The impetus to improve the way the thirteen colonies governed themselves was the Revolutionary War. First, we needed to induce foreign countries to help us in the war, and governments want to deal with governments – not thirteen colonial governments, just one. Second, we needed to buy munitions and pay soldiers, and that requires revenue – no taxes, no revenue. And last, we needed to instill a national patriotism in order to work together to defeat a much better armed and trained British military.
These were practical, determined men and women who struggled to wage and win a war for liberty, but make no mistake, their antipathy toward a strong, centralized government remained. Some of the founders felt more strongly than others, but none of those men would vest unlimited power in a federal government. To the contrary, not one argued for more federal power than he believed was absolutely necessary to do the common business of the states.
And they all realized that the powers given the central government in the Articles of Confederation, a very loose association of the thirteen colonies, barely got us through the Revolutionary War.
Influential patriots like Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson opposed the Constitution supported by men like James Madison and Benjamin Franklin. The “anti-federalists” proposed a compromise to the Philadelphia Convention to add the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. And since even the “federalists” were suspicious of a powerful central government, the amendment was added in 1787, and the Constitution was ratified.
What the 10th Amendment says is if a federal power isn’t written in the Constitution (or a state power isn’t specifically prohibited there), it doesn’t exist; the issue will be decided by the people and the States. The language is simple and absolutely clear. And that is why progressive liberals who are audacious enough to want to substitute their puny intellects for the thoughts and conclusions of the brilliant and courageous men who debated every word of our Constitution need to make things up.
The complication is that the American people are a good and adaptable bunch. As times change, so do we. Although some of us held religious beliefs that prohibited the use of any artificial bar to conception, many others who did not share those particular beliefs challenged state laws that banned contraception. Although our legacy of slavery left some states to segregate children in public schools, other citizens challenged those state laws that segregated children by race.
And most of us applauded those outcomes. So much so that we ignored the way those changes came about. The founders gifted us with several ways to accommodate changes we want to make, as a society. We used none of them.
Is there actually a right in the Constitution to abort babies or to attend a particular school or to ban nativity scenes? No. There is only the right of the people, in their states and local communities, to decide those things for themselves or to amend the Constitution. The proponents say that it takes too long and that not all states will agree. Yes, it does, and no, they won’t, at least not right away. But there were good reasons to “constitute” the United States government the way we did.
The founders had their fill of European monarchies, autocracies and theocracies. They believed in the wisdom of the people. They knew that the people would require some organization and policing, but they designed a system of governance that vested as much power as possible in the people, not the government. The government closest to the people was to have the most power, and in a hierarchy from the bottom up, there was to be less and less power the farther away from the individual citizen we go.
We trust the American people to get things right, eventually. In governance, “eventually” isn’t a bad word. We are a large country of 335 million people, from all different backgrounds. We are a representative democracy, and majorities do rule in one way or another, but our Bill of Rights also provides fundamental protection for the minority. When confronted with matters of human dignity and decency, there are no lengths to which Americans won’t go . . . eventually.
We fought a civil war, brother against brother, to abolish slavery, and we called out the national guard to protect children trying to enter the doors of a public school.
Let’s think about two causes that I happened to have supported at one time or another, choice and same-sex marriage. These are moral questions in the hearts and minds of Americans on both sides of the issues. We now have the technology to prove beyond any doubt that the babies we are aborting can smile, suck a thumb, react to pain or be soothed by his mother’s voice as early as eight weeks. At eight weeks, we now know that a woman is carrying a real, live human baby.
I don’t expect that to sway a person who is so inhumane that they can deliberately murder a partially or even a wholly born baby, but I wonder how many of the rest of us wish that we had taken the time to argue about abortion rights in the states. Now, with the Dobbs decision, we have a second chance to handle the question of abortion in our own communities, with the help of our own neighbors and pastors and local governments.
In the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling, the Supreme Court only said that the state had not decided the question of the baker’s right to “free exercise” of his religion versus the gay couple’s right to the wedding cake of their choice “with the religious neutrality that the Constitution requires.” Had the Colorado commission that ruled against the baker not done so in an openly hostile manner, the baker may well have been forced to make the cake, or go out of business. Would I have refused to make that cake?
Of course not. First, because “same-sex marriage” doesn’t violate my religious principles, and second, because it’s bad business! I won’t help to celebrate hatred, illegality or pornography, but love and marriage? Sure, but that isn’t the point? The baker didn’t share my views, but he never refused to sell goods to the gay community. He just refused to contribute his personal artistic creativity to a ceremony that violated his religious views. If the couple had wanted to buy a generic cake, they could have. But they didn’t.
They wanted the baker to put something of himself into a special cake. The baker’s 1st Amendment rights should have been protected, regardless of whether the commission did it nicely or not.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said that our states are the “laboratories of democracy,” that the founders intended that a “state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” [New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262, 311 (1932)] Justice Brandeis used those words in support of the powers delegated to the states in the 10th Amendment. We are intended to move with care and deliberation through the states before we make sweeping national change.
Allowing the people to make these decisions, although often exasperatingly slow, protects everyone, including the proponents. I know that it is of little comfort to those whose happiness may hang, in part, on that social change, but we are who we are because our founders wrote the most brilliant, timeless and inspired document in the history of organized nations. Who we are is a just and resilient people that, somehow, always manage to get it right, eventually.
