Of Slavery and the Constitution

 

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

Slavery in America was doomed under the Constitution, and the slavocrats knew it.  For more than four score years they had been fighting and steadily losing ground to preserve slavery.  When Abraham Lincoln was elected President, the slavocrats understood that things would not get better for them.  They saw getting out as the only way to continue slavery.

They pushed their states to leave after the election of 1860 not because they disputed the results.  They recognized that Lincoln had been duly elected.  What the slavocrats feared was that under his administration and his support in Congress their ability to preserve slavery would be irreparably eroded and eventually ended.  They sought to exit the Union before that happened.

By necessity, forming a “more perfect union” under the Constitution required compromise to accommodate diverse peoples and experiences.  The miracle of the Founders was to bring all the states in.  Compromise and accommodation are at the heart of a republic. 

There is an art to compromise.  I saw that during the days of the Reagan administration.  President Reagan was a highly principled man, yet he often compromised.  I marveled how, in his compromising, he resisted compromise of principle.  Again and again he advanced his principles while accommodating on details.   

The Founders establishing a Constitution sought to preserve essential principles by which a government of liberty would act.  A key example was the slave trade.  Some vociferously argued for its end.  Slave state representatives argued for the matter to be left to individual states.  The Constitution enshrined the national principle that the slave trade must end.  Placing regulation of trade in general with Congress, the compromise set 1808 for the complete end of the slave trade.

A similarly important example where compromise embraced the principle was the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives.  The number of a state’s representatives was based on population.  Representatives from slave states wanted to count slaves.  Others objected that if your state treats these people as property, then they should not be counted any more than other property.  The principle in the compromise was to recognize the humanity of people held in slavery, but to count a person only as three-fifths for congressional apportionment so long as he was held in slavery, reducing southern congressional representation.

With these two compromises, resting on anti-slavery principles, all the states came into the union, accepting a Constitution that would progressively lead to abolition.  As the reality of that became abundantly clear to the leadership of eleven of the states, they tried to renege on the deal and leave.  The slavocrats failed.  Rather than let the Constitution end slavery peacefully, they forced a horrid war that ended it all the sooner, but at the cost of more than 600,000 dead, greater than the total of Americans killed in both World Wars I and II. 

The power of the principles of the Constitution continued its work.  Amidst a Civil War that, in the words of Lincoln, tested “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure,” elections were held.  The voters chose liberty and the nation endured.

The American Founders were sober people, sobered by a long and difficult war of Independence followed by several years of economic and social confusion.  They understood that people were flawed and make mistakes.  They believed that people are also good, who can and do make good decisions.  The Constitution on which they established the United States recognizes and is designed to offset the bad and allow good to succeed, which it more often than not does.  

Tested by myriad difficulties and unparalleled prosperity, the Constitution has worked better than any other system of government on earth.  That is why enemies of freedom hate it and why so many people want to come here to live.

Of Congress and Appropriations

Photo by Jomar on Unsplash

Why is Congress not legislating?  Congress is the national legislature.  The Constitution vests Congress with exclusive legislative rights.  Then why will the Members of Congress not legislate? 

Among the exclusive legislative jobs for Congress is to appropriate funds for the operations of government.  This is a regular, annual task.  This must be well understood:  for Congress to fail to fund the operations of the federal government is a dereliction of duty of the highest order.  Nothing prevents the Members from doing that duty, and no one else can do it.

The President cannot legislate, least of all appropriate.  That limitation is firmly placed as a check on executive power.  The President may not write a single word of legislation, he may not appropriate one penny.  If the agencies of government are not funded, it is because Congress has failed to fund them.  No one else can fund them, and no one else can fail to fund them.  Currently, Congress has not done its job for much of the federal government, and the Members of Congress have no excuse, no justification for the failure.

The President can make recommendations to Congress, he can ask for appropriations.  Congress can heed or disregard such recommendations and requests entirely at its discretion.  They have no effect except as Congress chooses.

Some might say, but what about the President’s veto?  Can he not refuse to sign an appropriation, and send the bill back to Congress?  Indeed he can.  He may send it back, but he cannot change it, he cannot add or remove a single word.  Congress can decide whether to change the legislation, do nothing, or vote to override the veto.  Those decisions are entirely in the hands of the legislators.

It is no excuse for legislators to say that they cannot find sufficient agreement whether to override a veto or even to pass a law.  Whose fault is that?  True representative legislatures (not the rubber stamps of communist dictatorships) have always had the difficult job of dealing with disagreement.  That is why we have legislatures with numerous members.  It is expected that there will be varying points of view.  The legislators’ responsibility is to resolve these differences sufficient to pass necessary laws.

Appropriations for government operations are necessary laws.  They are also among the most malleable of questions.  When the consideration is money for government projects, there is a compromise to be found.  We will not pass anything is not an acceptable option.  It is legislative failure.

Presidents may say that they will veto a bill that does not meet certain standards.  That is a President’s prerogative, but the Constitution is careful to make it a surmountable obstacle.  The Members of Congress, working through the legislative process, may either find a sufficient majority to pass a law that the President will not veto or a sufficient unity of view that will allow them to override the veto.  Doing nothing until the President changes his view is dereliction.

Presidents have had vetoes overridden.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat, vetoed 635 Acts of Congress passed by strong majorities of fellow Democrats.  Congress overrode several of those.  Ronald Reagan vetoed 78 Acts of Congress, several of which were overridden. 

Most often, a significant number of Members will sympathize with the President’s view.  That calls for legislative efforts to find a formula reasonable enough that the President does not reasonably veto it.  That is what the national legislature traditionally does and is expected to do.  That is what this Congress has so far failed to do.  That failure is entirely the fault of the Members of Congress.

Of Lessons of History and Preventing Wars

History does not repeat itself, not precisely.  Humans, though, have been doing similar things for thousands of years.  History offers patterns from which we can learn.  That is to say, that there is nothing new that is wholly new. 

There is too much for comfort in the current international situation—and the U.S. response to it—that feels like the 1930s.  The republics of the West, focused inward, struggle with economic traumas and work hard to make them worse in the name of making things better.  National leaders even when aware of storm clouds on the global horizons ignore them if they can, and minimize the dangers if they cannot, applying symbolic but ineffective remedies where action is unavoidable.  Aggressive second rate powers strive for recognition as though first rate powers, conspiring to disrupt the international equilibrium and the peace that rests on it to get what they want.  While potential enemies rapidly rearm, the West disarms in the name of peace, heedless of the wars and conflicts that fill the vacuums of their military retreats.  Again, I am talking about today, not the 1930s, but the parallels are disquieting.

The United States has gotten into unwanted conflicts, especially in the 20^th Century, when adversaries miscalculated our nation’s willingness to sacrifice to defend crucial interests.  Weak-kneed, pusillanimous, or just unwise national executives invited war by giving enemies many reasons to doubt our will and resolve:  unprepared armed forces, verbal warnings enforced with bluster, shirked fulfillment of pledges to help endangered friends.  The Japanese thought that isolationist and poorly armed America would seek a negotiated settlement after Pearl Harbor, the North Koreans were confident that we were too war-weary to defend the South, Saddam Hussein—twice—believed that we would not want to fight a war in the sands of Iraq.  Our responses to frequent goading did little to dissuade them.  Logically following our miscues they each went too far at last.  They all could have been stopped by a determined show of strength early while war remained avoidable, when we could have corrected their calculations at lesser cost to us and to them.

The communist leaders of China are by nature cautious.  You survive the palace intrigues of the Forbidden City by avoiding mistakes, not by making them.  But the Chinese leaders also have big plans, increasingly marked on a global map.  The leaders of the regime in power are the heirs of their founder, Mao, who liked to refer to the United States as a paper tiger.  For a time Nixon and Reagan disabused them of that notion, but they seem to be reconvincing themselves of Mao’s insights.  Where is the recent evidence to the contrary?

At first, Chinese forays were camouflaged by equipping and supporting the adventures of the proxy North Koreans.  Lately, the Chinese military itself has repeatedly hacked into U.S. civilian and military computer systems, with efforts ranging from nuisances to theft of military and technology secrets. The rapidly expanding Chinese navy is now building aircraft carriers, though it has no overseas enemies.  In a related effort, the Chinese are dredging up artificial islands in the South China Sea, a thousand miles from their shores, closer to the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam than to the southern coast of China.  With naval stations and air strips on the islands, the Chinese are asserting a dramatic expansion of territorial waters measured from these militarized sandbars.  Connecting the dots from new island to new island (there are some half dozen or more of these land-creation projects underway), the Chinese navy alleges control of sea lanes and airspace, demanding that planes or ships not pass their theoretical net without Beijing’s permission.  The U.S. has made protests, recently backed up by a reconnaissance plane flying across what has been international waters and free airspace since before and after World War II.  At least for the moment the Chinese only fired words, eight times (according to a CNN story) warning the U.S. plane to stay away.  “This is the Chinese navy.  You go.”

This is a minor disturbance in a major geopolitical struggle.  Busy trade lanes cross the South China Sea.  In the context of Beijing’s acquisition of an offensive, MIRVed nuclear missile arsenal now approaching the size of Russian and U.S. nuclear forces (the U.S. being the only one developing plans to reduce its stockpile), the risks are becoming very high.

China has big domestic problems.  The economy is slowing, if not already in recession.  That will make it even harder for Beijing to keep quiescent a population only half of which has experienced extraction from grinding communist poverty.  An aging population will be difficult for the declining workforce to support in coming years.  And then there is the legacy of China’s one-child policy, more than 100 million males with no possibility of marriage and family.  What to do with those restless men?

Throughout history, China’s biggest dangers have usually been from Chinese, vulnerabilities from the outside attracted only when there was weakness caused by internal struggles.  Might the heirs of Mao seek to distract internal discontent with international adventurism?  A lesson from history is that the more autocratic the regime, the more likely it is to resort to this gambit.

We need a foreign policy that convinces the Chinese leaders how dangerous and unrewarding such moves would be.  That becomes harder to do the more we allow the Chinese to fool themselves that it might be otherwise.   That was a pattern of disaster for Tojo, Hitler, and others—and for us.

Of Compromises and Congresses

The beginning days of 2015 have brought the convening of a new American Congress.  It is fair to say that expectations and skepticism are high. 

Both are merited.  Our Constitution was inaugurated with high expectations, not that the end to all problems was at the door but that the means were available to deal effectively with the problems of government for the new nation.  The people who wrote the Constitution and those involved with implementing it (many the same people) were also deeply skeptical of government, including the one that they had just created.  Memorable and personal experiences had shaped their skepticism.  For that reason, the adoption of the Constitution had been a close thing, the opposition coming chiefly from those who thought that it imposed too much government on the people.  There may have been some contemporary views that the proposed national government would be too weak and light, but I have not found any examples.

No surprise, then, that an early use of the new Constitution was to adopt the Bill of Rights—a set of fundamental rights to protect individual people from their government.  If this new government were really self-government (a misconception reflected today in such bromides as, “Don’t worry about the national debt, we owe it to ourselves,” and “we should not fear the government because we are the government,” as well as much similar foolishness), then these first ten amendments would all be unnecessary.  They have since proven to be very necessary, sometimes breached by our government, but more often employed to preserve and protect us from government offense.

Much as with the convening of the First Congress in 1789, the 114^th Congress convenes after a troubled period of bad government.  Hopes and wishes abound that errors can be corrected, freedoms restored, troubles addressed.  As then, so today patience is in order.

A great virtue of our Constitution, an intentional feature, is that no one person can do much, for good or ill, in the federal government.  It takes a lot of people cooperating together to get things done.  Both Houses of Congress, usually with significant majorities, must agree to identical—word for word identical—legislation for it to be sent to the President, who must agree enough to add his signature to make it law.  And then the President and his colleagues in the executive branch must actually execute the law, which as we are seeing with this President is no sure thing, despite a solemn oath to do so.

All of that coming together of many people, with varying ideas and backgrounds and interests, seldom happens quickly.  For a people who do not need a lot of laws and direction from government to know how to live their lives, that is a fact to be celebrated.  As the Founders envisioned, making law requires compromise and accommodation of the many interests of the many who compose our great nation.  That takes time, as it should. 

It is a mistake to banish the use of compromise from republican government.  Those who would eschew compromise in our Republic would doom us to the fate of the Roman Republic.  The members of the Roman Senate lost the ability or willingness to compromise.  In so doing, they were doomed to inaction—not just slow deliberation—in the face of crisis, followed by reliance upon dictators, whom they fancied they could limit if not control.  They sometimes chose wise men, sometimes they trusted their liberties to demagogues, invested with nearly unilateral authority for an entire year.  The Republic and Roman freedom regressively devolved into the rule of the Caesars.

I understand the impatience that many have with compromise, people who would wish bold and decisive action in response to the would-be Caesar currently in the White House.  To these I would say, do not despair of the strength of the Constitution, even as the chief executive seeks to violate it.  In such times strengthening the Constitution and reinforcement of its checks and balances are the orders of the day, not further erosion of accommodation and compromise that have held our nation together (even through a Civil War) for two hundred years and more.  It is true that some compromises are bad; despotisms or anarchies are not much good.

One of the most important compromises involves idealism and realism.  American legislation requires a marriage of idealism and realism.  Idealism can offer the vision of a free and prosperous nation and the inspiration to action to protect and promote our liberties.  Realism, when operating in the light of idealism, focuses our work on what can be achieved now, without exhausting our energies and resources on quixotic quests that may do little more than tear the national fabric.  Realism would teach that much of the policy errors of years will take years to unravel.  With idealism and realism together, we can know what can and should be done today to make things better and get national policy moving in the right direction.

While a realistic view of the doable is essential to good legislating in a Congress of free men and women, the key and fundamental principles of our idealism help us discern a good compromise—one that makes things better and enables further progress—from a compromise that walks us closer to the abyss.  President Reagan made many compromises, but he had a vision and knew where he was going, each compromise uniting our nation for more prosperity, greater freedom, and stronger security.

We should rejoice that no one in the Republic by himself can bring about much change, however well meaning.  That virtue of our Constitution is why it has taken many steps and many mistakes to come to the many calamities our nation now confronts.  In the same way, because of this Constitution, it will take seemingly many steps along the way to optimal answers.  Every reason to be about the work and not tire of it.

Of Easter and the Constitution

One morning in Tennessee, 150 years ago, many thousand U.S. soldiers were quietly enjoying breakfast on a beautiful spring Sabbath, thinking of little more than passing a quiet Palm Sunday and sometime soon thereafter continuing the destruction of the rebel army in nearby Corinth, Mississippi.  That was, until the rebels came calling and rudely interrupted breakfast.

By the end of the battle the next day the rebels were in full retreat, but over 13,000 Union soldiers were dead, wounded, or missing, and nearly 11,000 rebels had met the same fate.  Shiloh turned out to be a major victory for the United States Army, opening up nearly the whole western part of the rebel confederacy to invasion.  The impact of the victory was missed by much of the population of the loyal states, however, whose senses reeled from a bill of losses of husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers never seen before in the life of the Republic.  General U.S. Grant, whose coolness under pressure made the victory possible, was mercilessly criticized in the press.

The nation little understood that the casualties of Shiloh would be only the first of many tens of thousands more who would suffer from civil war in the land of Washington and Jefferson before 1862 would be over.  Then there would be 1863, 1864, and 1865 to follow, running the tally of destruction ever higher.  In 1865, near the end of the war, Abraham Lincoln summed up in his marvelous second inaugural address—for a term of office that would last the rest of his life, less than 6 weeks—“Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. . . . Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding.”

All Americans today benefit from that profound victory and the others that brought an end to the rebellion and that upheld the Constitution.  It was a strange and new thing for the world that the words on a piece of paper, written by men of an earlier generation, could create a system of government and affect so many lives.  It was the lives of those who fought to sustain the Constitution that gave it that life, men who insisted on living by those words and organizing a free society within the protections of its provisions.

The same is true today, as with each generation:  we are called upon to uphold that Constitution, those words on a piece of paper, and hand it on down, as strong as ever, to our children.  Those men who died at Shiloh cannot do our work for us today.  Neither can the men who fought and died in Europe and the South Pacific and on many other places of battle.  Just as important as those who died to preserve the Constitution are those who have lived to maintain the Constitution.  They, however, could do no more than pass that freedom under constitutional law to us.  We have it today.  What will we do with it?

As Ronald Reagan taught in his 1967 inaugural address as Governor of California,

Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction.

We must not let it become extinct.  It is under challenge from enemies without, who hate the freedom and worth of the individual enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and it is endangered by those within the nation—some in very high places of power and responsibility— who see the Constitution as a barrier in the way of their plans to replace individual rights, value, initiative, and worth with the ages old system where the government and the governors run the lives of the people and decide who wins, who loses, who gets what, and how much.

Our forebears fought a revolution and crafted a new system in the New World to get away from that rule by the few.  The lesson we need to learn anew, is that it is the job of the many individuals who make up each generation to win that freedom again, because there will always be those eager to impose their will on others and use and direct and take the resources that they themselves did not earn, who will want to have their way with other people’s money and other people’s lives.

No one’s sacrifice is the same as anyone else’s.  Read no unfairness in that, because to sacrifice is to absorb unfairness.  But we cannot avoid the call to sacrifice.  Not even Christ, the greatest of all, could.

As we celebrate Easter we should remember the sacrifices of the Savior, by which He absorbed all unfairness.  Those sacrifices made Easter possible, by which all that is wrong is overcome and ultimate freedom bought for each person born into this world.  We are privileged by Christ to be given the chance to join in that effort to preserve and extend the blessings of freedom to our families, our friends, and to people we do not know and may never meet.

At Gethsemane, then Golgotha, and from the Garden Tomb, Christ has created the framework that makes freedom possible.  He inspired the founders who built a nation of freedom as the beacon to all mankind that it has been for over 200 years.  As our Easter worship, let us take up the last call given by Abraham Lincoln to the nation as the Constitution was reaffirmed in struggle, who recognized the great value of America for the world:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Of Ronald Reagan and Freedom in the Middle East

The 100th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, the greatest President of the Twentieth Century and one of the three or four greatest Presidents in American history, is a fit time to consider what makes for social freedom and civil liberty. We need to have a clear understanding of such freedom if we are to make heads or tails of the current civil turmoil in the Middle East. American foreign policy since the days of Woodrow Wilson has all too often gotten this wrong.

First of all, we need to understand that the right to vote is an important but far from the most important of civil rights. Demagogues and dictators have long demonstrated their ability to survive and even control elections. Never underestimate the willingness of desperate electorates to vote away their freedoms. From Germans in the 1930s to Venezuelans in the Twenty-first Century we have seen voters elect leaders who promised to exchange liberty for stability. Soviet citizens and the citizens of the old corrupt European communist countries all had the right to vote. In fact, they could be punished for failing to vote. Free suffrage may be an essential part of liberty, but it can also coexist with tyranny.

Consider that our Declaration of Independence pointed to far more important purposes of free government: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What makes these more important is that these are all individual freedoms, founded on the recognition of the worth of the individual. While votes are counted and effective only in mass numbers, life is an individual matter, as is the liberty to use that life to pursue happiness as the individual sees fit.

Of equal importance is how the Founding Fathers sought to secure liberty. They trusted the safety of liberty to the rule of law. The signers of the Declaration of Independence believed that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men”. The purpose of government is to establish and enforce the rule of law on which freedom rests, freedom that is lost when anarchy and mob rule prevail just as surely as when kings and dictators impose their will on their subjects. The American Founders recognized and proclaimed a new idea, the idea that when government strays from the rule of law, or, in their words, “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Bearing these principles in mind, we can be prepared to evaluate what is going on in the Middle East. Without argument, nearly all of the governments of the Middle East—with the important exceptions of the governments of Israel and of Turkey and perhaps the new government of Iraq—are tyrannies, where powerful dictators or oligarchies impose their will on their populations who are unable to trust in the law to protect them in the enjoyment of individual liberties. The cronies of these rulers, whether family or friends, are given special privileges to take property, impose prices, control businesses, and engage in wide varieties of corruption, impoverishing their nations in the process.

It is no accident that standards of living in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere continue to be depressed, while nearby Israel, with virtually no natural resources and almost no land—but a constitution that protects individual rights under the rule of law—is a comparative economic and social paradise. In fact, Israel’s prosperity based on individual freedom seems to be a fundamental source of the hatred of neighboring despotic regimes, not unlike the reason why despots have persistently fomented hatred of the United States.

The question is, will the rioters in the streets seek to replace despotism and crony capitalism with individual rights and liberties, founded upon the rule of law, or will they merely replace one despotism with another and more pervasive one? Iran gives us one chilling example. Can we really say that the totalitarianism of the Iranian mullahs is better than the dictatorship of the Shah?

Watch which liberties the emerging leaders of the rioters advocate. Surely they will call for elections. So did the Red Army in the wake of World War II, as did the ayatollahs in Tehran. But what about the rights to private property, what about freedom of worship, what about security from arbitrary arrest, the ability to start up and own a business and enjoy the fruits of individual labor. Most importantly, look for independent courts with authority and power to protect the rights of minorities and individuals. These are the rights that America should advocate and the promotion and protection of these rights that we should foster. When we have, in places like Poland, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and West Germany, the results have been sustainable freedom and dramatic prosperity.

Not quite 30 years ago, on March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan spoke to a big labor union meeting of the AFL-CIO. He explained why the U.S. economy was on the rocks and how to get it going again, stronger than ever. The problem, he said, was that America was not acting like America:

We’ve gone astray from first principles. We’ve lost sight of the rule that individual freedom and ingenuity are at the very core of everything that we’ve accomplished. Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.

A few minutes after that speech, President Reagan was shot. He recovered, and because he recovered and persisted with his policies of returning power to the individuals, America recovered. His policies led to America winning the Cold War and succeeded in a dramatic economic boom that lasted for almost 20 years. His advice, pointing to the fundamental principles for the success of America, are just as important now as they were then, just as important for us in the United States as they are for the people of the Middle East.