Throwing all into confusion

Considering the mischief caused by Tea-Party Republican representatives, and the resulting confusion about how to end the shutdown, here is Rawlins Lowndes’s realistic view of the proposed US  constitution of 1787, as collected in the Anti-Federalist Papers (54):

Great stress was laid on the admirable checks which guarded us, under the new Constitution, from the encroachments of tyranny; but too many checks in a political machine must produce the same mischief as in a mechanical one – that of throwing all into confusion. [1]

Lowndes was trying to protect slavery in South Carolina against those in the Northern States, those who would try to do away with that peculiar institution: affirming that “whilst there remained one acre of swampland in South Carolina, he should raise his voice against restricting the importation of Negroes.” He was a pragmatist.

More Republican constitutional bupkis

The US constitution seems very clear that taxes should be used to benefit the United States: pay the debts; provide for the common defence and the general welfare. But it’s never that clear: whose debts? which defence? what welfare?

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
— Article I (Section 8), US Constitution, 1787

Almost as soon as the constitution was confirmed there were arguments about debts from the war years, and what debts should be honoured. Taxes were used to pay for an invasion of Canada in the War of 1812, a war that was opposed by states near the Canada border who did not see it as part of any common defence. There was comparatively little discussion of the general welfare.

The bad history boys

When Rick Santorum makes assertions based on a conservative political stance about the place of Christianity in US history, the relationship between the State and religion, and religious freedom, it is often bad history but history that needs more checking than cheap jibes at Barack Obama.  Was the USA always “a moral enterprise” as Santorum thinks?