What ?? …

What did our Founders give us?  What are we doing with that legacy?  What should we do in the future?

Under the Constitution, the new Union was organized on a federal model of decentralized authority.  Although obligated to observe common federal or national commitments, the individual states were free to organize themselves as mini-republics along  politically democratic lines; to maintain their own customs, religions and mores; to write their own local laws, to raise and maintain their own armies (militias and national guard); and to impose their own taxes.  Each was self governing and independent, as they had been before the Union, with the exception that they could not make war on one another … the Federal Courts would keep the peace and harmony.  Even the federal obligation to provide military forces for the common defense varied in number and kind from state to state.

Out of the cauldron of the Revolutionary War and the un-workability of the Articles of Confederation emerged a new sense of identity and nationalism.  The several States experienced the self-awareness of being a nation, of being one people with a common fate, developed from the common experience of a war for survival that had produced a new political order.

That sense of being one people, under a political system designed to maximize the great diversity of the land and its peoples, allowed each state, each community, and its citizens to contribute their particular values, experiences, traditions, resources, and talents to a new national identity and psyche.

The genius of the American constitutional system was in recognizing not only the populace, but who they were, where they were, what they did and how they did it.  The system they devised gave due deference to population and its passions, but imposed a check on those passions by venerating the contributions of property and commerce to our prosperity.  The will of the majority was tempered by the rights of the minority.  In the national government, in the United States Senate, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire and the frontier States, sat together as equals to Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and the other populous States.  The Union could have never survived without the input of the little, sparsely populated states; those who provided the inputs that informed the urbanites of the tribulations of fire, flood, weather, savages, hardship, pestilence and disease involved in the travails of supplying them with food, fiber, minerals and timber for their enterprises.

The system conceived by the Founders worked well and so state governments, as was guaranteed under Section 4 of Article 4 of the Constitution instituted similar Republican forms of government to give the same deference to the similar diversity within their states.

All went well for over 160 years until a Progressive and revisionist Supreme Court decided, against all logic or historical fact, that when the States ratified the 14^th Amendment that it was their  intention to do away with the republican form in their governments.

The consequences, those intended by the Progressive plotters behind this decision and those unintended and unforeseen, of the Court’s decision were not readily apparent at first, but now we are beginning to see them.  The federal Courts totally ignore county boundaries, and their reasons that they are where they are, when some unengaged judge mandates who will represent whom.  Because the members of Legislatures are picked on the basis of population alone, ultimately only the urban areas are represented; rural issues are unaddressed and, more to the point, un-understood.   A great case in point, Oregon, a state ruled by one city, is breaching irrigation dams on the Klamath River to “save the salmon.” (To hell with the agriculture of the area or the property that sustains it.)  But the greatest travesty along this order of government is the drying up the irrigated lands of the Great Central Valley of California, where about 15% of the fruits, nuts and vegetables consumed in the US come from, to save the “endangered (2 inch) “Delta Smelt”, whatever that is.

Those in rural areas watch as our forests are killed by pestilence and disease while the US Forest Service fights their use by recreationalists from the city.  The stockmen (yes the real cowboys) watch as the BLM (manned by foreigners from the East) bans grazing to protect “endangered birds, snails and flowers.”  Farmers hire “illegals” to do the work that kids from the high school used to do, because the US Department of Labor says that people of high school age are too young and too dumb to work on farms like their parents did.  The Department of the Interior shuts down all drilling for oil, when we are desperate for energy, because a 100 year old technology failed on one well.  Environmentalists delay and demonize a form of power that would solve all our energy needs, one that we invented, one that powers most of Western Europe and Japan (where we demonstrated other uses for it), nuclear energy.  When our friendly neighbor to the north, Canada, tools up to deliver huge supplies of oil to us in a buried pipeline, bureaucrats and their overseers, the Environmentalists, have to study the problem for another 10 years, even though there are already around a half million miles of buried pipeline in the US.  The point here is that these problems, under the 10^th Amendment of the Constitution, are the sole responsibility of the States … and should be!  The political solutions to these problems should be left those the closest to the problem … those who will be most affected.

The next time that someone says that they don’t know why America is in decline, just point out that the Progressives have killed those things like local government and representative government and replaced them with federal grants, federal programs and federal bureaucrats … the unknowing, unresponsive, tyrannical, socialistic actions of the federal government, an all powerful government, the specter so feared and so disdained by our Founders has materialized.

Ask yourself, “If on the morrow, I should awaken and find that the Federal government and its debts, obligations and rules had all disappeared, would I be the better for it and would the country?”  My answer would be a resounding YES! … I am an individual first, then I am an intimate neighbor to my fellow citizens of a small county in central Idaho, then I am an proud Idahoan who disdains what the present national government does to us, but a person who would gladly devote the rest of his life to rebuilding a strong, but limited Federal Government nearly identical (sans slavery) to the one given us in 1787.