Rights and powers

In Thomas Jefferson’s initial draught of the US Declaration of Independence, inherent rights are at the forefront:

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness;
— Thomas Jefferson, Original Rough Draught of the Declaration of Independence, June 1776

These clauses form the basis for the most quotable sentence in the final document, where Jefferson’s original was modified by others to read:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
— The US Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776

Note that “from that equal creation” became “endowed by their Creator”.

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.

Insanity we trust

In the aftermath of the killings in Newtown there have been many calls on the Republican side for control not of guns but of people who might be shooters: people with mental health problems, bad guys with guns; and particularly bad people with mental health problems who are guys with guns. People with mental health problems are not well-treated, we are told, and should never been allowed the freedom they had. Not “well-treated”? – welcome to the US health care morass, encouraged by Republicans.
How do we know who has mental problems? – it all depends upon where you start. In the US public theatre, the same behaviour might be considered quirky, eccentric, around the bend, crazy, deranged, insane, or socialist – or perfectly acceptable and normal.

Majorities mandate miasmas

Miasma
1. An unwholesome atmosphere
2. Unhealthy vapours rising from the ground or other sources

After elections the unwholesome atmospheres usually come from ideologues who always know better (but are no better). One commentator saw the 2008 US general elections as “I've read that Obama doesn't have a mandate, but I don't know what planet you have to come from to draw that conclusion” – personally, I come from the planet Earth. Votes in elections may decide winning candidates, but votes in elections do not decide which were the winning ideas. The only tangible consequences of elections are the persons who were elected. The elected then act according to their intangible ideas of what should happen (their own personal mandates). These actions also have consequences, and certain self-confirming superior individuals have always feared the unintended consequences of actions resulting from misguided votes in majoritarian elections – miasmic assertions such as Mitt Romney’s remarks that Obama administration actions “were very generous in what they gave to those groups”, or James Madison’s worry that some groups would not act in the “permanent and aggregate interests of the community”.

The government in Washington is not broken

I think Congressmen should wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers so we could identify their corporate sponsors
— a quote of the day

Previous and present legislative stalemates in Congress regarding the US debt limit and extension of revenues through taxation do not mean the US government is broken, it means the US government is working exactly as designed, exactly as socially engineered. The social engineers’ plan was made explicit in the Constitution of the United States of America, and, unfortunately, the design was always flawed – it is the US constitution that is broken.

Tea Party: noisy but careless

The USA’s so-called “founding fathers” are the subject of much reverence, often uncritical, and often confused supporters of the US Constitution in 1787. These founding fathers are an amorphous, undefined large group, and let us concentrate on just two: Samuel Adams, and Thomas Jefferson – all of whom are quoted repeatedly in many a Tea Party publication. The quotations are often less sagacious sayings and more convenient concoctions, shown by the fact that apart from the supposed author, citations are usually missing.

Conservative movements defend established privilege by government power

The push to take away the common people’s ability to bargain collectively by some temporary conservative majorities in state governments – by any means possible, the use of power for the sake of power – is reminiscent of other excesses.