Is it any wonder why the Left is winning? Conservatives can’t even agree on something as basic as the plain meanings of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
Exhibit A is a pissing match between Edward J. Erler, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, and Mark Pulliam, playing out in the pages of American Greatness (Mr. Pulliam is a lawyer, a commentator, a contributing editor at the Library of Law and Liberty, and the proprietor of the Misrule of Law blog).
Mr. Erler tried to make a case, in a March 17th article published in American Greatness, that states did not exist prior to the Constitution:
In two recent articles (“Phony Constitutionalists Despise This Freshman Senator” and “The Pernicious Notion of ‘Unenumerated Rights’”) Mark Pulliam attempts to construct a defense of original intent jurisprudence. His attempt is vitiated by one glaring defect: he is utterly mistaken about the first principles of the Constitution. He invites us to “Recall our first principles: The U.S. Constitution is a compact among the states, which existed as separate sovereigns prior to ratification of the Constitution in 1789.”
Pulliam defends his position in a March 23rd article in which he takes apart Erler’s position point-by-point, beginning:
Erler’s response to my articles rests on a number of false premises. He contends that the states did not exist as separate sovereign entities prior to the Constitution (and, thus, the Constitution cannot be a compact among the states); the Declaration automatically formed the United States as a single national entity; the Declaration is central to the Constitution; and “natural law” lurks invisibly in the Constitution, waiting to be “discovered” by discerning judges. None of these contentions withstands scrutiny. For that reason, his entire analysis fails.
He continues:
The Articles of Confederation, approved by the Second Continental Congress on November 15, 1777 and ratified by all 13 states on March 1, 1781, comprised a loose federation of the states, which continued until the Constitution was drafted in 1787 and ratified by the requisite number of states (nine) in 1788. The Articles referred to the confederation as “The United States of America” but expressly stated that “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence.” The Constitution was drafted because the individual states realized that the confederation created by the Articles was too weak to be effective. The states clearly existed prior to and independent of the Constitution. It is absurd to contend otherwise.
There is a wealth of information about first principles of the American experiment in this debate. Anyone with more than a passing interest in the subject will likely learn something new by digging into the fur that’s flying. What we have is the very essence of “discourse in the public sphere”, what Obama would call a “National Debate”.
Whether one wishes to call them “States” or “Colonies” or “Fruit Fly Collectives”, the plain fact is that there were multiple regions on this continent, before the Declaration, that resided each with its own concerns and areas of control, and the Constitution that was crafted during the unfortunate absence of Thomas Jefferson was written with every intent to respect those individual (dare I say “sovereign”) lands.
4 replies on “Conservatives fractured in their interpretation of the Constitution”
Remind me not to follow Edward J. Erler in the case that I am ever tempted. He clearly does not understand early American history.
I got that impression very quickly.
I am a little confused by the first line: “Is it any wonder why the Left is winning?” As long as there is still SOME voice left on the internet through alternative sites such as BillWhittle.com, the left isn’t winning at all. They are louder than Conservatives, surely. As far as the Constitution is concerned, it truly is a problem with legal scholars like Mike Lee and Ted Cruz argue the interpretation of the document, like they did on the question of Executive Authority, but I maintain that the left has done so much damage to themselves that I can’t go past the first line in this article. They aren’t.
The Left appears to be fracturing and destroying themselves as a political party, but in fact as a cultural force the Left has had and continues to have an iron grip on nearly all of our institutions, and on the minds of the younger 2/3rds of the population. We are in a time of great uncertainty and turmoil, and while it may not be comfortable to admit, the Left has their hands on nearly all the levers.
Ask yourself where we would be if Hillary Clinton had won, rather than Donald Trump, compared to say, three terms of a “Republicans” like the Bushes. In the first case, I propose that America would have completed the transition to a totalitarian state, possibly lasting as long as did the Soviet Union, whereas in the second case we’d still be a couple of terms of a “Democrat” away from disaster.
It is not a balanced scale between the two when you look beyond politics. One Conservative voice on the internet may have a strong moral argument, but winning it is not, unless you consider Pyrrhic victories to be “winning”. “Politics is downstream of Culture” — I believe that was Andrew Breitbart’s stunningly concise observation.
One of the Left’s most powerful weapons, the media, just broke itself on the Mueller report. Let’s see how that plays out, and hope it causes a chain reaction.