Stephen Jones: The Tea Party, Libertarians, the “17thers” and All That

This is a post by contributing writer, Stephen Jones, who is a progressive political activist and a resident of Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Just when you thought the Tea Party conservatives and their Ayn Rand “Objectivist” libertarian allies couldn’t get any more peculiar, we are treated to yet a another new malady called the “17thers.” Much like the battalions of “Birthers,” “Deathers,” “10thers” and so-called “Originalists” that arrived on the scene before them, the “17thers,” and their close cousins the “19thers” wail that their warped fundamentalist vision of the U.S. Constitution has been violated by progressives, and even those who are not so progressive.

At the heart of this odd-ball crowd is the idea that because the framers of the United States Constitution did not support direct election of United States Senators that the 17th Amendment is somehow null and void. These same ideologues argue that the 19th Amendment that authorizes an income tax is negated because the framers didn’t include an income tax in the original text way back in 1789. And, of course, we hear daily how everything from financial, health, environmental and virtually every other sort of Congressional legislation is illegal because these issues are not found within the text of the Constitution that rolled out at Philadelphia’s Constitutional Convention.

These kinds of niche obsessions, like suddenly taking issue with a Constitutional Amendment like the 17th that was passed by Congress in 1912, and was ratified by three-fourths of the states in 1913, represent a peculiar fundamentalism whose supporters pick and choose phrases that suit them and ignore or attack the rest as heretical to their creed.

Setting aside the thought process that decides to oppose the direct election of U.S. Senators midway into the year 2010, the 17thers and political malcontents like them aren’t new. These wayward philosophies crop up in our history from time to time. John C. Calhoun, the antebellum Senator from South Carolina, set the pattern in the 1830s. Calhoun seized on a few quotes he dug up from James Madison during Madison’s opposition to John Adams Alien and Sedition Act, to “prove” the framers of the Constitution supported the States refusing to follow the laws that Congress passed, and that there was a constitutional “state right” to nullify those laws.

James Madison, who was still around to set the record straight, responded to a question about Calhoun’s “conservative” constitutional theory by William C. Rives, a U.S. Senator from Virginia. In his March 12, 1833 letter to Rives, Madison responded that Calhoun’s constitutional theories were “preposterous,” and “erroneous,” and warned against the “danger of inaccuracy” of Calhoun’s political ideas.

“The words of the Constitution,” Madison wrote, “are explicit that the Constitution and Laws of the U.S. are supreme over the Constitution and laws of the several states; supreme in their exposition and execution as well as their authority. Without a supremacy in those respects it would be like a scabbard in the hand of a soldier without a sword in it.” On the issue and function of what we refer to as the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution, Madison added, “One thing at least seems too clear to be questioned; that whilst a State remains part of the Union it cannot withdraw its citizens from the operation of the Constitution and the laws of the Union.”

More recently we have seen the ideas of Ayn Rand’s “Objectivist” libertarianism gain traction amongst right-wing groups like the Tea Party. Rand, and her libertarian followers, like to seize on a phrase of Thomas Jefferson, “He who governs least, governs best,” as proof that the founders opposed the government passing laws. Odd isn’t it how these 21st Century “conservatives” love the Jefferson who “governs least,” while hating the Jefferson who speaks of a “wall of separation between church and state?” But, then, this is just the average and typical mind-set of the fundamentalist. It also tends to ignore history. Thomas Jefferson and the Congress just went ahead, passed a law, and bought a third of a continent from Napoleon in the Louisiana Purchase. This is not an example of governing “least.”

John C. Calhoun, Ayn Rand, the 17thers and the Tea Party are really just a lot like 17-year-old boys. They like what they like, and what they don’t like sends them into a fit. This is not Constitutional theory or practice. To stretch out the family analogy, James Madison and the rest of the framers of our Constitution came up with a plan by which the family could come together around the table and pass laws and rules. Once this got through the family round-table process, the Congress, the rest of the family, the states, were bound to follow the rules.

Madison also devised a method by which the core text of the Constitution, the framework upon which all these laws get passed, and then enforced through Article VI, could be altered or amended. He used this process himself to pass and lead the argument for ratification of the first twelve Amendments. The Congress and states that passed the 17th and all the other Amendments just followed Madison’s process. The Tea Party, the “17thers,” the “Objectivists” and the so-called “originalists” are all just out of line and out of step.

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