Harold Meyerson: “When Tea Party Wants to Go Back, Where Is It To?” The Washington Post, October 27, 2010.

 

Only a few days before the elections, after what—one might have thought—saturation levels of news and of opinion centering on the ‘Tea Party Movement,’ a weekly columnist for the nation’s leading newspaper for political coverage, a man named one of the 50 “most influential commentators” in America by The Atlantic Monthly, still doesn’t get it.

Harold Meyerson serves as vice-chair of the National Committee of Democratic Socialists of America; he edits The American Prospect; he gets booked frequently on radio and TV talk shows; he publishes in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation. Everyone who thinks he’s anyone thinks he’s an expert on politics—very much including himself.

But when it comes to the Tea Party, Mr. Meyerson has yet to find a clue. As a socialist, he may be waiting for a subvention. Although not currently employed by a government agency, I can still help—if not materially then at least spiritually.

He likes the Tea Party slogan, “Take our country back.” But he doesn’t know what it means. Here’s what he wants to mean….

The Harold Hypothesis. Mr. Meyerson supposes that the Tea Partyers want to take America back in time. Writing in the WaPo, he tells us: “When the Tea Partyers say they want to take the country back, they mean back to the period between 1950 and 1980, when the vast majority of Americans encountered more opportunity and security in their economic lives than they had before or since.” They blame Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson before him, for “the New Deal order” that has (they imagine) ruined the American economy in the long run.

Poor, deluded TP’ers. They don’t know that the New Deal Order “produced the only three decades in American history—the aforementioned 1950-1980—”when economic security and opportunity were widely shared”; when labor unions really protected the workers and the G. I. Bill surged a generation of Americans into the universities; when Americans’ average income soared 75%. Alas, what FDR built Ronald Reagan tore down; thanks to him, “America’s claim to being a land of opportunity has become a sick joke” as “the average income of Americans in the bottom 90 percent of the population flatlined” for the subsequent thirty years and counting.

I resist the temptation to dwell upon Mr. Meyerson’s economic history, other than to remark that anyone who remembers the 1970s as a time of economic vitality in doesn’t remember the 1970s. And it might just be that America’s economic dynanism in the Fifties and Sixties had rather more to do with the collapse of all market-exclusionary empires (except for that pesky socialist one centered in Moscow) and the consequent expansion of trade in goods produced by the one major country whose manufacturing base survived and indeed thrived during the Second World War. It’s a bit unfair to expect a social democrat to offer a sensible account of production and distribution, so I pass on quickly to….

The Meyerson Mistake. Rather, Mr. Meyerson’s more serious error is (of all kinds, given his reputation) political. When Tea Partyers say they want to “take our country back” they’re not talking about leaving it to Beaver in a fit of back-to-the-future nostalgia. They’re talking about self-government.

It helps to take the trouble to listen to Tea Partyers. They’re talking about taking the country back from the kind of folks who’ve followed the career arc of so many of the country’s top politicians, bureaucrats, educators, and pundits—the arc traced by the New Dealers and, yes, Wilsonian Progressives before them. Groomed in the leading universities, taught there that the American Constitution ought to ‘evolve’ or ‘develop’ along a path toward ever-increasing social and economic egalitarianism, the leaders of the new republic, the seers of the American prospect, have long congratulated themselves for knowing where historical progress shall take us, with them guiding us along.

You demur? But then you must be a “reactionary,” no? A dupe of sick jokesters?

The Tea Partyers propose to take the country back from those who know best —including those who say they know that New Dealers led Americans to prosperity. The professional elites have wanted to run the country for more than a century, and have to some extent succeeded in running its schools and many of its other ruling bureaucracies. Theirs is the ox the Tea Partyers aims to gore.

Were they not so inexcusably retrograde, Tea Partyers might be forgiven by the leaders of public opinion for suspecting that those leaders do not so much misunderstand “Take our back,” as deliberately misconstrue it. It may be that the inheritors of the New Deal and of Progressivism know very well that the Tea Partyers would indeed take the country back from the decent people, the forward-looking people who prefer to write Constitutional law as they go along, without inconvenient reference to all those wig-powdering, slave-driving Founding Fathers and their obsolete intentions about limited government.

But we need not be so uncharitable. It may be that today’s Progressives really don’t get it, that their cluelessness about the Tea Partyers and their intentions is entirely sincere. After all, if one assumes that something called ‘History’ is taking us all somewhere that’s very, very good then one might also consistently interpret one’s critics as desperate losers engaged in a futile but damaging attempt to hold all of that back.

We have here a dilemma for progressives. Either they don’t ‘get’ popular self-government or they ‘get’ it all too clearly but prefer to patronize its defenders, hoping they will soon fade back into the obscurity whence they came. One way or the other, a reckoning comes this Tuesday, and this time the real political issue will likely stay with us for a while longer than the Progressives would like it to.

Article I, Section 2, Clause 5: “The House of representatives shall chuse the Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the power of Impeachment.”

Originally published as part of the “90-Day Study of the U. S. Constitution,” Constituting America, February 28, 2011.

 

The Articles of Confederation had established a federal government in which all three powers—legislative, executive, and judicial—resided in one body, the Congress. This proved unwieldy and in effectual. In principle, such an arrangement violated the Jeffersonian precept that any person or institution holding all of these powers constitutes a tyranny. The popular foundation of Congress under the Articles mitigated this danger but did not remove it, inasmuch as popular majorities might well tyrannize. The primary guard against congressional tyranny thus consisted precisely in Congressional incompetence, an incompetence derives not from the incapacity of its members but from the structure of the institution itself. At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, the Framers needed to remove the structural impediments to good government while simultaneously preventing governmental efficiency from malign use. Separated, balanced, but also interdependent branches of government, each exercising one of the three powers, could prevent tyrannical government without preventing firm government.

The House of Representatives chooses its own officers, including its chief officer, the Speaker of the House. This seems obvious to us now, but consider the other possibilities. The Framers might have empowered the President to choose these officers, selecting them from each newly-elected batch of Representatives. This quite obviously would have compromised the independence of the House from the Executive branch. After the 2010 Congressional elections (for example) it would have enabled President Obama to choose the officers of a House that had been elected in part as a popular rebuke to the president’s party and its policies. After the 1972 Congressional elections, President Nixon would have been entitled to choose those officers, which might very well have ended the Watergate investigation and precluded his eventual impeachment.

Alternatively, the Framers could have provided that the Speaker and perhaps some of the other officers might be elected by the Electoral College—i.e., by representatives of the people as a whole meeting prior to and independently of the first meeting of the newly-elected House. But this would elevate them to the same status as the President and Vice-President; separation and balance of powers requires that equal prestige be attached to the legislature as a branch of government and not to particular members within it. Choice of the House officers by the House members ensures that those officers will be well known and esteemed by the majority of their colleagues. Other methods of selection could not guarantee this.

The power of impeachment bespeaks the character of the American regime, of republican government itself. In his 1791 Lectures on Law, James Wilson writes, “The doctrine of impeachments is of high import in the constitutions of free states. On one hand, the most powerful magistrates should be amenable to the law; on the other hand, elevated characters should not be sacrificed merely on account of their elevation. No one should be secure while he violated the Constitution and the laws; every one should be secure while he observes them.” The laws are the considered judgments of the elected representatives of the American people; to violate them while entrusted with a Constitutional office must deserve the swiftest punishment consistent with a fair trial. However, only a violation of the law can deserve such punishment, or else no sensible person would undertake the responsibilities of public office. To keep impeachment and trial within the bounds of the rule of the people’s law, as distinguished from the envy, partisan rancor, or other passions of the hour must be a fundamental purpose of any just and reasonable constitution-maker.

The Framers assigned the power of impeachment to the House. That the House wields the sole power of impeachment speaks not only to the separation of powers but to their interdependence. The House alone can impeach an officer of the federal government. Impeachment means accusation or indictment, parallel to the power of a grand or petit jury. Under the British constitution the House of Commons was regarded as “the grand inquest of the nation”; as the most democratic branch the one most frequently elected, the United States ‘house of commons’ indicts officers in the name of the sovereign–namely, the American people, unencumbered by any dynasty or aristocracy. This provides for the independence of the House from all other branches, including the other legislative branch.

But, once impeached, the accused officer then has his day in court, so to speak, not in the House but in the Senate; further, presiding over that trial will not be any senator but the Chief Justice of the United States. In analogy to a trial, the House indicts, the Senate serves as the jury, and the Chief Justice serves as the judge. This illustrates and provides for the interdependence of the three branches. Without interdependence, the American government would feature branches not merely separated but isolated from one another. Each branch would lean in its own way, producing governmental incoherence—what Publius calls, in another connection, a hydra or many-headed monster. The incompetence of the Articles of Confederation would reappear, albeit in a more complex, interesting, and elegant form.

As intended by the Framers, impeachment and conviction of wayward federal officers has proven rightly difficult but possible in cases of clear malfeasance. Removal from officer has remained mostly in the best hands—namely, the people themselves, who elect, re-elect or dismiss their representatives in free elections.

Originally published in Big Government, September 13, 2010.

 

As we celebrate Constitution Day this week, a simple question suggests itself: What exactly does the Constitution constitute? Or, with respect to the Framers: What were these men trying to do?

The Constitution cannot have constituted the American people. The Preamble begins, “We the People….” The American people already existed. They didn’t need a constitution to call themselves into existence. On the contrary, they called it into existence.

Although clearly labeled “The Constitution of the United States,” the Constitution didn’t constitute the United States, either. Eleven years earlier, the Declaration of Independence had already described itself as “The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America.” We the People (the People tell us) ordain and establish “this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The Constitution constitutes not the people, not the states, and not the union of the states, but the federal government of these United States. With characteristic bluntness, the Framers identify their constitution as a framework for ruling. Each of the three sentences introducing what we call the “branches” of the new government forthrightly speak of “powers”: “all legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States”; “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States”; “the judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress shall from time to time ordain and establish.” The American people “grant” their government some of their powers—amendable, even revocable at pleasure by a sizeable majority following lawful procedures, to be sure–but ruling powers nonetheless.

The people “vest” certain powers in each of the three ruling “branches.” To “vest” literally means to clothe; in a monarchy the king or queen puts on the robe and the crown of authority. (An emperor ‘with no clothes’ has more than a problem of embarrassing display with which to concern himself.) In a republic the people vest their government with their own natural powers, arranging those powers in such a way as “shall [in the Declaration’s words] seem to them most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” The people so clothe the government in order to secure their unalienable rights—unalienable because natural, given by God and not by men, including the people themselves.

Modern states were invented in order to give governments the power really to secure territories, lives, and property of the people who lived on those territories. Feudal societies had consisted of a variety of authorities, each with its own sources of military and economic power: kings, aristocrats, churches, cities. At best, these authorities existed in a sort of equilibrium, each respecting the others’ spheres of rule, uniting on the occasion of any serious foreign threat.

Builders of the modern state designed differently. They centralized governmental powers, subordinating aristocrats, churches, and cities by establishing a network of bureaucrats who collected revenues, enforced law, defended and extended territories. Modern states crushed tribal and feudal societies in all but the most geographically inhospitable places—Afghanistan, for instance, where the mountainous terrain conduces more to pockets of political authority than to governmental centralization. Without a modern state, most peoples would soon have one, anyway: A state ruled by some foreign conqueror who exploited the decentralization of his victims’ feudal society.

But the same power that enables modern states to secure the rights of peoples, protecting their lives and property, can also ruin lives and take property from the very peoples who rightly ‘own’ that power. This seems to lead humanity into self-contradiction. To borrow an old joke on a slightly different topic, we can’t live with states and we can’t live without them.

With the government the Constitution constitutes the Framers solved the problem of the modern state. They gave the modern state a certain form, a certain regime, which retained the power of the centralized modern state while restricting its power to harm the people who had authorized its existence. The founded a republic, with rulers elected by the citizens—the ultimate rulers—or appointed by those elected representatives. They founded a commercial republic, in which every citizen could acquire and keep the property earned by working. They founded a federal republic, whereby each constituent state shared equal power in the Senate and population-apportioned power in the House of Representatives. They founded a republic of laws, limiting the central government to expressly enumerated and logically implied powers over each citizens, leaving most governing to be done at the local, county, and state levels of the federation. With representation, commerce, rule by law, and federalism in hand they could then frame an extended republic, big enough to defend itself against the geopolitical heavyweights of their day—and every day since then, so far.

Americans thus secured their status as a self-governing people, ready to resist any of their current or future regime enemies. That is what the Constitution is for.