Posted on 02/10/2016 8:48:08 AM PST by conservativejoy
Our Framers would despair about the winners of the nation's first presidential primaries in New Hampshire. Though polar opposites with very different ideological starting points, both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders would have set the Framers' hair - or wigs - on fire. They designed the Constitution to moderate the people at home while preparing a president to act quickly to counter emergencies, crises, and war abroad. Instead, the Republicans have a demagogue and the Democrats have an economic radical who promise swift, extreme change.
The men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 to write a new constitution designed it to prevent someone like Donald Trump from ever becoming president. One of their great fears was of a populist demagogue who would promise the people everything and respect nothing. As Alexander Hamilton, the key theorist of executive power during the Founding, warned in Federalist 67: "Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honours of a single state."
Talents for low intrigue. Little arts of popularity. The founder of this newspaper may not have known Trump, but he clearly knew men like him. Insulting braggadocio and self-aggrandizement are not the 21st Century exclusives of reality show hosts and cable news guests.
To prevent mindless populism from seizing the White House, the Founders rejected nationwide election of the president. Instead, they created the Electoral College. States choose electors (equal to the number of their members of the House and Senate), who meet and send their votes to Congress. If there is no majority, then the House votes by state delegation to choose the chief executive.
While the Electoral College today seems Rube Goldberg-esque, it served the important purpose of weeding out emotional passions and popular, but poor, candidates. "The choice of several, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community, with any extraordinary or violent movements," Hamilton wrote, "than the choice of one, who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes." He also praised the separate meeting of electors and the Congress as another brake on rash populism. "This detached and divided situation will expose [electors] much less to heats and ferments, that might be communicated from them to the people," he observed.
The Framers would also be aghast at Bernie Sanders. His calls for a political revolution, fomenting of class hatreds, and desires for a socialist economy also run directly contrary to the Framers design. The Framers believed our Constitution and our government should not view or think of people as economic classes or special interests. They were not naïve - they knew that what they called "factions" were an inevitable product of democracy. "Liberty is to faction what what air is to fire, an ailment, without which it instantly expires," James Madison wrote in Federalist 10. "But it could not be a less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air."
Our Constitution did not address the specter of factions by creating a government so strong that, in the hands of a crusading populist, it could crush special interests. Instead, it creates a decentralized government too difficult for one party to take over. It divides the national government between president, Congress, and the Judiciary. It further keeps federal power narrow and reserves authority over most of daily life to the 50 states. America would never suffer Sanders' political revolution or his wish to transfer the "means of production" (for those who have forgotten their Karl Marx since the fall of the Soviet Union, he is referring to private property and financial and intellectual capital) from private hands to the public. Ask the communist nations of Europe and Asia, with millions of lives lost and millions more oppressed from the 1930s-1980s, how that experiment turned out.
As many European and American intellectuals have lamented, no serious socialist or communist party has ever succeeded in the United States. There is a reason why Bernie Sanders comes from a tiny state and represents a caucus of one. Our Constitution's separation of powers and federalism raises too many barriers for any movement to take over all of the levers of government and impose an ideology on the United States. Even if they get too carried away by the latest intellectual fad or passionate anger, the American people have the handbrake of the Constitution to stop them from making a catastrophic mistake. It is time for them to pull it on Trump and Sanders.
The Founders wouldn’t have liked 19 trillion in Debt, unbalanced federal budgets, Abortion, legalized sodomy, Congress giving away their authority to bureaucrats, welfare, the war on poverty, etc.
It's been literally HOURS since I've benefited from some journalist telling me what I should think and do!
I was starting to go through withdrawals.
The Founders would not believe and wouldn’t approve of what has happened to America if you time traveled back and told them.
You Who? Isn’t that a Chocolate drink?
Like I said. Lincoln was more or less the beginning of this situation.
Maybe, the founders “worst nightmare” was someone born in a foreign country with a non-American father who fought alongside Castro being elected to the presidency. Or maybe their “worst nightmare” would be someone born inside the country to two foreigners from a country which is still considered to be our enemy to be elected as our president. Maybe... that is why they specified that the president could only be a “natural born citizen”, a term that just might have had a commonly understood meaning when the constitution was written, one which would disqualify both of the previous examples.
Yes indeed.
When Sanders policy wants of income equality, free this and that for the masses, public healthcare, and other socialist utopian goals translate into enormous growth of the federal government redistributors, Washington will get behind the Bern.
No. It is just that I know who Trump is. You don’t.
Trump is no worse than Andrew Jackson.
... One of their great fears was of a populist demagogue who would promise the people everything and respect nothing...
HRH George III said much the same about those pesky rebellious Colonists.
Yoo Tu Wong
Maybe. But he is not the first Populist presidential wanna-be.
Williams Jennings Bryant, Theodore Roosevelt, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, George Wallace, even Huey Long who was killed a month after he announced.
So the founders envisioned theft of property, high taxation, massive centralized government gun control and uncontrolled illegal immigration.
No. It is just that I know who Trump is. You don’t.
No you don’t. Your comment merely exposes that you are so wed to a certain candidate you haven’t bothered to learn any thing about Trump that challenges your emotion based opinions
The founders believed in commiting to action to actually promote liberty, unlike Trump who believes in suckering people with vacuous rhetoric.
would have set the Framers' hair - or wigs - on fire
What an utter lie about Trump, as businessman par excellence his voice would have been heard, respected and generally applauded. Sanders would have been shouted down quickly at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and Cruz would have gotten about five minutes of speaking time until shouts of, "Take it up on Sunday" would have resounded from the rafters.
This is another missive playing upon folks ignorance of the founders, ignorance of the underlying goals of the Constitution and just plain general ignorance. It would be nice to bring back civics as a discipline, but there would be no one qualified to teach it.
Weakly Staley crap.
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