THAT WORKS
After more than two-hundred years to think about it, one might easily conclude that
the American Revolution was truly a bad idea. I say this even if I did have an
ancestor in the Continental Line, one Henry Apperson, who froze, starved and went
virtually naked together with some 10,000 of his fellow conscripts at Valley Forge in
the winter of 1777-1778 while the dour, thick-pated George Washington
commandeered a nice warm house in which to spend the winter.
He had a great deal more than that. While his men munched on fire cakes, a
tasteless mixture of flour and water, and cried for meat (“We want meat! Give us
meat!) Washington sat feasting on mutton and fowl, drinking the best imported wines
and liquors and entertaining himself hugely, even hiring a band to play anthems for
his birthday entertainment. It is not clear how much the new federal government paid
for his expensive winter, but it must have been a pile. The expense account for his
entire eight years of his service came to $449,261.51—or more than 4 million dollars
in 21st century currency.
There it sits, the great stone house, amid huge oaks undoubtedly old when
Washington was there, with great fires roaring inside, on a low mount overlooking the
icy flats where his troops lay shivering and dying in the winter cold, plagued by typhus
and dysentery, without boots or shoes, leaving bloody footprints in the snow, their
legs frozen black and often amputated, twelve men to a drafty falling-down hut only
sixteen by fourteen feet, getting little sleep, often sitting by the fire the night long for
lack of blankets.
But where are his women? Martha is always close, so he must suffer at least this
hardship—no other women for the duration, unless the war did turn South as was now
expected, and allow him a certain amount of time, a day here and there, to renew old
acquaintances with slave girls and the like—and just too bad that his old love Sally
Fairfax had gone off to England with her husband.
Is there any real doubt that this character expected to be king in America? When he
saw that wasn’t to be, that nobody was prepared to place a golden crown on his
head, that there were to be no parades and no big drums beating in his honor, that
he would have to be satisfied with the presidency, which may not have seemed like
much of a prize in those days, he practically fades from history until the moment of his
much-quoted Farewell Address. I wonder who wrote it for him. Or who put up all
those signs in Revolutionary-era towns, saying, “George Washington Slept Here.”
So what are we to make of all this? Given a little more time, and less noise from New
England firebrands, the British parliament and even King George, who was adamant
about many issues though not yet insane, might have come round to Edmund Burke’s
way of thinking:
“My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names,
from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties,
which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep
the idea of their civil rights associated with your government--they will cling and
grapple to you; and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from your
allegiance. But let it be once understood, that your government may be one thing,
and their privileges another; that these two things may exist without any mutual
relation; the cement is gone; the cohesion is loosened; and everything hastens to
decay and dissolution.”
Burke, an Irishman and possibly the most brilliant parliamentarian in British history,
rivaled if at all by the first Lord . . . .., could not even with his great rhetoric forestall
the designs of the greedy, shortsighted legislators who ruled the House of Commons
in his day. So the war came, bloody, unnecessary, forever a blot on American-Anglo
relations.
Winning a war we could not have won without the help of France, an ignominious
proposition in itself, or so it seems today, was not enough. Then came the great
struggle over the Constitution. Now we can see what an inefficient job our founding
fathers, for all of their learning and brain power, actually accomplished. With their
great concern for checks and balances they created a government that simply does
not work efficiently in our technological age, often keeping Congress and the
President at loggerheads. Get a president and a Congress of the same political
persuasion, which happens all too seldom, (the present makeup of the national
government being one of those rare exceptions) and maybe progressive legislation
would lie within the realm of possibility.
Is it possible—one hesitates even to hint at such a heresy—that some of the great
minds in the hot summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, working mostly in the dark, might
have been a bit too clever for their own good?
These men, even the most learned of them, James Madison, for example, were wrong
about almost everything, unwittingly creating most of the constitutional problems we
face today, all in the name of checks and balances. Not because they lacked brain
power or a deep reading of the great philosophers of that age, but simply because
they could not see much beyond their own times. How could they have foreseen what
the steam age would bring, what the industrial age would bring, or the atomic age and
most recently the technological age? How could they have known that women would
get out of hand and begin to demand equal rights?
Most of all how could they have possibly foreseen that there was a chief justice
named John Marshall in their future. A cunning Virginia rustic and estranged cousin
of Thomas Jefferson, this infamous Big Thinker, in a series of rulings, beginning with
the textbook case of Marbury v. Madison, transformed the high court into an
overweening and often dictatorial institution in a supposedly Republican nation. Yet
he apparently did see the weaknesses that he had inherited, once suggesting that
the Supreme Court should at least be of unanimous persuasion before overturning
an act of Congress. Still, it was he who created the concept of judicial review, which
is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution or the Judiciary Act of 1789; and the effect
of his sweeping decisions bedevil our federal system till this very day.
During the first years after Independence the court was what Alexander Hamilton and
others reckoned it to be: In the Federalist papers Hamilton, a fellow not usually so
lacking in foresight, asserted “that the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of
the three departments of power; that it can never attack with success either of the
other two; and that all possible care is requisite to enable it to defend itself against
their attacks.”
Where, then, is the president who, like Andrew Jackson is willing to stand up to
peremptory justices. Said Jackson, after Marshall issued a decision denying the state
of Georgia, with the president’s backing, the right to strip Cherokee tribes of their
hereditary land: “Justice Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.”
For once the chief justice found himself helpless—and off went the Cherokees to
Oklahoma on the infamous Trail of Tears. This was an evil business for sure, but at
least Jackson had the gumption to know that the court had no troops other than those
at the President’s disposal. Perhaps he also knew that Jackson would not authorize
them, as President Eisenhower did in a later time, during the 1957 Little Rock
segregation imbroglio.
Congress balances actions by the President. The President also balances actions by
Congress. But who is there to check or derail dubious actions by the Supreme
Court? The truth is that the Constitution does have power under Article III of the
Constitution to withdraw such jurisdiction as it pleases from the court. Section 1
asserts that "the judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme
Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and
establish." Having created the federal district and appellate courts, Congress can
regulate, reorganize or even abolish them.
At the beginning of the Great Depression a liberal Congress that had come to power
with FDR withdrew from a pro-business court the right to hear cases involving labor
strikes, a action upheld by the court in 1938 and thereby setting a precedent, so one
might have thought, that would doom it forever to secondary status in the federal
hierarchy. The precedent is important, because even activist judges occasionally pay
attention to the concept of stare decises (Let the precedent stand).
In the early seventies, shortly before his chairing of the Watergate Committee, the
late Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina, teamed with conservative Democrats and
Republicans in an effort to withdraw jurisdiction from the federal courts over forced
cross-busing. The proposition failed in the Senate by only one vote on February 29,
1972. This insane doctrine, so beloved by Ivy League professors and their ilk, soon
died of its own weight, though not before befouling the education of a whole
generation of school children.
In 1980, our Senator Jesse Helms' (R-NC) amendment to withdraw jurisdiction over
prayer in public schools passed the Senate, but failed to come to a vote in the
House. Speaker Tip O’Neill, a savvy and devious Democrat, managed to block it.
Then, in 1969, after the Supreme Court had shocked America with a series of twenty-
two pro-obscenity decisions, Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL) made a valiant, though
unsuccessful, effort to withdraw jurisdiction from the federal courts to overturn a
jury's finding that a paper, magazine, book, movie or art exhibit, however repulsive,
can be declared obscene.
Meanwhile, the British government has developed along entirely different lines. It
did not get where we it is without great upheavals and monumental struggles, coming
all the way from the tyrannical kings and Star Chamber courts of the Middle Ages to a
government that today, without a written constitution, is doubtless the most efficient
on earth.
Now it is true that the United Kingdom also has its high court and is contemplating a
reform that would create a tribunal separate from the House of Lords, where the
judiciary power now rests. But the new court, like the old, would have no power to
overturn acts of Parliament.
“A Supreme Court along the United States model,” says a UK white paper, “or a
Constitutional Court on the lines of some other European countries would be a
departure from the UK's constitutional traditions. In the United States, the Supreme
Court has the power to strike down and annul congressional legislation, and to assert
the primacy of the constitution . . . . In our democracy, Parliament is supreme. There
is no separate body of constitutional law which takes precedence over all other law.
The constitution is made up of the whole body of the laws and settled practice and
convention, all of which can be amended or repealed by Parliament.”
Never has the House of Commons had any hesitation about altering or throwing out
decisions of its high court, and their government is the better for it. Yet contemplate
for a moment the “blessings” of American liberty: judicial supremacy at every level of
government, a devilish system insidious in its implications and often in its actions.
Add to that the paralysis that stalls the legislative process, except in those rare years
that Congress and the President are in ideological agreement. More often than not,
the two are forever working at cross purposes. The logjams that stall action on the big
issues of the day seldom if ever occur in BEYOND THE THRESHOLD the UK. There,
the prime minister and his party, labor and conservative, stand or fall together, and
the judiciary power possessed by the House of Lords is indeed a frail instrument, not
a doctrine that can decide the fate of a nation—and nobody needs a filibuster of a
corrupt monster like Lyndon Johnson to stall congressional action on important issues
The result, as has become increasingly apparent in recent years, is that the
ideologues of Left and Right spend all their time petitioning the court for their
versions of justice, ignoring Congress as a second-rate institution with no real political
clout. And Congress appears willing enough to cooperate, if for no other reason than
that they do not have to explain their votes on hot-button issues to their
constituencies. “It is out of our hands,” they say. “It is a matter for the court to
decide.”
Has the time come, then, to revoke the Declaration of Independence and petition for
readmission to the empire? Even before the legislative paralysis so common in the
present day it was beginning to be altogether too apparent that not the Declaration
so much as the Constitution that followed hard upon it is the real culprit?
I suppose it is too late to undo the shameful results of the American Revolution, but
why not be thankful in this season of forgiveness that our colonies did not fall into the
hands of a sordid bunch of Francophiles.
DISSOLVING CONGRESS
How often as the cry echoed down through the years: The Republic is never safe
when Congress comes to town. Life, liberty and property are all in jeopardy!!
I believe it was the British philosopher and political thinker John Locke who first hit
upon this deeply prophetic truth. Like most philosophers, from the ancient Greeks to
modern existentialists, Locke occasionally sought refuge behind the abstractions of
metaphysics. But mostly he was a plain spoken man, and certainly there was no
mistaking his meaning when he suggested, not once, not twice, but at least three
times, that when legislators have no business to conduct in their seat of government
they should simply STAY HOME.
Possibly the finest idea Locke ever had, though unfortunately it never made its way
into any of our founding documents, as so many of his others did. Maybe the
Founders thought the idea too obvious to deserve mention. Still, it is an idea that has
never caught on in Washington and apparently not in his own country either.
Even when Congress supposedly has great work to do somehow it can never quite
get down to the task. But, winter and summer, where are they? On Capitol Hill,
drawing down their pay as usual or else on some tax-paid sojourn in one of the world’
s many exotic trouble spots.
One cannot even cursorily read Locke’s works without concluding that young Thomas
Jefferson must have committed to memory practically every word the man ever wrote.
Not only Jefferson but all of our famous Founders owed a profound debt to the British
political thinker.
His words echo throughout the Declaration of Independence—more perhaps in
Jefferson’s draft than in the product that emerged after heavy editing by his elders—
and at the same time provided the constitutional foundation stone upon which our
system of government is built.
Yet nothing the philosopher ever said has more meaning for today’s Republican-
controlled Congress than a series of statements that can be reduced to a brief
phrase: Go home! Or if not home, go wander Europe with your mistresses, paying
your own way of course, or take to your yachts and vacation condos.
Now it is a great misfortune that Locke had nothing to say about the concept of a
Supreme Court that appears to be running the government and often without any real
sense of control or responsibility. But let that go. How could he ever have thought of
it, when it didn’t even occur to our most profound thinkers until Chief Justice John
Marshall and those who followed him created the concept of judicial review, with the
power to overthrow acts of Congress and to hell with checks and balances—and
Congress let him get away with it. And is still letting him and his many successors get
away with it.
Now the idea of reigning in the court—and Congress does have that power even if it
has seldom exercised it—is truly a great business that would justify the time and effort
spent on it; but nary a word about that, nary a suggestion that the time has come to
limit the court’s judicial excesses that grow more expansive by the year.
Consider for the moment Locke’s thoughts of legislative responsibility, when it begins,
when it ends and when it ought to disband and get out of Washington and spare the
country an embarrassing spectacle almost rivaling the farcial doings of a
mollycoddling president like the womanizing Bill Clinton and his servile aides.
Said Locke: “The Legislative Power is that which has a right to direct how the Force of
the Commonwealth shall be imploy’d for preserving the Community and the Members
of it. But . . . there is no need, that the Legislative should be always in being, not
having always any business to do . . . ” And again: “It is not necessary, no not so
much as convenient, that the Legislative should be always in being . . . because there
is not always need of new Laws to be made.” Even more to the point: “Constant
frequent meetings of the Legislative, and long Continuations of their Assemblies,
without necessary occasion, could not but be burthersome to the People, and must
necessarily in time produce more dangerous inconveniences . . . “
In simplest terms, as it relates to our present Congress: Go home. An obvious point
by now to almost anyone who has kept half an eye on the non-doings of the House
and Senate.
To paraphrase the author of Hamlet: Thou needs’t no philosopher come from the
grave to tell us this.
The last Democrat presidential candidate I ever voted for was the corrupt and
devious Lyndon Johnson, a vulgar, venal and thoroughly disreputable character, yet
too shrewd to leave behind him tapes that could have got him thrown out of office by
impeachment or perhaps sent to jail. Yet for all his shrewdness he lacked the deeper
sense or “vision,” the term now in common use, to foresee where his mistaken
policies in Vietnam were tending or that his big-spending Great Society would come to
nothing –or in many cases to worse than nothing.
What a lesson so many of us learned after Johnson’s election in 1964! But the
Republicans, now holding substantial power for the first time in a generation of more—
what will we learn from them? Will they actually take action on George W. Bush’s
ambitious agenda or dawdle away their time in bordellos and fancy bars? Will they
besmirch themselves with the same ‘do’nothing’ stigma that haunted Republican
legislators who briefly held power after World War II?
For the first time we have a president who wants still more tax relief for the American
public and is willing to take on the high-handed Internal Revenue Service in order to
get it. Bush also has the first original idea for reforming Social Security that has come
along in our lifetime. But who among us believes Congress will ever get these or any
of his other ambitious proposals done within a reasonable amount of time, or indeed
that it will ever get them done at all.
With the example of the paralysis that affects not only this Congress, but most of
those that have gone before, old Locke would have had a good many reasons to
expand his thoughts on the proper way to conduct a government.
Whether there is no business before Congress, or whether the majority simply doesn’
t know how to proceed with many unfinished matters now hanging fire or whether their
numerical majority is so thin that they are simply cowed by leftover Democrats—
whatever the case, it is all one: The words John Locke are more applicable than even
he could have imagined, though certainly he did understand, as many have since,
that the longer Congress remains in session the greater the jeopardy of the country.
It would be too easy to assume that our legislators have simply taken leave of their
senses, when they somehow manage to turn every issue, whatever its importance,
into a matter of inconsequentiality, in which they appeared to be slogging about
confused and weary and out of sorts and desperately in need of a change. So just let
them get out of Washington and go home to and explain themselves, if possible, to
their constituents.
Have any of these people ever thought of running on a “do nothing” ticket. Some
might even approach the well-nigh unattainable status of the learned and unexcitable
Calvin Coolidge. Let them go home and stay there until a national emergency calls
them forth. Better still, let them wait the “emergency” out and, depending on whether
it threatens national security, maybe it will go away by itself, as the Great Depression
almost certainly would have done if, as many revisionists now believe, Herbert Hoover
and Franklin D. Roosevelt hadn’t taken it upon themselves to tinker with naturally
sustaining and self-correcting market forces.
So let them go home and stay there and, above all, DO NOTHING! Let them drink
their toasts to the likes of William McKinley, who didn’t even leave his front porch to
campaign for reelection, and William Howard Taft and Franklin Pierce and the Filmore
Fews, a famous organization paying tribute to the non-accomplishments of the man
who may have been our greatest President, Millard Filmore, sneeringly and unfairly
impugned by his disclaimers as a “Copperhead” or “Cotton Whig”—in other words, as
a Southern sympathizer.
Certainly he managed to get fewer your Americans killed in unnecessary wars than
the Lincolns, Roosevelts, Wilsons and Lyndon Johnsons. If he could have been
around long enough he might even have managed us to avoid to the calamitous Civil
War or, more correctly, War between the States, fought on the pretext of freeing
slaves when, in actuality, the only real reason for it was the fear of Northern
moneychangers that the South would soon surpass their region in industrial might,
what with all that cotton lying for the taking just outside the doors of their textile mills.
If you have something to do, congressmen, and are willing to do it, which is seldom
the case, then for god’s sake do it and get the hell out of Washington. Go back to
your wives, your swimming holes, your summer revivals, your family reunions and
backyard barbecues, your long days when there are no easy women to sooth your
pain. Just get the hell on out and let the rest of us LIVE!
BEYOND THE THRESHOLD
In the dark house alive with the voices
of the newly dead, I must take care
to watch my step lest this strange world
of which I had previously caught
only the barest glimpse now snare
me for its own; I stand at the door
I had locked against myself, listening
to all those voices in other rooms
(ghosts of April evenings settling down)
and stand as though deprived of power
to cross into their imperious domain;
yet what is it that deprives us of the gifts
with which the more prophetic
have been endowed -- or that we have somehow lost
in the busy world of adult life?
Sometimes it comes back with a rush,
all the forgotten voices, almost voices,
or if not voices, what? Who would ever deny
they abide with us still? Sometimes you lie
in bed at night, as though you were a child again,
not sleeping, seeking the true poetry of life
remembering all the cool days in the shade,
the summer afternoons when you sat quietly by the lake,
watching the bass break the surface of the water;
the long walks over brown fields drowned in haze
and through hazy woods; and the long evenings when you sat
on the porch again with the church chimes ringing
and the night-birds doves crying
their cry of eternal damnation.
III
So it was and so it is again,
so many warm nights on the porch
amid the orchestral sounds of the summer dark,
crickets and katydids in full cry, their song of death
rising to crescendo, for they know that soon the crisp fall days
will come, that death will come, that release will come
at last. You dream of summers almost forgotten,
of the first chill of autumn,
as you walked along a road under the rim of a hill
ever more quickly, searching, always seeking
the voices and laughter that forever lie
just beyond hearing or understanding:
the evenings, mornings, and afternoons of life;
earth and sky and dreamy water, the substance
of things not quite grasped, the groping
and restless striving, and always at night in the empty houses
the disconsolate voices beyond the locked door,
intruding themselves upon us when all should be asleep
or thinking only of what lies ahead:
the hay harvest, the ingathering of the cotton,
the long days of plowing up worn-out fields
to make them fresh for another
season. Are they any less real to us,
these shrieks of midnight terror,
than the voices of our youth
when we lay half sleeping in the cold, dark house
listening for the voices that had come to us
from somewhere beyond what then we thought
no more than a thinly veiled curtain:
the voices, the abrupt cry of desperation
allowing you at last, in the dreamy silence,
to penetrate the dark reality of a world
you now can scarcely distinguish
from the more distant echo of life itself.
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