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TechnoratiThe Founders' Rights Stuff
Standing up for our constitutional rights is in the best tradition of our founding fathers, not a sign of weakness.
'The Constitution is not a suicide pact." After 9/11, that old saw -- originally coined by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson -- was dusted off. Lately, it's been getting a heavy workout.
On June 12, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court released a decision authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy holding, in Boumediene vs. Bush, that Guantanamo prisoners have the right to ask the federal courts to rule on the validity of their continued detention (many have been held for years, despite little evidence in some cases that they're truly "unlawful combatants.")
Barack Obama praised Kennedy's majority opinion for "re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law," but John McCain denounced it as "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." The Wall Street Journal's editorialists agreed with McCain and hauled out the usual cliches: "More Americans are likely to die as a result [of this decision]," they opined darkly. "Justice Jackson once famously observed that the Constitution is 'not a suicide pact.' About Anthony Kennedy's Constitution, we're not so sure."
When invoked with the requisite tone of pompous finality, "the Constitution is not a suicide pact" is an effective rhetorical ploy. Who could disagree? Anyway, no one wants to defend suicide pacts. The very phrase sounds like "suicide bomber," thus managing to subtly imply that those who stand up for basic rights are not only self-destructive but share the ideology of terrorists.
But the Constitution also doesn't contain any footnotes that say, "Note to our descendants: This Constitution is intended for easy times only. At the first sign of trouble, feed this document to your dog. We won't mind. We only fought a war for it."
This Fourth of July, celebrate by rereading the Declaration of Independence, created by more or less the same crowd who brought us the Constitution, 11 years and one war later. Remember it? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Wild stuff! To the founders, "all men" have "unalienable rights" -- not just U.S. citizens in the continental United States. (If the founding fathers were around today, Rush Limbaugh and Rudy Giuliani would pillory them as limp-wristed, latte-drinking, soft-on-terror liberals.)
It was treasonous stuff too. When the Declaration of Independence was drafted, there were no U.S. citizens: Instead, there were about 2.5 million scrappy Colonists who legally owed allegiance to the king of England, George III. But they went to war -- over the little matter of freedom, law and unalienable, God-given rights.
Among their grievances against King George, the rebellious Colonists complained that he ignored the will of their representative bodies, refused "his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers" and "affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power." The Colonists also objected to the denial of "the benefit of trial by jury" and the king's practice of avoiding the inconveniences of due process by transporting prisoners "beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses." (George III would have loved Guantanamo.)
The founders had a word for governments that respected rights only arbitrarily and selectively: tyranny. The signers of the declaration took rights seriously. They wrote, "For the support of this declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." That wasn't mere rhetoric. Technically, the signers were all traitors, liable to be executed for treason. And they accepted that standing up for rights means taking some real risks.
Of the 56 signers of the declaration, about a third fought in the Revolutionary War, and five were captured and severely mistreated by the British. Several later died. Many lost children in the war, and about a third had their homes damaged or destroyed by the British. About 25,000 Colonists died in the war, about 8,000 in combat, the rest of disease -- including an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 who died as a result of mistreatment while prisoners of the British. Extrapolating to modern population figures, that's like losing nearly 300,000 Americans in a war.
The Constitution is no "suicide pact," but the people who founded this nation risked war, prison and death for the sake of unalienable human rights. Their values guided us through good times and bad, through the Civil War, two world wars and the Cold War. But today, some Americans seem happy to discard those same precious values in the name of "security."
Sometimes I wonder: If the founders could have foreseen this, would they have bothered to fight the Revolutionary War?
--Rosa Brooks
Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times
11 Comments so far
Show Allmetzgerwil,forgive me, I'm drunk. Let me tell you a story-a short story. There once was a hard working man that thought if he worked hard and produced a product that was better than the guy next to him he could make a living for himself and his family. In accomplishing this feat he raised his sons and daughters to learn his business and tried to make their lives less painful than his. He loved his wife and he loved his children and he slaved to make a successful product in his immediate community. His work was passed on to his siblings to either embrace or forgo. But when an honest, hard working man dies he leaves his bounty to the heir apparent that he believes is best suited to take over his accomplishments. A good percentage of first generation siblings adhere to their fathers competentcies and go about doing for thier children what their parents did for them. Now the problem arrises when generations expand, for, let's say 5 generations What you have now is a pampered wealthy young person who polishes apples for another pampered young person and a working population that is 5 times removed from them trying to do what is right in thier immediate community. The people in charge have no idea what it is like to work. Please read that last sentence again, slowly. It is truely the foundation of most of our societal problems. The awkward social kids in high school, the ones that did not fit in, the ones that did not have sexual contact until well into their twenties, the ones that felt that society was beneath them because thier existence was privileged from birth. It is the generation upon generation of these assholes that control the money on this earth and it is up to you and I not to give them any more of it$. The compounded generational non-working rich kids are now running the show. They are idiots that have no experience in everyday life and you and I have nothing in common with them. Please try to enjoy your life, independence is what you ought to strive for, and happiness and geniune love is what you must embrace.
metzgerwil -- wow, nice paternalistic lecture ! All i am saying is that what comes around goes around and in the fractal, nonlocal scheme of things the rise of Bush, Cheney and the neocons was implicit from the beginning of 'this great nation'.
why am i here ? maybe because i'm an emissary from another timeline where we do things differently ?
oh, and women are still oppressed btw, my dear friend Jayne has just taken on babysitting her new twin granddaughters full time so that her daughter-- who was delivered of said children via c-section all of three weeks ago -- can go back to work full time -- because otherwise she will lose the health care coverage her babies need and which still will cost her hundreds of dollars a month plus not being able to be with her infants. Where is the logic or justice or 'glowing principle' in that little domino of events ? Nothing has really changed, in this timeline the white male landowners still rule. And we're still not supposed to notice. That would be unpatriotic.
exactly what American dream and American creed am i denigrating by speaking truth to power ? and why does that have to be my dream and my creed ?
I read this from an anti-war libertarian orientation and not a regular reader of Common Dreams. From the comments it seems the left really does hate America just like Rush Limbaugh says.
The Founders fought the Revolution to determine who would plunder the continent? It is simplistic to say, as Marxist historians do, that economics alone determine History. It is but one of many motives and it is ahistorical to project onto the Founders a continental perspective when they didn't see much beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Loyal British subjects in Canada, Australia and New Zealand were just as brutal and exploitive towards aboriginal peoples as their more rebellious American brothers. To say that the issue of Western lands was the only issue of the American Revolution is absurd. And to say that possession of land alone made America prosperous is equally absurd.
Alsakamaid thinks the entire history of the US is a history of tyranny. The US was not and is not perfect but in its bold assertion of ideals of liberty, justice, and equality, it has, until recently, led the world towards the realization of those ideals. That the promise of equality was not granted to slaves was a hypocrisy not lost on the revolutionary generation. But slavery and the economy behind it predated the Revolution by 150 years. To state the theoretical existence of human equality and to actually make it happen are two different things. Soon after the Declaration of Ind. about half the states did abolish slavery. The rest did after a bloody war. Yes the badge of slavery continued after that war, and we still struggle, ever so slowly, to remove that badge and make those ideals a reality. But we move towards a better world guided by the ideals set forth at our founding, however imperfectly they may have been practiced. As Martin Luther King said, his dream "was deeply rooted in the American dream, that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, 'that all men are created equal.'" He knew this would take time and diligence, but if we denigrate the American dream and the American creed then we abandon all hope for a better future. For as he also said, "let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred." For all of its problems America has been a land of opportunity for hundreds of millions of its own people, and a beacon of hope to untold millions of others around the world. Yes, even to women. It is absurd to fault our founders for failing to comprehend a theory of womens' rights that did not exist at the time. You might as well criticize them for not comprehending the theory of relativity. But their glowing principles were the foundation for those who later fought for womens' rights. I am tempted to say to Alaskamaid, if this country is so fundamentally flawed, if you are so oppressed, then why are you here? Yes, there are many things wrong, but nothing that could not be fixed by adherence to the great principles of our foundation. If we can agree to that, then we can work together to stop Bush, Chaney and the neocons from destroying those principles as they change our Republic into an empire even more despotic
than the one we rebelled against over 200 years ago this day.
Sweet words.
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/pricepaid.asp
Journalists should stop referring to anything taken from the Wall Street Journal. The articles are nothing more than fascist stained rags designed not to inform but heighten emotions. No different than any other Rupert Murdoch-- News Corporation rag. Why bother?
Brian has a good point, the Founding Fathers' intentions were not entirely altruistic. If you dig a bit deeper, economics played a large role in the Constitution.
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles Beard, 1913: "The concept of the Constitution as a piece of abstract legislation reflecting no group interests and recognizing no economic antagonisms is entirely false. It was an economic document drawn with superb skill by men whose property interests were immediately at stake."
And George Washington was the biggest land speculator of the time.
http://theformofmoney.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2008/3/24/3600602.html
"The founders had a word for governments that respected rights only arbitrarily and selectively: tyranny."
That would be the US, ask any Native American, African American, or female for that matter.
"To the founders, all men have inalienable rights". Certainly, as long as you define "all men" as white landowners of European descent. I for one am tired of having to use monopoly money featuring their images.
The only reason this country is so 'rich' is that we stole an entire continent from the previous inhabitants.
Wealth based on theft does not bring happiness, and in general we are not a happy people.
My preferred coin of the realm would be based on an ancient, honorable and useful plant which would be featured on the new paper currency, which would also be made out of the same plant -- hemp.
Sorry to burst your flag-waving bubble, Rosa, but the Revolutionary War was fought to determine who would control the incomparable booty being plundered from Indian lands.
I guess "Don't Tread on Me!" was catchier than "Plunderers R Us!"
YES! Most excellent!