FOUNDING FATHERS—-AND OTHERS—-FEARED AMERICA WOULD NOT SURVIVE
BY
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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The
Founding Fathers knew that self-government was difficult and arduous.
Benjamin Franklin said the Founders were bestowing to future
generations, “A Republic if you can keep it.”
At
the end of the Constitutional Convention, George Washington said, “I do
not expect the Constitution to last more than twenty years.” Today,
the U.S. has the oldest written Constitution in the world. The
Constitution owes longevity to principles such as federalism and a
strict separation of powers. Fear of an all powerful executive
dominated the Constitutional Convention. They had, after, just defeated
King George lll in a brutal war.
The
Founding Fathers also feared that political factions would tear the
country apart. The Framers of the Constitution omitted political
parties from the nation’s founding document. They desperately wanted to
avoid the divisions that had ripped England apart in the bloody civil
wars of the 17th century. Many of them saw political parties——or
“factions” as they called them—-as corrupt relics of the monarchical
British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly
democratic government.
“It
was not that they didn’t think of parties,” says Willard Sterne
Randall, Professor Emeritus of History at Champlain College and
biographer of six of the Founding Fathers. “just the idea of a party
brought back bitter memories to some of them.”
Alexander
Hamilton once called political parties “the most fatal disease” of
popular government. In Federalist 10, Hamilton wrote that “one of the
functions of a constitutional union” should be “its tendency to break
and control the violence of faction.”
In
fact, when Washington ran unopposed to win the first presidential
election in the nation’s history in 1789, he chose Jefferson for his
Cabinet so it would be inclusive of differing political viewpoints.
Prof.Randall notes that, “I think he had been warned if he didn’t have
Jefferson in it, then Jefferson might topple the government.”
With
Jefferson as Secretary of State and Hamilton as Treasury Secretary, two
competing visions for America developed into the nation’s first two
political parties. In 1791, Madison and Jefferson joined forces in
forming what would become the Democratic Republican Party—-largely in
response to Hamilton’s programs, such as the federal government’s
assumption of the debts of the states and the establishment of a
national banking system.
All
through history, philosophers have predicted that democratic societies
could not survive into the future. Thomas Babbington Macaulay, for
example, in 1857 lamented,, “I have long been convinced that
institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or
civilization or both.” Looking to America, he declared that, “Either
some Caesar or Napolean will,seize the reins of government with a
strong hand; or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid
waste by barbarians…as the Roman Empire was…with this difference—-that
your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country
by your institutions.”
More
than 200 years ago, the British historian Alexander Tytler provided
this assessment: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of
government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote
themselves largess out of the public Treasury. From that moment on, the
majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits
from the public Treasury—-with the result that democracy collapses over
a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship.”
Under
both Democrats and Republicans, the separation of powers has eroded and
the power of the executive has expanded dramatically, just what the
Founding Fathers did their best to prevent. Perhaps the most dramatic
example of the traditional authority of Congress being ignored and
superseded by executive action relates to the power to declare war.
Can
the United States be committed to war without a declaration of war by
Congress? In his volume, “The Way We Go To War,” Merlo Pusey wrote:
“In 1787, the Founding Fathers resolved that it could not be, and the
country held to that principle with little deviation for a century and a
half. In recent years, however, the President has been exercising the
power to make war with alarming consistency. One-man decisions
involving the lives of citizens and the fate of the Nation have become
the rule at a time when the President has at his command more power than
any human being has ever had.”
Despite
the Constitutional mandate that It is the responsibility of the
Congress to declare war, Congress has not done so since Pearl Harbor.
The Executive alone has taken us to war in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan,
Iraq and elsewhere. This is the opposite of what the Framers of the
Constitution clearly wrote into law. Needless to say, it is not the
only Constitutional mandate largely violated at the present time.
It
is extraordinary that our Constitution has survived for almost 250
years. But it is under constant attack by those involved in our
political life in both,parties. Think of the physical assault on the
U.S.Capitol by those who did not want to accept the results of the 2000
election. This attack felt personal to me, since I once had an office
in the Capitol,when I worked as Assistant to the Research Director of
the House Republican Conference.
That
seems like a different era in our political life. Two members of
Congress who went on to be President, Reps. George H.W. Bush and Gerald
Ford, served on our committee. They did not view the Democrats as
“enemies,” as so many in both
parties now do with
their adversaries. Instead, they sought to form coalitions with the
Democrats and convince them that the legislation we were developing was
good for the country.
I
remember President Reagan. I served as a member of his transition team
at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We prepared a report
calling for the creation of a genuinely color blind society. President
Reagan did not view Democrats as “enemies.” He formed a close
friendship with Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House. When
Reagan was shot in an assassination attempt, one of his first visitors
to his hospital room was Tip O’Neill. The recent movie about Reagan
captures a scene of the two men reciting a prayer in the hospital room,
which was described by one reviewer as, “Two Irishmen at prayer.”
Hopefully, we can look forward to a time when Republican and Democratic
leaders can once again be friends, however much they may disagree on
one issue or another.
0ur
Constitutional system would not have survived 250 years—-longer than
any other government in today’s world—-if those in competing political
parties had treated one another as “enemies,” as,too many are doing in a
destructive manner today.
If
our system is to continue, it is important to remember that
Republicans and Democrats, working together, won World War II and the
Cold War and advanced civil rights. Working together, and making
necessary compromises, there is no limit to what we can do. Hopefully,
our political life will return to the era I remember when I worked in
the U.S.Senate, the House of Representatives and the White House. That
era started with racial segregation and moved on to see a Black
president elected—-and re-elected. If anyone suggested that we would
live to see such a thing in the years I was in college in the segregated
South, he would have been called mad. But it happened. Working
together, we can accomplish extraordinary things, as we have done
steadily in our history.