Revolutionary Considerations

This morning I received a video by a former general in our military demanding President Obama resign or be impeached and that we restore American exceptionalism. Also this morning I have noticed that the teajehadists at the Focus on the Family and its research arm have embraced the tea parties and are warning about the moral collapse of our society and government tyranny. This they attribute to our fear of God. Next was a Washington Post article on how teabaggers celebrated the July 4th with materials from the 9-12 project. They claim the tenth amendment would protect them from health reform.

Progressives who bitch and moan about the imperfections of the healthcare reform bill and the Wall Street Reform should read about James Madison's trials and tribulations in negotiating the creation of our Constitution. And, yes, Barack Obama and Judge Thurgood Marshall were right. It is an imperfect document as Madison himself would tell you. The tale of Madison's preparation for the constitutional debates and the vote swapping that went on is colorfully describedin Jack Rakove's Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (Houghton Mifflin Holt, 2010). The chapter on Madison is "The Greatest Lawgiver of Modernity".

Of direct application today was the creation of the Commerce Clause in the Constitution. The problem Madison was grappling with was how do you get individual states to support projects that would develop the nation as a whole. I will be curious to see how the Supreme Court deals with the discussions of this clause when the healthcare bill comes before them. I doubt very much that the so-called "originalists"will consult the intent of Madison at the time.

After all in Citizens United, the Roberts court did not consult Thomas Jefferson on his fears of "an aristocracy of corporations". With our government basically enslaved by a military/ terrorist complex, I doubt we will see any conservatives mention that George Washington refused to attend the Cincinnatus Society composed of officers in the revolutionary army because he opposed any insinuation of there being any military elite.

Jack Rakove's new book has some interesting details on the whole issue of the separation of church and state. James Madison, considered to this day Princeton's greatest graduate student, hated the idea of "noxious amendments to the Constitution." However, to get the anti-federalists to come along, he indulged their wishes. The first amendment was dear to his heart. When he had served in the House of Delegates in Virginia, Patrick Henry proposed the first faith-based initiative by suggesting the state subsidize churches "without preference". The proposal seemed to have majority approval of the House until Madison objected that this was the "establishment of religion". He felt so strongly about this that he rounded up 10,000 people to sign a petition denouncing the move. Instead, he introduced Jefferson's draft of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which passed.

Madison was obsessed by preventing a different type of tyranny--the tyranny of the majority. He feared that majorities were popular in nature and would act with passion, not reason and their will would prevail over any mere statement of principles. We have seen this is how Latin American countries have gone through constitutions. Traditionally , bills of rights were thought to operate as a restraint on government by providing the people with a basis for knowing when their rulers were overstepping their power. Madison considered that function no longer fit the political life of a republic.

"Wherever the real power in a government lies,there is danger of oppression,"Madison observed. "In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents."