From: Black Unicorn <unicorn@access.digex.net>
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 94 01:32:27 PDT
To: blancw@microsoft.com (Blanc Weber)
Subject: Re: Constitution and Contract [Was: CIA & FBI]
In-Reply-To: <9404300235.AA26287@netmail2.microsoft.com>
Message-ID: <199404300832.AA25324@access1.digex.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> 
> From: Black Unicorn
> 
> "If the federal government mixes the recipe with too much power, the
> checks against tyranny established by the Constitution threaten to
> topple.  It is this that worries me.  It is this that worried the
> framers.  Should we dismiss their genius because it is old?  Because it
> did not bear the unanimous mandate of the people?"
> 
> It is not that the genius or the their document should be dismissed; it 
> is only to understand that written works do not produce automatic 
> effects of their own power, and that therefore the Constitution cannot 
> be looked to by the general population as an automatic savior which 
> will release them from the grip of tyranny.

Concur.

> 
> No matter what guidance the original document provides, each 
> generation, each era, each individual must still do the work of 
> thinking, reasoning, and determining their own fate, and they must 
> again agree among themselves whether to accept that contract or reject 
> it.  Or improve upon it.

This seems to me like the Jeffersonian notion that the Constitution 
should be amended in every generation.  Letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 
12 1816, The Portable Thomas Jefferson 557-558 (M. Peterson ed. 1975).
I think this is perhaps excessive, and if you consider the effect of short
term politics, one could well find his or her own generation is the one which
does away with the 4th and 5th amendments because of a "Crime Crisis."

If your suggestion is more along the lines of a more reasoned and 
enduring amendment process with some respect for the concepts of old and 
more importantly an attempt to adapt the spirit of the document to the 
reality of the day, I concur wholeheartedly.

> The current structure of government is modelled after the Constitution, 
> but the substance of it makes no sense accordingly.  If the federal 
> government mixes the recipe with too much power, it is because they 
> want it there and mean to increase it according to a self-benefitting 
> bias towards it.

And as such the federal government runs beyond the bounds of the 
document's "spirit."

> "One must remember that power was surrendered to the federal government
> by the people and the states conditioned upon limits."
> 
> Patrick Henry warned everyone that once they had surrendered to it the 
> power of the purse and the power of the sword, there would be no power 
> left to them with which to save themselves from it.  So who would be 
> respecting those limits?

It seems in many ways Mr. Henry was correct.
I think it is a question of apathy however.  The accretion of power and 
the expansion of the federal government is to my thinking a function of 
"...the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence
in even the most disinterested assertion of authority...."  _Youngstown Sheet
& Tube Co. v. Sawyer_, 343 U.S. 579 (1952).  (Frankfurter, J., concurring).

I don't think the United States has gone over the edge quite yet, or I 
wouldn't be here.  What disturbs me most, especially in light of Mr. 
Henry's quote that Mr. Weber brings to our attention, is that the 
citizenry do not seem interested in any form of resistance.  Funny how it 
is hard to say that and not sound like a subversive isn't it?  
Regardless, the political machine in the United States is incredibly
responsive to REAL public pressure.  The intergovernmental respect for the
Supreme Court is to me a demonstration that all is not lost.  I don't believe
that all the power in the citizens has been stripped, but it is being slowly
bled dry.  Mr. May has indicated many times that in his opinion a vicious coup 
and a dictatorship will not spring up overnight, but rather might come 
about through a slow disregard for the protections that reign in power.

I must agree.

>
> Blanc
> 

-uni- (Dark)