Returning to the Constitution
Copyright© 2011, John Danilow, All Rights Reserved
Collected works published in the
late 1780s by the Founding Fathers, and now known as The Federalist Papers,
consist of 85 essays and papers which seem to reveal the overall philosophy and
motivations for the proposed system of government under the new constitution
not then ratified. Nowadays the highest court in the land professes to use this
work as a primary source when interpreting the Constitution. Political
activists frequently use selected quotes in advancing various populist causes—especially
when trying to force administrations to “get back to the constitution” in governing
some area of interest.
That rallying cry typically is
effective in building support even though the written Constitution never has
been more than an icon or ideal. In his 1980 book entitled Democratic
Dictatorship constitutional authority Arthur Selwyn Miller detailed the
evolution of the intangible living Constitution and explained how and
why it is America’s de facto governing document, trumping the paper document in
every instance. The book also reveals constant gravitation of executive branch powers
toward dictatorship.
There always have been enormous
disparities between orchestrated popular perceptions and the undeniable realities
of American government machinery, methods, and motivations. For example
everyone knows that free speech is protected by one of the first ten amendments
to the Constitution and that the Constitution precludes the use of federal
military force against American civilians. These two facts are widespread
sources of national pride—and yet far removed from unadvertised historical
realities.
My generation is reasonably
familiar with federal crackdowns on non-violent student dissidents in the 1960s
and with arrests of eloquent demonstrators expressing non-mainstream views in
public places. Nevertheless most of us know nothing of earlier repressions of
American free speech even though we thank Howard Zinn for chronicling unjust
imprisonments of Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman—both of whom, along with others, served
hard prison time for vocally opposing the military draft during WWI.
And many of us erroneously believed
the 1970 deaths of four Kent State students at the hands of Ohio National
Guardsmen to be unprecedented anomalies in American history. Unfortunately
there also is a documented trail of American blood from National Guard rifles
at Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914 to the armed tanks of Waco, Texas, in 1993. And in
every case American citizens died unjustly and unnecessarily at the hands of zealous
federal troops or employees none of whom were held reasonably accountable for inane
actions—excused, if you will, in the line of duty. Most certainly there are more
and older cases but as a group we are ignorant of similar incidents transpiring
from 1776.
The germane point is not that these
incidents occur but that they reoccur in time. Despite the Constitution
government in these United States always has been, and always will be, relative
to circumstance. In the words of Arthur Miller: “government in the United
States has always been as powerful as circumstances necessitated, as perceived
by the relevant political officers”—perhaps a palatable way of saying that
government acts with impunity in doing whatever it believes it must do to maintain
the status quo while achieving its sole core business goals of
self-aggrandizement and expansion.
In any case governing by the
written Constitution seems a reasonable first step toward curing many of the
ills plaguing this rapidly disintegrating empire—certainly it would be worth a
try. The mythological great republic governed by adherence to the written
Constitution has never existed nor has any true American golden age. Surely the
greatest hopes of rugged individualists died in 1787 along with Shay’s
Rebellion and any hopes of harboring subtle trademark characteristics of individual
autonomy in America.
Copyright© 2011, John Danilow, All Rights Reserved
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