When the thirteen colonies successfully rebelled, they needed to create a new central government to take the place of London.
Starting from scratch (if you don't count life under Congress governing by the Articles of Confederation), the former colonies, now states, drew up a plan that we call the U.S. Constitution (Ver. 1787). They included a provision to establish a seat of government someplace; they didn't say where. The new government (named "the United States of America") met in New York City in 1789, when it opened for business for the first time after ratification of the somewhat experimental plan (called "the Constitution"). Experimental because no nation had ever before tried operating under a written constitution, so far as is known.
The capital, or national headquarters, the home office, later switched to Philadelphia, and finally to Washington, D.C., a former swamp on a river, where it remains today, you'll be surprised to know, and no less oozing with snakes.
Do you think that those original thirteen states wanted to give a lot of power to this new national, or central government they'd just set up? Why would they want to do that? Each of them already did all that was needed to provide for their citizens. Each state provided cradle-to-grave laws and protection for its citizens.
What they couldn't provide was an army or navy to protect the whole group of states, but since they didn't trust armies anyway (armies could be used by tyrants to step on people; see the Redcoats), this was no big loss.
But there were French to the north, Indians on the western frontier who were backed by the French, Spaniards to the south in Florida and New Orleans, and of course, the British navy, formerly protector, now a hostile force (we weren't pay our debts, and the Brits weren't leaving their forts on our land).
Also there were the Barbary Pirates in the Mediterranean, where our ships liked to trade. So we rethought the bit about not having a navy fast.
We built six frigates, including the one you can visit in Boston, called USS Constitution, or "Old Ironsides." A wonderful new book about all this is "Six Frigates." I've loaned out my copy, so you'll have to Google the name or browse the bookstores. There's a lot about Conlaw in all the biographies of the founding fathers that are all over the bookstores in recent years, some very good, such as Ron Chernow's "Alexander Hamilton" and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s "Age of Jackson" who wasn't exactly a founding father but did fight in the Revolution as a kid (he was captured). He became the first frontiersman president, the first president from the West (outside Nashville, where I visited his plantation, called the Hermitage, in April.) Jackson was the biggest slave-owner in Donaldson County, the home of Country Music and barbecued ribs. Washington was the biggest slave-owner in his corner of the country, too. as was Jefferson, Madison, and our other slave-driving founders. Imagine that.
But we were talking about setting up this new central government. The states wanted to give it as little power over themselves as possible. This is how it is when you have power. You want to keep it. You want to have the final say (sometimes called 'sovereignty' because this is what a sovereign, or king, or government has) over questions that come up under it.
The states wanted to keep all power local, except what they had to give up in order to establish a new national, or central, government that would work. Those, like Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, who saw the need to have a strong central government, were called Federalists, because they believed in confederating, joining together, to make a strong union. They adopted as a symbol of this the fasces or bound bundle of sticks which appears on the dollar bill as a bunch of arrows held in the eagle's claw.
The idea is that you can snap a single stick over your knee, but not a bundle of many bound sticks.
As Benjamin Franklin warned the rebelling founding fathers, "We must all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
The Golden Gate Bridge is suspended from two thick cables consisting of a thousand strands of steel no thicker than a pencil, all bound together into a near solid mass by a wrapping of more steel wire. You can see a cutaway cross-section of this cable next to the gift shop on the San Francisco side. Conlaw, it's all around you, if you keep your eyes peeled and your mind open, which is what it takes to do Conlaw, at least in my experience.
But why are we talking about this ancient history of the founding which you and can't remember, since we weren't there and don't even read about, well, some of us, anyway. Maybe you don't, but I do.
Because the issue of whether we are better off having Washington decide important issues in our lives or whether we should have local control, or better yet, individual power to decide such things like whether to become a parent or how our lives will eventually end, never goes away.
Do you really want those bureaucrats in Washington deciding which medical procedures you should be able to get? Those crooks? The ones who take the graft from lobbyists for the drug companies? The tobacco lobby? Oil? Well, those are the folks who legislate on Medicare and whether doctors may perform abortions. That's pretty centralized, right? Cuts you and your state right out of the picture, doesn't it.
Among the founding fathers, and mothers, those who were opposed to granting too much power to the new central government were called the Anti-federalists. They refused to sign and opposed ratification. Some of them came over when their biggest objection, the lack of a Bill of Individual Rights, was agreed to be tacked on at the end. Madison was given the drafting task. He consulted all the state charters to see what individual rights were provided. He boiled them down to a dozen and presented it. Ten were adopted. Thus our Bill of Rights. One of his rejects was adopted a couple hundred years later as Amendment 27 (Congressional salaries). The idea is that no Act to raise the salaries of the legislators who passed it shall go into effect until after the next election of representatives. This gives you'n'me control over greedy buggers who vote themselves raises.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has a column, today, about Tennessee senator Fred Thompson, the movie actor-legislator. Where have I seen that before? Oh, I forgot, Ronald Reagan.
What is Thompson campaigning on? He's an anti-federalist who thinks power should reside in his state, not Washington. He's been around Washington long enough to know that it doesn't work. Too much selfish grandstanding, not enough brainwork for the good of the country.
The past isn't dead, it isn't even past.
See the column, below. I've emboldened the sexy parts on federalism.
Federalism. Sexy. Don't forget.
Continue reading "TO CENTRALIZE OR DECENTRALIZE, THAT IS THE QUESTION" »