LETTER TO THE EDITOR
As a former social studies and history teacher, I have become extremely concerned with the obvious lack of understanding of our Constitution as the Framers envisioned, basic civics, and American national government in our educational system. What the Framers envisioned was a self-governing Republic. Citizens would no longer be ruled.
Under laws made by their elected representatives, they would be free to work out their own happiness in their own way, in their families and local communities. But since those elected representatives are born with the same selfish impulses as everyone else—the same-all-too-human nature that makes government necessary in the first place—the Framers took care to limit their power and to hedge them with checks and balances, to prevent the servants of the sovereign people from becoming their masters.
The Framers strove to avoid at all costs what they called an “elective despotism,” understanding that elections alone don’t ensure liberty. Did they achieve their goal perfectly, even with the first ten amendments that form the Bill of Rights? No—and they recognized that.
It took the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments—following the Civil War—to end the evil of slavery that marred the Framers’ creation, but that they couldn’t abolish summarily if they wanted to get the document adopted. Therefore, it took the 19th Amendment to give women the vote, a measure that followed inexorably from the principles of the American Revolution. During the ratification debates, one gloomy critic prophesied that if they ratified the Constitution, “the forms of Republican government” would soon exist” in appearance only” in America, as had occurred in Ancient Rome. American republicanism would indeed eventually decline, but the decline took a century to begin and unfolded with much less malice than it did at the end of the Roman Republic. Nor was it due to some defect in the Constitution but rather to repeated undermining by the Supreme Court, the president, and the Congress.
The result today is a crisis of legitimacy, fueling the anger with which Americans now glare at one another. Half of us believe we live under the old Constitution, with its guarantee of liberty and its expectation of self-reliance.
The other half believe in a “living constitution “—a regime that empowers the Supreme Court to sit as a permanent constitutional convention, issuing decrees that keep our government evolving with modernity’s changing conditions. The living constitution also permits countless supposedly expert administrative agencies, like the SEC and the EPA, to make rules like a legislature, administer them like an executive, and adjudicate and punish infractions of them like a judiciary.
To old Constitutionalist, this government of decrees issued by bureaucrats and judges is not democratic self-government but something more like tyranny—hard or soft, depending whether or not you are caught in the unelected rulers’ clutches. To the living constitutionalist, on the other hand, government by agency experts and Ivy league-trained judges—making rules for a progressive society and guided by enlightened principles of social justice that favor the “disadvantaged “ and other victim groups—constitutes real democracy.
This perpetual Constitutional argument became more intense about 1890 with the birth of the progressive movement. Patriots we are sliding into tyranny perpetuated by the socialist Democratic Party today. Patriots, the 2020 elections will determine our fate as a self governing Republic or as tyranny governed by a tyrant and an administrative state of unelected bureaucrats. God Bless America.
Tommy Coleman
Denmark, S.C.
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