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Good Government for a Good People
Posted on 07/14/2013 6:40:16 AM PDT by Jacquerie
In an American Thinker* column today, Bruce Walker posited that just as America long ago overcame British tyranny, she will overcome the evil Left that infests our government.
Here, I join in support of his theory, that American good will eventually overwhelm evil.
To do this, many conservatives must go beyond the heartfelt belief that electing fellow conservatives alone will restore republican freedom.
Electing only Godly, virtuous people to office is the ideal. While no republic can survive a government of crooks, it is unreasonable to expect all angelic politicians any more than our society at large was ever composed entirely of angels either. Our Framers knew this, that men at large were neither entirely good nor bad.
Family, society, churches, and even government institutions of the founding era openly promoted the Christian ideal. Still, society had its share of criminals and dishonest men.
Since un-virtuous people will always be among us, yet the foundation of our republic is the people, the great question was how to form a government strong enough to defend the nation, yet designed so that it would not eventually usurp our unalienable rights?
With the peace of 1783, Americans expected a quick return to prosperity. Economic recovery was spotty at best and conditions were not expected to improve. The Articles of Confederation were insufficient to secure the hard won expected benefits of peace, nor protect our unalienable rights. Instead of uniting, the thirteen petty states were flying off in random directions, as they mostly stopped bothering to send delegates to an ineffective Congress. By 1787, disunion was at hand.
Not entirely virtuous men gathered in Philadelphia to create a government that, knowingly or not, allowed for a significant proportion of un-virtuous men. The new plan divided necessary powers. First and foremost, it provided a vertical separation of authority, between the near plenary powers of the states, and enumerated powers in the federal government. State participation in one half of the legislative branch was a guarantee that all powers could not drift upward into a national, consolidated government.
The long term beneficial effect was enormous. The freedom enhancing structure of the Constitution set the stage for the transformation of a non-angelic, largely subsistence farming people of 1787 into a wildly prosperous, second tier industrial powerhouse only a hundred years later.
Back to the authors point. As history as shown, we will never elect 100% good and pure, altruistic men and women to govern us. I say our governmental structure must once again provide for this.
Just as the desperate people of 1787 recognized that the structure of government was not conducive to freedom, and boldly took the risk of reorganizing their government into one that did, we must acknowledge in 2013 that we face similar circumstances.
As the Framers predicted, absent a Senate of the States, ALL power will eventually flow upward. It is way beyond time for us to acknowledge a mistake, the 17th Amendment.
As America did in 1787, we must once again return to transcendent truths, that sending some virtuous men and women to political office is an insufficient safeguard, that undivided power will inevitably result in undivided tyranny. To possibly save what remains of republican freedom, power must once again be divided. The 17th Amendment must go, it will go.
TOPICS: History
KEYWORDS: 17th; constitution; seventeenth; statesrights; vanity
1
posted on
07/14/2013 6:40:16 AM PDT
by
Jacquerie
To: neverdem
Hat tip to neverdem for posting the American Thinker column earlier today.
2
posted on
07/14/2013 6:41:03 AM PDT
by
Jacquerie
(To restore the 10th Amendment, repeal the 17th.)
To: 1010RD; Bratch; 5thGenTexan; Greysard; lone star annie; boxlunch; OneWingedShark; ...
3
posted on
07/14/2013 6:42:23 AM PDT
by
Jacquerie
(To restore the 10th Amendment, repeal the 17th.)
To: Jacquerie
To: fieldmarshaldj
If I ever (I won’t) feel the need to read vacuous, brain-dead posts, you’ll be first on my ping list.
5
posted on
07/14/2013 6:57:22 AM PDT
by
Jacquerie
(To restore the 10th Amendment, repeal the 17th.)
To: Jacquerie
What would the Senate look like without the 17th Amendment? Scott Bomboy April 8, 2013
Its the 100th anniversary of the 17th Amendment, leading us to consider what todays U.S. Senate would look like if its members werent directly elected by voters.
The answer is simple: It would be probably be controlled by the Republicans, with a chance that it could be a filibuster-proof majority.
Given that the House is already controlled by the GOP, laws enacted by the Democrats in the past two years may not have fared well with a Republican-controlled Congress.
Prior to 1913, when the 17th Amendment was ratified, state legislatures elected two U.S. senators to represent them in Congress.
Members in each state House and each state Senate, in most cases, would meet separately to pick a candidate as its representative in the U.S. Senate.
If the two caucuses picked the same person, the race was over and that person was sent to the U.S. Senate. (The elections were staggered so only one senator was chosen every two or four years.) But if different candidates were preferred for that one U.S. Senate seat, the legislatures met in a combined session until they could agree on a selection.
Read balance of article here
6
posted on
07/14/2013 7:30:48 AM PDT
by
Bratch
To: Jacquerie
From the
Cato Institute :
Repeal the 17th Amendment?
By Gene Healy
This article appeared in The Washington Examiner on June 8, 2010.
Quick, whats the 17th Amendment? Good on you if you didnt need a lifeline: Its the one that mandated direct election of senators, instead of having them appointed by state legislatures.
Thanks to the wonderfully impertinent Tea Partiers, that 1913 reform is no longer just the stuff of trivia it recently made headlines in House and Senate races.
Two Republican nominees for House seats Ohios Steve Strivers and Idahos Raul Labrador have expressed sympathy for repeal. And Tim Bridgewater, one of two Tea Party candidates who last month knocked off sitting Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, argues that if the states elected their senators, legislative monstrosities like ObamaCare or [No Child Left Behind], with their burdensome mandates, would never see the light of day.
Predictably, the liberal intelligentsia has responded with scorn. Of all the goofy ideas from those lovable wacky Tea Partyers [sic], John Aloysius Farrell writes at USNews.com, this is the stupidest. Repeal talk is truly regressive, even Paleolithic, Timothy Egan seethes in Sundays New York Times.
Apparently, the only thing worse than peasants with pitchforks is peasants with pocket Constitutions.
But theres nothing silly or retrograde in deploring the effects of an amendment that has done untold damage to federalism and limited government.
Let the state legislatures appoint the Senate, Virginias George Mason urged at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, lest a newly empowered federal government swallow up the state legislatures. The motion carried unanimously after Masons remarks.
So its probably fitting that its a George Mason University law professor, Todd Zywicki, who has done the best work on the 17th Amendments pernicious effects.
Zywicki shows that selection by state legislatures was a key pillar of the Constitutions architecture, ensuring that the Senate would be a bulwark for decentralized government. Its inconceivable, Zywicki writes, that a Senator during the pre-17th Amendment era would vote for an unfunded federal mandate.
In the grade-school morality tale offered by Egan and others, noble Progressives pushed the amendment as an antidote to corruption. Yet Zywicki found no indication that the shift to direct election did anything to eliminate or even reduce corruption in Senate elections.
Indeed, the increased power of special interests was the purpose of the 17th Amendment, Zywicki writes. It allowed them to lobby senators directly, cutting out the middleman of the state legislatures.
Maybe thats why corporations and urban political machines Progressives supposed enemies supported the amendment.
Together with the 16th Amendment establishing an income tax, the 17th Amendment helped transform the states into little more than administrative units for the federal behemoth. The feds have the gold, and they increasingly make the rules in education, health care, and more.
Over the next decade, Obamacare will lead to $34 billion in new state spending on Medicaid alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office. With the Senate co-opted, state attorneys general can only look to the federal courts to save them from that unfunded mandate.
Unfortunately, repealing the 17th Amendment would be almost impossible. Since Congress wont propose the repealing amendment, you would need two-thirds of the states to call for an amending convention something that has never happened.
And repeal might not change anything. By 1913, more than half of the states had already adopted mechanisms that effectively bound state legislators to the voters choice, and its hard to imagine their 21st century counterparts ignoring the peoples will in senatorial selection. Democracy is popular, Zywicki notes dryly.
Repealing the 17th is a noble but quixotic goal. However, by focusing on the damage that amendment did, the Tea Partiers have drawn much-needed attention toward the problems that plague us. And diagnosis, one hopes, is the first step toward an eventual cure.
7
posted on
07/14/2013 7:50:04 AM PDT
by
Bratch
To: Jacquerie
Good has to be very good because evil is totally evil.
While the government is by nature destructive, it would never has happened with out a leftist compliant media.
8
posted on
07/14/2013 7:55:44 AM PDT
by
edcoil
("The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." Joseph Campbell)
To: Jacquerie
Jacquerie, you’ve really latched onto something here that I think is deep, substantial and needed. There’s so much in it that I have to take time, perhaps a long time, to formulate an outline of a practical philosophy just so I can savor its benefits.
So much of everything in popular culture is driven by fashions and habits. The question is can popular culture be steered to a new view of virtue? To an awakening of how virtue and morality underlie principles of freedom?
Lots to think about.....
9
posted on
07/14/2013 7:28:31 PM PDT
by
Hostage
(Be Breitbart!)
To: Hostage
A couple of freepers have helped me with this. One got me into the why of the 17th, which lead me to investigate the horrible consequences. Another freeper, experienced in state politics said the way to get legislators interested is to appeal to their egos. Wouldn't it be grand to appoint senators?
I think repeal of the 17th is something that conservatives groups can latch on to. Our various groups have great ideas on what needs to be done with excessive spending, regulation, border security, voting integrity, etc., but they are all pipe dreams as long as the Senate is subject to popular whims and a media that does the bidding of democrats.
Generations of Americans have been taught that democracy is swell, the more of it, the better. So yes, as you say, it will be incredibly difficult to take on not just the rats, and media, but a pop culture ignorant of history.
I know this: The rat party is ascendant, on the offensive. We conservatives are on continual defense, back on our heels. Until we start setting the terms of the debate, offer and fight for better ideas, our republic will continue its slide into tyranny.
On the bright side, the people and states may be p!ssed enough to do an end run around congress and get the ball rolling for reform via Article V.
I have great hopes, perhaps to be dashed, of Mark Levin providing the spark among conservatives to get things going.
Heck, we may be too far gone, too corrupt as a nation to return to sanity, but I think it is worth the effort.
10
posted on
07/15/2013 2:56:36 AM PDT
by
Jacquerie
(To restore the 10th Amendment, repeal the 17th.)
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