Month: April 2009

Federalist Nos. 71 – 72

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In three sentences Federalist No. 71 conveys the primary reason to prefer a republic over a democracy:

It is a just observation, that the people commonly INTEND the PUBLIC GOOD. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always REASON RIGHT about the MEANS of promoting it. (emphasis original)

By separating the people from direct decision-making a republic insulates the nation from mob rule.

I found great irony in the following truth:

The representatives of the people, in a popular assembly, seem sometimes to fancy that they are the people themselves, and betray strong symptoms of impatience and disgust at the least sign of opposition from any other quarter; as if the exercise of its rights, by either the executive or judiciary, were a breach of their privilege and an outrage to their dignity.

Sometimes today it seems that the representatives of the people in our "popular" assembly have fancied that they are the people themselves and they often appear impatient or disgusted at opposition from the voters when they are busy trying to promote the will of the President.

In talking about the duration in office of the president (Federalist No. 72), Hamilton comes out in staunch opposition to term limits:

Nothing appears more plausible at first sight, nor more ill-founded upon close inspection, than a scheme which in relation to the present point has had some respectable advocates, I mean that of continuing the chief magistrate in office for a certain time, and then excluding him from it.

As in various other decisions in the original Constitution we have changed our stance on that since that time. Unlike other such examples I believe that this change has been positive or at least neutral for the nation. In fact I have been one to favor the possibility of adding term limitations to other elected positions. There is one way in which I could see someone arguing that term limits may have contributed to our imperial presidency:

An avaricious man, who might happen to fill the office, looking forward to a time when he must at all events yield up the emoluments he enjoyed, would feel a propensity, not easy to be resisted by such a man, to make the best use of the opportunity he enjoyed while it lasted, and might not scruple to have recourse to the most corrupt expedients to make the harvest as abundant as it was transitory;

I’d love to hear other perspectives on whether our two term limit on the presidency has been a good or bad thing for the country now that we have had half a century to see the results.

Tags documents, federalist, history, questions, term limits

culture National

Political Action vs Reaction

Post author By David
Post date April 15, 2009
15 Comments on Political Action vs Reaction

It’s tax day and I doubt anybody who reads this has not heard in advance about the many "Tea Party" events that have been planned around the country for today. Ive been hearing about them from various sources for months and I have been conflicted in my feelings related to such activities. From a constitutional perspective we have a first amendment right to free speech and peaceable assembly so barring any violence there is no question as to the legality of these events. My conflict is in the way the events are being promoted.

Many of the public figures who are promoting these events paint them as a kind of legitimate political action. Among those who really care about the issues of constitutionally limited government and perpetual government deficit spending there are many, such as myself, who recognize that these tea parties have no possibility of bringing about real political results – they are a grand publicity stunt played off of the frustrations of one segment of the population. As such they are merely a political reaction and political reactions are easy to spin. Promoters are spinning this as an argument against larger government and deficit spending. Detractors are spinning it as a bunch of ridiculous anti-Obama rallies.

Real political action, in contrast to political reactions, is very difficult to spin. It takes much more time and effort than simply gathering some press coverage and getting people to show up one day carrying signs and shouting in megaphones. Real political action, for those who are interested, would include regularly seeking information on issues of interest to you. It would include attending county party organizing conventions. As Rob Miller so aptly said, "If you believe that you have something to contribute to the American experience, you should come to a county convention." In Davis County that would be this Saturday (4/18) for both Democrats and Republicans. If you really want to make a difference you should be looking to be a delegate to county and state party conventions (or even national conventions if you are so inclined). It means participating in those caucus meetings and conventions where parties are organized and candidates are chosen. It means not letting your party get away with ignoring its principles in the name of political expedience. (That does not preclude the possibility of compromise, but it does reject the argument that all of politics is compromise.)

Thankfully today I have come to my own resolution regarding that internal conflict. Real political action is what this country desperately needs from many more people of all political persuasions. We need people who are willing to put in the work and engage in civil debate even when the debate gets spirited. While political reactions do not qualify as real, effective political action they can serve as a first step for those who have not participated in real political action before. I hope that whatever else happens with the tea party events we will see many among the attendees who will start to take part in lasting political action.

Tags civic participation, deficits, Obama, taxes

General

Federalist Nos. 69 – 70

In Federalist No. 69 Hamilton argues that the president is not as powerful a position as some have made it out to be while in Federalist No. 70 he argues that having any less power vested in the president would be a recipie for bad government.

I have found it to be very interesting, not only in these Federalist Papers, to see the proposed government compared to the state governments that existed as well as to foreign governments. For example, Hamilton shows how the office of president as proposed holds powers inferior not only to the king of Great Britain (to which it had been compared by detractors) but also in virtually every instance to many of the governors of individual states. The other thing that I find interesting in this study is how closely subsequent state governments model the federal Constitution when they were being established.

Tags Constitution, documents, federalist, history, State Constitution

National

Federalist No. 68

Due to the number of people in recent years who have called for the abolition of the electoral college I was very interested in what Hamilton would say on the subject in Federalist No. 68. Imagine my surprise then when that paper opened with this:

THE mode of appointment of the Chief Magistrate of the United States is almost the only part of the system, of any consequence, which has escaped without severe censure, or which has received the slightest mark of approbation from its opponents. The most plausible of these, who has appeared in print, has even deigned to admit that the election of the President is pretty well guarded.

Even the opponents of the Constitution in 1788 felt that the electoral college system was praiseworthy. Of course, the electoral college today does not operate as the founders envisioned it back then. They planned a system where the people would choose members of the college to represent them in selecting the best person to become our president (and vice-president). Today the average citizen does not know the name of a single member representing them in the electoral college – we vote for a President and electors who have pledged to vote for the people’s choice (usually on a winner-take-all basis within each state) are assigned to officially cast the votes in the electoral college. no longer do the members of the electoral college deliberate on which presidential candidate will be the best for the nation – they simply vote blindly for the choice of the people if the people choose the same person they have pledged to vote for. In other words, we have already gutted the electoral college system and turned that element of our republic into a democracy while maintaining the weighted balancing between states that the founders sought.

Here is a description of what we have gutted from the process:

The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes. And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.

Perhaps instead of calling for the abolition of the electoral college we should be calling for the reinstatement of the electoral college.

Tags documents, electoral college, federalist, history

culture

Federalist No. 67

In Federalist No. 67 Hamilton is clearly upset at those who oppose the proposed Constitution because of their outrageous misrepresentation of the content of the Constitution in relation to the office of President. As I read the example of misrepresentation that he recounted I recognized the same spirit of selective fact presentation that is altogether too common among activists of all stripes in our nation today. In some ways we really have not changed that much in the last two centuries.

Tags discourse, documents, federalist, history

culture

Federal-Sighted

Most people have probably heard of the two basic classes of vision problems, far-sightedness and near-sightedness. For those who are not clear on the differences, far-sightedness is characterized by the eye being able to focus on objects at a distance while objects up close are blurry. Conversely, near-sightedness is characterized by the eye being able to focus on objects in close proximity while objects further away are unclear.

I have come to the conclusion that as a society we generally suffer from a political far-sightedness that I call federal-sightedness – that is, we focus on issues at a federal or national level while allowing local and state issues to become excessively fuzzy. Just as with personal vision problems that develop slowly and without our notice, our first reaction is to compensate in subtle ways. We step back from near issues and view them from a federal perspective. Rather than tackling problems close up we attempt to fix them from an arms-length away.

The problems associated with this perspective were illustrated to me from a recent comment stating that, “By definition you can’t have individual liberty while at the same enforcing your preferred level of societal morality.” This statement assumes a situation where there is a single layer to government and social order.

The comments were following a golf course analogy at the time so lets follow through with that imagery to show what I mean. If the governing body of golf were the only source of rules the statement would be true. The reality of the situation is that the governing authority should be promoting individual liberty by only mandating a minimal set of rules defining what makes an acceptable golf course. This would include basic rules regarding how the game of golf is played. It would include rules such as mandating that an official golf course must have 18 holes, that each hole must have a par rating between 3 and 5, that the entire course must have a par total between 69 and 73, and the rules for determining the par rating for a hole. On the other hand, the governing body should avoid making rules such as requiring that the third hole on each course must be a par-5 hole.

While the governing body lays out the general rules of golf the owners and operators of each golf course can determine the design of their own course, their hours of operation, their standards for membership etc. We need not conclude that the governing body is shirking its responsibility to promote individual liberty simply because some golf courses (or even a majority) have closed membership policies.

The antidote for federal-sightedness is local activism. Local activism helps us to focus on those things which are within our locus of control thus making for a much more functional society. This was brought to my attention with the news today of a group that stopped waiting for federal funds before fixing a bridge that had been destroyed in a flood. Although they had as much claim on federal disaster relief funds as New Orleans after Katrina or Minneapolis after the collapse of the I-35 bridge they changed their focus from waiting for help to making a difference with what they had. The end result, their bridge is fixed sooner and without costing $4 million.

I have seen much evidence of federal-sightedness among those who are politically active online – in fact I have suffered from this malady myself. Thankfully I am coming to my senses and trying to be more involved in finding solutions that are closer to home. It is a move that was recently demonstrated by Rob Miller as he decided to shift his political activity from the state party level to the county party level. Obviously we need people involved at all levels but I am left wondering how many of our federal problems would evaporate or whither away to manageable levels if we were more busy as a society focusing on the issues directly around us and spending less time waiting for help from a larger society.

Our propensity for federal-sightedness has been assisted by newspapers focusing on larger and larger issues at the expense of focusing locally. The newspapers are suffering from that ill-considered shift and so is society. Hopefully if we shift our focus back closer to home we will experience a social renaissance in which our problems become manageable – just as I noted that newspapers with a local focus are surviving better than national papers.

There is an opposite to federal-sightedness which is local-sightedness. This condition ignores the larger society and holds dangers of its own. Thankfully it is a much more rare condition today than federal-sightedness.

Tags civic participation, discourse, Elevated, government

culture

An Unlikely Headline

Public awaits First Dog news with bated breath declares the Houston Chronicle. I’m thinking that’s not accurate. At best its a gross exaggeration. The truth is that every day is a slow news day so there are reporters awaiting news of the First Dog with bated breath.

Maybe they should be reminded that if they are waiting for news like that with bated breath they no longer belong to the public.

Tags media

General National

Federalist No. 66

Federalist No. 66 has me seeking opinions on a few questions. Specifically it got me asking which of the four elements of our federal government (the Executive, the Judicial, the Senate, and the House) is the most powerful? Which Should be the most powerful? The founders clearly had some idea about which they thought should be the most powerful:

that the most POPULAR branch of every government, partaking of the republican genius, by being generally the favorite of the people, will be as generally a full match, if not an overmatch, for every other member of the Government. (emphasis original)

Their expectation was for the House to exert the most influence, but to be sufficiently checked to prevent it from becoming a law unto itself.

The wording of the above quote also got me thinking about two other questions. In this day of low approval ratings (not as low now as they were six months ago), which of the four is the most popular? Is that most popular one the most powerful?

I suspect that the most popular of them is the Executive branch now – last year it might well have been the Judicial branch. I am fairly confident that one of those two branches is generally the most powerful, although I’m not sure that it is always the same one of those who that holds the upper hand.

Tags checks and balances, documents, federalist, government, history

General National

Federalist Nos. 64 – 65

In discussing the powers of the senate related to the making of treaties John Jay outlines a truth that undercuts one of the major arguments against term limits. In Federalist No. 64 he states:

providing for the frequent elections of senators in such a way as to obviate the inconvenience of periodically transferring those great affairs entirely to new men; for by leaving a considerable residue of the old ones in place, uniformity and order, as well as a constant succession of official information will be preserved.

The argument that term limits would place institutional knowledge quarely in the hands of lobbyists is a strong one until we consider that the very form of senate elections was to preserve institutional knowledge across elections. Even if we were to go to the extreme of enforcing a single term limit on every elected member of the federal government each state would always have at least one member of their congressional delegation that had at least two years worth of experience in Washington. Overall, each new election would leave at least 66 out of 536 elected officials returning to Washington to pass on their institutional experience. Considering how poorly 90 – 95% transfer of institutional experience has served this country recently I don’t see that we could be much worse off by having a 13% transfer of institutional experience.

I cannot imagine suggesting such an extreme term limit policy, and I don’t pretend that this answers all the critiques of the idea of term limits, but I will never give any weight to the argument that essential institutional experience would be left to unelected bureaucrats and lobbyists in the future.

In Federalist No. 65 Hamilton discusses the responsibility of the Senate to try cases of impeachment. Despite, or possibly because of, the cases and threats of impeachment within my own lifetime which have been driven more by political considerations than by rational thought my respect is fixed for the method of impeachment and trials of impeachment designed by our founders and unaltered over two centuries.

Tags change congress, documents, federalist, history, senate

General life

A Currency All My Own

I really enjoyed Scott’s introduction to different currency types. It’s a great introduction to the differences between fiat currency, commodity currency, and representative currency. Coincidentally we have implemented a new representative currency in our household in an effort to teach our children about money and work. Personally I think that the commodity backing our currency is the safest commodity around except for it’s non-transferable nature and often short shelf-life. Our currency is backed by goodwill – although there is an exchange rate from U.S. dollars.

As for real world crisis scenarios, my personal philosophy is to do my best to maximize my production ability, build up my stores, minimize my vulnerability, and do what I can to maximize social stability by building up a strong and prepared community around me.

Tags connections, economics, money