What did our Founders give us?\u00a0 What are we doing with that legacy?\u00a0 What should we do in the future?<\/p>\n
Under the Constitution, the new Union was organized on a federal model of decentralized authority.\u00a0 Although obligated to observe common federal or national commitments, the individual states were free to organize themselves as mini-republics along\u00a0 politically democratic lines; to maintain their own customs, religions and mores; to write their own local laws, to raise and maintain their own armies (militias and national guard); and to impose their own taxes.\u00a0 Each was self governing and independent, as they had been before the Union, with the exception that they could not make war on one another \u2026 the Federal Courts would keep the peace and harmony.\u00a0 Even the federal obligation to provide military forces for the common defense varied in number and kind from state to state.<\/p>\n
Out of the cauldron of the Revolutionary War and the un-workability of the Articles of Confederation emerged a new sense of identity and nationalism.\u00a0 The several States experienced the self-awareness of being a nation, of being one people with a common fate, developed from the common experience of a war for survival that had produced a new political order.<\/p>\n
That sense of being one people, under a political system designed to maximize the great diversity of the land and its peoples, allowed each state, each community, and its citizens to contribute their particular values, experiences, traditions, resources, and talents to a new national identity and psyche.<\/p>\n
The genius of the American constitutional system was in recognizing not only the populace, but who they were, where they were, what they did and how they did it.\u00a0 The system they devised gave due deference to population and its passions, but imposed a check on those passions by venerating the contributions of property and commerce to our prosperity.\u00a0 The will of the majority was tempered by the rights of the minority.\u00a0 In the national government, in the United States Senate, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire and the frontier States, sat together as equals to Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and the other populous States.\u00a0 The Union could have never survived without the input of the little, sparsely populated states; those who provided the inputs that informed the urbanites of the tribulations of fire, flood, weather, savages, hardship, pestilence and disease involved in the travails of supplying them with food, fiber, minerals and timber for their enterprises.<\/p>\n
The system conceived by the Founders worked well and so state governments, as was guaranteed under Section 4 of Article 4 of the Constitution instituted similar Republican forms of government to give the same deference to the similar diversity within their states.<\/p>\n
All went well for over 160 years until a Progressive and revisionist Supreme Court decided, against all logic or historical fact, that when the States ratified the 14th<\/sup> Amendment that it was their<\/span><\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 intention to do away with the republican form in their governments.<\/p>\n The consequences, those intended by the Progressive plotters behind this decision and those unintended and unforeseen, of the Court\u2019s decision were not readily apparent at first, but now we are beginning to see them.\u00a0 The federal Courts totally ignore county boundaries, and their reasons that they are where they are, when some unengaged judge mandates who will represent whom.\u00a0 Because the members of Legislatures are picked on the basis of population alone, ultimately only the urban areas are represented; rural issues are unaddressed and, more to the point, un-understood. \u00a0\u00a0A great case in point, Oregon, a state ruled by one city, is breaching irrigation dams on the Klamath River to \u201csave the salmon.\u201d (To hell with the agriculture of the area or the property that sustains it.)\u00a0 But the greatest travesty along this order of government is the drying up the irrigated lands of the Great Central Valley of California, where about 15% of the fruits, nuts and vegetables consumed in the US come from, to save the \u201cendangered (2 inch) \u201cDelta Smelt\u201d, whatever that is.<\/p>\n Those in rural areas watch as our forests are killed by pestilence and disease while the US Forest Service fights their use by recreationalists from the city.\u00a0 The stockmen (yes the real cowboys) watch as the BLM (manned by foreigners from the East) bans grazing to protect \u201cendangered birds, snails and flowers.\u201d\u00a0 Farmers hire \u201cillegals\u201d to do the work that kids from the high school used to do, because the US Department of Labor says that people of high school age are too young and too dumb to work on farms like their parents did.\u00a0 The Department of the Interior shuts down all drilling for oil, when we are desperate for energy, because a 100 year old technology failed on one well.\u00a0 Environmentalists delay and demonize a form of power that would solve all our energy needs, one that we invented, one that powers most of Western Europe and Japan (where we demonstrated other uses for it), nuclear energy.\u00a0 When our friendly<\/span> neighbor to the north, Canada, tools up to deliver huge supplies of oil to us in a buried pipeline, bureaucrats and their overseers, the Environmentalists, have to study the problem for another 10 years, even though there are already around a half million miles of buried pipeline in the US.\u00a0 The point here is that these problems, under the 10th<\/sup> Amendment of the Constitution, are the sole responsibility of the States \u2026 and should be!\u00a0 The political solutions to these problems should be left those the closest to the problem \u2026 those who will be most affected.<\/p>\n The next time that someone says that they don\u2019t know why America is in decline, just point out that the Progressives have killed those things like local government and representative government and replaced them with federal grants, federal programs and federal bureaucrats \u2026 the unknowing, unresponsive, tyrannical, socialistic actions of the federal government, an all powerful government, the specter so feared and so disdained by our Founders has materialized.<\/p>\n Ask yourself, \u201cIf on the morrow, I should awaken and find that the Federal government and its debts, obligations and rules had all disappeared, would I be the better for it and would the country?\u201d\u00a0 My answer would be a resounding YES!<\/span><\/em><\/strong> \u2026 I am an individual first, then I am an intimate neighbor to my fellow citizens of a small county in central Idaho, then I am an proud Idahoan who disdains what the present national government does to us, but a person who would gladly devote the rest of his life to rebuilding a strong, but limited Federal Government nearly identical (sans slavery) to the one given us in 1787.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What did our Founders give us?\u00a0 What are we doing with that legacy?\u00a0 What should we do in the future? Under the Constitution, the new Union was organized on a federal model of decentralized authority.\u00a0 Although obligated to observe common … Continue reading