Lots of people like to bring up what the founding fathers thought and this or that opinion agrees with them, but why is that relevant? They aren’t alive. Sure, they set certain things in motion, but I wouldn’t fret over what Henry Ford would think of my Jeep. Why should I fret about what John Adams would think of my state?
The arguments goes something like this:
In a democratic society, laws have legitimacy because they represent the will of the people–the consent of the governed. We legitimize the power of laws by accepting them through democratic processes. Thus, the legitimate part of a law is that part which the majority understood to be lending its consent to. If we passed a law that made cocaine illegal, and the powers that be interpreted it as banning sugar, we would say that law lacks democratic legitimacy because We the People never intended that.
According to this theory of the legitimacy of laws, any constitution that does something more than set up a general structure faces a paradox. Constitutional limits on governmental power are just a means to thwart the will of current majorities, since such limits are only relevant when a legislative majority wants to transgress them. But since we believe laws only gain legitimacy by the consent of the governed, we have a contradiction. How can we have a legitimate law that simultaneously thwarts the will of the those governed by it?
The answer is that its legitimacy comes from having been consented to by a past majority. The Constitution is a way to bind ourselves, as a society, to the mast. Since we already established that the legitimate part of a law is that part which the majority understood to be lending its consent to, it follows that the legitimate part of the Constitution (in other words, the legitimate interpretation of the Constitution) is that part which a past majority understood as accepting.
Under this theory, it’s not that Adams or Madison is any more privileged to define the document than any other 1789er. But they tend to have thought about it more, and their writing are the extant ones. Of course, it may be that the framers intended the document to be flexible and to enshrine principles rather than rules. If so, then their opinion is relevant to the meaning of the principle, but not necessarily its application.
Because a car is not a Constitution.
The Founding Fathers set this country in motion and a great deal of what they laid down continues to direct how our country operates.
The assembly line Ford pioneered is a tool to make cars (and other things now). Our Constitution is our way of life…or at least underpins our way of life.
The FF’s had a vision for a new country and we try to abide by that vision. We kind of have to else chaos ensues if we attempt to reinvent the country every decade or so. They set the system up to allow for tweaks if things change beyond what they could imagine but mostly we hew to their original goals.
They also seemed a smarter bunch than most we have had in government since. They certainly were not all agreed on all points but they were intelligent, eloquent and seemed to have a genuine desire to see something great come from their work rather than line their own pockets.
ETA: Beaten to the punch and by a far more eloquent post to boot. Ah well…
Because once you trail off beyond what was agreed to, you’re just making shit up. There are ways to change the law if you want to, but if you opt instead to stretch and stretch the laws already made past anything the originators could possibly have intended, it can’t be said that anyone has actually democratically agreed to the current state of affairs.
^ Note that this isn’t my stance, though I understand it.
Because, for one, Henry Ford just made a car, he didn’t come up with the concept of a car, from which your car may be departing. Adams and the other founders created the idea that is the United States. It was a unique construction to: 1) recognize that rights flow directly from God to man and 2) to have the government rise up from the people. The Declaration of Independence outlines both the reason for doing so and the moral underpinnings of the nation. This was the best idea for a nation since the dawn of man. The the ideas in the DofI were then carved into reality by The Constitution. Now if you have a better idea for a nation, and a better way to institute and protect those ideas and ideals, I’m sure everyone will be all ears. If you can then convince a majority of them to abandon what we now have and adopt your new notions, you will be the next Adams. Until them, we might as well stick with what we have.
No snark intended, but I think people who ask the question in your OP don’t really have a full appreciation for what those men did. The good news is that reading about it is fascinating, and there are many good books to dive into.
This seems to be supposing that we owe something to their understanding, despite the undeniable fact that we know more than they did about many things.
I wouldn’t feel bound by what doctors thought were the best treatments for cancer in 1950, even if the greatest medical minds of that time all got together and voted and agreed.
On the other hand, if those practices are still the best, then we should be able to see that, not to make the argument that those practices are somehow valuable just because someone believed in them once.
They are the ones who created the laws that (for the most part) govern this land. But the constitution et al are just words, and words are open to interpretation. One way to determine what the appropriate interpretation is for a given set of verbage is to understand the motives of the writer(s).
Consider the 2nd Amendment. Technically speaking, any American citizen should probably be allowed to purchase and own a nuclear weapon if they so wanted. The justification for laws which limit the capabilities of weapons that an individual can own is based on the idea that when the 2nd Amendment was written, the authors had no possible way to theorize the existence of a gun which could kill a few hundred people in just a few seconds.
The trouble is that, without keeping our bark fixed on some identified star, what we are as a nation could change with the wind. Today we are about equal rights and a strong federal government; tomorrow we could be about “white” rights and nationalism; in another ten years, we could be all about regionalism and goodness knows what.
You might not care what Ford thinks about what you drive. But suppose you wanted to drive a truly authentic “automobile?” Wouldn’t you want to know what the people who created the automobile thought they were doing?
Damn, Mr. Parker. Do you ever right bad posts?
The other major point is that the U.S. has followed those laws for over 200 years, and the result has been unprecedented wealth and a very high standard of living. Therefore, you have significant empirical evidence that the Constitution may in fact be a very good model for how to run a society.
In contrast, countries that have adopted various other organizational structures have not survived. Communism did not survive. The social welfare state in Europe and elsewhere is breaking down. Japan’s style of industrial policy and insular society is causing them no end of grief. Britain’s colonialism collapsed, as did France’s. Mao’s five year plans didn’t work out so hot. The Khmer Rouge succeeded in killing a lot of people and little else. Fascism resulted in war and economic stagnation.
And today, if you measure the economic and social well-being of countries, the pattern that emerges is that the countries which are closest to the U.S. constitutional ideal of having limited government and personal freedom are doing the best. The various forms of statism under-perform.
So… If you want to change the system, I think the burden of proof should be on you to show exactly why the system needs to be changed, exactly how your changes will improve things, and how you’ve considered all the possible problems your changes may cause and why they will not be worse than the problems that currently exist. It should be a really high bar.
Sorry, this is not true. The Second Amendment did not preclude the federal government from denying private citizens the right to keep, oh, say, cannons. “Arms” has never meant anything that can be used in the course of war as a weapon.
But yes, if we wanted to make sure that we were really “properly” applying the Second Amendment, we would want to make sure that we understood what it was that they thought they were doing at the time of adopting it. Of course, the trouble there is that you may get a bit tunnel-visiony. Notice, for example, the intense focus on the simple statement in one letter about the so-called need for a separation of church and state. Does this really reflect the feelings of the nation as a whole at the time the First Amendment was adopted? Probably not. So reading Madison’s letter offers us insight into what Madision was thinking, but that’s just one data point.
Damn, I won’t be able to belly up to it then!! 
Were cannons restricted from private ownership?
I dunno. I was goning to ask the same in regards to private (but armed) merchant vessels.
What “knowledge” do you have in mind when you say we know more now than they did?
Much of today’s big government rhetoric sounds similar to Alexander Hamilton’s words. Proponents of small government sound similar to Thomas Jefferson.
What do we really know today that’s light years ahead of them? The knowledge of electricity? Jet airplanes? The Internet? That communism is flawed? Foreign policy?
I seriously doubt if any of our congressional representatives could intellectually match wits with the founding fathers regarding theory of government organization. If anything, today’s modern creature comforts have made us collectively dumber than the framers of the constitution.
They had no idea that printing presses would become so efficient and cheap never mind the internet, television, or radio.
Odesio
It boils down to a question of interpretation. We ponder what the founding fathers meant by certain things in Constitutional scholarship because they wrote the Constitution, and as such it their thoughts and commentaries provide us a means to interpret what they meant in the Constitution.
Look at it this way, if we decided to scrap the Constitution and start over again with a new constitutional convention, legal scholars 200 years from now would be pondering what the drafters meant by things.
So, you agree with Scalia, then, and we should just stick to the text? And if not, then why even bother having a text?
We know that black people, female people, and poor people are worthy of respect and can be trusted to vote. That’s a good start.