Posted on 07/28/2025 2:38:13 AM PDT by george76
Our Constitution, perhaps the greatest document in human history behind the Bible, is not quite perfect. In 2025, we can see things that might have been added. Number one is probably term limits. Another would be a prohibition on deficit spending outside of war. And maybe they could have added something about judges being responsible for the results of giving criminals a free pass
...
What the Founding Fathers never envisioned, however, was a permanent government, whether elected officials or a bureaucracy. Sadly, today we have both ... for America’s first 50 years, we had a Department of State, Treasury, War, Attorney General, and Postmaster General. That was it. Interior and Agriculture came in the middle of the 19th century when the country was adding states and territories rapidly, and farming was becoming a major point of conflict between cattle herders, sheep herders, farmers, and miners, not to mention Indians. Nothing more until the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903 (the two split in 1913).
The point is that, for most of the first half of America’s history, the federal government was essentially an afterthought in most Americans’ minds. For the Founding Fathers, the government was part-time. Today it’s anything but.
...
Seventy-five percent of federal government spending is on things that didn’t exist at the federal level for our first 150 years. From healthcare spending to food stamps to Social Security to education, the limited government our Founding Fathers left us with has metastasized into a Borg that grows year after year, regardless of who’s in control.
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America needs a new group of would-be heroes, men willing to target the entrenched barnacles that have grown up around our Constitution and the leeches that feed off both.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Typical Anti-Federalist claptrap.
Blame the Framers.
Don’t like it? Amend it via Article V.
Simply restoring the original meaning of the Commerce Clause would severely limit Congress' authority and opportunity for meddling and bribery. Term limits would also help immensely, as would repealing the 17th Amendment. I would also ban Federal spending on programs that bribe states, which makes a mockery of Federalism.
The other big problem is incorporation, mainly because it's unclear how it was to be implemented and granted SCOTUS unprecedented power over the states. The same goes for civil rights: equal protection under the law is correct, but that also implies that the social engineering aspects that limit freedom of association and subject every contract to the tutelary despotism of the state far exceed the government's lawful authority.
Lots pf good comments below the article.
Thanks for the post.
Name of that "18th-century Scottish historian" not explicitly stated (or even hinted at) in the entire excerpt!
FAIL!
Regards,
“What the Founding Fathers never envisioned...”
The most long-term forever damage was The Great Compromise being written into it. Little did the Founders know what would happen when two senators from each state were granted, that one day in the future the perspective senators in their own state would migrate to a political party rather than protect their own state. This ‘senate’ stuff in the eyes of the Founders was necessary to encourage and thus make the territories join the union.
Adding the 17th Amendment made this even worse. Notice the rats seem to always go the senate for presidential candidates while the GOP hasn’t plucked one from the senate for over a century to their credit. The senate as a whole has evolved into a uniparty of it’s own and has weakened this nation, blindfolded and put her on knees.
bkmk
Term limits are over-rated, they have them in California, how has that helped?
These words are chillingly ominous when one considers the magnitude of power concentrated in Washington and the kinds of power hungry people whom it will attract like a magnet.
“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”
There’s no documentation Tytler ever wrote or said that. It sounds about right though.
“The other big problem is incorporation”
I’m no expert, but am trying to catch up. As I understand it, “incorporation” means that the Bill of Rights, first ten amendments to the Constitution, applies to the states. It seems pretty clear that that was not the original intent, or the original language. So how does it work?
From Wikipedia. “The clause in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides:
No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.
The clause in Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides:
... nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Sounds harmless enough to me, but I’m probably missing the power of self-aggrandizement by the courts.
Justice Hugo Black favored complete incorporation. Is he the culprit?
I suspect that the Framers did not anticipate “permanent government” because they could not conceive of wanting to spend their own lives in government. They undertook public service as a temporary duty, not a “career”.
Taken all together, it's basically that no state can abridge the rights of any citizen of the United States guaranteed by the Constitution.
The main problem is that SCOTUS has been extremely expansive regarding "equal protection," which is how we got "gay marriage" and Constitutional protection for sexual acts subject to legislative authority since time immemorial. Meanwhile, the 2nd Amendment was never legally applied against the states until McDonald v. Chicago in 2010.
SCOTUS seems to pick and choose which Amendments get incorporated and twists the plain meaning of the text beyond recognition whenever it feels like it.
That's what I meant by saying "incorporation" as a legal doctrine is a mess.
One thing you have to consider is that when the Framers of the Constitution were around, only taxpayers could vote i.e. citizens who owned property. That makes a difference. Taxpayers are far less likely to want to see government waste.
The existence of slavery and then freedmen created a legal conundrum unprecedented in Anglo-American law. Britain got off easy because slavery was confined to its colonies: so freedmen there were still not full British subjects.
The post Civil War Republicans sought to raise freedmen to the level of full-fledged citizens, a prospect for which there was little political support among a majority of whites. Northern whites detested slavery as giving rise to the planter aristocracy who destroyed the Union, but that certainly didn't imply giving freedmen full citizenship.
If you read the text of the post-Civil War amendments, that would imply they only apply to freedmen ("previous condition of servitude"). But that would mean blacks could make an equal protection claim that whites could not. So the courts interpreted it to mean everyone could make an equal protection and due process claims.
This interpretation now meant that every law by every jurisdiction no matter how picayune could be scrutinized by the Federal courts for "equal protection" and "due process" violations, granting the Federal courts unprecedented power for which the institution was never set up to handle and for which few if any precedents existed in Anglo-American law.
If the Founders had foreseen the courts having this kind of power, it would have been far more curtailed in the Constitution than it was.
We have term limits every 4 years but alas most people are stupid or duped and just vote the same o’ same o’. The real issue is campaign money. It corrupts everything. From day one of being “elected” the goal is to be re-elected, not doing your elected job, and keeping your slush fund.
Thanks.
As I recall, a group of affluent individuals approached Ronald Reagan and told him they would back him if he ran for President. Later campaign finance reform made that scenario impossible. The courts later decided that limiting self-financing constituted a limitation of freedom of speech. The Trumps and Bloombergs could self-finance as others could not. Unions could contribute, but not businesses. Courts decided that businesses could contribute also. I’m sure many non-profits can contribute. Probably NGOs as well.
Getting back to basics. I think only individuals should be allowed to contribute. They should be allowed to contribute without limit. Perhaps campaigns should be required to list their contributors, at least the top 100. Or not. What do you think of anonymous contributors?
Good question that made me think more about it.
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