The Constitution vs. the Articles of Confederation

Posted February 11, 2012

If you examine closely the fundamental principle  of the right-wingers, the teabaggers and and the self-proclaimed conservatives--emasculate the Federal government and empower the states--you will conclude, as I have, that what these people really want is to scrap the Constitution and return to the Articles of Confederation, which established a weak central government and gave most power to the states.
The Articles of Confederation were enacted in 1781. But Americans soon discovered that government under the Articles of Confederation was an unmitigated disaster.
There weren't three branches of government, only the legislative branch--the Congress.  But Congress was granted little power to finance itself or to ensure that its resolutions were enforced.
There was no president--thus no executive branch of government. Likewise, there was no judicial branch: no Supreme Court, no Courts of Appeals and no District Courts. 
Furthermore the Federal government was so enfeebled that it could not adequately defend the nation's borders.  And the state governments were either unwilling or unable to resist attacks on private contracts and public credit.
Government under the Articles of Confederation was unworkable because they gave the states too much power and denied sufficent power to the Federal government.
Yet that's exactly the agenda of today's right-wingers, teabaggers and and self-proclaimed conservatives!
But because Americans realized after a few years that government under the Articles of Confederation was unworkable,  the several states convened the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and ratified the resulting document, our current Constitution, in 1789, which corrected the abuses permitted by the Articles of Confederation and created the tripartite system of government that we have today.
Patriotic Americans will resist the current attempts to scrap the Constitution and replace it with a new version of the Articles of Confederation!
Jagor

Update February 14, 2012

Accorading to Artlcle the First, according to the 2010 Census, the House of Representativers would be increased from the current 435 members--established by the Apportionment Act of 1911-- to 6,195 members.  This would definitely be a good thing and would comply with the wishes of the Founding Fathers, concerning represenation of the people in the House.
Many other countries have parliaments with many more members than the U.S. House of Representatives, even though their populations are much smaller. 
In the United Kingdom, for example, the House of Commons has 650 members for a population of just 62 million.  And there are 308 members of the Canadian House of Commons for a population of just 32 million.  So it's obvious that just 435 Members in the House of Representatives is far too few for the United States with a population of 313 million!
There are plenty of auditoriums and convention centers with a capacity of 6,000; alternatively, Members of Congress could also be authorized to vote electronically from their offices--which is not the case today. 
Currently, all 435 Members have to be physically present on the Floor of the House for each recorded vote--when I was a Congressional staffer, I knew not to get in the way of the Members as they stampeeded into the elevators on the way to the Floor to cast their votes at the very last minute!
Today, with 50 states in the Union, the legislatures of 27 more states, for a total of 38, would have to ratify the Amendment in order for it to become part of the  Constitution.
Here are a couple of of the points regarding the Constitution and the Bill of Rights:
 The First Amendment is quite clear that, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." 
Concerning Thomas Jefferson, like Thomas Paine and many other patriots and Founding Fathers, He was a Deist--and a member of no established religion.
In the presidential campaign of 1800, Jefferson's opponents, including virtually every preacher in the country, accused Jefferson not only of miscegenation with his slave Sally Hemmings, but also of being an infidel and an atheist. 
Furthermore, Jefferson sought what he called a "wall of separation between Church and State."
Finally, I would lower the voting age to 17 from the age of 18, as stipulated in the 26th Amendment to the Constitution.
Why?
Currently, 17 is the minimm age to join the armed forces.  Therefore,  lowering the voting age to 17would enfrachise all the members of our armed forces.  If you're old enough to fight and die for your country in hellish places around the world, you should certainly be able to vote for the people who are sending you to those hell holes.

Jagor

Update February 23, 2012

...With respect to secession, it is true that there is no Constitutional provision prohibiting secession.  Aside from the Confederacy, there is one state where the secession issue has persisted over the years: Texas.  The modern movement for independence was started by the research of Richard Lance (Rick) McLaren claimed that, in 1861, Texans had voted four-to-one to leave the Union.  We know that from 1836 to 1845 the Republic of Texas existed.  [The California Republic lasted less than a month, but its name still survives on the state flag.] 
In my own view, if there is one state that has a real, justifiable reason to seceed from the Union, it's Hawaii, which was an independent country, first a kingdom, ruled by the Kamehameha dynasty, then a republic declared on July 4, 1894. 
In early 1897, newly-elected U.S. president William McKinley agreed to a treaty of annexation but it failed in the Senate because petitions from the islands indicated lack of popular support and would be in violation of international law. Subsequently, a joint resolution was written by Congressman Francis G. Newlands to annex Hawaii.
On July 7, 1898 President William McKinley McKinley signed the Newlands Resolution which annexed Hawaii, illegally in the opinion of annexation opponents, to become the Territory of Hawaii.
I think it's pretty easy to make a valid case for Hawaiian secession and independence.
As for calling a new Constitutional Convention, according to Article V of the Constitution, "The Congress,..., on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments ..."  Here is a link to a table showing a long list of all the states whose legislatures have voted to call such a convention: http://bit.ly/yBVUlJ
Jagor

Update February 28, 2012

For the Senate, we should repeal the 17th Amendment and return to the original intent of the Founding Fathers that, to ensure a truly federal system, senators should be elected indirectly, by each state's legislature. 
As things are now, the Senate is nothing more than another version of the House, except that its members are elected at large, instead of by districts.  This means that, in order to run for the Senate, tens of millions of dollars must be spent by each candidate, especially in the large states.  That goes a long way to explain why most of the senators are old, white, male multi-millionaires [along with a couple of female multi-millionaires].  Those multimillionares certainly do not represent me or understand my concerns.
For the House, once again, we should return to the original intent of the Founding Fathers and increase to number of Representatives: from the 2010 census the number would be 6,195. Now that would be real democacy!
Getting back to indirect elections, some French friends were somewhat aggressively grilling me about why we Americans don't elect our presidents "democratically," through a popular vote, but elect them indirectly through the Electoral College.
You know my answer to these Frenchies?  I shot back that we elect our president in exactly the same way as they elect their senators--by an indirect election!
That put an end to the conversation!
[For background, there are 343 senators in France; a third elected every three years.  Most of the electors are elected municipal officials, so it's similar to the way as we chose our senators until the enactment of the 17th Amendment.]
Jagor