Posted on 04/25/2002 9:41:56 AM PDT by Korth
WorldNetDaily book editor Joel Miller recently authored one of the best common-sense constitutional arguments against the government’s failed “war on drugs” that I’ve seen (“Alan Keyes is Wrong!”, April 23). It was a response to neo-conservative Alan Keyes, who had written in support of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s use of the federal Controlled Substances Act to exert federal dominion over drug regulation by the states. Keyes was addressing Oregon’s “euthanasia laws” that permit the dispensation of lethal drugs, and Miller agreed with him that “killing yourself . . . is not medically legitimate.”
The bigger issue, though, is what constitutional right the federal government has to exert such control over drug regulation – or any kind of regulation for that matter – by the states. As Miller pointed out, Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which delineates the legitimate appropriations of Congress, does not include regulating drugs (or the vast majority of what the federal government does today, for that matter). The Tenth Amendment, moreover, reserves such powers “to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Miller interestingly quotes historian David Musto as having observed that until the late nineteenth century, the federal government laid no claim to such regulatory powers; such things were the responsibilities of the states, or the people. Miller is correct to invoke the Tenth Amendment in his argument, but this Amendment was all but destroyed during the War Between the States, after which federal political hegemony was established. As Dean Sprague wrote in Freedom Under Lincoln, “States Rights, which prior to 1860 had been as important a part of northern political beliefs as southern, were overturned.” This includes, first and foremost, the Tenth Amendment.
Miller also correctly observed that the “progressive era” federal regulatory agencies “were profoundly unconstitutional and un-American” and are “the elder bedmates of the coercive, expansionist politics of modern-day liberalism.” Exactly. This, however, is exactly the position that neo-conservatives like Alan Keyes hold.
There is a method in the neo-con assault on the Constitution: They routinely invoke the part of the Declaration of Independence about “all men are created equal,” but not the rest of the document, as our “national creed,” even if the policies they advance in the name of that creed are in deep conflict with the Constitution itself. For example, in Keyes’s article he bases his argument in support of federal drug regulation on the equality principle of the Declaration. He claims that the Constitution supposedly creates a “federal regime of ordered liberty” by which democratic mobs supposedly “govern themselves in dignity and justice” (I’m not making this up, honest).
To neo-cons like Keyes, the Constitution supposedly prohibits the interpretation of federal law by anyone but the federal government itself because the people of individual states are supposedly incapable of doing so; only “the people of the whole nation” are “competent” to perform this task. But his makes no sense, for there is no such thing as “the people as a whole” acting on this or any other issue. The fact that a small percentage of us votes every four years or so does not imply that we are acting with competence as “a whole people” on this or any other issue. A state referendum on a specific issue, on the other hand, is much more meaningful in terms of citizen participation.
Keyes barely ever makes a speech or writes a column anymore where he does not invoke the Declaration and make a not-too-subtle comparison between himself and Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, he frequently states that his main passion, the pro-life movement of today, is the equivalent of the abolition movement of the nineteenth century. (This comparison is not entirely accurate, however, if one acknowledges Pulitzer Prize winning Lincoln biographer David Donald’s statement that “Lincoln was not an abolitionist”).
The link between Lincoln and neo-con ideology is clear: Lincoln falsely claimed that the Union preceded the states, and was therefore not subject to their sovereignty. The neo-cons make the exact same argument in advancing whatever policy cause they happen to be involved in, whether it is drug regulation, abortion, censoring of television, waging war, etc. This is why so many neo-cons, such as the ones associated with Keyes and the Claremont Institute, are such slavish idol worshippers when it comes to Lincoln. They use his martyred “sainthood” to promote their political agenda through an ever more powerful federal government. That’s why they’re described as “neo-cons” and are not a part of the Old Right tradition: They are comfortable with Big Government, as long as it fights their wars and enacts their social and regulatory programs. This is one reason why there is such a large “Lincoln Cult” among conservative (but mostly left/liberal) academics and think tank employees.
But the alleged supremacy of the federal government over the states is a lie. It was established by the most violent means, a war that killed the equivalent of more than 5 million Americans (standardizing for today’s population), not logic, argumentation, or even legal precedent. It is a lie because:
Each American colony declared sovereignty from Great Britain on its own; After the Revolution each state was individually recognized as sovereign by the defeated British government; The Articles of Confederation said, “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence”; The states then decided to secede from the Articles and dropped the words “Perpetual Union” from the title; Virginia’s constitutional ratifying convention stated that “the powers granted resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression.” This right was also asserted for all other states; In The Federalist #39 James Madison wrote that ratification of the Constitution would be achieved by the people “not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong,” flatly contradicting the contrary assertions of Keyes and other neo-cons; The Constitution always speaks of “the United States” in the plural, signifying that the individual states were united in forming the federal government as their agent while maintaining their sovereignty over it; The Constitution can only be amended with the authority of the states; Until 1914 U.S. Senators were appointed by state legislatures so that the states could retain a degree of sovereignty over federal “officials,” who now have carte blanche to rule over us as they wish.
Only by endlessly repeating what Emory University philosopher Donald Livingston calls Lincoln’s “spectacular lie” that the federal government created the states (and not the other way around), and that the nation was supposedly founded by “the whole people” and not the people of the states in political conventions can the neo-cons continue to champion the further centralization of governmental power to serve their own political ends, whatever they may be.
Of course, it’s not only the neo-cons who perpetuate this lie. Liberals and other assorted leftists do so as well. The left-wing journalist Garry Wills, for example, praises Lincoln’s “open air sleight of hand” in effectively rewriting the true history of the founding (not unlike so many of the former communist governments rewrote their own histories during the twentieth century) because it enabled us to embrace “egalitarianism” and the massive welfare state in whose name it has been advanced (Lincoln at Gettysburg).
Columbia University law professor George P. Fletcher echoes the neo-con mantra in Our Secret Constitution, where he celebrates the fact that the centralized state that was imposed on the nation by the Lincoln administration has led directly to the adoption of myriad “welfare programs,” “affirmative action measures,” the New Deal, modern workplace regulation, etc. He is quite gleeful in his description of the Gettysburg Address as “the preamble of the second American constitution.” This is not necessarily a written constitution, however, but one that has been imposed by federal policy.
This transformation of American government from one in which federalism, states rights, and the rights of nullification and secession allowed the citizens of the states to retain sovereignty over the federal government to a consolidated, monolithic Leviathan, means that Americans now live under what historian Clinton Rossiter called a “constitutional dictatorship.” He used this phrase in a book of the same name which appropriately featured an entire chapter on the “Lincoln Dictatorship.”
There would have still been a U.S.A., but it would have been of smaller land area, encompassing the northern States but not the South. And I have never heard anyone deny that such would have been the consequences.
Wrong.
A neo-con is a former liberal espousing political conservatism. The definition hasn't changed for the last fifty years.
The north started the war by trying to force the southern States to remain under federal control.
The Squalid 14th Amendment
Ratified by trickery during the federal military dictatorship over the South, this treacherous appendage to the Constitution is an attack on liberty and its American political foundation, states rights.
Roger Pilon and the 14th Amendment
Gene Healy, the libertarian legal scholar who's brought sanity to discussions of an evil amendment, continues his work.
Contra Centralism
Libertarian states rights scholar Gene Healy takes on Clinton Bolick, Roger Pilon, and John McClaughry, advocates of liberty through federal power.
The Supreme Court held in the Prize Cases that the "so-called Confederate states" (to use their phrase) were in rebellion and that the president was authorized/required to put down the rebellion.
Walt
He preserved the reach and range of authority of the government. The government itself wasn't under attack. It was a secession, not a revolution or an insurrection.
Wrong. Without a single centralized polity, Germany would certainly have won... WWI. No German defeat, no Hitler. No Hitler, no Nazism. No Nazism, no WWII (not to mention, no Holocaust). No WWII, no Cold War. And if Communism had survived and remained a threat, it would have been mainly a threat to Germany.
The most difficult thing for most people to fully grasp is that there are legitimate limitations on power. You cannot change the rules, simply because you do not like the way other people are exercising freedoms that they have the right to exercise.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Neo Cons are former leftist who moved right during the cold war. They've highjacked the conservative movement. The Old Right which was isolationist(just like the founding fathers) in its foreign policy, free trading and wanted to destroy FDRs New Deal.
Neo Cons say the welfare state is here, get used to it. They're also very interventionists on foreign policy. In other words, they want us to bomb the rest of the world back to the stone age. Israel's enemies are our enemies. etc etc.
Doubtless you have not studied the economic and financial situation Washington's administrations operated within but you will find that the credit of the U.S.A. immediately became the best in the world. Because Hamilton insisted that the debts be paid off (not defaulted like a 3d world country as Jefferson wished to do) it made them a source of capital and created the ability to borrow when necessary.
This, in turn, allowed the Union to borrow enormous amounts from creditors with the faith they would get their funds back and the interest. This allowed Lincoln to raise the huge resources to defeat the Slaveocrats who were left to the economic idiocy of printing paper money backed by nothing.
As far as market reactions to statements by the Fed - it reacts wildly to many types of statements unrelated to political figures. And it will ignore the fed when it wants as well. Witness the attempts by Greenspan years ago to caution against the internet stocks rocketing value. At least two years went by before the market paid the slightest attention.
Modern economies cannot function effectively without a banking system. National banks are part of that system and are necessary. It is just foolishness which believes that a metallic standard can assist economic growth. Hamilton understood this since he saw first hand the results of not having sufficient capital in the form of gold. The monetary aspect of debt funding was genius in the highest degree and showed the financial incompetence of Madison and Jefferson neither of which interfered with Hamilton's program after they took power. Monroe realized that the expiration of the charter of the 1st National bank was a great mistake and allowed it to be rechartered for the good of the nation.
Jackson's demogogery and hatred of the 2d bank prevented its re-charter and the country went into its greatest economic collapse prior to the Great Depression.
Mythology is fun but not productive as a guide to policy.
This nation is not falling apart at the seams by any measure except those used by the Black Caucus and Jesse Jackson. I know the lives of myself, family, friends and acquaintences is far better financially than they have been for decades. Now, morality and religion is a different story not related to governmental programs or practices. Hamilton warned repeatedly of the ennervating effects of prosperity and worried that the growing wealth of the nation would weaken its people and make them immoral.
If the people of (say) Alaska decide that assisted suicide should be legal, why should someone in (say) Pennsylvania tell them otherwise?
Joel Miller is opposed to immorality, including the immorality of state coercion.
On the other hand, Alan Keyes is a conservative hero. How can you disagree with him? Perhaps because he has been critical of your hero, neoconservative President George W. Bush, the Neville Chamberlain of the Republican Party...
Keyes' errors, although they are less, lie in the same direction as Bush's.
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