gracchusdixit

In the summer of 1215, King John of England, was cornered by a group of rebellious barons in a meadow, not far from the banks of the River Thames, called Runnymede.  There, under a spreading oak tree, he was forced to sign one of the most famous political documents in history, the Magna Carta, or Great Charter.   Under intense pressure and against his will, John reluctantly promised that, in exercising his royal power, he would abide by the established customs and laws of the land, conceding that Englishmen had certain rights that even a king could not ignore.  

John, however, was a notoriously slippery character.  As soon as he was safely beyond the reach of his troublesome barons, he reneged on his promises.  This did him little good, since he died less than a year later, and the document he had disavowed long outlived him.  Indeed, the Great Charter was reissued under his successor,  Henry III, and in 1225, copies were nailed to the doors of hundreds of churches throughout the land.  Thus, the Magna Carta took its place as the foundational text of constitutional government, not only in the United Kingdom, but also in the United States, where it greatly influenced the men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to fashion our own constitution.

The Magna Carta has assumed such iconic status that few people, apart from scholars, any longer bother to read it.  One reason is that it was written in Latin, which was the official legal and diplomatic language of Europe at the time, and the first English translation did not appear until 1534.   Even modern translations can still be forbiddingly arcane and archaic.

If you nevertheless take the trouble to read the Magna Carta, you may be surprised by what you find.  While it is true that some of Great Charter deals with fundamental liberties—the right to be judged by a jury of one’s “peers,” for example—the bulk of it addresses, not lofty ideals, but mundane and less-than-inspiring issues of property rights and taxes, dowries and estates.  It would seem that the barons of medieval England were more concerned about pounds and pence than about political principles.

Much the same can be said of our own constitution, another document that has assumed such mythical status that few any longer pay close attention to what it actually said when it was first promulgated.

As with the Magna Carta, one of the principal aims of the Constitution of the United States was to protect the privileges and property rights of the reigning colonial aristocracy.   We speak reverentially of the “checks and balances” embedded in our constitution, as if their only purpose were to prevent one branch of government from exercising too much power over the others, or to protect vulnerable minorities from the depredations of powerful majorities.  We pay scant attention, however, to the “minorities” the Founding Fathers were actually trying to protect.

James Madison made no secret of this in the Federalist Papers, which he coauthored with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay to persuade a skeptical body politic to accept the new constitution.  Madison and his colleagues not only took economic inequality for granted, they asserted that a divide between the privileged few and the impoverished many was part of the natural order of things.  They were convinced that economic inequality would inevitably produce political parties or “factions,” in which a property-owning minority would be confronted by a propertyless “overbearing majority”.  This was a development they abhorred above all else, because it might lead (God forbid!) to “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper and wicked project”. 

There is no mistaking the intent underlying Madison’s argument.  To the Federalists who authored our constitution, the idea of a democratic majority pursuing even a dollop of economic equality was an “improper and wicked project”.  They accordingly created a constitution laden with anti-democratic “checks and balances”.  

These included: allowing slaves to be counted toward the apportionment of congressional districts, giving slave-owning states far more representation than their populations deserved; a deliberately undemocratic Senate, in which a sparsely populated state like Wyoming wields as much legislative influence as a state like California, with a population fifty times larger; treating states as if they are sovereign nations, a notion that was questionable in 1787, led to secession and civil war in 1860, and is utterly ludicrous today.  

We no longer need, if we ever did, Swiss-style “federalism” to unite historically different cultural and linguistic communities.  “States rights” do not unite us.  On the contrary, they divide us by allowing some states to deny fundamental rights to American citizens they deem to be unworthy.

When Republicans and the now predominant conservative majority on the Supreme Court invoke in lofty terms the “original intent” of the Founding Fathers as a guiding principle for interpreting the constitution, when they insist on reminding us that we live in a “constitutional republic,” they are not indulging in sly or scholarly obfuscations of their own intentions.  On the contrary, they are being shamefully obvious.  

It is time that we recognized that the “original intent” of the founders was fundamentally anti-democratic.  It is also time that we recognize what Republicans actually mean when they invoke term, “original intent”.  It is their intention to suppress democracy.

When they talk about protecting the rights of minorities against tyrannical majorities, they aren’t talking about protecting the most vulnerable people in our society.  When they speak of “checks and balances,” it is not their purpose to check the overreach of one branch of government against the others.  When they talk about “freedom,” they aren’t talking about you and me.  

As we confront the malign intentions of today’s Republicans, we must not kid ourselves into thinking that the intentions of the men who created our “constitutional republic” were benign.  Behind their “original intent” was a malign purpose—to suppress the many in favor of the few.  Those who today invoke that “original intent,” as if it were holy writ, share the same purpose.