Insurrections or Revolutions?
Posted On Tuesday, May 26, 2009 at at 12:05 PM by Dan
This article was originally published at LINKS. I found it at Monthly Review Online and copied it from there. The MR site has links to the original version in Spanish as well as a Portuguese translation. This is an excellent, although introductory, article.
URL: mrzine.monthlyreview.org/harnecker220509.html
Ideas for the Struggle #1
Insurrections or Revolutions?
The Role of the Political Instrument
by Marta Harnecker
This is the first in a series of articles on "Ideas for the Struggle" by Marta Harnecker.
1. The recent popular uprisings at the turn of the 21st century that have rocked numerous countries such as Argentina and Bolivia -- and, more generally, the history of the multiple social explosions that have occurred in Latin America and the rest of the world -- have undoubtedly demonstrated that the initiative of the masses, in and of itself, is not enough to defeat ruling regimes.
2. Impoverished urban and rural masses, without a well-defined leadership, have risen up, seized highways, towns, and neighborhoods, ransacked stores and stormed parliaments, but despite achieving the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people, neither their massive size nor their combativeness has been enough to develop from popular insurrection into revolution. They have overthrown presidents, but they haven't been able to conquer power and initiate a process of deep social transformations.
3. On the other hand, the history of triumphant revolutions clearly demonstrates what can be achieved when there is a political instrument capable of raising an alternative national program that unifies the struggles of diverse social actors behind a common goal; that helps to cohere them and elaborate a path forward for these actors based on an analysis of the existent balance of forces. Only in this manner can actions be carried out at the right place and right time, always seeking out the weakest link in the enemy's chain.
4. This political instrument is like a piston that compresses steam at the decisive moment and -- without wasting any energy -- converts it into a powerful force.
5. In order for political action to be effective, so that protests, resistance, and struggles are really able to change things, to convert insurrections into revolutions, a political instrument capable of overcoming the dispersion and fragmentation of the exploited and the oppressed is required, one that can create spaces to bring together those who, in spite of their differences, have a common enemy; that is able to strengthen existing struggles and promote others by orientating their actions according to a thorough analysis of the political situation; that can act as an instrument for cohering the many expressions of resistance and struggle.
6. We are aware that there are a number of apprehensions towards such ideas. There are many who are not even willing to discuss them. Such positions are adopted because they associate this idea with the anti-democratic, authoritarian, bureaucratic and manipulating political practices that have characterized many left parties.
7. I believe it is fundamental that we overcome this subjective barrier and understand that when we refer to a political instrument, we are not thinking of just any political instrument, we are dealing with a political instrument adjusted to the new times, an instrument that we must built together.
8. However, in order to create or remodel this new political instrument, the left has to change its political culture and its vision of politics. This cannot be reduced to institutional political disputes for control over parliament or local governments; to approving laws or winning elections. In this conception of politics, the popular sectors and their struggles are completely ignored. Neither can politics be limited to the art of what is possible.
9. For the left, politics must be the art of making the impossible possible. And we are not talking about a voluntarist declaration. We are talking about understanding politics as the art of constructing a social and political force capable of changing the balance of force in favor of the popular movement, in such a way as to make possible in the future what today appears impossible.
10. We have to think of politics as the art of constructing forces. We have to overcome the old and deeply-rooted mistake of trying to build a political force without building a social force.
11. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of revolutionary phase-mongering among our militants; too much radicalism in their statements. I am convinced that the only way to radicalize a given situation is through the construction of forces. Those whose words are filled with demands for radicalization must answer the following question: What are you doing to construct the political and social force necessary to push the process forward?
12. But this construction of forces cannot occur spontaneously, only popular uprisings happen spontaneously. It needs a constructor.
13. And I envisage this political instrument as an organization capable of raising a national project that can unify and act as a compass for all those sectors that oppose neoliberalism. As a space that directs itself towards the rest of society, that respects the autonomy of social movements instead of manipulating them, and whose militants and leaders are true popular pedagogues, capable of stimulating the knowledge that exists within the people -- derived from their cultural traditions, as well as acquired in their daily struggles for survival -- through the fusion of this knowledge with the most all-encompassing knowledge that the political organization can offer. As an orientating and cohering instrument at the service of the social movements.
Bibliography of Marta Harnecker's Works on This Theme
La izquierda después de Seattle, Siglo XXI España, 2002.
La izquierda en el umbral del Siglo XXI. Haciendo posible lo imposible, México, Siglo XXI Editores, 1999; España, Siglo XXI Editores, 1ª ed., 1999, 2ª ed., 2000 y 3ª ed., 2000; Cuba, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2000; Portugal, Campo das Letras Editores, 2000; Brasil, Paz e Terra, 2000; Italia, Sperling and Küpfer Editori, 2001; Canadá (francés), Lantôt Éditeur, 2001; El Salvador, Instituto de Ciencias Políticas y Administrativas Farabundo Martí, 2001.
Hacia el Siglo XXI, La izquierda se renueva, Quito, Ecuador, CEESAL, 1991
Vanguardia y crisis actual or Izquierda y crisis actual, Siglo XXI España, 1990. Under the title Vanguardia y crisis actual: Argentina, Ediciones de Gente Sur, 1990; Uruguay, TAE Editorial, 1990; Chile, Brecha, 1990; Nicaragua, Barricada, 1990. Under the title Izquierda y crisis actual: México, Siglo XXI Editores, 1990; Perú, Ediciones Amauta, 1990; Venezuela, Abre Brecha, 1990; Dinamarca, Solidaritet, 1992.
Marta Harnecker is originally from Chile, where she participated in the revolutionary process of 1970-1973. She has written extensively on the Cuba Revolution and on the nature of socialist democracy. She now lives in Caracas and is a participant in the Venezuelan revolution. This article was translated by Federico Fuentes for Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, in which it first appeared; it is revised and reproduced here for educational purposes. The original article "¿Insurrecciones o revoluciones? El papel del instrumento político" is available at <168.96.200.17/ar/libros/martah/revol.rtf>. Click here for a Portuguese translation.
Historians Letter to Pres Obama: Don't Honor White Supremacy
Posted On Wednesday, May 20, 2009 at at 1:20 PM by Dan
This was posted on the History News Network. The full letter, along with signers, is reprinted below. If you like a laugh, check out the comments section on the HNN site. Apparently the neo-confederates are a little pissed. Good.
5-19-09
Dear President Obama: Please Don't Honor the Arlington Confederate Monument
http://hnn.us/articles/85884.html
By Edward Sebesta and James Loewen
This letter was written by Edward Sebesta and James Loewen and signed by the scholars listed below.
May 18, 2009
President Barack H. Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Obama:
Since the administration of Woodrow Wilson, presidents have sent annually a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument. Prior to the administration of George H. W. Bush, this was done on or near the birthday of Jefferson Davis. Starting with George H.W. Bush, it has been done on Memorial Day.
We ask you to not send a wreath or some other commemorative token to the Arlington Confederate Monument during your administration or after.
There are several reasons as to why this monument, a product of the Nadir in American race relations, should not be honored, and we list and explain them in this letter.
The monument was intended to legitimize secession and the principles of the Confederacy and glorify the Confederacy. It isn’t just a remembrance of the dead. The speeches at its ground-breaking and dedication defended and held up as glorious the Confederacy and the ideas behind it and stated that the monument was to these ideals as well as the dead. It was also intended as a symbol of white nationalism, portrayed in opposition to the multiracial democracy of Reconstruction, and a celebration of the re-establishment of white supremacy in the former slave states by former Confederate soldiers. In its design it also tells wrong history, boasting fourteen shields with the coat of arms of fourteen states. Thus it claims that Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland were part of the Confederacy. They weren’t.
The monument was given to the Federal Government by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which raised the funds to erect it. The UDC’s reasons for the monument are instructive. In the address of Mrs. Daisy McLaurin Stevens, President General of the United Daughters of the Confederacy at its dedication, she makes clear that the monument is to glorify the ideas of the Confederacy:
Great ideas and righteous ideas are alone immortal. The eternal years of God are theirs. The ideas our heroes cherished were and are beneficial as they are everlasting. These were living then; they are living to-day and shall live to-morrow and work the betterment of mankind. Thus our heroes are of those who, though dead, still toil for man through the arms and brains of those their examples have inspired and quickened to nobler things.
Since the United Daughters of the Confederacy upheld in multiple publications in the early 20th Century that the Ku Klux Klan was the heroic effort of the Confederate soldier, we have an idea what the “noble past” and “ideas our heroes cherished” were. Of course one of these “ideas” was secession to preserve the institution of African slavery.
Likewise General Bennett H. Young, Commander-in-Chief of the United Confederate Veterans also defends the cause of the Confederate soldier, the neo-Confederate cause of their descendants, and defends secession in his speech as follows:
At this hour I represent the survivors of the Southern army. Though this Confederate monument is erected on Federal ground, which makes it unusual and remarkable, yet the men from whom I hold commission would only have me come without apologies or regrets from the past. Those for whom I speak gave the best they had to their land and country. They spared no sacrifice and no privation to win for the Southland national independence.
I am sure I shall not offend the proprieties of either the hour of the occasion when I say that we still glory in the records of our beloved and immortal dead. The dead for whom this monument stands sponsor died for what they believed to be right. Their surviving comrades and their children still believe that that for which they suffered and laid down their lives was just; that their premises in the Civil War were according to our Constitution….
The sword said the South was wrong, but the sword is not necessarily guided by conscience or reason. The power of numbers and the longest guns cannot destroy principle nor obliterate truth. Right lives forever, it survives battles, failures, conflicts, and death. There is no human power, however mighty, that can in the end annihilate truth.
In fact, most white Southerners in 1914 agreed that both slavery and secession were wrong. Not Young. No apologies. No regrets -- despite the historical record of Confederate soldiers having committed racial atrocities of massacring surrendered African American soldiers on at least eight occasions.
Hilary A. Herbert, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Arlington Confederate Monument Association, makes it clear that the monument stands for the legitimacy of secession, in opposition to Reconstruction, and for white supremacy. In his History of The Arlington Confederate Monument at Arlington, Virginia, he writes:
In 1867 the seceding States were subjected to the horrors of Congressional Reconstruction, but in a few years American manhood had triumphed; Anglo-Saxon civilization had been saved; local self-government under the Constitution had been restored; ex-Confederates were serving the National Government, and true patriots, North and South, were addressing themselves to the noble task of restoring fraternal feeling between the sections.
Within a generation after Congressional Reconstruction, American historians condemned it …. as “a crime against civilization,” and public opinion seems to have approved the verdict.
Herbert goes on to refer to the Confederate soldiers who joined the Ku Klux Klan and Red Shirts as being heroes for restoring white supremacy and overthrowing Reconstruction, referring to “the soldiers who fought the battles of the Confederacy and … by their courage and devotion during the two decades after the war, were saviors of Anglo-Saxon civilization in their section.”
The monument itself has a Latin motto, “Victrix causea Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.” It translates, “The winning cause pleased the Gods, but the losing cause pleased Cato.” This is a classical reference which to the cognoscenti implies that Lincoln was a despot and the Union cause unjust; Cato, the stoic believer in “freedom,” would have sided with the Confederacy.
The Arlington Confederate Monument is a denial of the wrong committed against African Americans by slave owners, Confederates, and neo-Confederates, through the monument’s denial of slavery as the cause of secession and its holding up of Confederates as heroes. This implies that the humanity of Africans and African Americans is of no significance.
Today, the monument gives encouragement to the modern neo-Confederate movement and provides a rallying point for them. The modern neo-Confederate movement interprets it as vindicating the Confederacy and the principles and ideas of the Confederacy and their neo-Confederate ideas. The presidential wreath enhances the prestige of these neo-Confederate events.
Fr. Alister C. Anderson, as Chaplain-in-Chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), at the 85th anniversary of the dedication of the Arlington Confederate Monument in 1999, gave a lengthy speech explaining its meaning. His understanding of the Arlington Confederate Monument can be said to be fairly representative of modern neo-Confederate opinion.
Anderson believes that the Civil War was a holy war between an orthodox Christian nation (the South), a view widespread in the neo-Confederate movement, and what he feels was an un-Christian and heretical North, as he explained in a series of articles in the Confederate Veteran as Chaplain-in-Chief of the SCV. This explains some of the passages of his speech at the Arlington Confederate Monument. In his speech Anderson explains regarding the monument:
… It reveals and concentrates in beautiful, rugged bronze nearly every idea that a true Southern historian, theologian, statesman, and patriotic citizen could present about the religion, culture, morals, economics, and politics of a civilization from out of which the Confederate States of America evolved. The monument captures the ideals and accomplishments that still existed at the end of the War for Southern Independence. Thank God it does not depict the beginning of the Reconstruction Era, the most disgusting and destructive period in United States history from which the South has never really recovered.
Anderson goes on to note Washington’s presence in bronze:
It depicts George Washington on horseback with the Latin inscription DEO VINDICE, which means, “God Vindicates.” Southerners believed under the Constitution they had the right to secede if they were being harmed by a tyrannical government.
To Anderson, as to other neo-Confederates today, the Arlington Monument exists to glorify the ideas of the Confederacy, which he sees as the ideas of the neo-Confederacy.
Anderson goes on to explain, correctly, the meaning of the main inscription on the monument, “Victrix causea Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.” This is a line from a poem Pharasalia by the Roman poet Lucan, used to represent Lincoln as a tyrant and the North as tyrannical. Fr. Anderson explains:
Victix causa, “the winning cause (or side)”, referring to Julius Caesar’s inordinate ambition and his lust for total power and control, is compared with President Lincoln and the Federal Government’s desire and power to crush and destroy the South. Next we read diis placuit which translates “pleased the gods.” In this context, gods are with a small “g” and refer to the gods of mythology; the gods of money, power, war and domination, greed, hate, lust and ambition. Next we come to the noble climax of this quotation, sed victa cantoni which translates “but the losing side (or cause) pleased Cato”. Here Lucan, the poet, refers to Pompey’s fight to retain the old conservative, traditional republican government of Rome. Even though Pompey was defeated by Caesar’s greater military power, his defeat, nevertheless, pleased the noble Cato. And here, of course, Cato represents the noble aims of the Southern Confederacy. The South fought politically to maintain the Constitution which had guided her safely for eighty-seven years. She merely wanted to be left alone and governed by it. The aggression-minded totalitarian Northern government would not permit that and so she pleased the gods of abolitionism, transcendentalism, utopianism, state centralism, universalism, rationalism and a host of other “isms.”
Anderson here denounces abolition, the anti-slavery movement that ultimately led the United States of America out of the moral evil of slavery, as an evil itself.
Sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Memorial Monument enhances the prestige of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization with a long history of racism from praising the Ku Klux Klan in the early part of the 20th century, to publishing articles against the Civil Rights movement in the Civil Rights Era, to promoting neo-Confederacy today. When the president of the United States of America enhances the prestige of this monument and of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, he strengthens a group working to set back America’s progress in race relations.
Finally, in 2009, the main speaker for the annual observance at the Arlington Confederate Memorial is Ron Maxwell, director of the movie “Gods and Generals,” whose neo-Confederate meaning he made clear in an interview in Southern Partisan. He also has written expressing his fear of Hispanic immigration leading to civil war in the notoriously racist Chronicles magazine, the organ of the ultra-right Rockford Foundation.
For the president of the United States of America to send a wreath to the monument this year would contribute to providing Ron Maxwell with a more prestigious setting for his speech. It would aid and abet the ongoing use of presidential prestige and this monument for their neo-Confederate agenda.
We ask you to break this chain of racism stretching back to Woodrow Wilson, and not send a wreath or other token of esteem to the Arlington Confederate Monument. This monument should not be elevated in prestige above other monuments by a presidential wreath.
Sincerely yours,
| Last Name | First Name | Institution | Biographical Information (for identification purposes only) |
| Alexander | Shawn Leigh | Langston Hughes Center, Kansas University | Assistant Professor African and African American Studies, Interim Director, Langston Hughes Center |
| Attie | Jeanie | Long Island University | Associate Professor of History |
| Ayers | Bill | University of Illinois, Chicago | Professor of Education |
| Barber | David | University of Tennessee, Martin | Assistant Professor of History |
| Blakely | Allison | Boston University | Professor of European and Comparative History; George and Joyce Wein Professor of African American Studies. |
| Bridges | Roger D. | Rutherford .B. Hayes Presidential Center | Executive Director Emeritus |
| Brown | Joshua | The City University of New York | Executive Director American Social History Project/ Center for Media and Learning, Professor of History, Ph.D. Program in History, The Graduate Center. |
| Burton | Orville Vernon | Coastal Carolina University | Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University. Formerly he was Director of the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (ICHASS) at the University of Illinois, where he is Professor of History, African American Studies, and Sociology. He is also a Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where he is Associate Director of Humanities and Social Sciences. In addition, he is Executive Director of the College of Charleston’s Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World. |
| Christie | Thomas | Lincoln Public Schools, Lincoln, Nebraska | Multicultural Administrator |
| Davis | Simone | Mt. Holyoke College | Professor of English |
| Ewert | George | Former Director of the Museum of Mobile | |
| Farley | Jonathan | Institute fur Algebra Johannes Kepler Universitat Linz | Teaching and Research Fellow |
| Fellman | Gordon | Brandeis University | Professor of Sociology |
| Fink | Leon | University of Illinois, Chicago | Distinguished Professor. Director of WRGUW (Graduate Concentration in the History of Work, Race, and Gender in the Urban World) Department of History |
| Finkelman | Paul | Albany Law School | President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law |
| Gundaker | Grey | College of William & Mary | Professor of Anthropology |
| Hague | Euan | DePaul University, Chicago | Professor of Cultural Geography, editor of "Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction." |
| Hayes-Bautista | David E | School of Medicine, UCLA | Author of numerous articles on Calfornia Hispanic history |
| Hicks | David | Virginia Tech | Associate Professor of History and Social Science Education |
| Jackson | Kenneth T. | Columbia University, NYC | Professor of History and Social Sciences |
| Jennings | Matt H. | Macon State College | Student |
| Katznelson | Ira | Columbia University, NYC | Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History |
| Kennedy | Roger G. | National Museum of American History (ret.), National Park Service (ret.) | Director Emeritus, National Museum of American History, Former Director, National Park Service |
| Key | Barclay | Western Illinois University | Assistant Professor of African-American History |
| Key | DeWayne | Mars Hill Bible School, Florence, Alabama | |
| Knapp | Peter | Villanova University | Professor of Sociology |
| Leib | Jonathan | Old Dominion University | Associate Professor of Geography |
| Loewen | James | Univ. of Vermont | Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Univ. of Vermont; author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me," "Lies Across America," "Sundown Towns," etc. |
| Love | David, A. | Commentator | Columnist at www.blackcommentator.com |
| McPherson | James | Princeton University | Professor of History |
| Miller | Willaim Lee | Univ. of Virginia | |
| Mitchell | Don | Syracuse University | Professor of Geography |
| Mizell | Linda | University of Colorado at Boulder | Assistant Professor, School of Education |
| Murray | Paul | Siena College | Professor of Sociology |
| Nieto | Sonia | University of Massachusetts at Amherst | Professor Emerita, Language, Literary, and Culture |
| Owens | Deirdre Cooper | University of Mississippi | Assistant Professor of History |
| Parenti | Michael | On advisory boards of Independent Progressive Politics Network, Education Without Borders, the Jasenovic Foundation, New Political Science, and Nature, Society and Thought. Author of many books in political science. | |
| Phillips | Michael | Collin College, Plano, Texas | History Professor, Author of "White Metropolis" |
| Roisman | Florence W. | Indiana University School of Law | William F. Harvey Professor of Law |
| Schmeeckle | Maria | Illinois State University | Associate Professor of Sociology |
| Sebesta | Edward H. | Independent researcher. | Editor of "Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction," University of Texas Press. |
| Shabazz | Amilcar | University of Massachusetts at Amherst | Professor and Chair of the W.E.B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies |
| Sinha | Manisha | University of Massachusetts at Amherst | Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies and History |
| Sleeter | Christine | California State University Monterey Bay | Professor Emerita, College of Professional Studies |
| Sowa | Maureen | Bristol Community College | Professor of History |
| Webster | Gerald Raymond | University of Wyoming | Chair, Department of Geography |
| White | George, Jr. | York College, CUNY | Assistant Professor of History |
| Wiener | Jon | University of California, Irvine; The Nation Magazine | Contributing Editor at "The Nation"; Professor of History at UC-Irvine. |
Great Blog Post on Georgia Nullification Bill
Posted On Wednesday, May 13, 2009 at at 1:02 PM by Dan
This last session the state legislature passed a resolution "affirming states' rights based on Jeffersonian principles." The sponsors of the bill are not marginalized right-wing extremists. They are prominent leaders of the Republican Party like Senate majority leader Chip Rogers. These are powerful right-wing extremists. The post below is from The Washington Monthly and puts the resolution into great historical context. I found it through the History News Network.
Originally posted May 8, 2009 by Hilzoy
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_05/018093.php
About That Georgia Nullification Resolution ...
As Steve and others have reported, the Georgia State Senate has adopted a resolution allowing the state to nullify any federal laws it thinks are unconstitutional. Hendrik Hertzberg actually read the resolution, and wrote a post that made me want to read it as well: he described it as "a Kompletely Krazy Kocktail of militia-minded moonshine and wacko white lightning -- a resolution that not only endorses defiance of federal law but also threatens anarchy and revolution."
So I did, and as I read I had two main thoughts. First, while Hertzberg writes that the resolution is written in "a mock eighteenth-century style, ornate and pompous", I thought it was an unnervingly good imitation of eighteenth-century prose. And not just in general: in referring to the Constitution as "a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States", the 'style and title' part struck me as pitch-perfect.
Second, there is something very peculiar about its content. Consider this passage:
"That to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress."
Where, I wondered, is the Supreme Court in all this? The Supreme Court determines the constitutional limits on the exercise of federal power. It has the power to nullify federal statutes. Therefore, it obviously puts a check on the executive and legislative branches. And while one might think that it has interpreted the Constitution wrongly, it's very odd to write as though it didn't exist, and did not have the authority to keep the other branches of the federal government within constitutional limits.
It occurred to me that there was a simple explanation for all this. So I googled a distinctive phrase, and lo! it turns out that the Georgia resolution is a lightly modified version of Thomas Jefferson's Resolutions Related To The Alien And Sedition Acts. (Most of the resolution follows this version, but towards the end, it substitutes the eighth resolution, here.) It omits all references to the Alien and Sedition Acts themselves, as well as the part where Jefferson seems to say that states, rather than the federal government, have authority over "alien friends", and that the federal government has no right to imprison people who do not obey deportation orders.
UPDATE: I inadvertently cut the following: And they added this piece of lunacy:
"Any Act by the Congress of the United States, Executive Order of the President of the United States of America or Judicial Order by the Judicatories of the United States of America which assumes a power not delegated to the government of the United States of America by the Constitution for the United States of America and which serves to diminish the liberty of the any of the several States or their citizens shall constitute a nullification of the Constitution for the United States of America by the government of the United States of America."
It's followed by a list of laws that would constitute a nullification of the Constitution. Read it and weep. END UPDATE
This matters for the following reason. Jefferson wrote his Resolutions in 1798. At that time, it was still an open question how the Constitution was to be enforced, and, in particular, how the federal government was to be kept within its limits. In 1803, the Supreme Court decided Marbury v. Madison, which answered that question by holding that federal courts had the power to determine whether or not federal laws were constitutional. It did so on grounds similar to those that moved Jefferson:
"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained? The distinction, between a government with limited and unlimited powers, is abolished, if those limits do not confine the persons on whom they are imposed, and if acts prohibited and acts allowed, are of equal obligation. It is a proposition too plain to be contested, that the constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it; or, that the legislature may alter the constitution by an ordinary act.
Between these alternatives there is no middle ground. The constitution is either a superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it.
If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary to the constitution is not law: if the latter part be true, then written constitutions are absurd attempts, on the part of the people, to limit a power, in its own nature illimitable."
Jefferson and Justice Marshall were confronting a similar problem: the need to keep the federal government within constitutional limits. They proposed different solutions: in Jefferson's case, state nullification, in Marshall's, judicial review. When Jefferson wrote, his views were not "militia-minded moonshine and wacko white lightning". They were an attempt to answer a serious problem that had not yet been answered. His solution was, in my view, not the best one, but it was a serious answer to a serious question.
It matters when you write something. The Articles of Confederation were not ideal, but when they were written, they were a real solution to a real problem. Proposing them now would be idiotic. Likewise, what makes the Georgia resolution a Kompletely Krazy Kocktail is that it parrots Jefferson's words as though we had not arrived at a solution to that problem nearly two centuries ago. But we have, and acting as though that solution does not exist, or as though it does not make state nullification both superfluous and a recipe for lawlessness, is absurd.
Happy May Day
Posted On Friday, May 01, 2009 at at 10:01 AM by Dan
Hope you have a happy workers holiday. Take a moment to check out these links when you have a sec:
International Workers Day
Employee Free Choice Act
Thanks and don't work too hard
