From: Black Unicorn
"If the federal government mixes the recipe with too much power, the checks against tyranny established by the Constitution threaten to topple. It is this that worries me. It is this that worried the framers. Should we dismiss their genius because it is old? Because it did not bear the unanimous mandate of the people?"
It is not that the genius or the their document should be dismissed; it is only to understand that written works do not produce automatic effects of their own power, and that therefore the Constitution cannot be looked to by the general population as an automatic savior which will release them from the grip of tyranny.
Concur.
No matter what guidance the original document provides, each generation, each era, each individual must still do the work of thinking, reasoning, and determining their own fate, and they must again agree among themselves whether to accept that contract or reject it. Or improve upon it.
This seems to me like the Jeffersonian notion that the Constitution should be amended in every generation. Letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12 1816, The Portable Thomas Jefferson 557-558 (M. Peterson ed. 1975). I think this is perhaps excessive, and if you consider the effect of short term politics, one could well find his or her own generation is the one which does away with the 4th and 5th amendments because of a "Crime Crisis." If your suggestion is more along the lines of a more reasoned and enduring amendment process with some respect for the concepts of old and more importantly an attempt to adapt the spirit of the document to the reality of the day, I concur wholeheartedly.
The current structure of government is modelled after the Constitution, but the substance of it makes no sense accordingly. If the federal government mixes the recipe with too much power, it is because they want it there and mean to increase it according to a self-benefitting bias towards it.
And as such the federal government runs beyond the bounds of the document's "spirit."
"One must remember that power was surrendered to the federal government by the people and the states conditioned upon limits."
Patrick Henry warned everyone that once they had surrendered to it the power of the purse and the power of the sword, there would be no power left to them with which to save themselves from it. So who would be respecting those limits?
It seems in many ways Mr. Henry was correct. I think it is a question of apathy however. The accretion of power and the expansion of the federal government is to my thinking a function of "...the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority...." _Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer_, 343 U.S. 579 (1952). (Frankfurter, J., concurring). I don't think the United States has gone over the edge quite yet, or I wouldn't be here. What disturbs me most, especially in light of Mr. Henry's quote that Mr. Weber brings to our attention, is that the citizenry do not seem interested in any form of resistance. Funny how it is hard to say that and not sound like a subversive isn't it? Regardless, the political machine in the United States is incredibly responsive to REAL public pressure. The intergovernmental respect for the Supreme Court is to me a demonstration that all is not lost. I don't believe that all the power in the citizens has been stripped, but it is being slowly bled dry. Mr. May has indicated many times that in his opinion a vicious coup and a dictatorship will not spring up overnight, but rather might come about through a slow disregard for the protections that reign in power. I must agree.
Blanc
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