This is kind of a preface-post. I had originally written a post in reaction to three things: the tea-parties that have sprung up across the country (though I actually wrote it the day before the ides of April), the Department of Homeland Security's controversial report on right-wing extremism, and the 10th Amendment movement in Texas and Gov. Rick Perry's quick move to act as standard bearer for the movement.
In order to really fully lay out my thoughts, I have to explain my thoughts on the Constitution and interpretations of relationships between the US Federal Government, the various State Governments, and We the People. A lot of what I have to say I have probably said before and is laid out quite well in Akhil Reed Amar's fantastic book, The Bill of Rights.
Basically, when the Founding Fathers were drafting the Constitution, they approached it from a position of extreme distrust of centralized government. The abject failure of the Articles of Confederation proved that there was at least some value in having a reasonably strong federal government, but the drafters wanted to make sure that states were sufficiently strong to resist any encroachment by an oppressive central government, much like the colonies had experienced with Britain.
It is interesting to look at how little the Constitution, in its original form, imposes itself upon the States. Of course now, largely thanks to the "civil war" amendments abolishing slavery and granting citizenship and voting rights to blacks and, later on, women, the Constitution is interpreted more as protecting the rights of individual citizens. But in its original form the Constitution, and its accompanying Bill of Rights, was meant to delineate where the federal government's authority ended and where that of the States and the People began. Indeed, the only actions that the Constitution forbids both States and the Federal government to do is to grant titles of nobility and to pass ex post facto laws.
The Bill of Rights, as envisioned by its authors, is basically a list of things that the federal government is forbidden to impose on the State governments. The 2nd amendment right to bear arms and have a militia (the militia part is often forgotten in popular rhetoric today) makes much more sense as a State's rights issue. Each state has the right to organize a militia and to use force to let the federal government know when it has overstepped its bounds.
We often refer to our 1st Amendment rights to religion, speech, and so on. But when the Constitution was drafted many States had already endorsed official religions in their own constitutions. There was never ANY questioning of their right to do so in 1789. It is quite interesting to see that, under the original interpretations of the Constitution, States were actually allowed to pretty much do what they wanted....hence the slavery issue.
Somewhere in the last 250 years this idea that the States were the most important unit of governance was lost and I'm not sure where. So all that is going on now, the rhetoric that the federal government has become too big, talk of secession in Texas, and a federal report warning of anti-government groups (some of whom advocate a transfer of power to states and localities) is pretty closely tied in to a classic interpretation of the Constitution. So this was the background post and the foreground post is coming up...
Leave a comment