The Down Range Forum
Member Section => Politics & RKBA => Topic started by: tombogan03884 on January 10, 2011, 11:30:44 AM
-
3 commentaries on the US Constitution and the new Congress
[/b][/size]
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/will-the-gop-walk-the-walk-on-the-constitution/?singlepage=true
Now that the Republicans have won control of the House of Representatives, they’ve chosen to demonstrate their respect for the U.S. Constitution in two important ways. First, they plan on reading the full text of the Constitution on Thursday, January 6, 2011, one day after swearing in John Boehner (R-OH) as the new speaker of the House. Second, they’ve promised that every new bill will contain a statement citing the constitutional authority for the proposed law. But while these are important symbolic steps, the real test will be whether the GOP-controlled House will defend the Constitution with deeds and not just words — especially on high-stakes issues like health care. In other words, will the GOP “walk the walk” as well as “talk the talk” on the Constitution?
The fact that the Republicans proclaim respect for the Constitution is an encouraging contrast to the open disdain expressed by many Democrats during last year’s health care debate. When a reporter asked then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi where the Constitution authorized the government to require Americans to purchase health insurance, her only reply was, “Are you serious?” When Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA) was asked a similar question at a town hall meeting, he replied, “The federal government [...] can do most anything in this country.” And when then-Congressman Phil Hare (D-IL) was asked about the constitutional legitimacy of ObamaCare, he replied, “I don’t worry about the Constitution.” That’s a far cry from George Washington’s pledge that “the Constitution is the guide which I will never abandon.”
While the GOP’s expressions of respect for the Constitution are a welcome change, they are not enough. The Republicans must also demonstrate respect for and commitment to the underlying principles of the Constitution — namely, limited government and individual rights.
As Ayn Rand once wrote:
[T]he Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals… t does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government… t is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.
The proper function of government is to protect individual rights, such as our rights to free speech, property, and contract. Only those who initiate physical force or fraud can violate our rights. A properly limited government thus protects our rights by protecting us from criminals who steal, murder, rape, and so on, as well as from foreign aggressors. But it should otherwise leave honest people alone to live peacefully. In particular, government should protect our right to enjoy the fruits of our labors, not rob us to pay for “stimulus packages” or “universal health care.”
Hence, if the Republicans truly wish to demonstrate their respect for the Constitution, they must support and defend the underlying principles of individual rights and limited government. In the realm of health care, they could do so by “defunding” ObamaCare and working towards its eventual repeal.
ObamaCare is closely based on the Massachusetts system of mandatory health insurance. Such a system violates individual rights on a massive scale, forcing individuals to purchase health insurance on terms set by government bureaucrats and forcing insurance companies to offer services at prices set by the government. The end result for Massachusetts residents has been skyrocketing costs, worsened access, and lower quality medical care.
Fortunately, the core provision of ObamaCare — mandatory insurance — has been ruled unconstitutional by federal judge Henry Hudson in Commonwealth of Virginia v. Sebelius. The Obama administration is appealing this ruling, and it may take years before the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately resolves this issue. Nor does Judge Hudson’s ruling block implementation of ObamaCare during the appeals process. In the meantime, the House of Representatives could demonstrate its support for the Constitution by depriving the Obama administration of any funding to implement its health plan. At present, Republicans lack sufficient votes to sustain a repeal against a presidential veto. But “defunding” ObamaCare would stall it until the GOP has a chance to win control of the Senate and White House in 2012 and finish the job.
With recent polls showing a majority of Americans supporting the outright repeal of ObamaCare, “defunding” would be a political winner for the GOP as well as a way of proving their commitment to the Constitution.
Indeed, the GOP could use “defunding” for issues beyond health care. For example, the House could vote to “defund” the EPA’s plan to perform an end-run around Congress and impose new burdensome regulations on carbon emissions. The Constitution gives Congress the “power of the purse” over the executive branch. Hence, whenever the executive branch threatens to runs amok, Congress has both the legal and moral authority to rein it in.
In the 2010 midterm elections, the American people restored the Republicans to power in House of Representatives in large part because of their promise to block ObamaCare, respect the Constitution, and defend the principles of limited government. The voters have done their part. It’s time for the GOP to live up to its end of the bargain.
Paul Hsieh, MD, practices in the south Denver metro area. He is co-founder of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (MD).
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/what-would-a-return-to-the-constitution-entail/?singlepage=true
Fortified by historic Republican electoral gains at the federal and state levels last November, Tea Party activists and the new generation of Republicans led by rising star freshman Senator Marco Rubio, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor have reaffirmed their intention to return to the Constitution. To underscore that intention, Republican representatives kicked off the 112th Congress with a piece of provocative and potentially instructive political theater by, for the first time in the nation’s history, reading aloud the 224 year old document on the House floor. But what does such a return entail?
Some hard-driving conservatives see it as an opportunity to restore simplicity and purity to democratic self-government. Meanwhile, many influential progressive politicians and pundits are determined to hear in talk of return a reckless and reactionary repudiation of the modern welfare state.
In fact, an informed and thoughtful return to the Constitution will take seriously the devotion to individual liberty and limited government shared by the original Federalist proponents of the Constitution and their Anti-Federalist opponents. It will learn from the intricately separated and blended political institutions that the Constitution established to impose restraint and allow for energy and efficiency. And it should culminate in the recovery of the spirit of political moderation that the Constitution embodies and on which its preservation depends.
It is conservatives’ good fortune that political moderation is central to the November mandate, just what the nation now needs, and at the core of the abiding conservative mission in America.
In recent times, respecting electoral mandates has proved a stumbling block for both parties. President Obama misread or disregarded the mandate of 2008, seeing in the electorate’s dismay with the Bush administration and distrust of Republican stewardship of the economy a popular authorization — or golden opportunity — to undertake large-scale progressive reform. In so doing, he repeated the mistake of the 1990s Republican revolutionaries, which was to confuse aversion to the Clintons’ health care reform with a license to effect fundamental change in the federal government’s role.
As many have noted, again this election year majorities did not endorse transformation of the political system along the lines sought by the most uncompromising elements of the winning party. Rather, they sought to rein in the transformative ambitions of the losing party.
What needs to be added is that the moderation for which the electorate has been yearning is inscribed in the Constitution’s origins and is prescribed by its principles, or better, by the manner in which it weaves together the variety of principles that animate it.
Amidst justified conservative determination today to aggressively reassert the central constitutional imperative to limit government, it should be recalled that the Constitution was also born out of the pressing need to create a larger, stronger, and more centralized government. The decision in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to abandon repair of the Articles of Confederation and instead replace them with a new constitution stemmed from the need to establish a national government capable of levying and collecting necessary taxes, regulating commercial life to promote economic prosperity, and providing for the national defense in a dangerous world.
The founders won ratification for the Constitution by arguing that to preserve liberty, government’s powers must be limited but ample, constrained but energetic, grounded in interest but elevated by virtue, and based on the consent of the governed while aimed at securing natural rights that are not subject to majority whim or will.
In other words, political moderation, or the balancing of competing political principles, is a constitutional imperative. It is also a demanding virtue. Although often suspected, and sometimes serving, as a mask for spinelessness, the impostor should not be confused for the real thing. Political moderation, at least of the sort that the Constitution calls for, doesn’t mean selling out principles under pressure or making a principle of pragmatism. Rather, it is exercised in recognizing the weight and reach of competing constitutional principles, and adopting policies, fashioning laws, and acting, at once judiciously and decisively, to harmonize them.
One of the principles rooted in the Constitution that conservatives must do a better job of recognizing and respecting is that of progress. It is not only that the people’s intentions proclaimed in the Constitution’s Preamble — “to form a more perfect union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” — make progress a Constitutional aspiration. In addition, by protecting freedom and thereby unleashing curiosity, experimentation, innovation, and risk-taking the Constitution fosters an interest in improvement, including improvement of the quality of government.
But not all forms of progress are equally consistent with the spirit of political moderation in which the Constitution was conceived. Less consistent is the immoderate progressive interpretation of improvement that brings bigger, bossier, more arrogant government dictating an ever-expanding array of rules to achieve a greater and more oppressive uniformity in outcomes.
Instead, conservatives should become proponents of progress understood as the crafting of better laws to protect individual freedom. And they should pursue that constitutional mandate, which has been reinforced by the November electoral mandate, in light of changing circumstances, essential constitutional constraints, and the enduring imperfections of human nature.
Of course Congress’s first priority must be bringing spending under control and putting people back to work. But renovating our overextended and fraying social safety net is inseparable from the long-term task of placing our economy on a sound footing. Those who doubt that such is the proper work of conservatives should revisit The Road to Serfdom, Hayek’s classic defense of individual freedom and limited government. In it, the great theorist of liberty does not argue for the abolition of the welfare state, indeed he recognizes the legitimacy of government assisting those who can’t provide for themselves. Instead, he focuses his criticism on the progressive aspiration to undertake extensive central planning of the economy.
To be sure, repairing health care and Social Security without unnecessarily expanding government will require careful calibration of interests and reasonable accommodation of settled expectations and widely shared values.
Progressives seem to think that the task lies beyond conservative concerns and capabilities. After their November triumph, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recycled the conventional progressive wisdom that the current crop of Republicans are bereft of proposals for dealing with the country’s problems, having nothing to offer except “a grab bag of tired clichés.” But it is Friedman whose captivity to cliché prevents him from reporting accurately refreshing Republican public policy ideas.
For example, Representative Paul Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future, 2.0 — long available to all courtesy of the world wide web — presents a model of progress, conservatively understood. One can quarrel with the specific proposals it puts forward — for reforming health care, retirement, taxation, job training, and the budget process. But the spirit in which it approaches reform is exemplary.
The Roadmap starts from the understanding that unsustainable government spending is strangling the economy, which dims the prospects of all citizens for a decent future. It observes that steady expansion of government into the economy and society fosters a culture of dependency, which corrodes character by turning self-reliance into a vice. It nevertheless recognizes that government has acquired and must discharge “a necessary role in supporting the institutions through which Americans live their lives, and in providing a safety net for those who face financial or other hardships.” And it insists that reforms must be designed and evaluated in light of their ability to promote individual freedom, personal responsibility, and economic prosperity.
Such an approach makes a fair claim to embodying the spirit of political moderation in which the Constitution was created and combining the commitment to limited government and judicious reform that is critical to conserving it.
Peter Berkowitz is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/why-the-constitution-is-relevant-today/?singlepage=true
There has been a great deal of discussion in the United States about the Constitution — despite the fact that it was promulgated over two centuries ago — and whether it is relevant to contemporary America. I’d like to remark briefly on this.
The founders of the United States were not merely technicians setting up an administrative framework and a set of rules. They had pondered long and hard over the lessons of long-term history as to why republics had always seemed to fail and how governments had tended over time to become tyrannical.
From this study, debate, and analysis, their most important conclusion was that human beings could not be trusted with power. Those who had power — at least many or most of them — would misuse it to make themselves wealthy; to order around others; to hold onto office; to increase their authority; and to benefit themselves, their friends, and their supporters.
What was the solution? Their unanimous conclusion was that two safeguards were needed:
1. To divide power among as many institutions as would be possible without paralyzing government. On the federal level this meant there was a division among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Each of them had a large measure of independence and could check the others if they went too far.
Equally, power was divided among the federal government and independent state and local authorities.
2. To limit government, leaving the maximum amount of freedom in the hands of individuals.
These two strategies were tremendous innovations. While in need of some adjustment over time, this was basically to define the precise boundaries in each case, not to transform fundamentally the structure as a whole. The history of the past two centuries — and especially the twentieth century — showed just how right they were in this plan.
For example, Communism came up with the idea of being even “more” democratic, placing power in the hands of the “proletariat.” But as the founders of America could have told them, in the end this just meant giving absolute power to those who claimed to be the representatives of the masses, and in particular a man named Joseph Stalin.
Even in the twenty-first century, the lessons about human behavior understood by those at the Constitutional Convention still apply. I will use the pragmatic formulation of “human behavior” (in other words, what we actually see in the real world), but if you want you can say human nature, implying that there is some built-in pattern along those lines.
That’s why the Constitution is still highly relevant and should be observed. Not just because it is the founding document that provides the framework for governing the United States, but because it actually does make sense and works better than any alternative approach.
But this also leads to one more equally important conclusion. The key word for the success of a political system, and especially of this system, is: balance. That means neither what we call today “liberalism” or “conservatism” is innately correct. It depends on the circumstances.
For example, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century — due to the transformation of America by industrialization, urbanization, and other factors — big corporations became too powerful. The level of corruption rose to unprecedented heights. Big business bought and sold governments. The balance needed to be restored by strengthening government, by increasing regulation, and other measures.
Yet today, while the ideologies of the left and cultural elite maintain this long-outdated picture of the fat capitalist and greedy corporation running wild, the situation is totally different. Today, it is the federal government that has become too powerful. Regulation is too tight and taxes are too high. This has driven the structure out of balance. In our era, it is the federal government that must be reined in, and the margin of individual liberty needs to be widened.
In this system, no specific or partisan doctrine is always right. The needs of the time correspond to the circumstances of the time. And that, too, is a sign of the Constitution’s living, dynamic nature. It provides a brilliantly workable structure, not a straitjacket. And the plan laid out two hundred years ago, if properly cared for and kept in balance, is the foundation of the most successful society in world history.
Those who mock the Constitution have it backwards. The idea that the Constitution is “alive” doesn’t mean that it should be infinitely changed, but that it should be protected and obeyed.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition, Viking-Penguin), the paperback edition of The Truth about Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan), and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.