his second presidential term, the latter setting a respected standard that remained unbroken until FDR. Both times he had accomplished much, but he felt humbled and worn by his experiences. On both occasions, it was time to abandon power.
Nowadays, no President (not to mention anyone in Washington) is generally praised for pronouncements of abandoning power. As the executive branch, and government generally, has expanded radically in recent decades, it’s hardly surprising that some feel that one executive leader is no longer enough.
Michael Auslin of the American Enterprise Institute recently opined in his piece, “America Needs a King,” that America would benefit from a king. He or she would be termed a “First Citizen” and would reign “above” the President.
Auslin seems to suggest that if another individual served to fulfill the ceremonial presidential duties — the ribbon-cutting, the photo-ops, the baby-kissing — then the President would have time to more effectively lead the nation. He laments that America lacks a common meaning, and that Americans crave a unifying leader to save us from self-destructing in our increasingly partisan differences. He proposes that shoving such a figure into the purview of the executive branch, loosely mirroring nations like Russia or France, would cure this passionate partisan divide.
He also justifies the “First Citizen” through increased political animosity in America. Congress is at a staggering 6% approval rating. The judicial branch is increasingly distrusted. It’s no secret that millions loathed President Bush during his time in office, and today’s popular disenchantment with President Obama is increasingly undeniable.
These arguments are plausible. A First Citizen would, indeed, likely be a superficial Band-Aid of fuzzy-feeling unity to slap onto the minds and hearts of America. But at the cost of something much greater, and in furtherance of the underlying problem itself: the systematic addiction to power. We should not collectively cater to the radical aggrandizement of such power, even through symbolic clout, but rather consider the troubling nature of the aggrandizement itself. We must learn, in other words, the power in abandoning power.
At the time of our nation’s founding, the Framers considered instating a monarch-like figure, and the idea was quickly dismissed. Alexander Hamilton himself, once the proponent of the idea, elaborated at length in the Federalist Papers on the danger of anything but a sole executive.
In distinguishing between a president and a monarch, Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 69: “The one would be amenable to personal punishment and disgrace; the person of the other is sacred and inviolable. The one would have a qualified negative upon the acts of the legislative body; the other has an absolute negative.”
Hamilton continued in Federalist No. 70, in considering a pluralistic executive: “Wherever two or more persons are engaged in any common enterprise or pursuit, there is always danger of difference of opinion . . . If they should unfortunately assail the supreme executive magistracy of a country, consisting of a plurality of persons, they might impede or frustrate the most important measures of the government.”
By placing a First Citizen “above” the President within the executive branch, we would give this branch an even greater sense of mystic inviolability than what it has already gained through government’s self-propelled rapid growth. Instead of a mere “qualified negative” upon other branches of government, the executive would be a new, sacred area to popularize power. We would make the executive untouchable. And as Hamilton noted, we would give the executive a crippling new means of internal conflict, the absence of which has set apart this branch since our nation’s founding. Do we want to reward Washington with another reason to celebrate its perception of self-worth while getting nothing done?
In this dire age practically begging for knowledgeable and committed leaders, a First Citizen would be a glamorous and majestic creation, not the accountable or trustworthy leader America yearns for most. We would worship a magical conception that, while in other nations has a strong historical rooting, serves absolutely no place in our own deeply-rooted constitutional vision. A First Citizen, dividing up what was previously demanded from one person, would teach voters that the integrity of our President is less important than ever before; the First Citizen “above” would somehow be the good guardian of the President’s reputation and capacity to lead. He or she – the inexperienced First Citizen directly chosen by the previous inexperienced First Citizen – would somehow save us, too.
Meanwhile, the President’s power could actually be seen as more important than ever before. The Framers purposefully devised the executive branch with four-year elections and with a high degree of accountability and limited latitude. “Needing” a king ultimately says we want the President to have increased executive authority, through condoning the flippant diversion of at least some presidential obligations to someone else if deemed “less important.” As such, we create the potential for an increasingly divisive and arbitrarily dispersed branch. We send the message that the executive branch is entitled by default to more power, more pomp, and more love by the nation.
Do we want meaningless love or meaningful leadership?
Our distrust in government is not simply because the President is not up to the busy job, but because our government as a whole has grown to an inconceivable and unsustainable level. And people don’t like it. In 2013, a record number of Americans believe the federal government simply has too much power. Worse yet, our government doesn’t know how to relinquish power. Our government doesn’t know how to stop. And in that lies our current failure.
So, what’s a proper President to do?
For the answer, let us return to history. Let us return to George Washington.
As the Revolutionary War came to a close, King George III asked American-born painter Benjamin West what George Washington planned to do after winning independence. West replied, “They say he will return to his farm.”
“If he does that,” said the king, “he will be the greatest man in the world.”
America NEEDS leadership which it lacks.
And that is why the world laughs at us
A competent President!!
Instead we have a Hugo Chavez wannabe.
Let me guess who Michael Auslin would envision as the perfect “First Citizen”
The problem here is that our Constitution was structured for a government of strictly limited powers. Checks and balances are by definition intended to prevent government from effectively doing things.
Yet our federal government has increasingly tried to “run the country” in the manner common in Europe and elsewhere. 100 years ago progressives were open about the Constitution being inadequate for the government they believed was needed. It turned out American weren’t open to the idea of replacing or drastically modifying the Constitution, so progressives have since either modified it by judicial edict or by just ignoring it.
But the inefficiency remains. America, with its constitutional government, even as presently modified, is just incapable of functioning as efficiently in “run the country” mode as a European-style parliamentary system, in which the winner of an election gains control of all branches of government and can fully implement the programon which they ran. If the people don’t like the results, they can toss them out at the next election and give the opposition a chance to implement it’s program.
Choices: 1. Return to a limited scope of government as the Constitution was designed for. 2. Replace our present system with one the people want, using entirely constitutional means. 3. Continue to limp along as we presently are, with all sides unhappy.
I prefer option 1, but I suspect we’ll choose door #3 for quite a while longer.
America needs to have its Constitution obeyed. It (Our Constitution) provides for us to elect those who would manage the government, and it limits what it can do. The framers understood the corrupting influence of power.
Today’s politicians are elected, sort of, and they appoint those who manage the government without limiting what they do that they manage a lot more than the government. They are thoroughly corrupted by power.
At this point, America needs a revolution and a return to the Constitutional principles on which it was founded.
Perhaps Washington relinquished power because he wasn’t a revolutionary leader. The American War of Independence was not a revolution, but itself a conservative uprising — a war to vindicate the traditional rights of Englishmen, which the Founders concluded could better secured in the context of a constitutional republic than in the context of a monarchy. It is one of the very few times in history when the landed and moneyed class rose up against the government (there were others, the Glorious Revolution and the revolt of the barons against King John comes to mind, though I’m not sure there were any outside the English-speaking world — any FReeper classicists have any precedents from antiquity I’m neglecting?). The one revolutionary idea in it was that the traditional rights of Englishmen were universal rights given to all men by God.
To fool Americans, you only have to fool the presstittues. Hussein Obama cares less what individual Americans think, he and his band of terrorist loving traitors controls the press.
America’s first Muslim President thinks Americans are idiots. So far, he is right.
Good responses today!
....For half the country anyways.
.
I don’t hear either half of the country calling our FIRST Muslim President a terrorist. Why else would the clown give US weapons to Muslim terrorists like Al Qaeda? Why else would the Muslim moron support terrorist overthrows in countries like Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Syria?
Half of the country functions as useful idiots, the other half watches the evening news or listens to idiots like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter try to explain why Hussein Obama does what he does.
Everything Hussein Obama does is meant to weaken the US. For example, Hussein Obama’s EPA is shutting down coal fired electric plants at an insane rate. WHY? Greenhouse gases and the resulting climate change. Try to explain Husseincare without purposeful destruction of the US healthcare industry and economic hardship. Hussein is not insane, he is a terrorist loving traitor because by the time either half of the US awakens, it will be too late.
Watch as America is kicked and beaten like a pinata in the next few years. China and other nations will do as they please as we sit on our hands and continue to experiment with Socialism/Communism. Obama’s lack of leadership will sink us into a big shooting war—maybe even WW III. This time Pearl Harbor will be a Cyber Attack with a confederacy of enemies—North Korea, China, Cuba, iran, Egypt and more. I hear the hoofbeats of the four horsemen approaching!
Incorrect. We have a Hugo Chavez GONNABE.
No more islamists.
THE SUMMER OF 2014:
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Today is the last watershed day for America, because it is the last chance for the US Supreme Court to exercise a Constitutional Check and Balance on the current rogue, tyrannical and oppressive Federal Administration.
Chief Justice John “Traitor” Roberts will probably again refuse to abide with the clear Constitutional Law, and again rewrite the US Constitution to his own liking, in similar manner to what Roberts did with the Constitutionality of the Obamacare Case when he un-Constutionally converted a legal fine into an illegal tax.
Today the US Supreme Court takes up the issue of whether or not an Administration can act without Congressional Approval on matters relating to personnel appointments.
The topic of bypassing the House on approving the spending of taxpayer’s dollars by the Administration will not be considered today, except tangentially, as the appointed personnel will be paid with taxpayer dollars, which would be a bypassing of the Constitutional Control of the Purse by the US House of Representatives.
We taxpayers view this as a clear cut case where we have “Taxation Without Representation” because our Representatives have not been part of the decision-making process.
Examples of a few Imperial matters of record include the following:
* Senator Reid’s Democrats recent voting to turn the US Congress into the US Parliament,
* Boehner’s refusal to appoint House Special Prosecutors for each of the Five Obama Administration Scandals,
* Obama’s four years of Imperial actions, and
* the recent history, ( Traitor Roberts’ Obamacare decision), of the US Supreme Court’s proven reluctance to provide their Constitutional duty of a Check and Balance on the other two Branches of the US Federal Government.
With the usual US Supreme Court private straw vote today that always follows the 30 minute Official Hearing before the Court, America’s future fate will be sealed, and later proclaimed between now and the Summer of 2014.
Either way that the NINE SUPREMES rule on this case, “The Summer of 2014” will prove to be the Summer that decided whether or not our Founding Fathers fought King George the Third of England in vain - - - .
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THE SUMMER OF 2014.
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