05.19
By The Way… The Constitution is Dead
If you read my blog on even a rare occasion, you will know how much I revere the American system of government. I think it’s the best that humanity has been able to engineer in human history so far. The idea’s behind it’s construction and the way that power is seperated within the Federal government, and then further balanced by state sovereignty is just really genius. The problem is that no system can survive a catastrophe like the The War of Northern Agression(Civil War :)). That’s something you just can’t predict and make allowances for when you are building a government. And, even if you could predict it, it wouldn’t matter. The whole idea of the immasculation of the Constitution during war time means all bets are off. The invasion of Southern states to force them back into the Union was such a monumentous violation of every facet of the founding that no pre-planning for it would have mattered anyway. The number of transgressions of Federal power, starting with Lincoln, then carried to fruition by the Radical Republicans, are just too numerous to count. How do you plan for that? You don’t.
So what am I saying here? Well, the Constitution is still given a nod by politicians who want to keep other politicians in check. But, the heart of the Constitution itself – that is to say, those provisions that intentionally hamstring the Federal government to keep it in check – are ignored. The states are no longer a check on Washington at all. Woodrow Wilson summed it up this way in his book called Constitutional Government in the United States:
The old theory of the sovereignty of the States, which used so to engage our passions, has lost its vitality. The war between the States established at least this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers. Since that stern arbitrament it would be idle, in any practical argument, to ask by what law of abstract principle the federal government is bound and restrained. Its power is “to regulate commerce between the States,” and the attempts now made during every session of Congress to carry the implications of that power beyond the utmost boundaries of reasonable and honest inference show that the only limits likely to be observed by politicians are those set by the good sense and conservative temper of the country.
He pegs – as other’s such as Dr. DiLorenzo have – the “Civil War” as the obituary of true constitutionality and state’s rights. No constitution could survive something like that in tact. Ours survived in symbolism, but not in practice. We hold it up as our founding document. We even have little pocket sized constitutions in our nightstands. But, what part of it is still adhered to? Name one amendment or clause that hasn’t been mutilated. You can’t. And, that leads me to my real point. Is a constitution necessary? New Zealand doesn’t have one. Neither does Israel. They take their law from a sort of court-derived interperetation of natural law. Of course this can be just as corrupt as our system. That’s not the point. The point is that it isn’t necessarily more so. A country as large as ours is inherently difficult to govern from the top down. Again Wilson speaks to this:
If the jealousies of the colonies and of the little States which sprang out of them had not obliged the makers of the Constitution to leave the greater part of legal regulation in the hands of the States, it would have been wise, it would even have been necessary, to invent such a division of powers as was actually agreed upon. It is not, at bottom, a question of sovereignty or of any other political abstraction; it is a question of vitality. Uniform regulation of the economic condition of a vast territory and a various people like the States would be mischievous, if not impossible. The statesmanship which really attempts it is premature and unwise.
Of course the problem here is that Woodrow thought it was just a matter of gaining the right type of progressive statesmanship to make centralized government work in the United States. I very much disagree. The appearance of control is not the same thing as control itself. And with a dead constitution, that image of control will fade. We’re already seeing it from various states with these so-called sovereignty bills. I see this less as a traditional state’s rights battle as we have seen in the past, and more of a predictable, natural first step toward re-localization. In the past, state’s rights battles have always been fought with a moral issue at it’s heart. When Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard to force George Wallace out of the school-house door, the troops who took part could anchor themselves to the fact that they were fighting for a just cause. They were justified to violate Alabama’s sovereignty because of that moral blight. The same can be said, to a certain extent, for invading the South in the great war. The North had a very large contingency of abolitionists. And that anchored the cause. Even if it wasn’t the full story.
Fast forward to today. Montana and Minnesota have now passed bills that prohibit the Federal government from interfering with firearms sales in their states. This is a clear spit in the face of Washington. They basically have said, “all those laws on the books in Washington about firearms… screw ’em. We’ll manage our own business.” And, from the Federal point of view, resisting these two states is not an issue that can gain any moral traction in the mind of the nation as a whole. And, especially not in the minds of troops. It’s just not the same type of thing as a stand in the schoolhouse door type of moment. It’s simply a natural decision from a local government that makes sense to most Americans. There would be absolutely no national, or political, will to force these two states into any type of compliance. Basically, I suspect, Washington will do nothing about it. And, there are many more such issues that will come down the pike. Issues that are just a continuation of a natural attrition of a bloated central government that’s lots it’s guiding priniciple. I think what we will see over the next 10-20 years will be a natural regression to local governance. Sure, our superpower status may go away. But, maybe it wasn’t sustainable anyway.
