Madison: The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home

jim has been particularly on the mark when quoting our founders, especially james madison, so i thought i'd jump on the bandwagon...

Selected Quotes of
James Madison

A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.

A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained in arms, is the best most natural defense of a free country.

All men having power ought to be mistrusted.

As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.

Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

Such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.

The Constitution of the United States was created by the people of the United States composing the respective states, who alone had the right.

The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.

The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad.

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

The proposed Constitution is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal constitution; but a composition of both.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.

We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed?

why aren't the presidential candidates quoting our founders...? wouldn't that make sense...? isn't the ability to understand and relate our situation today to their wisdom something we should expect to see in those who would be our leaders...? (yeah, i know... silly me...)

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"The Constitution cannot enforce itself" and George Bush as “the foetus of monarchy”

thanks to the liberal doomsayer who pointed me to this fine piece by adam cohen in today's nyt...

Given how intent the president is on expanding his authority, it is startling to recall how the Constitution’s framers viewed presidential power. They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom. To guard against it, they sharply limited presidential authority, which Edmund Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate and the first attorney general, called “the foetus of monarchy.”

[...]

When they drafted the Constitution, Madison and his colleagues wrote their skepticism into the text. In Britain, the king had the authority to declare war, and raise and support armies, among other war powers. The framers expressly rejected this model and gave these powers not to the president, but to Congress.

The Constitution does make the president “commander in chief,” a title President Bush often invokes. But it does not have the sweeping meaning he suggests. The framers took it from the British military, which used it to denote the highest-ranking official in a theater of battle. Alexander Hamilton emphasized in Federalist No. 69 that the president would be “nothing more” than “first general and admiral,” responsible for “command and direction” of military forces.

The founders would have been astonished by President Bush’s assertion that Congress should simply write him blank checks for war. They gave Congress the power of the purse so it would have leverage to force the president to execute their laws properly.

[...]

The Constitution cannot enforce itself.

[...]

Members of Congress should not be intimidated into thinking that they are overstepping their constitutional bounds. If the founders were looking on now, it is not Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who would strike them as out of line, but George W. Bush, who would seem less like a president than a king.

we've just got to keep the drumbeat for getting rid of these people going strong... i first started banging my drum during hurricane katrina, not that i was exactly a bush supporter prior to that, but, for me, that was the last straw... for the umpteenth million time, our republic is in serious danger, and it is up to us to see that it changes course...

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Robert Scheer echoes Jim on James Madison

yesterday, i pulled jim's comment, in which he quoted james madison about the dangers of an imperial presidency, and bumped it into a full post... today, i find this from robert scheer, the excellent former la times columnist (who, sadly, was replaced by that dipshit extraordinaire, jonah goldberg)...

George W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and other founders of this great republic warned us about. He lied the nation into precisely the "foreign entanglements" that George Washington feared would destroy the experiment in representative government, and he has championed a spurious notion of security over individual liberty, thus eschewing the alarms of Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the inalienable rights of free citizens. But most important, he has used the sledgehammer of war to obliterate the separation of powers that James Madison enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

With the "war on terror," Bush has asserted the right of the president to wage war anywhere and for any length of time, at his whim, because the "terrorists" will always provide a convenient shadowy target. Just the "continual warfare" that Madison warned of in justifying the primary role of Congress in initiating and continuing to finance a war -- the very issue now at stake in Bush's battle with Congress.

In his "Political Observations," written years before he served as fourth president of the United States, Madison went on to underscore the dangers of an imperial presidency bloated by war fever. "In war," Madison wrote in 1795, at a time when the young republic still faced its share of dangerous enemies, "the discretionary power of the Executive is extended ... and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force, of the people."

scheer seizes on the very quote from madison that grabbed jim's attention...

Bush betrayed Congress, which in turn betrayed the American people -- just as Madison feared when he wrote: "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it compromises and develops the germ of every other."

< sigh > we gotta get rid of 'em... we just gotta... every single day i wake up and think, my god, we simply CAN'T tolerate another day with that gang of criminals in office, and every night i go to bed thinking exactly the same thing...

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Dana Milbank on Fourthbranch: "Madison and Franklin did not return phone calls yesterday"

with somebody this over the top and this bizarre, and someone who also seems to have been running our country for the past 6 1/2 years, it helps to have a sense of humor...

dana milbank from today's wapo...

The Cheese Stands Alone

By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, June 26, 2007; Page A02

[...]

"The vice president's theory seems to be one almost laughable on its face, that he's not part of the executive branch," Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) said in a conference call with reporters from his car. "I think if you ask James Madison or Benjamin Franklin or any of the writers of the Constitution, they'd almost laugh if they heard that."

Madison and Franklin did not return phone calls yesterday.

and, after being attacked by the press wolf pack yesterday (entirely justified, imho), i don't imagine dana perino is going to willingly throw herself back into action again any time soon... or, if she finds herself in front of the gaggle again today, maybe she can just sing them a song...

The farmer in the dell

The farmer in the dell
The farmer in the dell
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer in the dell

The farmer takes a wife
The farmer takes a wife
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer takes a wife

The wife takes a child
The wife takes a child
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The wife takes a child

The child takes a nurse
The child takes a nurse
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The child takes a nurse

The nurse takes a cow
The nurse takes a cow
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The nurse takes a cow

The cow takes a dog
The cow takes a dog
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The cow takes a dog

The dog takes a cat
The dog takes a cat
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The dog takes a cat

The cat takes a rat
The cat takes a rat
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The cat takes a rat

The rat takes the cheese
The rat takes the cheese
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The rat takes the cheese

The cheese stands alone
The cheese stands alone
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The cheese stands alone

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Poopin' on Putin

i predicted this in my post the other day...

you can be sure that, given the source, even liberals and progressives will be tempted to dismiss such criticism as merely global political posturing...

'course, not like anyone with two brain cells to rub together COULDN'T have predicted it...

Since the speech, Putin has been excoriated in the U.S. press. As usual, such intense vitriol is reserved for people who bring up inconvenient truths about U.S. policy. Of course, Putin didn’t say anything that was untrue, and that’s the reason for the intense anger in the United States.

Americans have never been very good at looking at their government in the mirror. They see the cogent and pithy words of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison about our system of government and reach the conclusion that the United States can do no wrong in the international arena because it has one of the world’s best systems at home. Yet the two have nothing to do with each other.

This unquestioning attitude when dealing with other countries I label the “Tarzan foreign policy,” which assumes “we good, you bad.” In other words, in this distorted mental framework, aggressive U.S. actions would not be tolerated if another country did them.

i have repeatedly maintained that this is one of the reasons bush and his criminal cronies have continued to perpetrate the most outrageous deeds, shredding the constitution, and other such nefarious hi-jinks, and still manage to remain in office... we, the american people, are so brainwashed into believing that our country can do no wrong, we simply can't bring ourselves to believe that crooks are calling the shots...

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