He’s probably the world’s funniest vegan. Fred Grandy is known to millions of Americans as “Gopher” from the hit 70s comedy series, The Love Boat. The Harvard-educated Grandy is the former four-term Republican Congressman from Iowa. He narrowly lost the GOP nomination for Governor in 1994 and went on to serve ably as president of Goodwill Industries. Since 2003, he had had a better platform to reach workers in the nation’s capital as co-host of the drive-time Grandy and Andy [Parks] Morning Show on radio station WMAL. I’ll confess that when I should be listening to books-on-disk, I often give an ear to Fred Grandy’s offbeat humor and generally smart conservative chatter. He’s not reflexively right wing. Few Iowans are. But, in addition to some side-splitting jokes, he brings some Midwest common sense to a capital badly in need of somebody’s common sense.

That’s why it matters when a good man like Fred Grandy launches into a shtick that includes this: “Oh, the Founders, they thought black people were just three-fifths of a person.” Maybe Fred was joking. Maybe he was pulling everyone’s leg. But it didn’t sound like it.

Political theorists can get pretty heavy duty. Which is why morning drive time includes very few of them as talk show hosts. Bill Bennett is one of the few who can pull it off successfully. But political theorists talk about “ideological hegemony.” That means you get the other guy–your opponent–to think in categories that you’ve determined in advance. Another phrase would be “setting the terms of the debate.”

If even conservatives seriously think that the Founders were so racist as to deny the full humanity of black people, then, “Houston, we’ve got a problem.” Grandy’s “three-fifths” crack echoes Al Gore’s infamous rants during the 2000 campaign. Gore demagogically whipped up crowds in Pennsylvania saying that those who favored “original intent” in constitutional interpretation wanted to deprive black people of their civil rights. They thought you were only three-fifths of a person, Gore suggested.

The Founders thought no such thing. The much-misunderstood Three-Fifths Compromise was just that, a compromise. Northern, anti-slavery delegates to the Constitutional Convention would have preferred not to count slaves at all for purposes of representation in Congress. This would have penalized slaveholding states and given them lesser influence in the House of Representatives. Just as important, it would have penalized them in the Electoral College that chooses our Presidents. Delegates from slaveholding states would have preferred to count slaves fully for purposes of representation, but they didn’t want to be taxed fully for slaves.

So the Founders compromised. It’s important to point out that such a compromise also existed in the Articles of Confederation, prior to the Constitution, when all taxation was by state.

A little-noted feature of the Three-Fifths Compromise is that it gave a reward–an electoral bump, if you will–to all states that emancipated their slaves. Free the black people of your state, and you get to count them fully for Congress. Then, American you can increase your numbers in the House and in the Electoral College.

Seven of the original Thirteen States got that reward. Tragically, six of the original thirteen failed to free their slaves. And other slaveholding states were later admitted to the Union.

The Founders were anti-slavery. They took pains never to use the words “slave,” “Negro,” “African,” etc, in the great charter of freedom they gave us.

Abraham Lincoln’s Midwest common sense exceeded even that of Fred Grandy. Lincoln said the Founders hid away in the Constitution the fact that we had slavery, just as a man who has a tumor or wen or other defect tries to hide it from view. Frederick Douglass hailed the Founders’ Constitution and said not of word of it would have to be changed if the states would only agree to free their slaves. They were both right.

Why does any of this matter today? Because President Barack Obama is using the tragedy of American slavery in 1787 as a pretext for casting aspersions on the Founders’ great work. Why should we listen to the authors of the Constitution? They allowed slavery to exist. They thought black people were only three-fifths of a person. So goes the liberal take on the Constitution.

It wasn’t true then. It’s not true now. Lincoln knew that if the Founders had tried to ban slavery outright in 1787, the liberty-promoting Constitution would never have been adopted. But the principles of the Declaration of Independence as embodied in the Constitution were, Lincoln said, like “apples of gold in pictures of silver.” Lincoln used the words of Scripture to speak of his awe and reverence for the Founders’ work. Should we have less?

Comments: - |

Sen. Daniel Akaka is probably the quietest person in the U.S. Senate. He is known as a kindly man who votes faithfully but is not a vocal or activist member of the “upper body.” But this week, when asked if there is a constitutional basis for the Democratic health care bill, he candidly said, “I’m not aware of that, let me put it that way.”

Good way to put it, Senator, because your lack of awareness indicates that at least you know your Constitution well enough to recognize that it contains no basis for this latest exercise in federal elbow-throwing.

Sen. Akaka’s colleague Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) could learn from him. Sen. Reed was asked by a reporter “where in the Constitution does Congress get its authority to mandate that individuals purchase health insurance?”

Reed responded, “I would have to check the specific sections, so I’ll have to get back to you on the specific section. But it is not unusual that the Congress has required individuals to do things, like sign up for the draft and do many other things too, which I don’t think are explicitly contained (in the Constitution).”

Sen. Reed is an undoubted patriot, a former Marine who served honorably in Vietnam. So it is disappointing that someone of his political stature would equate the draft with an individual federal mandate of citizens for non-military purposes. To what “many other things” is Reed referring?

In the 1918 Arver v. United States case, the Supreme Court ruled that the draft is constitutional because it is essence an implementation of the Constitution’s provision for the federal government to create a standing army (Article I, Section 8). Men (and women) are needed to defend the nation, and during times of national crisis conscription might be needed.

The Democratic health plan (H.R. 3962), passed last weekend in the House, goes well beyond any authority conferred on the federal government, through our written Constitution, by “We, the People.” In fact, the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) wrote to the House Ways and Means Committee that “failure to comply with the terms of the law that the Democrats passed last weekend could put people in jail. The JCT told the committee that anyone who decides not to maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” or, absent that, pay the individual health insurance mandate tax of about 2.5 percent of income, would be liable to large fines or prison sentences” (The Washington Times, “Tax Penalties and Prison,” by Donald Lambro, November 12, 2009).

The JCT went on to write that “H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at anytime during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.”

This mandate is unconstitutional in its own right and also poses a serious threat to the fundamental liberty of ordinary Americans: When the federal government requires specific economic activity (in this case, the purchase or acceptance of a health insurance plan) and threatens to impose “fines or prison sentences” for non-compliance, our essential freedom as citizens is eroded and our path into coerced political subjection all the more obvious – and dangerous.

Comments: 1 |

Family Research Council has several critical concerns with the Democratic health care legislation under consideration on Capitol Hill.  The sanctity of human life, although safeguarded in the House version of the measure passed on Saturday, remains a live issue as the bill goes to the Senate.  Rationing, costs, patient control of medical decisions, an increase in the size and scope of Washington’s power: These and other matters animate FRC’s active opposition to the Democratic approach to revising our system of medical care.

But there is another issue that we have raised and will keep raising as the debate goes forward: The constitutionality of the Democratic plans.

When Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked recently at the introduction of her mammoth health care “reform” bill if the measure was constitutional, the usually glib Californian was caught off-guard.  “Are you serious?” she asked.  And, a second time, “Are you serious?”  She then turned to another reporter without answering further.

At least House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer gives the Constitution a guilty nod.  He says that the “general welfare” clause gives Congress the right to pass a massive health care bill full of mandates on businesses and individuals and higher taxes for all.

Continue reading »

Comments: 6 |