Posts Tagged ‘james madison’

Thomas Del Beccaro

Liberty and Government: An American Tipping Point

by Thomas Del Beccaro

Thomas Paine said that “It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government.”  He did so amidst the long shadow of a centralized government which regarded individual rights as secondary to its own.  Today, “56% of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey  . . . say they think the federal government’s become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”  They do so in the shadow of a government seeking to take control of nearly 17% of the US economy, if not that portion of our lives, in the name of caring for our health.

statue_of_liberty

For any that have cared to listen to the debates over multi-trillion dollar spending programs, tax hikes, cap and trade or health care, at issue is not simply whether those huge government programs would provide lasting solutions – they will not – at issue is our basic right to Liberty.  Quite frankly, it was never the assumption of the Founding Fathers that it was the role of government to provide a moving target standard of living for Americans.  It was their sincere hope that the government of limited powers they set up would allow people to pursue their lives, Liberty and happiness.  To do so they, wanted to hamstring government’s ability to act – not ours.

Since then, of course, the scale has tipped in favor of government power over our pursuits.  Each step along the way, those concerned with our Liberty have heard the echoes of Senator Daniel Webster when he said:

“Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.”

As you consider his words, it may worthy to also consider the lives of Americans, at the dawn of these United States, and the lives of Americans today.

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Posted Mar 1st 2010 at 7:51 am in Culture, History, Local Government, Politics, Regulation, Tax Reform, Tea Party, federal spending | 76 Comments

Warner Todd Huston

The Mount Vernon Statement, A Poor Man’s Manifesto… Very Poor

by Warner Todd Huston

A group made up of some of the biggest names in contemporary conservatism got together a few days ago and crafted what they are calling the “Mount Vernon Statement,” a manifesto of sorts meant to give direction to today’s conservative movement. Put succinctly, it fails to fill the bill.

mt.vernon

Taken as a whole this statement is fine as a short history lesson. It explains pretty clearly what the founders had wrought when their basic work was done with the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. But as a statement of principles that might guide today’s discussion, I do not think the letter works.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that this effort is harmful. In fact, I think every young person should read it for its explication of our historically conservative American principles. The problem is that this thing doesn’t seem to speak directly to what we are facing today like a statement that perhaps aims to become boilerplate should.

Some of those involved with the statement said that the 1960 “Sharon Statement” served as their inspiration. The Sharon Statement, intended to give some ideological umph to Goldwater conservatives, is an effort that works much better as a rallying cry to action. Sadly, the Mount Vernon Statement falls a little flat in this respect.

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Posted Feb 23rd 2010 at 5:18 am in Congress, Culture, Economics, Education, History, Politics, Tax Reform, Tea Party, federal spending | 50 Comments

Tim Slagle

Freedom to Censor

by Tim Slagle

It always happens. When the mainstream media thinks they are on the heavy side of popular opinion they take a poll and run with it. In a recent poll by ABC and the Washington Post, they determined that 80% of America was opposed to the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC.  I would have like to seen something much more relevant, like how many people know that the case before the Supreme Court was even called “Citizens United v. FEC?”

quiet

Because I’m fairly certain that that few people know anything about the decision. The 80% figure reflects more than public opinion, it reflects how well the mainstream media has been obfuscating the reality of the case.

Not that it’s relevant anyway. Despite popular opinion, America was never intended to be a Democracy. In the immortal words of James Madison: “…democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” (Federalist #10)

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Posted Feb 20th 2010 at 10:03 am in Congress, Culture, Featured Story, Justice/Legal, Media Criticism, News, Politics | 176 Comments

Andrew Mellon

Our Time for Choosing

by Andrew Mellon

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.  We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

Ronald Reagan spoke these words some forty-six years ago in his famous “A Time for Choosing” speech.  Tragically, today in America it appears the time for choosing is fast passing. As each day goes by our debt grows more untenable; our security more imperiled; our economy more shackled; our government more tyrannical.

These are symptoms of an America that has chosen the wrong path.  We lost our way on the road to civilization, veering onto the road to serfdom. Our plight is the result of a hundred-plus year campaign by the socialist sophists to slowly but surely undermine the bedrock principles on which we had built our strength.

While the ends of a nation are peace, prosperity and culture, from our founding there was a dichotomy of opinion as to how best to achieve these ends.  It was not merely a matter of state versus federal or small versus big government.  Rather, at its core the split rested and continues to rest upon embracing liberty or embracing tyranny.

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Posted Feb 15th 2010 at 5:51 am in Congress, Culture, Featured Story, History, Justice/Legal, Politics, Tea Party, federal spending | 151 Comments

Publius

Federalist No. 62: The Senate

by Publius

To the People of the State of New York:

james-madison-picture

HAVING examined the constitution of the House of Representatives, and answered such of the objections against it as seemed to merit notice, I enter next on the examination of the Senate.

The heads into which this member of the government may be considered are: I. The qualification of senators; II. The appointment of them by the State legislatures; III. The equality of representation in the Senate; IV. The number of senators, and the term for which they are to be elected; V. The powers vested in the Senate.

I. The qualifications proposed for senators, as distinguished from those of representatives, consist in a more advanced age and a longer period of citizenship. A senator must be thirty years of age at least; as a representative must be twenty-five. And the former must have been a citizen nine years; as seven years are required for the latter. The propriety of these distinctions is explained by the nature of the senatorial trust, which, requiring greater extent of information and ability of character, requires at the same time that the senator should have reached a period of life most likely to supply these advantages; and which, participating immediately in transactions with foreign nations, ought to be exercised by none who are not thoroughly weaned from the prepossessions and habits incident to foreign birth and education. The term of nine years appears to be a prudent mediocrity between a total exclusion of adopted citizens, whose merits and talents may claim a share in the public confidence, and an indiscriminate and hasty admission of them, which might create a channel for foreign influence on the national councils.

II. It is equally unnecessary to dilate on the appointment of senators by the State legislatures. Among the various modes which might have been devised for constituting this branch of the government, that which has been proposed by the convention is probably the most congenial with the public opinion. It is recommended by the double advantage of favoring a select appointment, and of giving to the State governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government as must secure the authority of the former, and may form a convenient link between the two systems.

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Posted Feb 14th 2010 at 12:15 pm in History, Justice/Legal, Politics | 129 Comments

William E. Morrisey

Remembering Lincoln: What is ‘The New Birth of Freedom’?

by William E. Morrisey

As he prepared “Notes on Government” for publication in 1791, Congressman James Madison wrote a note to himself. “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact. The power lies in a part [of the people] instead of the whole, in the hands of property, not of numbers.” He drew a telling conclusion: “The Southern States of America,” very much including his native Virginia, “are on the same principle aristocracies.”

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As an architect of the new Constitution, Madison knew that Article IV, Section 4 says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” He knew, therefore, that the American regime contained a self-contradiction. With most Americans of his generation, he hoped that the eventual removal of slavery would remove this potentially fatal flaw. In fact many states did abolish slavery in that first, founding generation. But his “Southern States” did not. It took civil war and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to continue the liberation that the founders had begun.

Lincoln came to the battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg to say in public what Madison in prudence could not say some seventy years before. In declaring their independence, their self-government, in 1776, “our fathers,” the founders, “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Conceived, brought forth: this is the language of fertility, of childbirth. It is a paradoxical conception and childbirth—the work of fathers not of mothers. Somehow the signers of the Declaration of Independence were fathers and mothers, men who conceived and gave birth.

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Posted Feb 13th 2010 at 6:12 am in Featured Story, History, News, Politics | 145 Comments

Paul A. Rahe

Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and the Political Psychology of the Modern Republic

by Paul A. Rahe

In earlier posts – here, here, and here – I drew attention to the pre-eminence of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu in and for a time after the eighteenth century, and I suggested that at least two of the reasons for his pre-eminence are still pertinent today. There is at least one other such reason, and it, too, deserves careful consideration.

montesquieu 1

In The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu pays exceedingly close attention to the political psychology regnant within the various forms of government that he examines. Republics have as their psychological principle, he tells us, virtue or love of the fatherland and its laws; and, when this fails, they collapse. As we have just seen, monarchies have as their principle the love of honor; and, when monarchs make holding public office degrading and demeaning, they subvert their own authority. And by the same token, despotisms have as their principle fear, and they are corrupt through and through. In The Spirit of Laws, all of this is made crystal clear.

But when it comes time for Montesquieu to specify the principle or passion that sets in motion “the republic concealed as a monarchy” that he discovered when he visited England, he is ostentatiously silent. Eventually, however, in oblique fashion, he will tiptoe around the question.

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Posted Jan 31st 2010 at 11:23 am in Congress, Defense, Economics, History, Politics | 63 Comments

Publius

Federalist No. 41: General Views of Powers Conferred By the Constitution

by Publius

To the People of the State of New York:

james_madison

THE Constitution proposed by the convention may be considered under two general points of view. The FIRST relates to the sum or quantity of power which it vests in the government, including the restraints imposed on the States. The SECOND, to the particular structure of the government, and the distribution of this power among its several branches.

Under the FIRST view of the subject, two important questions arise: 1. Whether any part of the powers transferred to the general government be unnecessary or improper? 2. Whether the entire mass of them be dangerous to the portion of jurisdiction left in the several States?

Is the aggregate power of the general government greater than ought to have been vested in it? This is the FIRST question.

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Posted Dec 25th 2009 at 7:31 pm in History | 40 Comments

Paul A. Rahe

The State of Higher Education: Who Was Montesquieu?

by Paul A. Rahe

Every once in a while one gets an insight into the sad state of higher education in the United States.

montesquieu 1

Back in 2008, when my agent was attempting to market the manuscript of what recently appeared in two companion volumes under the titles Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic and Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect, he ran into an unexpected snag.

None of the editors at the trade presses he approached had ever even heard of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu.

That came as a shock to me; and when I repeated the story to other students of the eighteenth century, they expressed amazement and dread.

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Posted Dec 20th 2009 at 2:51 pm in Culture, History | 83 Comments

Publius

Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against ObamaCare

by Publius

No, we haven’t performed a miracle and resurrected Ronald Reagan to provide his take on the current health care debate. We didn’t have to, because the ideas underlying the current proposals, whether it is ObamaCare, PelosiCare or the Reid health care legislation, have been around for decades. This Reagan speech, from 1961, comes for the early days of the debate over Medicare and Medicaid. Well, here we are again. And, Reagan’s words are still relevant.

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Posted Dec 6th 2009 at 12:07 pm in Healthcare, History | 33 Comments

Dr. Paul Moreno

The Education of Congressman Hoyer

by Dr. Paul Moreno

Congress is moving closer to enacting a law requiring all Americans to purchase health insurance. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says that this is “like paying taxes.”

stenyhoyer

He’s right about that. But Hoyer made this statement as part of an effort to justify the health-care mandate on constitutional grounds. Here he indicates that he doesn’t understand the Constitution that he took an oath to support.

When asked what power the Constitution gives to Congress to enact this legislation, Hoyer claimed that it came from the Constitution’s “general welfare” clause.

Article One, section eight says that Congress can “lay and collect taxes… to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.”

But what defines the “general welfare”?

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Posted Oct 24th 2009 at 9:15 am in History, Justice/Legal, Politics | 103 Comments

Publius

Federalist Paper Number 42

by Publius

THE SECOND class of powers, lodged in the general government, consists of those which regulate the intercourse with foreign nations, to wit: to make treaties; to send and receive ambassadors, other public ministers, and consuls; to define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations; to regulate foreign commerce, including a power to prohibit, after the year 1808, the importation of slaves, and to lay an intermediate duty of ten dollars per head, as a discouragement to such importations.

james_madison

This class of powers forms an obvious and essential branch of the federal administration. If we are to be one nation in any respect, it clearly ought to be in respect to other nations.

The powers to make treaties and to send and receive ambassadors, speak their own propriety. Both of them are comprised in the articles of Confederation, with this difference only, that the former is disembarrassed, by the plan of the convention, of an exception, under which treaties might be substantially frustrated by regulations of the States; and that a power of appointing and receiving “other public ministers and consuls,” is expressly and very properly added to the former provision concerning ambassadors. The term ambassador, if taken strictly, as seems to be required by the second of the articles of Confederation, comprehends the highest grade only of public ministers, and excludes the grades which the United States will be most likely to prefer, where foreign embassies may be necessary. And under no latitude of construction will the term comprehend consuls. Yet it has been found expedient, and has been the practice of Congress, to employ the inferior grades of public ministers, and to send and receive consuls. It is true, that where treaties of commerce stipulate for the mutual appointment of consuls, whose functions are connected with commerce, the admission of foreign consuls may fall within the power of making commercial treaties; and that where no such treaties exist, the mission of American consuls into foreign countries may PERHAPS be covered under the authority, given by the ninth article of the Confederation, to appoint all such civil officers as may be necessary for managing the general affairs of the United States. But the admission of consuls into the United States, where no previous treaty has stipulated it, seems to have been nowhere provided for. A supply of the omission is one of the lesser instances in which the convention have improved on the model before them. But the most minute provisions become important when they tend to obviate the necessity or the pretext for gradual and unobserved usurpations of power. A list of the cases in which Congress have been betrayed, or forced by the defects of the Confederation, into violations of their chartered authorities, would not a little surprise those who have paid no attention to the subject; and would be no inconsiderable argument in favor of the new Constitution, which seems to have provided no less studiously for the lesser, than the more obvious and striking defects of the old. (more…)

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Posted Oct 10th 2009 at 6:01 pm in Culture, Economics, History, Justice/Legal | 33 Comments

Publius

The Federalist Papers: Federalist No. 1

by Publius

AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world. It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.

Hamilton

This idea will add the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism, to heighten the solicitude which all considerate and good men must feel for the event. Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected. The plan offered to our deliberations affects too many particular interests, innovates upon too many local institutions, not to involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its merits, and of views, passions and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.

Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government.

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Posted Oct 3rd 2009 at 2:23 pm in History, Justice/Legal | 73 Comments