“A republic madam, if you can keep it.” What did Ben Franklin mean by his famous retort at the close of the 1787 Federal Convention? Here’s a clue: Voting every two years is insufficient effort to keep a republic.
Franklin and his convention peers knew that unlike tyrannies and absolute monarchies, republics required the people’s active participation. This wasn’t a new concept; our Framers were well aware of Roman and Greek republics, all of which amended and improved their unwritten constitutions as changing times warranted. It was from their love of liberty and dread of consolidated power the Roman Republic spanned 450 years. They kept their republic.
While the Framers structured the best government they thought possible for their times, they knew their plan of 1787 must be likewise amenable to change. Article V provided for the peaceful change they envisioned for a free people. Make Ben smile.
Over the next one hundred forty plus years until the New Deal, Americans applied the Framers’ Article V gift to amend their constitution over twenty times. We refined existing national powers and expanded individual rights. Keep the republic.
Yet, by the New Deal, Washington DC increasingly assumed powers not remotely granted by the Sovereign People. So many wholesale judicial amendments to settled constitutional clauses were made that they required the new term, “living and breathing.”
Why, since the New Deal, did the people relinquish their God given and Article V right to define the breadth and depth of their government and largely turn such decisions over to lawyers in black robes?
Through disuse, Americans had forgotten the second amendatory process within Article V, which provided for an end run by the people and their states around the Washington DC elites. Having never been used in modern times, Americans were not familiar with convening by state delegations. They were further informed that any attempt to keep the American Republic by the state amendatory process was dangerous, that it could easily runaway and spoil an emerging Scotus designed social justice Utopia.
Consider:
Should employers be required to recognize Labor Unions as per the National Labor Relations Act of 1935?
Should the scope of the Commerce Clause include intra-state commerce as per the Wickard v. Filburn decision of 1942?
Should there be a wall of separation between Church and State?
Is there really a 9th Amendment right to abortion?
Can the Executive branch assume Article I legislative powers?
If so, and in order to keep our republic, these issues and so many more should have been decided along the way by the American people through Article V. Had this been done over the decades, America would not be on the verge of a police state. Article V wasn’t designed to be used solely in extremis situations such as the runaway Obama tyranny; it was and remains to this day a fundamental tool to secure liberty.
Reverse the tyranny. Keep the American Republic. Article V NOW!
“If so, and in order to keep our republic, these issues and so many more should have been decided along the way by the American people through Article V. Had this been done over the decades, America would not be on the verge of a police state. “
I agree with this 100%. However, history is replete with examples of what complacency begats and it isn’t pretty. I don’t much like the term democracy but the “cycle of democracy” By Alexander Tyler describes common outcomes.
Imagine the outrage from the left when they realize there is a higher earthly power than the institutions they corrupted.