Joseph Lane: When Founders’ Envy Becomes Political Obstruction
[Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry. He previously taught at Hampden-Sydney and at Bowdoin College.]
Asked to write about the most troubling feature of our national politics, I have considered many inviting targets—the filibuster and the Senate, the Supreme Court and the (ab-)use of judicial review, the constantly expanding modern presidency all come to mind, but in starting to write about any of these possible topics—I was struck again and again by the inescapable fact that I can’t make an argument about any of these things without having to thrash through well-worn and largely irresolvable debates about what the “Founders Fathers” did, or did not, think about the practice in question.
Perhaps the talismanic status that we accord to deliberately selective readings of the indeterminate historical record left by the Founders is itself one of the problems. We can’t have reform unless we can demonstrate that it is condoned (perhaps even mandated) by the Founders’ collective opinions about the issue under discussion, and insofar as our political habits and practices are reverse engineered into ad hoc narratives about what the Founders did, or did not, intend, we too often discover that we must adhere to practices that look (based on all available evidence) to be counter-productive or worse because we cannot disprove those who insist that those practices are derived from the Founders.
We are perpetually stuck in a Founders trap.
Don’t get me wrong. I have a great admiration for our Founders and their political ingenuity and wisdom. The American constitutional system is truly a marvel, and it has proven to be both capable and enduring. I am not suggesting that we should discard or disregard the textual constitution that was written in Philadelphia in 1787. I am not saying that we should dismiss the notion that the writings (even private ones) of those who helped with the writing because these can be valuable aids for interpreting the plan they conceived. Furthermore, I am not insisting that we should rush to embrace radical reconfigurations of our political institutions.
I am suggesting that fetishizing the Founders’ purported political opinions about practices that they never anticipated or about institutions that they never saw or studied is deeply problematic. We ought to reconsider our perpetual habit of insisting that a Founders appeal must be the first step in any political argument....
Read entire article at Britannica Blog
Asked to write about the most troubling feature of our national politics, I have considered many inviting targets—the filibuster and the Senate, the Supreme Court and the (ab-)use of judicial review, the constantly expanding modern presidency all come to mind, but in starting to write about any of these possible topics—I was struck again and again by the inescapable fact that I can’t make an argument about any of these things without having to thrash through well-worn and largely irresolvable debates about what the “Founders Fathers” did, or did not, think about the practice in question.
Perhaps the talismanic status that we accord to deliberately selective readings of the indeterminate historical record left by the Founders is itself one of the problems. We can’t have reform unless we can demonstrate that it is condoned (perhaps even mandated) by the Founders’ collective opinions about the issue under discussion, and insofar as our political habits and practices are reverse engineered into ad hoc narratives about what the Founders did, or did not, intend, we too often discover that we must adhere to practices that look (based on all available evidence) to be counter-productive or worse because we cannot disprove those who insist that those practices are derived from the Founders.
We are perpetually stuck in a Founders trap.
Don’t get me wrong. I have a great admiration for our Founders and their political ingenuity and wisdom. The American constitutional system is truly a marvel, and it has proven to be both capable and enduring. I am not suggesting that we should discard or disregard the textual constitution that was written in Philadelphia in 1787. I am not saying that we should dismiss the notion that the writings (even private ones) of those who helped with the writing because these can be valuable aids for interpreting the plan they conceived. Furthermore, I am not insisting that we should rush to embrace radical reconfigurations of our political institutions.
I am suggesting that fetishizing the Founders’ purported political opinions about practices that they never anticipated or about institutions that they never saw or studied is deeply problematic. We ought to reconsider our perpetual habit of insisting that a Founders appeal must be the first step in any political argument....