A republic, if you can keep it

Has our government been completely taken over?  Are our elected officials - regardless of their stunning incompetence - merely puppets for some other group of power brokers?  A few months ago, I would have - in fact I did - dismiss these sorts of statements as crackpot conspiracies, but watching how the financial bailout has unfolded, I have to wonder.

Most of you have probably read an article or email that stated that if the amount of money in the financial bailout was divided up equally among US citizens (or taxpayers, or sometimes among all people in the US), each person would receive a large amount of money.  The actual figure would vary, but it was usually a high 5 or low 6 figure number.  I remember thinking that in most of those scenarios, my household would have been able to pay off our mortgage and still have enough cash for some substantial landscaping.

A coworker forwarded this article to me today that provides an interesting read.  It explains how Wall Street brokers have stolen money from every American taxpayer, and used the useful idiots (useful to them at least) in Washington DC to legally do it.  With America now strapped with that much debt, Americans cannot be truly free.  Not only is this a huge money grab, but it is a enormous reduction of our liberty.  A person who is strapped with debt is little more than an indentured servant.  An indentured servant, while not technically a slave, is NOT a free person.  Because of our elected officials, we are all now indentured (which by the way is a violation of the 13th amendment, but who’s keeping track of Constitutional violations anymore?), and many generations of Americans will be born into this servitude.

But ultimately, who is responsible for this mess?  Since our leaders are democratically elected, who is to blame, if not ourselves?  On the other hand, many people did try to tell their congressmen that they were opposed to the bailout, yet the reports were that both the congressional switchboard and email servers were shut down.  I don’t know if that’s true or not.  I do know it was impossible to get through.  It’s tough to know who is to blame, but it appears that most people are sick of Washington elitism and simply don’t know what to do to fix the problem.

We are not in uncharted waters here.  This sort of government corruption has happened many times throughout history, and there is one way that has been successful in resolving this.  Thomas Jefferson called it refreshing the tree of liberty with its natural manure.  That has been shown to work sometimes, not always though, and it comes with a steep price.  I don’t think that Americans are willing to pay it, now or ever.  We have become too lazy and spoiled.  I know I would rather exhaust all other avenues, but what are those avenues?  Also, while persuing those avenues, we make it harder & harder to ever refresh the tree of liberty.

So what will we do?  Will we reach a breaking point, or will we as a nation go quietly into the night?  We are currently on course to go quietly into the night, is there anything that can change us from that course?

James Madison was the fourth president of the United States.  He was one of the primary authors of both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and came to be known as the “Father of the Constitution.”

In 1817, Congress sent the Internal Improvements Bill to President Madison.  It called for spending money on roads, canals and making other infrastructure-type improvements.  Madison felt that the bill was unconstitutional, and so he vetoed it.  His explanation for the veto can be found here, but the meat of his opinion is this paragraph:

To refer the power in question to the clause “to provide for common defense and general welfare” would be contrary to the established and consistent rules of interpretation, as rendering the special and careful enumeration of powers which follow the clause nugatory and improper. Such a view of the Constitution would have the effect of giving to Congress a general power of legislation instead of the defined and limited one hitherto understood to belong to them, the terms “common defense and general welfare” embracing every object and act within the purview of a legislative trust. It would have the effect of subjecting both the Constitution and laws of the several States in all cases not specifically exempted to be superseded by laws of Congress, it being expressly declared “that the Constitution of the United States and laws made in pursuance thereof shall be the supreme law of the land, and the judges of every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.” Such a view of the Constitution, finally, would have the effect of excluding the judicial authority of the United States from its participation in guarding the boundary between the legislative powers of the General and the State Governments, inasmuch as questions relating to the general welfare, being questions of policy and expediency, are unsusceptible of judicial cognizance and decision.

Just like the enumerated powers of the Constitution didn’t give authority to Congress to spend money on roads then, there is nothing in the Constitution that gives Congress any authority to bailout the financial industry, the American auto industry, or any other industry.

I think it’s safe to say that Madison would have been opposed to these bailouts.  Boy could we use someone like him today.