I remember that during the NAFTA debate people said all sorts of US laws would be found invalid. I haven’t heard a word about this since then.

Fears of a ‘superstate’ may be exegarated, but all the elites have to do is to control the EU courts and they will impose their agenda soon enough.

LA wrote: “Yeah, right. This is like Hubert Humphrey telling the Senate in 1964 that if the Civil Rights bill led to quotas, he would eat the paper it was written on; or like Edward Kennedy telling the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration in 1965 that under the proposed immigration act ‘our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually…’”

Or like the Convention-era Federalists telling the Antifederalists, “Don’t worry. We have safeguards built into the system…”

Bubba’s analogy is tendentious. In the instances I gave, the fears of opponents of the measure being debated were realized almost instantly, because the re-assurances of the supporters were false to the actual nature of the measure. In the instance Bubba gave, it took a long period of historical time, and the utter transformation of the concrete society into a society utterly unlike the one in which the original debate took place, before the the anti-federalists’ fears of consolidation began to be realized. Other than the unique emergency of the Civil War, the country maintained its federalism pretty much intact well into the 20th century. Of course, the anti-federalists expected the consolidation to occur almost immediately. They were wrong in the short term and medium term and the federalists were right, though the anti-federalists were arguably correct in the much longer, historical term.

So, as I said, the analogy is not a good one.

I kind of liked Bubba’s analogy. What is eighty years or so among friends?

If Matt had said 150 or 200 years instead of 80 years, I might agree with him, at least in part. But it is simply incorrect to treat the TEMPORARY expansion of federal powers that occurred under the EMERGENCY conditions of the Civil War as though that represented a confirmation of the anti-federalists’ warnings that the 1787 Constitution, in and of itself, would lead to a consolidated government. Let us please remember that up through the mid 20th century, the federal government played a small to non-existent role in the lives of individuals and communities in this country. Also, some of the key expansions of national power, such as the income tax, were not the result of the 1787 Constitution, but of later amendments.

To treat the 1787 Constitution as though it were a blatently fraudulent measure on a par with the 1965 Immigration Act or Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (or, even worse, with the EU constitution) is to blur the distinction between what is good and great about our country, and what is rotten. Once one adopts such a view, one is not far from the mindset of Murray Rothbard and his followers, who regard the Framers as gangsters engaged in a coup d’état.

Part of the problem though is that the sort of scoping the federalists wanted to do is not possible even in principle. It was quite literally inevitable - in the sense that the opposite is literally impossible over an extended period of time - that the concept of enumerated powers would give way under a constant barrage of new circumstances (formally it is not possible to _completely_ specify the powers of any authority, and the basic error made by the founders mirrors the error that Luther made in propogating _sola scriptura_). I realize that this seems counterintuitive, but it is nonetheless the case.

Whether it is morally fraudulent to attempt something that is in principle impossible isn’t something I have much to say about.

Mr. Auster wrote:
“Once one adopts such a view, one is not far from the mindset of Murray Rothbard and his followers, who regard the Framers as gangsters engaged in a coup d’état.”

It isn’t at all clear why this should be the case, by the way. Why would basic errors in rationality embedded in the constitution have the effect of damning all authority? It seems to me that this could only be the case if authority is justified based on formal reasoning from first principles rather than ordained (or at least allowed) by God. A traditionalist doesn’t pretend that rational perfection is required before obedience. It is the liberal who insists upon a perfected rational abstraction before any actual concrete authority is acknowledged as such. Whether that is simply the liberal’s pretext for rejecting an actual authority, or if the liberal actually believes in it as a fundamental principle, probably depends upon the individual liberal.

Here Matt is making worthwhile points about the inherent impossibility of creating an enduring institution based on a single, written document. Underlying that concern, I believe, is the tragic understanding that all humanly created, and perhaps even divinely created, institutions are subject over time to decay and even to becoming the exact opposite of what they once were. Thus, for example, the Catholic Church now promotes “understanding” for Islam and encourages the building of Islamic mosques in Italy. But all that is very different from the specific issue being discussed here. The promoters of the EU superstate, who are evil, power-seeking leftists, are engaged in a BLATANT LIE of world-historical import; namely they are aiming at erasing the sovereignty of the nations of Europe in an un-elected, unaccountable, centralized bureaucracy while they deny that they are doing that. Bubba and Matt’s analogy, even though it was not their intention, could be taken as suggesting that the U.S. Constitution was a similar fraud. I of course reject that comparison, both because it is false in itself and because it erases the distinction between a tragically flawed good and an outright evil. Such an implication helps feed the kind of moral equivalency and anti-Americanism that is rife on today’s right and left.