mystoryorhistory

When the British army marched out of Yorktown after surrendering to a colonial upstart nation in October of 1781 they shouldered arms and marched into defeat, supposedly, playing a tune called the “World Turned Upside Down.”  I would assume it was a popular 18^th Century ditty at the time or just maybe apropo for the moment. But this was a truly a moment when the bottom rail was on top.  A change in the world order took place.  Shortly after the American Revolution there was a far more radical French Revolution that decapitated many French traditions that easily dated back to the 14^th Century. France literally lost its head with change.

I feel that we all should bone up on the “World Turned Upside Down.” The world is changing quickly with the Covid-19. Add the recent cries of racism to the turbulence swirling around us and we are  like an airplane in a flat spin. We see people rushing to judgment on all sorts of issues.  Opening businesses back up and then reeling them back in. We have turned simple traditional health practices like wearing a mask into a public debate on civil liberties equivalent to free speech.  One woman, complaining at a Florida county commission meeting,  compared wearing a mask to wearing underwear. Everything has got to breathe, she said.  This really has me asking which end is really up. It is hard to believe that this is the same country that helped wipe out smallpox and could vaccinate its citizens from polio. That we could build health care systems and sewage systems to control dysentery, yellow fever, and cholera.

Americans complaining about public health and safety concerns is nothing new.  In the 1970s we squawked about seat belt buzzers and bells in our cars reminding us to buckle up.  Finally states started passing mandatory seat belt laws. But we resisted, feeling it was our God-given-right to implant our face on the windshield of our car when we experienced a sudden and abrupt stop.  I recall a classic bumper sticker in Florida from the 1980s.   It simply said: “I’ll Buckle Up When Bundy Buckles Up. It’s the Law.” This was in reference to serial killer Ted Bundy, who like so many of our country’s conmen, miscreants, weirdos and psychopaths end up in Florida. Some even get elected governor.  Bundy spent 10 years on death row after being convicted of his killing spree in Florida. He kept appealing his date with the hangman.  Finally on January 24, 1989 he was executed in “Old Sparky,” Florida’s electric chair.  This was an era before drugs were used to execute a death penalty sentence.

It’s ironic how we Americans embrace change.  Sometimes we move fairly quickly.  We went from price tags being stamped on canned goods at the grocery store to bar codes, chip reading credit cards, and now smart phone payments.  Who writes a check? But the Covid has turned businesses upside down.  We have  airlines filling the coach section of the plan at 60 percent capacity and first class at 50 percent. What happened to overbooking? Baseball is talking about  a 60-game schedule.  In fact, the Covid may finally kill off the 150 year tradition of pitchers batting in baseball altogether.  The National League, probably the last league in the world not to use a Designated Hitter to replace the pitcher in the lineup, is finally coming around in a short season. Sometime change is slow in coming. Golf tournaments are back, too. Without crowds and some obnoxious fan screaming his guts out to be heard on TV: “In the hole!”

Without a doubt small businesses have been sliced into the the high fescue grass. There are so many small businesses “in the hole” it is doubtful they will ever reach the fairway let alone the green. Forget par. And Congress is stuck on a third stimulus package because it will increase a multi-trillion-dollar deficit. Get with the program.  We quit counting after billions. This reminds me of the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when they are contemplating jumping off the cliff and into the river below to escape the posse that has been following them for days and now has them trapped. In  fit of desperation a reluctant Sundance tells Butch he can’t swim. Butch laughs and tries to reassure Sundance that the fall will kill us. Well, we fell off the fiscal cliff 10 years ago and survived. Meanwhile some poor schmuck, who cannot “tax and spend” his way into  or out of debt cannot pull $1,000 together to stave off eviction and a life on the street is drowning.

We have been told that the Covid would miraculously be gone in the summer heat in a belief businesses could attempt to open. While many are crying for more money to help businesses there is a huge demand to defund the police.  In Seattle a group even took over a police precinct. Some have called them terrorists, anarchists; but nobody has called them entrepreneurs.  But why not? In a time when things are going upside down, opening up your own cop shop goes beyond a Libertarian belief. It is pure Reaganism. It is  getting government out of your back pocket.  It is good for everybody. It is teaching a man to fish for his dinner. It is putting your money or lack of it where your mouth is. I am surprised more conservatives have not embraced this concept.

What is equally disturbing is the systemic overt and benign racism that is flipping old embraced beliefs and traditions. For more than 150 years since the end of the Civil War Americans have either blatantly ignored or just turned a blind eye to our country’s racial inequality.  The country’s check engine lights that have been lit up for so long but we keep driving.  The state of Mississippi is just now removing the Confederate Battle flag from its canton on its state flag. As much as Robert E, Lee is (or was) beloved it really is time for him and his fellow Confederates to come down off their pedestals. They have finally had their 150 years of fame turned to shame–to say the least.

These racist icons are going off all across the nation, and in some cases physically being pulled down. Statues in town squares or in front of courthouses that we drove by every day, never really paying attention to,  have gone from amber to red to being gone.  Those statues are making Americans question the past and how it influences the present. As much as we may try to deny it, the old plantation belief still survives in our nation’s consciousness.

As conquering heroes at the end of World War II we had no problem turning Germany and Japan upside down by eradicating Nazi fascism and Japanese imperialism. It is easy to enforce change from the end of gun barrel.  The Union Armies may have drove old Dixie down, destroying a slave economy.  But it did not institute lasting economic and equality changes that the country needed. The South, however, managed to throw off the yoke of Reconstruction and reestablish and institutionalize slavery beyond the plantation in all but name. What happened was the infusing of segregation, suppression and inequality deep into our country’s muscle memory. Today, we are now dealing with up righting the changes that should have taken place 150 years ago.

 

The recent deaths of Blacks at the hands of police has stoked up  the concept of equality into a bonfire with protests and demonstrations across the nation stating that Black Lives Matter. The problem is that equality got buried in Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution way back in 1787. Better known as the three-fifths compromise, counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for tax and representation purposes. 

Most middle school students are familiar with John Locke and Montesquieu’s concepts on equal justice and the rule of law. These concepts moved us away from autocratic laws, orders and decrees put forth arbitrarily from on high.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776  in our Declaration of Independence: “that all men are created equal.”  Strangely that concept went out the window in just over a decade when 50 of the best minds in the original 12 states (Rhode Island did not send a delegation to Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia) tried to form a more perfect union with “We the People.”  The Constitution was intended to break away from a loose confederation of independent states serving in their best interests to a federation of states with a stronger national government instead.  These men (sorry ladies it was different era and  a battle to be fought later) hammered out a series of compromises on how a new government should be formed. 

The Continental Congress grappled with the three-fifths ratio but could not amend the Articles of Confederation because it took an unanimous decision of all 13 states to approve amendments. The 1787 Constitution is comprised of compromises. The three-fifths compromise found its way into the approved Constitution. It is the a compromise that negates the Jeffersonian concept that all men are created and ties voting and representation to wealth and human ownership. After all the South was operating under a slave economy that profited from cash crops like tobacco and cotton.

Slavery and racial inequality is our original sin.  It started with the Native Americans and continues today still causing  racial, gender and socio-economic problems. As a nation we hardly got out of the starting gate in dropping the old British social class structure before we put a numerical value on people. While many other groups in our country may have been undervalued for doing work “Americans” won’t do, none has had a numerical value placed on them, except Blacks. It could be argued that as long as one group is being valued less it devalues everybody. The opposite holds true, too. A multi-millionaire sex offender can push through a revolving door of justice and walk right in and out of jail while others are put into the gulag to rot.  It puts us all on some sort of nebulous sliding scale of justice instead of a balanced set of scales. Equal justice under the law becomes a tilted roulette wheel that excludes many from sitting at the table let alone buying a chip in a rigged game

Now some scholars say the three-fifths compromise was a way to appease the South to accept the new Constitution. Had those men in Philadelphia not addressed slavery at all, a slave would not have been counted as anything.  This would have given real meaning to Roger B. Taney’s ruling in the Dred Scott Supreme Court case where he ruled that slaves were property. This went beyond three-fifths. It negated the belief that slaves were even people. And Taney’s decision was in 1856, almost 80 years after the ratification of the Constitution.

The three-fifths compromise allowed the South to count three-fifths of each slave as a person for representation and tax purposes. This really turns out to be a halfway measure in dealing with the economic wealth slaves were generating for the nation.  It will fester up in the Union through a series of additional compromises until the first shots are fired at Fort Sumter.  The three-fifths compromise assured that from the 1800 election to the 1856 election that there would be enough Electoral College votes in the South that a pro-slavery president would always be elected. The Senate, by design, was always evenly split between Free and Slave states. It was not until the North’s population grew to a point were the balance of power in the House was shifting northward that Northern population growth broke the South’s voting grip in the Electoral College and brought in the first anti-slave president, Abraham Lincoln, a Republican.

This really is not hard to understand when we look at say one state: South Carolina, the first state to leave the Union in 1860. In 1790 South Carolina’s Black population was about 43 percent of its total population. By 1860 the Black population was closing in on 60 percent. Under the three-fifths compromise that Black population would equal close to 248,000 people; just under half of South Carolina’s total population for tax and representation purposes. Black lives have always mattered. What mattered was how they were counted.

Once the Civil War was over and the South and slavery were defeated, counting freed Blacks was not the problem. It was a problem of suppressing a large portion of the Black population. Two concepts that needed to be suppressed were the one-man-one-vote concept and equal justice under the law.  By 1900, states like Mississippi and South Carolina had Black populations that were nearly 60 percent. Other Deep South states  had Black populations well over 40 percent.  For the defeated ruling elite of the South, this was not the sort of democracy or society they envisioned. Rule of law became a rule of repression.

Thirty-five years after the end of the Civil War Jim Crow laws are firmly in place and a rebirth of Confederate pride builds up with statues honoring those who fought in the “Lost Cause.” A Confederate mystification sweeps the South. And with it, it brings in a new breed of Klansmen enforcing laws at the end of a rope. And this, only 25 to 30 years after passing the civil rights amendments: the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. It would take another 65 years for these Amendments to be federally enforced. And many would argue that they are still not being enforced to the full extent of their intentions.

For many, the compromising and suppression is over. The three-fifths compromise may not be in the forefront of today’s protests. But since 1789 when the Constitution was approved it seems that Blacks Americans are still waiting for that other two-fifths to matter.

 

https://www.theusconstitution.org/news/understanding-the-three-fifths-compromise/

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=163

https://www.sciway.net/afam/slavery/population.html

With the passage of the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package it made me wonder where did all those fiscal deficit hawks fly off to. When the whole country falls into the category “too big to fail” the wallet really opens up.  And some economists and financial gurus say it might not be enough. It appears that our governments, state and federal, are overwhelmed on how to move forward in dealing with the pandemic we are facing.

In this shelter-in-place time I found myself taking longs walks. On one of these walks through my neighborhood I came across a lawn filled with political yard signs for the up and coming primary elections. One sign in particular piqued my imagination in today’s pandemic. It was a sign with no candidate’s name posted, just initials, and no party affiliation. It simply said “Constitutional Conservative.” And I thought what is a Constitutional conservative and considered what President Bill Clinton said in his impeachment defense “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

The conundrum  I had with the sign was that it was next to two red signs: one proclaiming  “Make America Great Again” (which makes me wonder when we became not great– maybe just after the first case of coronavirus); and the second red sign simply advertising “Trump 2020.” Nothing personal against President Trump but I never really considered him Constitutional anything.  More of Constitutional Compass in a magnetic storm. But the signs did give me a rough bearing to follow.

It is not my intention to to weigh in on the pros and cons of the Trump Administration or rehash the last three years of political discourse or even the last three months. Much wiser men and women have taken that cross upon their shoulders.  However, what I find puzzling is how to reconcile the past three years; or any three years after the approval of the Constitution for that mater, with the term “Constitutional Conservative. ”  As far as I know this could be a marketing scheme, a sort of joint branding taking place between a nebulous (or obvious) group of Constitutional Conservatives and the Trump name  Maybe its just political happenstance like the Whig party and the Know Nothings way back in the 1850s. We may ask ourselves, How did that work out?

This makes me wonder what Constitutional conservative means in the crisis we are now in. Does a strict view of the Constitution have any bearing on what is going on? In a time of crisis the Constitution tends to get stretched.  Abraham Lincoln took liberties expanding the traditional role of the presidency.  His views on secession differed with the Constitutional viewpoint of say his counterpart, Jefferson Davis, who looked at the Union as a compact of states that could be undone. And Lincoln really waded into constitutionality with his Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in states that left the Union or were in open rebellion against the Union.  But Lincoln kept it all within the guideposts of the rule of law. Lincoln knew the law and he knew where he could bend it with out breaking it. But none the less, he took a lot of heat from the Democrats for the way he conducted the war .

Our Constitution calls for a bicameral legislative body and a Supreme Court to interpret what is constitutional. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mandate a two party system. Unlike other countries with a multitude of parties, particularly those with a Parliamentary form of government, when an election has no majority winner, then various parties come together to form a majority coalition to run the government, as in the recent elections in Israel. Here, in the US, third party ideas get absorbed into one of the main parties. The Tea Party movement, for example,  got pulled into the GOP like a black hole sucking in a nearby planet. Unlike a black hole, where we are not sure what comes out the other end, here on terra firma we get to see the end results.

So who or what is a Constitutional Conservative?  Right off the bat I would say Alexander Hamilton or George Washington.  Washington simply because he was the president of the Constitutional Convention and the first President of the United States. Doing a quick internet search, George’s name does not pop up as Constitutional Conservative. This, despite, the many references to the “intent” of the Founding Fathers. Here again, no Washington but you will find Senator Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan’s smiling faces popping up as disciples of original intent.

From what I can glean a Constitutional Conservative is somebody who believes in in low or no taxes, limited government,  Christian family values, and sees liberals as a threat to American Exceptionalism.  I am going to stop there on American Exceptionalism because that is another political black hole concept that is easy to fly into with no idea where you will come out–that is if you come out. In the short, it looks like the old belt buckle proclaiming God, guns and guts–let’s fight to keep all three.

Once again, it is not my intention to deride conservative values.  But when it comes to taxes what American in their right mind  would turn down the option of legally not paying taxes?  Just look at the lengths the current president has gone to keep his tax returns secret.  It’s called tax evasion. Evading taxes is like avoiding the coronavirus–shelter your returns in a safe place.  Remember,  tax evasion is how the Feds got Al Capone.

We also have to remember we are a country founded on smugglers and tax evaders.  The guy who signed his name so boldly to the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock, was one of the biggest tax cheats in the Colonies.  I am sure if King George III could have gotten a hold of Hancock he would have done several eons in irons as a permanent resident of the Tower.

But avoiding taxes was not just for rich merchants. We even had  western farmers in the early stages of the nation balk at taxes. The Whiskey Rebellion took place from 1791 to 1794 when farmers refused to pay newly levied taxes on whiskey.  Before there was high fructose corn syrup and ethanol, there was corn liquor. A very lucrative way to turn surplus corn into cash. As a Constitutional Conservative, President George Washington, led an army out into Pennsylvania to collect the taxes and put the rebellion down in person.

One of the remarkable qualities of America, and its Constitution, is our Christian values that allowed us to set up a government where religion and politics tried to stay out of each others bailiwick or diocese.  The questioning of one’s beliefs or no belief at all has not pillared anybody at a burning stake. Although there were some fanatical Puritans in pre-constitutional times  roaming around in the late 1600s looking for witches. Here again Christian values have evolved through time with the rule of law.  We no longer hunt witches or Irish immigrant papists down.

As for the “intent” of those who wrote the Constitution,  eleven members of the convention were either slave owners or associated with the “peculiar institution” of slavery. This is the paradox of American exceptionalism.  In one document we proclaim boldly “all men are created equal” and then in another we decide that some men will be considered “three-fifths of a person.” This seems arbitrary. But it is not. All that would change in the Dred Scott decision.   Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s court even went beyond a strict Constitutional conservative decision definitively saying that Dred Scott, a slave, had no rights at all under the Constitution. He turned Scott into property except when it benefited the purposes of their slave owners for tax purposes and representation. Taney and associates were no doubt following a close interpretation of the Constitution. But was this interpretation the intent of all the signers of the Constitution?

Even the founders found ways to get around a strict interpretation of the Constitution.  Alexander Hamilton used the “necessary and proper” clause to get a national bank.  It makes sense.   Congress can coin money, set and collect taxes but there is no mention of banking. Hamilton reasoned that a bank was needed to put the nation’s money in. There was no Goldman and Sachs back then. No Federal Reserve and no quantitative easing.

As much as President Trump proclaims he is a great builder and developer Thomas Jefferson has him beat hands down with the Louisiana Purchase.  Jefferson, who had a strict view of the Constitution, found no Constitutional way to get this land deal done.  But there was a twist in the Constitution.  The president can negotiate treaties.  Looking beyond the limitations, Jefferson made the land deal with Napoleon a treaty. Then got Congress to approve it.  Talk about the art of the deal.

And then there is Andrew Jackson.  I am not sure if this populist president would fall into the Constitutional conservative file or not. He did not, however, look fondly upon Henry Clay’s concept of the American System. Clay proposed using tax revenues from tariffs for internal improvements such as roads, bridges and canals. Jackson felt that funding these sorts of projects, particularly Clay’s Maysville Road Bill that would tie various roads in Kentucky to the Ohio River and the Cumberland Road System, as unconstitutional. Jackson promptly vetoed the bill. Of course there was a deep political animosity between the two political rivals that grew throughout their public life.

It is interesting to note that 120 years later President Dwight Eisenhower took a completely different view. In 1956 Eisenhower signed one of the greatest infrastructure deals in history with the Federal-Aid Highway Act. This act create 41,000 miles of interstate highways  with  I-90 being more than 3,000 miles long running from Seattle to Boston.

So, I am not sure about strictly holding on to old ideas.  There is some comfort in knowing rules hold up over time.  But even baseball has changed. It has a Designated Hitter, football players don’t have to play both ways, basketball has a three point line; and to make sure every call is correct, we now have instant replay review. So much kicking for arguing and kicking dirt on an umpires shoes.

I often think that most people who spout off about the Constitution forget the Preamble part where the purpose of the Constitution is laid out.  With all the yammering about abortion and gun rights we forget that the reason our government was founded was “to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty.”  It is a tall order without a doubt trying to meet these demands. Those who wrote the Constitution during that hot Philadelphia summer had no idea there would be space travel or instantaneous communication.

But now that we are engulfed in a pandemic maybe we should look to the Preamble of our Constitution as a beacon of hope. The government has the task of balancing justice, tranquility, and the general welfare all the while trying secure our liberties.  Is this the time to take a 19th Century approach to a 21st Century problem? Or look forward to progress.

 

 

https://www.ushistory.org/us/24e.asp

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/history.cfm

https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/g2827/7-of-the-longest-us-interstates/

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/01/28/toward-a-constitutional-conservatism/

https://theweek.com/articles/654508/what-exactly-american-exceptionalism

The recent impeachment debate reminds me of why those who wrote the Constitution kept the people as far away as possible from the seat of power. This, despite two of our nation’s founding and guiding documents that are laced with references to “we the people,”but are designed to keep angry farmers with pitchforks away from the county courthouse–as in Shay’s Rebellion. It was also designed to keep greedy despots and tyrants at bay with an impeachment clause.

The Declaration of Independence has slightly more than 1,400 words.  The document is laced with words like fellow citizens, our coasts or we and us. And of course the curse phrase “all men are created equal.” This little phrase so succinct wrapped tight in the logic of  Enlightenment gives us the indefensible “all” not “some” and no indication at all of the royal “we” but” all.” That little phrase has had this country back peddling on a lot issues starting with counting slaves as three-fifths of a person to women’s rights and immigrants rights. Somehow along the way we have managed to rope in non-people and corporate rights, into “We the People.”  Go figure.

The Constitution starts out with “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union…” telling us that government derives its just powers from the people. This is a unique concept that has evolved throughout the centuries but has yet come to full fruition. One of the greatest republics in history was the Roman Republic. It lasted almost 500 years from 509 BC to 27 BC.  But the Romans, like the men who put our Constitution to paper, realized that it was vital to keep the masses as far away as possible from Forum. But yet, the Romans knew how to use the masses to manipulate “public policy”  for personal gain. At times the Roman Republic was rocked with public mayhem, mob murder and several civil wars, which would have been impossible without “we the people.”

The  big difference between the Roman Republic and ours is “We the people” is a fine example of well-reasoned rhetoric.  After all, the men who crafted the new government and the Constitution were educated in the Age of Enlightenment or Reason, which came about 1,700 hundred years–give are take a decade or two–after the fall of the Roman Republic.   The Roman Empire, however, lived on for another 500 years before falling like a straw castle to barbarian hordes whose public policy was pillage and personal gain.

Those who wrote our Constitution looked back to the Roman Republic and Athenian democracy to form a our new government, as witnessed in the Classic Roman-Greco architecture style of a lot of our public buildings. They took many of the ideas from Enlightened thinkers like John Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau, as well. But between all of that, Western Europe experienced a heavy dose of feudalism. I am not sure if feudalism is more of social system than it is a form of government. To quote Merriam-Websters  a government is “a small group of persons holding simultaneously the principal political executive offices of a nation or other political unit and being responsible for the direction and supervision of public affairs.” 

Here is where  things get a bit murky: public affairs. Was there any consideration for public affairs in Medieval Europe?  This social structure of the time started basically with one man at the top:  the king or the crown. What makes public affairs questionable is that the crown handed out land to the nobility. The nobility in turn handed land down to the vassals who in turn worked the land with serf or peasant labor.  Serfs were tied to the land in fealty to the lord and master. This quid pro quo was based on loyalty and obligation to the next guy up on the social rung with not a whole lot coming down. This required nobles to pony up knights, archers and pikemen in the crown’s defense in a semi-military society. This included peasants and any yeoman farmers, and the fruits of their labor, too.

Here is another hitch in this quasi military social structure.  If we assume that a Medieval king was a government (unto himself) then the question is what is public affairs or in the public interest. Granted, we cannot impose 21st Century beliefs on 14th Century man.  It is unfair.  It would be easier said, that any sort of public interest  or public policy was really the crown’s interest or what the king said it was.  There were no polls in the field to gauge public perception on, say, going on a Crusade to the Holy Land; or the public’s views on the Hundred Year’s War where the English House of  Plantagenet fought with the French House de Valois over who would  rule France.  And we think 20 years in Afghanistan is a stretch.

I wonder what  a serf would care about who controlled France? Think about it, this is a person who lived and died five miles from where he was born. That is, unless he got dragooned into the front lines fighting Saracens. Then he probably had the opportunity to die hundreds if not thousands of miles from where he was born, in the interest of one man’s personal gain.  Public policy was really how far a king could go in pursuing his own ambitions.

Eventually, the nobles got fed up with this sort fealty to the king. In 1215 a group of English noblemen sat King John down at Runnymede and had him sign the Magna Carta Libertatum, which translates from Latin the Great Charter of the Liberties.  This is looked as a great moment in history when a group of men tried to check the unbridled power of a king. Interesting the Great Charter does not make too much reference to we the people: the serfs or the peasants.  But it was a start and was just a speed bump in royal self-interest.

If we move ahead about five centuries and shift continents to North America we witness a group of colonials trying to sit a truculent king down with the Olive Branch Petition to discuss their rights as British subjects. The king, being king, saw no advantage in discussing public policies with a group of rebellious, second-class colonial  citizens. One thing that must have chafed the Crown was how the colonials used mobs to intimidate his  tax collectors and other governmental officials, particularly in Boston. In 1715 the British Parliament passed what was officially known as “An Act for Preventing Tumults and Riotous Assemblies.”  We simply know this today as “The Riot Act.” The Act allowed for the quick and speedy dispersal of any group of more than 12 people gathered on the street corner. I am not sure how effective this act was at curbing Boston’s Waterside gangs.

The Sons of Liberty in Boston, could sum up mobs almost at will. They could whip up a rowdy crowd comprised from either the Northend or Southend gangs. These gangs of out-of-work- sailors, rope walkers and local toughs could tar and feather some poor unfortunate British official, ride his feathered  backside out of town and be in the Pub knocking back rum before sun down. This was sending out an intimidating message. It could be the precursor of “Don’t mess with the US.” The Sons of Liberty were very successful in manipulating public opinion with the use of “we the people.” But they were also well aware of the dangers of controlling the wild horses that were pulling their wagons.

There are two interesting points we can gather from the use of mobs to influence public policy. One, is that when it came time to write a Constitution, it was obvious that the people needed to be included, mobs and all. The question is how and what role do the people play in the process without giving them too much power that translates into mob mentality.

One of the ways to dilute the power of the people was the Electoral College. This way of electing the president was sort of letting the “we the people” in through the front door while showing us the back door quickly. The people, however, could elect local officials, members to the House of Representatives but not judges, senators or the president.

The second point is how do the people deal with an unresponsive government official without taking to the streets. The struggle with King George III taught them that they could not count on a loss of  a horseshoe to unhorse a king. Hence, the new Constitution included Biennial elections. It also included an impeachment clause in Article I Section 2 Clause 5.

The one thing that those Enlightened thinkers did not incorporate from the Roman Republic was a Dictator. According to Encyclopedia Britannica a Roman dictator was “a temporary magistrate with extraordinary powers, nominated by a consul on the recommendation of the Senate and confirmed by the Comitia Curiata (a popular assembly).” It is interesting to note that a dictator was nominated and approved “only in times of military and later internal crises.” (It is interesting to note that this is how Hitler became Chancellor of Germany during a time of financial upheaval.)

In theory, a Roman dictator’s  term was only six months or until the crisis passed. The Romans. like English colonials, had toppled Roman kings to form a republic. And like there past Republicans, American colonials feared the unbridled power of a  king.  The Romans, however, saw a need for one man taking charge in a crisis much like when Secretary of State, Al Haig, stepped in for the wounded President Ronald Reagan telling the American people “I am in control here.”

The problem is one man’s crisis could also be his opportunity. An opportunity that could be fudged as in the case of two of the more famous Roman Dictators Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Julius Caesar. Sulla was granted broad powers which included rewriting the constitution. But it was more in the unique way in which he went after his political rivals with proscription.  This was a “judicial process.” All Sulla needed to do was simply post names of people he considered “deplorable.” These undesirables who got tagged with with the term “enemies of the state” risked losing everything including life and limb.  According to the website UNRV.com Sulla’s rule became a bloody affair:  “A reign of terror ensued with rewards offered for the death or capture of any name on the list.”  The end result was “as many as 40 senators and 1,600 members of the equestrian class (the property owning social class just below senators) were murdered.”

For those who found themselves on the top of his hit list:  “There was simply no place to hide or run. People taking refuge in the temples were murdered; others were lynched by the Roman mob. An intricate network of spies kept Sulla informed and at his whim, tracked down anyone who might be considered an enemy of the state.”

Caesar’s popularity as a dictator took a slightly different turn and ended up with him flat on the Senate floor, bleeding away the last remnants of a Republic, that eventually gave rise to the Roman Empire.

 

It should not come as a surprise that those Enlightened thinkers who wrote the Constitution put the beginning of the impeachment process in the  people’s chamber of the Congress: The House of Representatives and not the Senate. It is  interesting to note just about the time these Enlightened thinkers were writing our Constitution  the reign of terror was being nurtured in the beginnings of the French Revolution. It was mob rule on steroids and  guillotine. Four years after the ratification of our Constitution the French lopped the head off head of their king and displayed it for all to see.

The impeachment threshold is a major cliff to climb. And yes, it does nullify an Electoral College election, which sounds a hell of lot more civil than putting a ruler’s head on a pike. The Electoral College vote is one of the few elections in the world where having a majority of a popular vote can have you coming in second. Impeachment is the people’s way of rectifying an election through their representatives. It is “We the People” trying to rein in the reign of a president who may be acting more in his personal interest than the public’s.  It is a way of keeping a waterside mob forming onto Boston wharf, storming onto  the Beaver, Dartmouth, and Eleanor and chucking 342 tea chests into the harbor.

As Winston Churchill said: Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

 

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/congress-adopts-olive-branch-petition

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/adolf-hitler-is-named-chancellor-of-germany

https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/feudalism.html

http://sageamericanhistory.net/colonies_empire/topics/enlighten.htm

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/20/the-rule-of-history

https://www.unrv.com/empire/lucius-cornelius-sulla.php

https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/reelect.php