The recent passing of U. S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did not put our country in jeopardy. We did that ourselves over the last seven decades, but his passing is a stark reminder there are precious few Americans left who know and hold dear the Constitution in its original meaning, and who lament countless violations of its principles, large and small.
Scalia knew the heart of the Constitution was about resisting the urge of human nature to serve ourselves, the key notion being “restraint.” Our Constitution was not only about individual liberty, rule of law, private property rights and balance of power, it was about limiting government. Restraint.
Scalia’s scathing dissents on some landmark decisions tried to instruct other justices that indulging their personal inclinations was improper, that they should be confining themselves to interpreting what words in the Constitution were originally meant to say, that finding what you want between the lines is a justice substituting themselves for the Congress or state legislatures. He struggled mightily to promote the constitutional principal of restraint.
I don’t know that anyone can pinpoint when we stopped teaching our children the unique character of the Constitution and the blessings of America. I think that educational rot set in slowly, beginning in the cultural revolution we like to pretend never happened here in our own country when the anti-establishment movement took root in the 1960s.
Along the way, too many generations learned in morally relativistic classrooms that socialism or communism are just different ways to organize a government, that capitalism leads to income and wealth inequality, and that our founding fathers were wealthy white slave-owners, thereby calling into question their legacy to us.
These same misled souls hear Obama’s apology to the world that America is just five percent of the world’s population but we consume 20% of the world’s resources, and maybe they are too busy wallowing in guilt to figure out that American capitalism lit the fuse of fierce motivation of individuals eager to trade their mental and physical sweat for wealth, thereby setting the planet on fire with unmatched innovation and productivity. Obama forgot to tell them that part. Assuming that he knows.
The really sad thing to me is so many Americans will spend their lives not even realizing the grand gift our founders left to us, something new that whetted the appetite for freedom and sparked revolutions of varied heat all over the world, a precious gift that should be nurtured, protected and revered. But to our everlasting shame, we have not done that here in America where the idea was born. We have squandered our legacy.
Sure, the words remain and lip service is paid, but we have failed to make a key part of our children’s education a deep understanding and appreciation of our Constitution’s principles.
Of course to do that our kids would have to violate the political correctness that governs their lives now by forgiving the founders for being white males, some of them for being scoundrels; they would need to look past the issue of slavery and understand the founders fought each other bitterly over that practice and had to defer the argument to have any chance of resisting the British.
Our kids would have to set aside the feelings they have been taught to follow: they would have to think instead.
Our founders certainly did. They were highly educated men, schooled in philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hume, but especially influenced by John Locke of 17th century England, who wrote that property rights are the basis of human freedom and that government should exist to protect those rights and preserve public order. It was a good place to start, even though our founders did what humans have always done, split up into groups that despised and conspired against each other.
The Revolutionary War victory was four years old by 1787 when the states sent representatives to a convention in Philadelphia to hammer out a Constitution. During and after the war the states had been using the wholly inadequate Articles of Confederation.
With varied and hotly contested views, creating a Constitution all states would ratify would be no easy task. Over the five months in Philadelphia there were many proposals, debates, arguments and disagreements.
Even after the Constitution was considered complete, two more years were required before the states ratified the document, and during that process the first 10 amendments were added, referred to collectively as the Bill of Rights.
Most Americans don’t even know what federalism means – the process of states delegating a limited number of “enumerated” rights to the federal government, and keeping all other rights.
The Federalists considered certain rights to be given to us by God, and that listing some in the Constitution would be implying those rights are granted by the government, thereby raising the question if a right is not listed then maybe it does not exist.
The Anti-Federalists withheld their support unless certain rights were specified, and so the Bill of Rights include the first 10 amendments, including freedom of religion, speech, assembly, grievances against the government, bearing arms, no unreasonable search or seizure, due process, rights of the accused, and notably amendments nine and ten.
Amendment IX – “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” In other words, the people have more rights than are listed in the Constitution.
Amendment X – “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In other words, if a power is not listed in the Constitution as delegated to the federal government, the fed does not have that power.
So the Federalists and Anti-Federalists compromised and gave us a government that was intentionally limited, with all powers not specified retained by the people at the state level.
Of course, before a reader ever got to these 10 amendments called the Bill of Rights, what they found in the Constitution was a system that valued the individual and treated personal property as almost sacred, with limitations on how the government could wield its power over us.
During those times democracy was a bit of a dirty word, akin to two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. With the uneducated rabble in the street, democracy was thought to be mob rule. And so our founders designed in the Constitution a democratic republic, wherein we elect representatives to be the cooler heads, as a buffer between the passions of the moment and decisions of government. And they limited who could vote.
So what was the gift? Where was the magic? This was a system of the people deciding what powers to give the government, not the government deciding what rights to give the people. It was based on individual rights, protection of personal property, a system of laws equally applied, the federal government being limited to only those powers enumerated in the document, a three-way check and balance of powers among the Legislative, Executive and Judiciary, and an election system designed to calm the irrational passions of the moment.
The world said, “Wow!” The ideas in our Constitution might be America’s most important export, influencing how numerous countries have re-designed their own system.
Meanwhile, for the last 70 years, here in America we have ignored it, abused it, trampled on it, and those are the polite words.
Our bloated federal government has steamrolled past constitutional limits, assuming ever-expanding powers far beyond the enumerated list, churning out over 4,000 laws and regulations every year, desperately seeking to control every facet of our lives.
State and local governments follow suit, because, just as every organism has two imperatives – to survive and reproduce – every government unit has the imperative of perpetual life and growth. A vampire hunter armed with an arsenal of wooden stakes and silver bullets would be hard pressed to kill a government program.
If you could look inside the head of every elected official and government employee in Washington, D.C., you would have to search a long time to find the “restraint” intended in our Constitution.
Deficit spending has allowed those we send to govern to pile layer after layer of duplicate and unnecessary programs, promoting themselves with our money, piling up endless debt and wielding an iron fist to shove us around as they stomp the ideals of the Constitution under their clumsy feet. It is human nature, and we have let them forget about the restraint of limited government.
It doesn’t help that we have the burden of mob rule our founders feared. it is called TV news, spreading the passions of the moment like wildfire instead of calm and thoughtful journalism.
Can we recover those constitutional principles? I fear not. We may as well refer to our children as drones, trained by TV to be self-indulgent with ignorance and apathy toward tedious things like the Constitution, but who cares?
Certainly not our own constitutional professor President, who ignores the laws he doesn’t like despite the Constitution’s definition of his duties in Article II, Section 3, “.. . he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed …“
On college campuses nationwide, free speech is suppressed to protect the tender feelings of students. One Florida college professor asked students if they would support his suggested method of redistributing wealth, and one wonders if they were appropriately appalled to learn they had endorsed the Communist Manifesto.
Look around you. The 2016 Presidential race is a mix of vaudeville and burlesque on the Republican side, with a Socialist-cum-Commie and a huckster who should have been behind bars for decades on the Democrat side, with daily flames delightfully fanned into every home by the grateful minions of TV news.
As just one worrisome example, listen to the promises of free everything from Bernie Sanders, with nary a mention of responsibilities, and you will see before you in cheering crowds the answer to a disturbing question, ”How do our constitutional principles die?”
To thundering applause.
[Terry Garlock of Peachtree City occasionally contributes a column to The Citizen. His email is [email protected].]
