Every so often, we get essay submissions from writers and bloggers across Delaware and beyond. We welcome guest columns, and today it is my pleasure to bring you an essay from Reid Champagne, a freelance writer who has written for Delaware Today.
The Constitution: Suspenders or Straightjacket
By
Reid Champagne
The more politicians use and abuse the Constitution as so much mud to be slung at opponents, the more it reveals just how much ignorance abounds over a document many believe should be adhered to with an almost biblical literalness.
In fact, the Constitution itself was unconstitutional in its framing and adoption. Historian Garry Wills, writing in his political biography James Madison, points out that no less an Original Intender than Madison himself knew that the then existing Articles of Confederation would be of no use in supporting the fledgling United States in taking its proper and secure place among the nations of the world.
Madison knew the mechanism providing for the constitutional changing of the Articles would never allow for the transformation of that document into something he believed would be necessary for the country to survive not only a Europe swept by despots bent on conquest, but also to “control the centrifugal tendencies of the states [that would] destroy the whole harmony of the political system.” In short, no less a limited government icon than James Madison was enshrining the idea of a strong central government into the very parchment of today’s Constitution in order to bind the nation together and to grow into the powerful force necessary to defend itself against any and all enemies.
And it was another icon of limited government, Thomas Jefferson, who early on expanded the role of a strong central government to encompass that of an equally strong executive. Nothing in the Constitution gave Jefferson the authority to make the Louisiana Purchase and then staff it with governors of his own choosing without congressional oversight. Later, having once denounced a national bank as unconstitutional, Madison supported it as president, defending it as necessary to the survival of the national treasury recently emptied by the disastrous impact of the Embargo of 1807.
If the framers did not originally intend the Constitution to be elastic like a pair of suspenders managing a growing waistline, rather than rigid like a straightjacket confining us to an asylum of ideologues, they certainly discovered that it was to theirs and the country’s benefit to interpret it so. It follows then that if “Obamacare” is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution (although you could perhaps argue the phrase “promote the general Welfare” in the Preamble puts it there) as wasn’t the Louisiana Purchase or the Embargo, it merely takes a stroke of Jeffersonian or Madisonian pragmatism to permit it. At least then we could argue Obamacare on the merits of its fixing the abysmal record of private and profit driven healthcare, rather than on sectarian principles no one appears to even minimally understand anyway.
If the phrase “those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it” is a truism, then what history are today’s dazed and confused politicians doomed to have us repeat: the 1960s perhaps?
How about the 1860s maybe?