Perpetuating False Myths: The US Constitution

As the Republican Party continues its campaign to hold the Nation hostage as a means of forcing their radical program down the throats of the American people they depend on the propagation of many myths that serve to justify both their programs and their tactics.

Many of these myths turn around our founding fathers and their intent in the creation of the Constitution. We hear over and over again, until by the mere use of repetition, it becomes a truism, that the purpose of the Constitution was to limit the powers of the Federal government. Nothing could be further from the truth!

At the time that the Constitutional convention was called, the thirteen states that had won independence from Britain, were in a very loose alliance under a document called the Articles of Confederation, which had been agreed to by the Continental Congress on November 15,1777, but which had not been ratified until 1781. The War of Independence ended in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris. The Constitutional Convention convened four years later in 1787, and was convened because the Articles of Confederation did not confer sufficient powers on the Federal government and was causing gridlock. Among its many weaknesses was the fact that it could only be amended by unanimous vote, and that it did not have the power to prevent the states from acting in their own individual interests, instead of in the interests of the whole, e.g., “Rhode Island's imposing taxes on all traffic passing through it on the post road that linked all the states.”

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“Virginian James Madison has been called the Father of the Constitution. He arrived in Philadelphia for the Convention almost two weeks early so that he could start thinking about what he wanted the Convention to accomplish. From his point of view, there were a few main problems with the Confederation. The states were under no obligation to pay their fair share of the national budget; they violated international treaties with abandon; they ran roughshod over the authority of the Congress; and they violated each other's rights incessantly.”

See here.

As can readily be seen, from this history, the founding fathers, and Madison in particular, did not draft the Constitution in order to limit the powers of the Federal Government or to create gridlock, as a front-page article in the New York Times’ Week in Review contends under the title of “Standstill Nation."

The Constitution was intended to do away with the gridlock of the Articles of Confederation, and to decrease the power of the states. Contentions so often heard to the contrary are not only misleading, but downright false. The New York Times, “that paragon of liberalism” is simply playing into the false paradigm promulgated and perpetuated by dint of repetition by the Republican party in order to justify its program of emasculating the Federal government, and in fact emasculating all government, in so far as it tries to serve the vast majority of its citizens who have not been fortunate enough to acquire great wealth.

The New York Times article propounds a notion that in order to create gridlock the Founding Fathers created two Houses. While the existence of two Houses certainly does not further the smooth functioning of government, it is nothing short of silly to suggest that they were created for that purpose. This among many of the other myths propounded ignores the fact that the document was not the product of careful evaluation of all its possible consequences, but rather the product of endless compromise. There were those who felt that the legislative branch should simply be representative of the individual states, and therefore the Senate was created giving each state regardless of its size, two Senators, who were to be selected, not by the people, but by the legislatures of the individual states. See Article I, Section 3 of the US Constitution (This was not changed until 1913 when the 17th Amendment provided for the election of Senators by popular vote.)

Others felt that the people, according to their number, should be in control of the legislature of the United States, and argued for what came to be the House of Representatives.

The creation of the two Houses was the compromise worked out to satisfy these contending factions, not as the Times article contends, to create gridlock. What utter nonsense!!

In any case, today’s gridlock is not so much the result of the existence of the two Houses but rather the result of one of our parties being determined to use parliamentary tactics to thwart the will of the majority, and impose its will on the Nation. Toward this end they have created non-constitutional requirements to pass legislation, having, for example, instituted the 60 vote rule in the Senate, a requirement nowhere to be found in the Constitution. (While the filibuster was used before it became a tool of party policy, it was used only by individuals or small groups, most frequently to thwart civil rights legislation. It was not until fairly recently that it became a tool of one of the major parties, creating a new hitherto unknown requirement of sixty votes to pass any legislation or confirm any Presidential appointment.)

Similarly Tea Partiers and Republicans in general, keep relying on the provisions of the US Constitution and its first ten amendments, totally ignoring the 17 amendments that have followed, unless they happen to favor their agenda. Most particularly, they would like to negate the 14th amendment and take us to an antebellum era. The Civil War was fought, the secessionists and state righters lost, and the 14th amendment is the law of the land, and in so far as it contradicts the provisions of the tenth amendment, it overrides that amendment.

What the Times and other so called liberal newspapers are doing is allowing the "Right" to dismiss any liberal sounding article or columns as just the "usual liberal" views, while taking the many Right wing fulminations that come from the page of the Times as, "even the Times says," making it sound as the ultimate affirmation of falsehoods and myths.

What the media should be doing, is setting the record straight, shining a light on truth, and exposing lies, instead of trying to prove its non-partisanship and its non-liberal bona fides by propounding lies and feeding into the myths that support the agenda of one party and a fanatical group of radicals trying to impose their will by non-Constitutional and reckless means.