"But can they be made unchangeable? Can one generation bind another, and all others, in succession forever? I think not. The Creator has made the earth for the living, not the dead. Rights and powers can only belong to persons, not to things, not to mere matter, unendowed with will. The dead are not even things. The particles of matter which composed their bodies, make part now of the bodies of other animals, vegetables, or minerals, of a thousand forms. To what then are attached the rights and powers they held while in the form of men? A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life; when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the rights and powers their predecessors once held, and may change their laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man."That has always been one of my favorite Jefferson quotes. I think about it every time I see someone argue that future generations will be somehow bound to do things as we do. It comes up a lot with discussions of the national debt. In thirty years, this country will probably have a larger GDP than we have today. They will decide for themselves how to distribute that which they produce and that includes decisions as to how much of their resources they will devote to paying the debts that we create. People should give some thought to that reality when they purchase our debt. In thirty years, the people living then will determine the rules by which they live. We cannot bind them by what we do.
"I was glad to find in your book a formal contradition, at length, of the judiciary usurpation of legislative powers;"
Jefferson did not like John Marshall and Jefferson did not agree with the Supreme Court's power-grabbing decision in Marbury v. Madison. I think about Jefferson and that case every time I see someone arguing that certainly the courts should have the final word on the meaning of the natural born citizen clause. Why, that is what the courts are for!! They have to have the final say about everything.
I believe I know how Jefferson would have felt about that argument. ;-)
