Next week is Constitution Day. So it’s a good time to assess threats to our Constitution.
Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass called our original Constitution “a glorious liberty document.” Yet it has been under threat at the most fundamental level almost since it was adopted, most notably from reactionaries that would reinterpret the Founding of America from a republic to a democracy, such as the Progressive Democratic Party.
In Our problems actually start with the Constitution, Nicholas Goldberg, an associate editor for one of America’s leading media outlets, the Los Angeles Times, clearly highlights the threat.
Using the well-worn reactionary argument that The U.S. Constitution has outlived its usefulness in our modern world, Goldberg proposes revisions that can only be described as radically reactionary.
The Constitution created the undemocratic U.S. Senate that allots the same representation — two senators — to a state like Wyoming, which has fewer than 600,000 people, as it does to California, with nearly 40 million people.
The Constitution was designed to limit the concentration of political power through a separation of powers and checks-and-balances between the governmental branches for the purpose of protecting individual liberty. While the House of Representatives gives a direct democratic power to the people as individual voters for the purpose of directly choosing representatives, the Senate gives power to the state governments, through their legislatures, for the purpose of choosing senators. This bicameral Congressional arrangement is part of the checks-and-balances design. Yes, smaller states have proportionally more influence than the larger in the Senate. But the larger states have massively more influence in the House.
As long as tyranny, or the threat thereof, exists in humanity, it’s hard to make the case that the need for constitutional protections against tyranny have outlived their usefulness.
It established the voting system that allows presidents to be elected who did not win the popular vote.
Indirect democracy is part of the checks and balances. It tempers the irrational passions of popular majorities by breaking democracy down into smaller competing majorities. Of course, the Electoral College does not eliminate the popular vote, since the popular vote in each state ultimately determines the Electors. What Goldberg objects to is the irrelevance of the national popular vote in presidential politics. But so what? The American system is based on the primacy of individual rights, not the primacy of democracy.*
It's got antiquated — and dangerous — provisions, such as the anachronistic "right to bear arms," which reflects long-forgotten concerns dating to post-revolutionary America. Today, no countries protect gun rights in their constitution except the United States, Guatemala and Mexico.
The right to life is fundamental to all rights. The right to self-defense is inherent in the right to life. The right to possess the means of self-defense is fundamental to the right to self-defense. Hence, the right to bear arms. Violent criminals still exist. As long as criminals exist among us, gun rights will never be antiquated.
What's more, constitutional thinking has evolved since 1787. Today, most new constitutions include far more enumerated rights than ours, notes David Law. The right to education, for instance, and to privacy, food, healthcare and housing. Many modern constitutions protect reproductive rights, freedom of movement, the right to unionize and the rights of the disabled. Today, more than 100 national constitutions include explicit references to environmental rights. The rights of women are singled out for protection in 90% of today's constitutions.
This is truly the provision that would destroy America.It would subvert the very concept of rights.
The Founding generation rebelled against what they believed were the erosion and violation of their rights as Englishmen by the British parliament, which they had believed were sacrosanct. Realizing that individual rights dependent on government are tenuous, the Founders knew they needed a new objective grounding for rights. They turned to the Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, and discovered the concept of Natural Rights. Natural Rights theory holds that individuals are free by nature. Individual rights, which define that natural liberty, are thus derived from the scientific study of man’s nature and man’s relationship to broader nature. Rights, to the Founders, are inalienable and precede government, which is instituted to protect those rights. Government neither creates nor denies rights. It recognizes rights and bases its laws on these facts of nature. **
So-called Progressives revert back to the pre-American concept of rights. Governments, they hold, create rights.
Consequently, denying the Founders, most of Goldberg’s litany of “rights” are not rights at all. They are privileges granted to some at the expense of others. A “right” to material benefits that others must be forced to provide are really empowerments of some to enslave others. The right to property is fundamental to living, because the product of one’s labor is the means of living. A Constitution that empowers the government to seize private property to pay for, say, others’ education is not a liberty document. It is a blueprint for tyranny and the enslavement of the nation. A government with the power to enforce such economic “rights” is a government operating on the premise that the state owns the nation’s wealth and has first claim on it, rather than those who produced that wealth. That is a slave premise, and the exact reversal of America’s foundational recognition of property rights as a natural inalienable right.
Goldberg selectively attacks free speech—“Let's ban corporate money from politics!”
He calls for “a frank, no-sacred-cows discussion” about revising the Constitution. Apparently, freedom of speech is one of the sacred cows he wants to slay.
To be sure, the Constitution could use some pro-liberty reforms to strengthen it. But given the state of the culture, opening up that can of worms today would be a huge risk and more likely end in disaster for Constitutional liberty. So, for now, we’ll have to settle for our somewhat flawed Constitution. That’s OK, because it’s still a glorious liberty document. If Goldberg’s alterations become reality, that will no longer be the case. The American Revolution will have died.
It’s true that we’ve already strayed far from the purpose of the Constitution. The pervasively anti-liberty regulatory welfare state has been built on disregard for the Constitution. Some might argue that Goldberg’s reactionary changes would merely formalize where we’ve already gone, so it’s no big deal.
But it’s a very big deal. As long as the pro-liberty thrust of the Constitution is preserved, we who fight for a rebirth or re-Founding of America’s Revolutionary principles, and to finally fulfill the Enlightenment promise of a fully free society, will have the Founders’ gales of liberty at our backs.
To repeat, opening up the Constitution to major revisions today based on “a frank, no-sacred-cows discussion of what works and what doesn't” would be a disaster. Goldberg blames the Constitution for just about everything wrong—or what he sees as wrong—in America. “We'll never solve our problems” until we update the current Constitution to one “that addresses the issues that concern us today, not those that faced a new republic in the long-ago past,” he says. But the issues that concerned the Founders were deep philosophical and historical issues that remain as relevant to us today as they were at the time of the Founders. Human nature, after all, has not changed. The Founders weren’t primarily concerned with transient issues of the day. They had history and posterity firmly in mind. Just read The Federalist Papers.
Whatever flaws the Constitution has, it is still a liberty document. It’s a republican document, not a democratic document. Goldberg’s proposed radical alterations would reorient it into an anti-liberty democratic socialist document, unleashing unlimited government power on Americans as happened in Venezuela and, perhaps next, Chile. Let’s keep it a liberty document.
* [The 17th Amendment greatly weakened, though did not destroy, the Senate’s power. That Amendment mandated popular elections of senators, stripping the power to select senators from the state legislatures. It should be repealed. That said, before the 17th Amendment, the states were already moving toward direct popular elections of senators, as they had long done in regard to the Electoral College electors. The most-used method, adopted by 28 of the then-45 states, was the “Oregon Method.” Thus, popular elections for senators were coming. The crucial difference was that state legislatures retained control of the process, thus maintaining the balance of power between the federal and state governments.]
** [Ayn Rand refined and advanced this concept of Natural Rights. She showed that rights are actually moral concepts, not entities intrinsic in man’s nature. But she agrees that the justification for these moral concepts is still to be found in the scientific study of man’s nature and man’s relationship to broader nature.]
Related Reading:
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
Man’s Rights by Ayn Rand
The Nature of Government by Ayn Rand
A Leftist Acknowledges the Un-American Premise Behind the Welfare State
Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty by Randy E. Barnett
Reaction to SCOTUS Gay Marriage Ruling Vindicates Hamilton’s Bill of Rights Warning
On a Revisionist's Proposal to Upend the Declaration of Independence
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