It’s
important in these turbulent times to recall once in a while why the framers of
the American Constitution wrote it the way they did. Remember that they had just escaped the
clutches of what they perceived as a tyranny under the English monarch, and
they were well aware of the autocratic governments that ruled much of the rest
of the world. They wanted something
different – they wanted a version of democracy with a great deal of individual
liberty.
What
the framers of the Constitution feared more than anything else was the re-emergence
of a tyranny in America, so they devised a pretty good plan for avoiding that –
they divided up the power among a number of independent power centers, so that
each would be kept in check by the others.
First, they limited the power of the federal government, leaving most of
the power in the hands of State governments, so that the states could keep a
check on the federal government. Then,
in the federal government, they divided up the power four ways – among the executive
branch, the House, the Senate, and the judiciary. In theory, no one power center could get out
of hand because all the other power centers would work as a check.
Now,
some 200 years later, this system is beginning to fail precisely because the original
intent of the framers of the US Constitution has been eroded in a number of
significant ways.
First,
over the past 50 years or so the power of the states has been diminished
relative to the federal government. Today federal law invades all sorts of
issues that used to be the province of the states.
Second,
starting mostly under the New Deal of the 1930s a whole new unelected branch of
government has grown up under the executive – the massive federal bureaucracy.
And this unelected branch makes and enforces the regulations that rule most of
our lives and businesses.
Third,
increasingly over the past couple of decades the President has arrogated to that
office more and more of the powers that were originally intended for the
Congress, to the point where the President these days can effectively take
America into a war without Congressional approval.
Yesterday
we had the President speak in favor of requiring companies to install secret
back doors into all consumer communication devices so that the government could
always see what people were saying or writing – so much for the Constitution’s
fourth amendment prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures”. And this
was in defense of a demand made, not by any elected body, but by the FBI, part
of the massive unelected bureaucracy of America.
The
writer C. Northcote Parkinson in his 1958 book The Evolution of Political Thought argued that democracy was an inherently
unstable form of government, which would inevitably morph into autocracy and
then tyranny. The history of democracies and republics certainly suggests that
is true (think of the Roman Republic, for example). We, the American voters,
had better be vigilant, because we seem to be headed the same way, though in
our case the tyranny may come initially from the bureaucracy, not from an
individual.
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