As we search for the Holy Grail of Freedom we have found that we are woefully deficient in our understanding of the “genius” of the American Republic.
From the beginning of time until 1787 when the Constitutional Convention convened, there had never been any place on Earth where or any time when mankind was completely free of tyranny except, maybe, in the Garden of Eden. As we have taken instruction from our “Ephors” in this blog, we have traced man’s attempts at Freedom, the ability for man to govern himself. Beginning in antiquity we have inspected most of the major attempts to that end from the dawning of organized society to the present. Always, in the old world … in Asia, Asia minor, Europe, Africa and elsewhere … there was some form of tyranny, a king, or tyrant, or city-state … some individual, junta, or committee ruling the individual, preventing him from exercising his free-will. For mankind the ideal of the free individual was a pipe dream … that is until a reasonably large body of persons who were individually self sustaining and essentially on their own, many of them (or their near forefathers) fugitives from either religious or civil tyranny, rebelled against absentee and distant oppressors. They were our forefathers, those brave men who fomented and prosecuted the American Revolution.
The veterans of the revolution, our Founders, all fearlessly independent and each from an equally independent community, their Colony, now an independent State, met to form a government in Philadelphia in 1787 to attempt to protect their personal and blood won Freedom for themselves and their community.
The Colonies sent their very best men to this august meeting. And they did well, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, as a group, were some of the smartest and best educated men that ever met in any forum dedicated to preserving the freedom of man. Education in the mid seventeenth century was what is now considered a “classical education.” The curriculum consisted of the study of religion, mathematics, language, grammar, handwriting, poetry, manners, music, argument and history. Unlike today, much of what was known about their world had been known for centuries past, and came from ancient cultures, principally the Greeks and Romans. History was studied in the writings of ancient scholars in their original languages. Many, if not most, of the Founders knew how to read and write Greek and Latin. The ancient societies that they studied had tried many forms of government, including republics and democracies that had, in antiquity, been instituted to throw off the chains of not only tyrannical kings, but also equally heinous systems of rule like that of the privileged classes, the oligarchies, the theocracies and various forms of citizen committees. The Founders were well acquainted with the advantages and dangers of each of these systems. Almost to a man, they distrusted large democracies because they knew from reading the words of the men who actually had been there, sages from the past, and who had seen them in action, what had happened. The histories chronicled the first hand observations of just how dangerous democratic governments could be and the tyranny that could come from them. The Founders knew that the greatest of the ancient experiments, the Athenian democracy, had eaten itself. We, of this time, have never been told of that, nor were we likely to find out about it, as almost none of us can read Greek. We, in this modern age, are in many ways deficient … ignorant … of something that our ancestors, our Founders, were expert … comparative government.
We, in our schooling and from unchallenged tradition, have been taught (a cynic would say brainwashed) that the only fair government is democracy. Case in point — most modern commentators call our Constitutional Republic a democracy, but, if you reflect, you will recall that you yourself pledge allegiance to “the Republic for which it stands” several times each year. The shortcomings of democracy are never debated. So, possibly, we do not really appreciate the difference between democratic and republican government.
Let us consider what the Founders were trying to do. It is simple and it is philosophical. They were the recipients of the greatest gift ever given to man, the chance for human freedom. The question was, “what do we have and how do we preserve it?”
The Commandments given to Moses of the Jewish Bible pretty well instruct man how to live; they are constraints upon the free man’s latitude of action. They are the “thou shalt nots.” Basic introspection informs us that my freedom ends at the tip of your nose. I may do anything that does not injure others. Thou shalt not: kill, rob, slander, injure others, covet, dishonor parents or demean our devotion to God … all in all pretty straight forward and certainly a blueprint for a good society … providing nobody cheats. Therein lies the problem, some of us do cheat and if we do, what is to be done about it? Man had, long before the Revolution, answered this problem. Beginning much earlier, but formally in the English speaking world in 1215 with the written Magna Carta, he had devised a system by which the community could fairly and equitably resolve transgressions of God’s Law; a system of justice was instituted. Coincidentally and possibly of more importance, the resulting decisions were written down so that those in the future could know how disputes were resolved in the past. This was “The Common Law” written so that the wisdom of this age could be consulted for all time.
At the convention, the Founders were determined to protect the legal system that was already well developed in their particular states. They were not interested in changing the local law and its administration. The Common Law is probably the most nearly perfect guide for justice that man has ever had or is likely to have, for through its deference to precedent it is a self healing, self adjusting system. In the States, local law and state law were already well developed and were uniquely responsive to the individuals in the local communities and to the local communities in the individual States. What the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were interested in was to promote harmony amongst the several States for the State that they represented and to present a united front for their harmonious co-existence and for collective protection from foreign or domestic threats. The document that they wrote has always been read in our lifetimes, “We the PEOPLE …” but what it proclaimed literally and what the Founders thought it said was, “We the people of the UNITED STATES … “ As far as the Founders were concerned, the people, the individual person, was already protected in his person and property where he lived … what was needed was for the State to be protected without reverting to some kind of tyranny. Some patriots, like Patrick Henry, who along with other Virginians was responsible for the Bill of Rights, opposed the new constitution, because they could see, clairvoyantly, that it contained dormant seeds of tyranny. Patrick Henry said of it, “I smell a rat.”
From the individual’s perspective, compliance with the Common Law was not only in his interest, but its protections were the reason for him to participate in the community. First, the individual was assured that the community would protect him from the cheaters. And second, the community would assume the obligation of making right the damages done by those who had damaged him, even unto death. A thinking man would reflect that for he himself to exact punishment upon those who had harmed him would require that he too would be breaking God’s Law. A morally unacceptable remedy. From this dilemma evolved the Courts and juries of peers. From this beginning, community democracies came into being. Local communities evolved the school board, the city council, the township school, the county commissioners, the town meeting and a myriad of other civic and political organizations. True, workable democracies were achieved from these assemblies. What happens in these local symposia? A peer group has a common problem; they meet, and this is important … face to face… to discuss the alternatives; solutions are suggested; everyone is given their opportunity to speak out on the issue; ideas are bandied about, the pro and con discussed and compromise of method and ideas is often reached; and the group, by ballot or other device, by majority rule decides the course of action to be taken. We as individuals have all participated in these forums and would probably agree that this type of democracy is a fair and just way to solve problems of mutual concern. Compromise is a reasonable solution to mutually agreed upon problems. What are the essential ingredients of this process?
- Local problems affecting the community
- Local symposia to address problem
- Those affected gather freely to craft solutions to the problem
- Face to face discussions
- Compromise of ideas and methods
- Democratic solution of the shared problem
What has happened through this process? The individual has freely participated with his peers to prevent a threat to their mutual freedom of action. This action, if later found to be incorrect, can be easily brought before the local forum for redress of any shortcomings. In this sense, democracy can be used by the individual to enhance his freedom by cooperation with his peers. It is free association for solution of mutual problems.
The problem for the Founders was how to project cooperative action at a national level to the state government while protecting the individual’s personal freedom and giving due deference to the value of the individual’s intelligence, ideas and inputs. Since the Founders knew that the viability of large democratic assemblies such as the one that had doomed ancient Athens was at best improbable, if not impossible, they instead devised a system whereby the individual and his peers were able to select from their community exemplary individuals to represent them first at the State level and then at the national level. This system, the republican (representative) form, was already well developed at the state level. The Founders, ever sensitive to individual freedom, understood far better than we of today that a person could not be free unless he or she was secure in their property. The state solution to this was a legislature composed of a Senate to be a protector of property and the interests of the community at large and a House of Representatives to represent the populace. On the Federal level, the Senate was to protect the interests of the States. The Senators were to be elected by those who could and would know those best qualified to represent the interests of their state, the state legislators; the House as the representative of the people was to be elected by the people themselves. Additionally, the people of the states would choose electors who would in turn vote for the person that they had democratically selected for President. Why was it done this way? So that the State could project its interests into the selection of the head of the national government from the territorially tempered but democratically determined views of its citizenry. In this way several small states could prevail over the view of more populous states. It was done to mitigate the ability of populous areas to affect their disinterested and often uninformed influence over the territories of less populous sovereignties. It was a planned check to protect the weaker from the more powerful. The Electors from each state would cast votes for president in proportion to their representation in the Congress. This system gave the individual the ability to affect state and national politics through association with representatives that one could or should know from the local community. It allowed the individual to participate in Congressional and Presidential campaigns, but the system weighted the national government in favor of the States through the Electoral College and the makeup of the Senate. All this was done to protect the states first from the tyranny of an overreaching federal government, but more particularly to allow the interests of the small states, those disadvantaged either in size or population, to compete fairly with those larger in population or wealth. After all, the US Constitution was a compact between small republics that united them in a harmony of mutual interests, trade and protection. This was and is the genius of the system, due deference to the majority, but protection of the minority, a mitigation of the tyranny of the majority. The compact was consummated for few and very specifically enumerated reasons defining the purposes for and limitations of that agreement; the power of the Federal Government was to be this and nothing more. To make this tenant perfectly clear and to obtain ratification that would be otherwise withheld, the Anti-Federalists, Patrick Henry and Henry Lee among them, required that the Bill of Rights, in particularly the Tenth Amendment, be a condition of their support for that ratification. The Constitution would have never been ratified had not the freedom of the individual to do as he pleased, guided only by God’s Law, and the sovereign supremacy of the States been guaranteed.
You might say that the Constitution contains a “supremacy clause” that makes federal law superior to state law – the answer to this is that the federal government has no Constitutional right to legislate on any issue not specifically granted to it, so federal law is supreme only where state law treads upon the power specifically granted under the Constitution.
You might say that the “interstate commerce clause” gives the federal government the right to regulate any trade or any action that is involved in commerce – the answer is that the convention inserted this clause to guarantee the orderly unencumbered flow of goods and services throughout the republic, a subject much discussed and fully documented by the Founders.
It is impossible to rationalize that it was the intent of the framers of the 14th Amendment, an amendment adopted to enfranchise the vote of former slaves, to repeal Article V Section 4 of the Constitution, thereby denying the States the right to apportion their Legislatures. Does anyone believe that this controversial amendment would have been adopted had that tenant been among its stated purposes?
The Courts and the Congress, infested with enemies of the Constitution and their knowing (or maybe unknowing) fellow travelers, have done their level best to destroy our great charter not only in the ways just cited, but in an almost incomprehensible number of other ways which we will continue to explore.
But probably the most insidious and egregious mechanism used to destroy our Constitution comes from the old saw, “politics is the art of compromise” … the title word of this essay.
Commentators on the state of American politics often rail about “do nothing Congresses.” We who have studied the American system know that the intention of the convention manifested in the Constitution was for Congress to do very little and to do what ever they did do very deliberately.
Our forefathers forbade the Congress to tax the people. But the enemies of the Constitution changed that with the 16th Amendment. Did you ever think of what your life would be like if there was no federal income tax? (Did you know that 100 years ago no one had ever paid a federal income tax?) Now reflect on what the federal government does for you that is worth half of everything that you make?
Now think about compromise. When earlier we talked about compromise in a true democracy, it was easy to see that it is the butter on the bread of community action. But today, in the federal Congress, people are being confronted with the type of compromise envisioned by Fabian socialists. The Democrats passed an unbelievably complex and contorted 2000+ page health care bill that is opposed by about 70% of the American people. The President, sensing the restlessness of the natives, has magnanimously offered to talk to the opponents of his bill about modifying the law … he is offering to compromise. The Democrats in this Congress, hell bent upon spending $1,400,000,000,000 more than taxes will bring to the federal government by “borrowing it” have generously offered to compromise with the Republicans who wanted to reduce that number by 100 billion dollars to $1,300,000,000,000 (the Tea Party wanted to reduce the borrowing to $0.00) by allowing the number to be reduced to $1,370,000,000,000.
The difference between the compromise of the fellow and his adversary at the town hall meeting and the Congressional examples given above are quite divergent. It has to do with semantics. What does the word mean in each case? The two fellows are participating of their own free will at a meeting of their community to solve a problem that both of them perceive as important. They are exchanging ideas in front of their peers, coming finally to a mutually acceptable solution to reach a mutually desired goal. That is what you and I were taught was meant by compromise. In the Congressional examples compromise means that one side gives up a tiny portion of an outrageous proposition to maintain the rest of it in the main, while the opponents are required to accept a large portion of a proposition that they are fundamentally opposed to.
In the community case, compromise is fundamental to a working democracy. In the Congressional case, compromise is morally and ethically reprehensible. Why should a Congressman ever even slightly consider acting on a bill when he knows that its consideration is contrary to the intent and text of the Constitution that he has sworn upon his oath to uphold? That too is morally and ethically reprehensible.
I suggest that when in the future you hear the word compromise in conjunction with the word Congress, that you consider hiding the women and children, grabbing your gun and kit, calling the dog and heading for the hills, for dark devilment is about to be loosed in the land.