Founding Fathers

Celebrating Constitution Day: The Need To Understand The Intentions Of The Founding Fathers!

Ronald 2 Comments

Today is Constitution Day, the day 223 years ago that the Founding Fathers signed the Constitution at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and started the process of ratification of the sacred document that we have lived under for 221 years!

There is great admiration and respect for the Founding Fathers, but the ideas of the Founding Fathers have been hijacked by many groups that claim to understand what the Founding Fathers believed and put into effect in 1787!

Many would have you believe that the Founding Fathers set up a rigid document that was not meant to be adaptable to changing times!

Many promote the belief that the Founding Fathers were setting up a Christian nation, rather than a nation with religious freedom!

Many want us to believe that the national government was meant to be secondary to states rights!

There is so much misunderstanding of what the promoters of the Constitution intended, and many believe that they would support the intentions of today’s social conservatives and the Tea Party Movement!

All of the above assumptions are totally false, as the Founding Fathers intended for a broad interpretation of the Constitution, as shown in Article 1, Section 8, the Elastic Clause; promoted a separation of church and state; and had no intention of promoting states rights which would defy the Constitution’s intention of one united nation! They were not narrow minded and bigoted, as social conservatives and Tea Party Movement people have proved to be!

The Founding Fathers had a forward looking view of the future, not the narrow minded, negative view of many today who keep on distorting the reality of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution! We must not allow these negative forces to destroy the true meaning of the Founding Fathers and the fantastic document they bequeathed to us!

The Contradiction Of Joe Miller: The “Anti Ted Stevens” For Alaska!

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Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska served longer in the upper chamber than any Republican Senator in history, and when he died last month in a plane accident, he was deeply mourned by most Alaskans as the man who had done more for Alaska than any other political figure in its half century history as a state!

Alaska was the beneficiary of more federal largesse (money and public works projects) than any other state, and Alaska then and now desperately needed such funding, as it is a state which even today has very few roads and bridges and other public projects, making travel and access through much of the state extremely difficult!

Juneau, the capital in southeast Alaska, cannot be reached by land, for instance, and much of the state is isolated and poor! So Stevens was good for Alaska, but so were Senator Frank Murkowski and his daughter, Senator Lisa Murkowski, who recently lost a close renomination contest to Joe Miller!

Of course, Sarah Palin was a critic of all of these political figures, but never did anything to deal with the realities of backwardness and poverty in much of Alaska in her BRIEF time in public office! She, however, has been very effective in improving her own economic conditions, while advocating the nomination of Joe Miller, a person who shares her vision of a “new” Alaska without federal intervention! 🙁

Joe Miller portrays himself as the opponent of federal largesse, of “earmarks”, and therefore is the “anti Ted Stevens”! He was able to defeat Lisa Murkowski by a razor thin margin on this basis!

It is amazing how in one month, Alaskans can mourn “Uncle Ted”, who brought his state so many benefits by doing what all members of Congress are expected to do, make life better for their constituents; and then have the dominant party in the state reject that approach and nominate a Tea Party favorite, who defies the history of the American political system!

If Alaska does indeed proceed to elect Joe Miller over Democratic opponent Scott McAdams, will they have “buyer’s remorse”, when they realize they are putting into a position of power an individual who has no interest in benefiting the state, modernizing it, bringing it into the future, but would rather quote the Founding Fathers in a narrow, restrictive manner, evoking the states rights argument of the Civil War Era of the 19th century in the 21st century?

Joe Miller, like most conservatives and Republicans, distorts the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, failing to understand that the document they created was purposely left vague and broad, as they could not possibly predict the long term future, and so left it open to modern interpretation by Congress and the courts!

The Founding Fathers did not intend a “strait jacket” Constitution, but if Joe Miller in office follows it in that manner, Alaska will suffer, and remain a backward state without a modern public works system and large levels of poverty! Somehow, the feeling arises that Joe Miller would end up contradicting himself once in office, and therefore would have to be seen as a hypocrite who exploited the general discontent that exists, with rhetoric that is false and manipulative! 🙁

Tea Party Activists: Back To The Articles Of Confederation, States Rights, And Secession! NO WAY! :(

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There is a new movement developing to promote a constitutional amendment to take away the power of the federal government, and allow states to refuse to obey federal laws and statutes! This is secession all over again, just as we come close to the 150th anniversary of the secession of the Southern states between December 1860 and April 1861! 🙁

Tea Party activists and other conservative interests want to negate the effects of the Civil War, which ended for all time the concept that states rights could be utilized to defy federal law and the Constitution!

Basically, what these radical extremists want to do is revive the Articles of Confederation, which denied the national government any real authority, and totally failed between 1781-1789! The American people were in the “critical period” during this decade, with states going their own way and no federal authority to enforce the concept of one nation indivisible! The Founding Fathers saw the necessity of a stronger national government when they gathered at Philadelphia in the spring and summer of 1787, and drew up the Constitution we live under now for 221 years!

These Tea Party activists fail to understand our history, and the essential nature of having a central government which keeps order and promotes freedom and liberty!

The history of the states is that many have failed to promote equality and freedom, so all this does is try to revive the past, when the mass of common citizens were denied just treatment under the law!

Do we really want to go back to the era of the Articles of Confederation; or the times of the Southern Confederacy; or the Gilded Age, when big corporations ran rampant over the rights of their workers, and immigrants and women and children were exploited for the benefit of unbridled capitalism? 🙁

Do we want the rights of minority groups and women taken away by state governments that historically have not given any concern to basic human rights?

Is this not a power play by conservative interests to bring back the 19th century, the “good old days” of slavery, segregation, labor exploitation, mistreatment of women and children, and widespread nativism against immigrants? 🙁

Has not the American dream been advanced by the federal government, the Supreme Court, and Presidents of both parties who saw the NATIONAL interest, not petty, sectional and regional interests, as essential for the common good?

The fortunate thing about this mad rush to destroy everything that has been good about our national experience is that it requires a constitutional amendment–two thirds vote of the House of Representatives and of the Senate, and three fourths (38) of the states with majority vote in both houses of the state legislature!

This is a tall order, and thank goodness, the Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, made sure that outrageous ideas such as this loony amendment would not see the light of day, beyond the suggestion itself!

The American people need to make clear in their votes this November that the Tea Party activists are repudiated as a anti democratic movement that would take away progress, human freedom, equality, and basic fairness!

The American dream was not meant to be in the form that these disgraceful extremists wish to take it! 🙁

The True Meaning Of July 4th!

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Today marks the 234th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia!

It is a day to celebrate the greatest political experiment in freedom, democracy, liberty, and opportunity in human history!

It is a day to commemorate the significance of the Founding Fathers, who this nation was blessed with, a group of talented and committed men who sacrificed their safety and security to bring about a nation committed to principles not celebrated elsewhere in human history before their time, and rarely practiced fully, if at all, in most nations since their time!

This nation has gone through many crises and emergency situations, but we have always met the challenges that we have been faced with!

This is a time, in the minds of many Americans, of gloom and doom, as we deal with a terrible economic crisis, two foreign wars, and an assault on our shores by a massive, disastrous oil spill out of control!

But this is not the time to promote hate, division, mistrust, and insecurity, all of which many right wing groups see as an opportunity to advance their narrow based agendas!

This is the time to celebrate the diversity of America, and honor the contributions, past and present, of immigrants from all over the world, who have been and will continue to be part of the story of the miracle that America has been!

America is a beacon of hope, and no nay saying can be allowed to divide us, as we progress into a future, despite skepticism, with as much potential for success and happiness as our past has brought us!

We must admit our past shortcomings, while working to advance the welfare of over 300 million Americans on this Independence Day!

Progressive forces have brought us to this anniversary, and progressive forces will continue to advance our commitment to excellence and equal opportunity! A positive outlook and optimism toward the future will promote the continued greatness of the American democratic experiment!

The “Europeanization” Of America: What Is The Problem?

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Throughout the Health Care reform debate, we kept on hearing the opposition stating that the United States did not wish to copy “Europeans”, as if everything they have done and everything they represent is, somehow, inherently evil!

This is evidence of the total ignorance of those who profess this,of those Americans who argue that America is superior in every way to the “old world” from which the majority of Americans have their ancestry, and that we cannot learn anything positive from those nations that are the heritage of a majority of our citizens!

This narrow mindedness demonstrates the need for our education system to teach about the European roots of America, as this has been downgraded in the curriculum of our public schools, and even in our universities!

Waving the American flag and claiming somehow that we are “better” than European nations is the root of much of our shortcomings as a society. Should we not honor the effect of the Greeks and the Romans; of the French Revolution; of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution in Great Britain; of the contributions of people from all over Europe who have had an impact on our growth and success; of the philosophers who helped to bring about the rationale for our American Revolution; of the many ideas and concepts that have advanced our nation because of their setting an example for us?

Cannot we learn from “our parents”? Of course we can, and that includes the struggle over considering the effects of European law on our Supreme Court, where the battle rages over whether or not our highest court should consider foreign law in making decisions that affect our future as a nation!

Instead of condemning “foreign influences”, we should embrace them as a way to improve and promote “a more perfect Union”! The Founding Fathers certainly appreciated that concept!