CommentsONE MAN’S OPINION-The Founding Fathers fashioned a republic based upon thousands of years of Western history where the consent of the people had been ignored.
Looking at the Bible, they saw no enlightened form of government and looking at Ancient Greece and Rome, they saw repetitive social disintegration. In fact, the classical political philosophers thought that the average person was too dim-witted and too swayed by myopic passions to be trusted with self-government. They also realized that platitudes and exhortations for decency were worthless when combating the evils of accumulated power. Power does whatever it wants. The only thing which controls power is another power.
Neither the monarchs (a dictator is a non-inherited monarch) nor mobocracy was acceptable. Thus, they fashioned a constitutional republic where the ultimate law was based on a self-evident truth: Each individual has certain unalienable rights including Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Governments are instituted to secure these rights, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Today, virtually no one cares about Aristotle, Hobbes, or John Locke. Many people operate under the delusion that we are a Christian nation based on the Bible, and thus, we should be displaying the Ten Commandments on public buildings and enacting religious dogmas as law. The Constitution, however, created a secular nation which expressly excluded religion including Christianity from the government.
Today People Invoke the Constitution While Trashing it to its Core
Nancy Pelosi, far more than Donald Trump, trashes the Constitution to the point of secular immorality. Pelosi has done far more harm to the Constitution than Trump who in July 2019 made the absurd claim that the U.S. Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president.”
The founding fathers wrote extensively about Trumpish men who would come to power and that they posed an existential threat to the Republic and an individual’s inalienable rights. For this reason, the constitution provides for impeachment. The Federalist Papers counterbalanced the abuse of power by an egomaniacal chief executive against the power of Congress to remove such an individual from office. Although they knew the threat that factions posed to decent government, they did not foresee political parties or that one person could dictatorially dominate one House of Congress. For them, Congress was composed of individuals who would exercise individual judgment.
In the July 2, 2018 issue of the New Yorker, Yascha Mounk’s article, “The Rise of McPolitics,” explained the disastrous error that allowed someone like Nancy Pelosi to dominate an entire political party. As long as “America’s main political parties remained pragmatic associations of local interests,” intra-party compromises were required to hold together a national government. The Northern Democrats who favored rapid civil rights progress had to cooperate with the Southern Democrats who opposed such legislation. The result was a succession of centrist governments. The downside of the centrist government was the slow recognition that “all men have inalienable rights” applied to all men including Blacks, women, Jews, etc.
The Judiciary was designed to apply the Constitution so that the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights were applied to all individuals. The constitutional principle was simple -- the government may classify no person by his or her ascriptive group and then impose special rights or special liabilities. In other words, no child may be denied the right to attend his neighborhood school on the basis of his ascriptive status, e.g. race, color, creed, national origin, religion, etc. There was no need to enumerate the groups since treating any individual according any ascriptive group was unconstitutional.
An ascriptive group is where membership is based on a factor other than achievement. A group that only has members of a certain race or sex is an example of an ascriptive group; criminals are not an ascriptive group as they earned their liabilities.
Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), ignored the individual but instead started us down this path where the ascriptive group was all important. The Supreme Court veered away from the Declaration and the Constitution in favor group rights – a notion the founding fathers had resoundingly rejected. Discrimination ceased to be the impairment of an individual’s constitutional rights, but rather was measured by the impact on his group. Segregation was unconstitutional because Black children tested worse than white children when the schools were segregated. The reason the Supreme Court went in this bizarre direction is that the Menninger Clinic of Topeka provided much of the funding for the legal challenge to the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas and the Clinic wanted to promote its psychological studies that said segregation was psychologically harmful to Blacks. Under the Brown Decision, if Black children do better in segregated schools, then segregation would be constitutional – a horrible constitutional proposition.
The proper constitutional opposition to segregation had been enunciated by Justice Harlan in his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537 (1896). Segregation infringed on an individual’s inalienable and constitutional right of liberty. The Constitution does not look at the group to which a person belongs and then decide if that group has special protection. Protection is not afforded to groups but to individuals. Because segregation separates individuals based on ascriptive status, by its very nature segregation is unconstitutional.
The nation has never recovered from this gross departure from the Constitution. Yascha Mounk explains one consequence -- the fashioning of homogeneous political parties to promote the group rights claims of certain ascriptive groups. The concept of compromise was rejected as a weakness. Purity of cause was paramount.
As night follows day, individual inalienable rights waned while Group Rights waxed strong. Intra-party dissent was verboten, so that the hall monitors of extreme right and the extreme left could make certain that there were no moderates in the hallways of Congress or elsewhere. Another casualty was the role the U.S. Constitution plays in American political life.
In the era of rabid Group Rights, one cannot honor the founding documents based on individual inalienable rights. As the law professors vainly tried to tell the House Dems during the impeachment hearing, impeachment -- not elections -- is the constitutional remedy for Donald Trump and his megalomania. It is oxymoronic to resort to elections to remove a person like Trump since the Constitution expressed created Congress’s power of impeachment to take the process away from elections and to allocate to Congress the power to thwart a would-be tyrant. Pelosi’s power rests in elections and with the new lock-step unity in the Democrat Party, she was able to trash the constitutional process of impeachment by prematurely stopping the fact gathering.
Pelosi could see that it was highly likely that Trump would be Nixonized before the end of 2019 if the fact gathering continued. Various GOP members were clearly signaling from whom they wanted to hear and the documents they wanted to see in order to have the public support to tell Trump to leave. If that happened, then Pelosi’s power would be shattered. She would have no one against whom to rail. Rather, the GOP’s stock would rise, since it had finally done its duty. While the GOP would lose the Alt-Right, it stood to make huge gains in the center, especially among white educated women.
Pelosi’s chickens are coming home to roost faster than anticipated. Now the person who stopped the fact gathering is complaining that the Senate will not do more fact gathering! When will Dems realize that Pelosi is as much a threat to the Union as is Trump?
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Photo: Doug Mills/New York Times. Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
