If original intent is such a great thing, it seems to me there is a great deal more we ought to be doing with it.
Let’s start with the whole red/blue state thing. You might be aware that tax money paid to the federal government has a tendency to flow from so-called blue states to red states. Prosperous blue states pay more in federal tax money than they get back, while less prosperous red states are exactly the reverse.
Mitch McConnell pretty much admitted it when he was home in Kentucky the other day, telling his constituents that even though he and every other Republican had voted against Joe Biden’s economic rescue plan, Kentucky would be getting more than $4 billion in federal money from the government.
Of course, it isn’t even the money that’s obscene. It’s that in the name of creating a union of 13 small countries in 1878, the founders created a bizarre sort of hybrid in which somewhere between 20-25 percent of the people can stand in the doorway and prevent progressive chance.
That’s partly because of the Senate and its equal representation for states, but where it’s truly worse is that a little more than a fourth of states can block amendments to the Constitution. That may not sound horrible on the face of it, but consider this:
Idaho, West Virginia, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine and Rhode Island; Montana, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming. Those 13 states make up less than 5 percent of the country’s population, but no constitutional amendment can pass without the support of at least one of them.
The major alternative that would result in change would be a new constitutional convention, but in such an event, each state would receive one vote.
Maybe the answer is to live the way the founders did.
1. We should farm and make food the way they did in the 18th century, because that’s the way the Founders did it.
2. We should forget about penicillin and other antibiotics and instead bleed people who are ill, because that’s the way the Founders did it.
3. The womenfolk should have no rights at all. Indeed a married woman should be the property of her husband, because that’s the way the Founders did it.
4. All voting should be done by paper ballots, because that’s the way the Founders did it.
5. Black people, well, sorry …
6. There should be no FAA, or FCC, or FTC, or any of the other alphabet things regulating things that the Founders never had to worry about.
Of course there is a tremendous irony in this. When we go on and on about original intent, we are disrespecting our Founding Fathers, who never once said anything about keeping everything the way it was.
Indeed, the Founders were some of the great intellects of their time. We’re acting as though they were the McConnells, Greenes, Gaetzes and Boeberts of their time, with a Pat Robertson or two thrown in for good measure.
I would be happy to follow what the founders wanted.
Just not what Moscow Mitch says they wanted.