If that is "good-bye", then let me leave you with a simple, profound idea:
If, according to you, the Free Republic established under our Founders' Constitution never really existed -- if from Day One it was corrupted and killed-off, by the Founders themselves(!), then everything we advocate as Conservatives is pure fantasy, mere figments of some overactive imaginations -- because it never really existed.
I say: such an opinion would be untrue and unacceptable.
The much better opinion is that our Founders' Republic, as established in 1788 and substantially corrected in 1865, continued on its track, as founded, until the "Progressive" era circa 100 years ago, with its new 16th & 17th Amendments.
I cite as proof of this the fact that our Founders themselves well understood which legal actions required Constitutional Amendments, and which could be accomplished with laws passed by Congress.
Thus, they passed the 11th & 12th Amendments in the 1790s, but felt no need to pass amendments regarding, for example, John Marshall's judicial review, or, say, President Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase.
But around 100 years ago, and not before, the Republic essentially came off its rails, and steamed off into the swamp of unlimited, centralized Big-Government, into which it has sunk ever deeper and deeper -- from 2% of GDP then to now well over 20%.
This view has the huge benefit of requiring less than total shut-down and rebooting the Constitution -- an effort which cannot conceivably end well.
But repealing two amendments -- 16th & 17th -- would go as far as necessary in restoring the Republic as intended, and as inherited from our Founders, imho.
Oh dear, it isn’t goodbye. I would miss you.
You refused to see that Napolitano and I are saying the same thing about the federal government’s powers. Of course, you needn’t agree with us, but I knew the response I’d get.
What you have made clear over time is that you hold deeper principles that drive your “historical” views. Chief among them is your “Living Constitution” jurisprudence, which I realize was probably unconsciously held by you until this exchange. You idolize Lincoln and his war. In fact, you are the perfect audience for the “war as necessity” dodge employed by all power mongering political “leaders”. The war you so love didn’t “correct” the Constitution; it was anti-Constitutional. I realize that you don’t read much or have the emotional strength to come to terms with opposing views, but Professor Jeffery Hummel’s Emancipating the Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the Civil War might be therapeutic for you.
You also have the quaint view that the “Progressives” are the source of the problem. Actually, they were just a manifestation of the metastasizing cancer mercantilism and other big government tendencies introduced by the Republican Party during and after the War. There is no discontinuity between your principles and the Progressives. In fact, I think you’d be a big defender of the “necessary adjustments” made by the Progressives if they had gone no further than they had by 1917 (I’ll bet you love that war, too). The trouble, of course, is that once sown the seeds of tyranny continue to grow. Lincoln was an enemy of the American Constitutional Republic, just as both Roosevelts, Wilson, Hoover, etc. in an almost unbroken line up to Obamalini. We are only talking differences in degree and style.
“Statism”, of which “Progressivism” is just one species, has always been around. All of the actors in the Founding generation were quite aware of the evils of statism because they had before them, not so much George the III, who was a relatively weak monarch, but example of the Tudors and the Stuarts, whose views of the rights of government were statist to the core.
I think the real difference between us is that you are a “moderate” socialist, while I am not. Your real objection to our government is that it has gone farther than you like, while I view it as illegitimate because it is lawless and unconstitutional.