Posts Tagged ‘Thomas Jefferson’
“A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”*…
Following the often heated debate between Federalists and their opponents that led to the the ratification and adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the Anti-Federalists were still unsatisfied. Then-Representative James Madison, who studied the deficiencies of the Constitution pointed out by Anti-Federalists, collected proposals (16 in all), and then crafted a series of 12 proposed corrective amendments. Congress approved the twelve articles of amendment on September 25, 1789, and submitted them to the states for ratification. 10 were ultimately ratified– the first 10 amendments to our Constitution… or as we know them, The Bill of Rights.
In an excerpt from his book, Constitutional Myths: What We Get Wrong and How to Get It Right, Ray Raphael elaborates…
The Constitution of the United States, drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788, did not follow the precedent set by these state constitutions. Despite spending almost four months drafting their new plan, the framers did not include within it a thoughtful listing of rights but only a scattering of guarantees. On September 12, just five days before the end of the Convention, George Mason finally suggested that delegates add a “Bill of Rights” similar to the state declarations of rights, but his motion failed to garner the support of a single state delegation.
Although state conventions ratified the Constitution, several included a caveat: the new plan should be amended as soon as possible. In fact, they proposed scores of amendments, some resembling provisions of what we now know as the Bill of Rights, but many others altering or even deleting structural features of the Constitution. New York’s convention coupled its list of proposed amendments with a demand for a second federal convention to consider these various proposals. The profusion of proposed amendments, plus the prospect of a second convention, frightened supporters of the Constitution, who feared that a new convention, if it met, would revise the fledgling Constitution before it could be put into effect and gut some of its major provisions.
Most leading Federalists hunkered down. In arguing against a second federal convention, they insisted that a bill of rights was not necessary and could even jeopardize rights that were not included. The job of the Constitution, they said, was to state what government could do, not what it couldn’t do. Rights already were secured because the government possessed no power that allowed it to impinge upon them. In fact, any catalog of specified rights would imply that rights were limited to those in the catalog, and not others.
James Madison and George Washington agreed with this argument, but they also took an accurate measure of people’s displeasure. It was strong and it was widespread. Rather than fight a rearguard action against the wave of discontent, they preferred to channel and control it. Article V of the Constitution stipulated that either Congress or state conventions might propose amendments. If Congress acted first, Madison and Washington reasoned, it could take charge of the issue and protect the substantive features of the new plan–congressional taxation, for instance–while giving ground elsewhere. Madison, meanwhile, pledged to his Virginia constituents that he would work to add a bill of rights if they elected him to represent them in Congress.
Once elected, in the First Federal Congress, Madison whittled down the large list of amendments suggested by the states’ ratifying conventions. With President Washington’s blessing, he proposed nineteen that did not endanger key constitutional components. After considerable debate and some revision, Congress pared Madison’s list down to twelve amendments, which it sent to the states for approval. Ten of these, which we call today the Bill of Rights, were ratified by three-quarters of the states, as required by the new Constitution. The genesis of the Bill of Rights, like the origins of the Constitution, was political as well as theoretical.
The short-term effect of the framing and ratification of the Bill of Rights was to put a Federalist stamp on the amendments and to doom the attempts by the Constitution’s opponents to modify the substantive or structural features of the new plan. The long-term effect was to reinforce America’s culture of rights and to infuse specific rights into American jurisprudence. After more than two centuries, the Bill of Rights, which had been so casually dismissed by the framers, figures so prominently in our minds that it often eclipses the Constitution itself. In an era when the word “government” has a bad name, the ten amendments that circumscribe the federal government’s authority over individuals are often viewed more favorably than the Constitution the framers created in 1787…
The backstory of the Bill of Rights, via the always-illuminating Delanceyplace.com
For more on the process that yielded them, and the texts of all 16 proposed amendments, see here.
* Thomas Jefferson, a critic of Federalists, in a 1787 letter to James Madison (who had originally been opposed to the idea of a “bill of rights,” both because he believed that the Constitution as written did not grant the federal government the power to take away people’s rights, and because he [and some other Framers] believed that we have natural rights too numerous to list– and that anything not explicitly included in a Bill of Rights would be unprotected.)
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As we ponder precedent, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that a BBC newsreader had nothing to communicate. His entire script for the 8:45 pm news bulletin was: “There is no news”… after which piano music was played for the rest of the 15-minute segment. The wireless service then returned to broadcasting from the Queen’s Hall in London, where the Wagner opera Parsifal was being performed.
“A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected”*…
Readers may recall an earlier post on John B. Sparks’ Histomap, a well-known 1931 attempt to visualize the 4,000 year history of global power. Public Domain Review takes a look at Histomap‘s ancestor/inspiration, Friedrich Strass’ Der Strom der Zeiten (published in 1803), and its influence…
In his foundational textbook Elements, the Alexandrian mathematician Euclid defined a line as “breadthless length” — a thing with only one dimension. That’s what lines can do to history when used to plot events: they condense its breadth into pure motion, featuring only those people and places that serve as forces thrusting it forwards along an infinite axis. Early in the nineteenth century, Friedrich Strass proposed a different way to visualize time’s flow. A Prussian historian and schoolteacher, he published his chronological chart in 1803, a massive diagram titled Der Strom der Zeiten oder bildliche Darstellung der Weltgeschichte von den altesten Zeiten bis zum Ende des achtzehnden Jahrhunderts (The stream of the times or an illustrated presentation of world history from the most ancient times until the eighteenth century). The linear timelines that Strass resisted, like those inspired by Joseph Priestley, “implied a uniformity in the processes of history that was simply misleading”, write Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg. Strass’ stream, by contrast, allowed historical events to “ebb and flow, fork and twist, run and roll and thunder.” It would spawn several imitations as the century drew on…
Capturing history in its organic unfolding: “The Stream of Time,” from @PublicDomainRev. See the original at the David Rumsey Map Collection.
* Reif Larsen
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As we contemplate chronology, we might recall that it was on this date in 1800 that the Library of Congress was established. James Madison has first proposed a national library in 1783. But it wasn’t until 1800, when (on this date) President John Adams signed signed an act of Congress providing for the transfer of the seat of government from Philadelphia to the new capital city of Washington, that the deed was done. The Act appropriated $5,000 “for the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress … and for fitting up a suitable apartment for containing them.” Books were ordered from London, creating a collection consisting of 740 books and three maps, which were housed in the new United States Capitol.
But in 1814, during the War of 1812, British forces burned the Capitol Building, and with it, the the collection (by then, around 3,000 volumes). The Library as we know it was created from those ashes. Thomas Jefferson offered to sell his personal library– 6,487 books– as a replacement, Congress accepted, and the Library of Congress grew from there.
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”*…
The pandemic economy has been strange and unpredictable from the get-go.
Throughout the past 14 months, the twists and turns have been surprising: The housing market boomed, the stock market soared, people got into day trading, everyone hoarded toilet paper, and lumber became a must-have. There’s been widespread disagreement about how much support from the government was needed, whether the country was doing too much or not enough, or whether help would come at all. We won’t know whether the country overshot or undershot the response for years, and there’s still uncertainty about what’s happening in the labor market, prices, and other areas. And the prevailing theme has been one that has nothing to do with the economy directly: As long as Covid-19 isn’t under control, the economy isn’t either.
“Having been a forecaster for 10 years, we were surprised all the time, because nobody has a crystal ball and particularly if you just pull out one data series, one month, there’s just no way,” said Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist and now a senior fellow at the Jain Family Institute. “It’s going to be a wild ride; the data through the end of this year, they’re going to be tough.”
The country and the world are staring into a black box of uncertainty on the economy. It’s frustrating, but it’s also inevitable. Anyone who says they know exactly what is going on in the economy right now is lying. The same goes for anyone who says they know what’s going to happen next.
“Because of the unique nature of this crisis, there are going to be some swings,” said Mike Konczal, director of macroeconomic analysis at the Roosevelt Institute. “In a year, they’re going to be trivia questions, but right now we’re obsessing about them.”
Few people will probably remember two years from now that the price of used cars and trucks went up by 10 percent in April.
We know that the economy is different now than it was a year ago and that it will be different a year from now. What’s not clear is exactly how. And what we need now — including economists, experts, and policymakers — is the intellectual humility to recognize that’s the case.
“At this point, most things should be presumed temporary until proven permanent,” said Jed Kolko, chief economist at the jobs website Indeed.
It’s unnerving to admit what we don’t know, and the pandemic has been a real exercise in that. But after so long of staring into the abyss, maybe it’s time we embrace it…
Anyone who says they know exactly what’s happening in the economy is lying. Emily Stewart (@EmilyStewartM) explores that uncertainty and what it might mean: “The black box economy.”
* John Kenneth Galbraith
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As we consult the stars, we might note that today is National Be a Millionaire Day. While many sources confirm this celebratory fact, there’s no real information on its origin. The term “millionaire” was coined in France around 1719 to describe speculators in the Mississippi Bubble who earned millions of livres in weeks before the bubble burst; it seems first to have appeared in the U.S. in 1786, when Thomas Jefferson wrote about the French… so the “holiday” surely dates from sometime after that.
“Humanity’s 21st century challenge is to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet”*…
One evening in December, after a long day working from home, Jennifer Drouin, 30, headed out to buy groceries in central Amsterdam. Once inside, she noticed new price tags. The label by the zucchini said they cost a little more than normal: 6¢ extra per kilo for their carbon footprint, 5¢ for the toll the farming takes on the land, and 4¢ to fairly pay workers. “There are all these extra costs to our daily life that normally no one would pay for, or even be aware of,” she says.
The so-called true-price initiative, operating in the store since late 2020, is one of dozens of schemes that Amsterdammers have introduced in recent months as they reassess the impact of the existing economic system. By some accounts, that system, capitalism, has its origins just a mile from the grocery store. In 1602, in a house on a narrow alley, a merchant began selling shares in the nascent Dutch East India Company. In doing so, he paved the way for the creation of the first stock exchange—and the capitalist global economy that has transformed life on earth. “Now I think we’re one of the first cities in a while to start questioning this system,” Drouin says. “Is it actually making us healthy and happy? What do we want? Is it really just economic growth?”
In April 2020, during the first wave of COVID-19, Amsterdam’s city government announced it would recover from the crisis, and avoid future ones, by embracing the theory of “doughnut economics.” Laid out by British economist Kate Raworth in a 2017 book, the theory argues that 20th century economic thinking is not equipped to deal with the 21st century reality of a planet teetering on the edge of climate breakdown. Instead of equating a growing GDP with a successful society, our goal should be to fit all of human life into what Raworth calls the “sweet spot” between the “social foundation,” where everyone has what they need to live a good life, and the “environmental ceiling.” By and large, people in rich countries are living above the environmental ceiling. Those in poorer countries often fall below the social foundation. The space in between: that’s the doughnut.
Amsterdam’s ambition is to bring all 872,000 residents inside the doughnut, ensuring everyone has access to a good quality of life, but without putting more pressure on the planet than is sustainable. Guided by Raworth’s organization, the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), the city is introducing massive infrastructure projects, employment schemes and new policies for government contracts to that end. Meanwhile, some 400 local people and organizations have set up a network called the Amsterdam Doughnut Coalition—managed by Drouin— to run their own programs at a grassroots level…
You’ve heard about “doughnut economics,” a framework for sustainable development; now one city, spurred by the pandemic, is putting it to the test: “Amsterdam Is Embracing a Radical New Economic Theory to Help Save the Environment. Could It Also Replace Capitalism?“
* Kate Raworth, originator of the Doughnut Economics framework
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As we envisage equipoise, we might recall that it was on this date in 1791 that President George Washington signed the Congressional legislation creating the “The President, Directors and Company, or the Bank of the United States,” commonly known as the First Bank of the United States. While it effectively replaced the Bank of North America, the nation’s first de facto central bank, it was First Bank of the United States was the nation’s first official central bank.
The Bank was the cornerstone of a three-part expansion of federal fiscal and monetary power (along with a federal mint and excise taxes) championed by Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury– and strongly opposed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who believed that the bank was unconstitutional, and that it would benefit merchants and investors at the expense of the majority of the population. Hamilton argued that a national bank was necessary to stabilize and improve the nation’s credit, and to improve handling of the financial business of the United States government under the newly enacted Constitution.
History might suggest that both sides were correct.
“To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past”*…
As historians from James MacGregor Burns to Jill Lepore remind us, the United States was– and is– an experiment. The Constitution was the collective best effort of the Framers to write the first draft of an operating manual for the society they hoped it to be– a society unique in its time in its commitment to political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people– what Jefferson called “these truths.”
But like any wise group of prototypers, they assumed that their design would be refined through experience, that their “manual” would be updated… though even then Benjamin Franklin shared Jefferson’s worry [see the full title quote below] that American’s might treat their Constitution as unchangeable…
Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. -Benjamin Franklin, letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy (13 November 1789)
The Framers expected– indeed, they counted on– their work being revised…
Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. -Thomas Jefferson, letter to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval) (12 July 1816)
Jesse K. Phillips has found a beautifully-current– and equally beautifully-concrete– way to capture the commitment to learning and improving that animated the Framers: he has put the Constitution onto GitHub, the software development platform that hosts reams of (constantly revised) open source code (and that was featured in yesterday’s (Roughly) Daily.)
[Image above: source]
* “To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past. ‘Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,’ Jefferson conceded. But when they do, ‘They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human [and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment].”‘
― From These Truths: A History of the United States
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As we hold those truths to be inalienable, we might recall that it was on this date (which is, by the way, Fibonacci Day) in 1644 that John Milton published Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England. A prose polemic opposing licensing and censorship, it is among history’s most influential and impassioned philosophical defenses of the principle of a right to freedom of speech and expression. The full text is here.
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