Rep. Ron Paul gets history wrong
On Sunday an op ed by Presidential candidate Ron Paul appeared in the Deseret News. The topic was familiar as the headline read, “Utah needs to protect state and local authority, decentralize government”. For the record let me state that I absolutely agree with Dr. Paul on several of these key points. The structure of federalism in our country is profoundly out of balance. Federal overreach into nearly every facet of our everyday lives is oppressive and a very real threat to individual liberty in 21st century America. Some level of push-back from the states is appropriate in both political and historical contexts.
But I do not believe the case for protection of states’ rights is bolstered by the re-writing of history. In the opening lines of his op ed Dr. Paul perpetuates one of the great historical myths of modern conservatism. “Our Founding Fathers understood the dangers of a massive and intrusive federal government.
That’s why they gave us the U.S. Constitution — establishing a very limited, decentralized government to provide for national defense and little else.” This is, quite simply, a direct inversion of the historical realities that led to the convening of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Ignore, for a minute the preposterous idea that America’s Founding Fathers “understood” any single issue of government with a unanimous mind and turn your attention to the idea that the U.S. Constitution was somehow drafted to limit the powers of the federal government and decentralize that power on behalf of the states. This is a modern conservative talking point that has been repeated so often it is now accepted by many as fact. On the contrary however, the federal Constitution was drafted to establish a powerful centralized government.
When James Madison entered the Philadelphia Convention in June of 1787 he did so with a revolutionary plan to free the Union from its dependence on the states. Enjoying near autonomy in their loose association under the Articles of Confederation, it was the failure of the states to unanimously approve needed amendments to those Articles, to meet the financial requisites of Congress (this had been a problem since several states refused approval for funding for Washington’s army in the Revolutionary War), and their failure to abide by the provisions of the Treaty of Paris which ended the War that these called into account the fundamental premise of the Confederation: that states would exercise their sovereign powers in good faith to fulfill rather than frustrate essential national interests.
Madison and most of the other delegates attending the Convention came to Philadelphia with a determination to secure a vibrant and powerful Federal government capable of properly subduing these destructive tendencies in the states. (Most who thought like Dr. Paul does today about local and state governments purposefully ignored the federal convention in Philadelphia as they considered the idea of a powerful federal government both dangerous and a betrayal of the ideals of the Revolution…sound familiar?) In fact, the key to Madison’s plan was a Congressional veto of an any state law deemed in opposition to the national interest! Delegates from the South balked at this idea and eventually Madison was forced to settle for the “supremacy clause” in Article VI, a compromise he feared would prove a weak and ineffectual check on the influence of unruly state legislatures.
Writing to Thomas Jefferson who was serving as U.S. Ambassador to France during 1787, Madison gave his observations on the reasons for calling the Convention. “The evils issuing from the states contributed more to that uneasiness which produced the Convention…than those which accrued to our national character and interest from the inadequacy of the Confederation to its immediate objects” (Madison to Jefferson; October 24, 1787).
Nowhere in his notes on the Convention do we find the rants against centralized authority that would characterize Madison’s writings in the partisan wars of the 1790s and Tea Party rallies of 2010. In fact those arguments were made forcefully in 1789 by the opponents of the Constitution.
The history is clear that the impetus for the urgency behind the drafting of the Constitution was the “evils issuing from the states” and the threat those evils posed to the very survival of the Union.
Again, I don’t mind Dr. Paul’s calls for a new emphasis on reclaiming local government in the digital age, but an attempt to claim the philosophical and political high ground by flipping the historical record on its head seems at the very least, unhelpful, and at the most dishonest and destructive.
(It should be noted, interestingly, that Madison’s political thought at this time (1786-1789) stands in stark contrast to his thinking both before and after the Constitutional period.)
