Contributed by Susan North
                I have often made the case that the Constitution of the United States and common sense dictate that states, not the Federal government, must be the arbitrators of what happens in our schools. This of course leads me to thoughts of Jeb Bush – who seems to think (or his supporters do) that he could actually win the Presidency in 2016.  I have a message for Governor Bush.
 
Dear Gov. Bush,
           We are on to you.  You were apparently a fine governor at one time, but that was a few years ago, before you drifted pretty far left for someone with an “R” after his name. Today everyone has the internet. People are far more knowledgeable and savvy than they were even in 2000. President Obama and the Democrats have, by their unconstitutional policies and their actions, opened the eyes of a large number of people. America is a center-right country, whereas you and your whole family are at best center-left, although “Democrat Light” is probably more accurate.
           Don’t even think of utilizing your wife, Columba, in your effort to win the White House; it will simply make you look like an opportunist. She is Hispanic. So what? So are a lot of people. This would be pretty lame and exploiting her background will be very transparent while delighting the media who hate all Republicans and will find it an excellent way to do what they want to do – turn on you.
           Go, please go, I don’t care how or why. Maybe the Democrat Party would like to, as some have suggested, have you run with Mrs. Clinton.  Ideologically this would be a better fit for you. The base of the Republican Party doesn’t want you and maybe some of the rest of the party sees through you as well.
           I supported your father for President and I supported your brother for President, but I won’t support you. I’ve had enough of the Bush family, but mostly I’ve had enough RINOs. I was a conservative when each of these men ran for president and believed initially that they too were conservatives, but that wasn’t so.  I have learned a lot about politics over the last ten years, and I don’t want you as President. I want a true conservative, although I won’t be upset if someone else, someone with good ideas and a forceful personality wins.  I voted for Ronald Reagan and I’m looking for another Reagan (or at least a reasonable facsimile). You just don’t cut it and it is too late now.
 
          You have clearly come out in favor of an unconstitutional approach to education. Ronald Reagan trusted the Democrats and thought he had made a deal that would eliminate the Department of Education. The creation of this department was simply a payoff from Jimmy Carter to the teacher’s unions who helped get him elected. Reagan never trusted the Democrats again after he was betrayed by them over this issue. We know you know this, but it doesn’t matter to you. It may have something to do with the millions of dollars you expect to receive by supporting Common Core, a nationalization of American education. Just because Bill Gates and other wealthy men support Common Core does not make it right or good for America.  What do they know about the Constitution? Or American history? Or the values of the American people?
           The more the American people know about Common Core, the more they hate it.  Common Core has been exposed as an attempt to create a nationalized education system, in direct violation of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.  This promotion and your standing to make a great deal of money from it – doesn’t help your cause. 
           Furthermore, although statistics on homeschooled children are hard to come by, there are an estimated 1.5 million American children being homeschooled. Homeschooling grew from 2012 to 2013 by 7.6%, which, of course, might be because one parent is jobless and staying at home.  Even so, this is an astonishing rate of growth.  Even ten years ago the number of children homeschooled was substantially less than it is today, and twenty years ago the number of homeschoolers was virtually non-existent.
           Homeschooled children and their parents know Common Core is a very bad idea. They probably also know something that you don’t seem to know or understand – it is unconstitutional.  More than other demographics, people in homeschooling families are more likely to vote, and get out and tell their families, friends, and neighbors who they are voting for and why.  The number of homeschoolers and their contacts is going to grow and grow before the next presidential election.  And this is just one small component of the issue.  Another component is all the voting, recently retired parents and grandparents of schoolchildren who attend public schools  – these are people who have a lot of time to spend on the Internet, where they are learning more about Common Core and the more they see, the less they like it. 
                So supporting Common Core, a program that is now under attack nationally with many states opposing it, pulling out of it or pulling away from it, some even fighting it in courts of law, does not seem like a very smart political move.  In fact supporting Common Core is beginning to look more and more like evidence of hubris, and we have had more than enough of that in the White House since your brother George left. The American people are in the process of rejecting Common Core. The American people reject Obama’s illegal amnesty program for illegal aliens.  The American people will reject anyone who disagrees with their positions.
 
Susan North

If the president’s State of the Union Address is to be our guide, we can expect his “pen” to be very busy in the months ahead.

Yet as many (including a number of concerned Congressmen) have noted, little in the Constitution or presidential precedent supports the massive expansion of executive power that has already taken place on his watch–and which seems likely to accelerate in what remains of his presidency.

But implicit in the president’s stated justification for acting alone–the intransigence of a hyper-partisan Congress–is a more subtle critique of his presidency: the evidence of systemic political and administrative incompetence. While incompetence seems like a less serious problem than constitutional malfeasance, the two are intimately and dangerously connected in this increasingly-lame duck presidency.

President Obama made his first mark on the national political scene delivering the Keynote Address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. His energetic performance and unifying message left many counting the days until he could speak at his own nominating convention.

It didn’t take long. Two years after winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, he was a presidential candidate, stirring up audiences with calls to “hope and change”–serious change, as he promised in the speech he gave upon clinching the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination:

If we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.

That’s not quite how things have played out. Hence reporter Jake Tapper’s recent line of questioning in interviewing the president: did he promise too much? Has he since “recalibrated” his “ambitions”?

On the contrary, said the president. Like Michael Scott enumerating his weaknesses (“I work too hard, I care too much …”), the first problem was no problem at all. In fact, he said, “we got a lot of that stuff done.” The second problem, of course, is other people–namely, House Republicans.

Yet for his first two years, the president had a Congress willing and able to enact almost all the big pieces of his agenda. Then, after 2010, he didn’t. Everyone knows why: the president who could sell himself like few politicians of his era couldn’t sell Obamacare. He could ram it through Congress by co-opting “stakeholders” and using every parliamentary trick in the book, but the speechmaster who made partisans swoon in 2008 and 2012 could do nothing to save the sixty-three House and six Senate Democrats who paid the ultimate political price for their Obamacare votes.

Over and over again, the president has failed to move the American political needle with a “major speech” on this or that important policy question. He can hector, but it’s hard to persuade people of your arguments when you never debate a real opponent. Republicans are always “anti-government” disciples of “trickle down” economics who believe only in “rugged individualism.” They never have an agenda, except to say “no” to his, and thereby protect the profits of Wall Street, Big Oil, and greedy insurance companies. His “sensible” proposals are always attractively posed between two straw men: a government-has-all-the-solutions scarecrow on the left and a government-is-always-the-problem scarecrow on the right.

But what of the real law behind the curtain? When we’re told, for example, that his stimulus package will bring unemployment down to 6%—and it doesn’t; that we can keep our health care plan and our doctor—and we can’t? When the fantasies of presidential rhetoric meet the realities of our daily lives, there is no talking us out of the conclusion that the president hasn’t delivered.

Multiplying administrative failures reinforce our skepticism: shovel-ready jobs that turn out not to be shovel-ready; “investment” after “investment” in failed and failing companies; an Obamacare website that still flunks basic security and privacy tests; a list of scandals (IRS, Benghazi, Fast-and-Furious) where the only alternative to evil intent is fundamental incompetence.

And so, “the pen.” Combine an overly-ambitious political agenda, an inability to convince others to support much of it, and serial failures to administer responsibly the part they do support, and you have the perfect recipe for executive overreach–whether to try to do what you can’t do otherwise, or to clean up the messes you’ve already made.

Having now done our best to apply the lessons of more than one-third of the Federalist essays to contemporary political events, there is a reason–hopefully better than personal dislike, partisan antipathy, or a mistaken love for political traditions that have passed us by–that, over and over again, we compare, unfavorably, the science of politics practiced by the Obama Administration with that of the American founders: the ideas are different, and the consequences matter.

In Federalist 29 Hamilton argues that Americans cannot wish away the dangers of domestic insurrection or foreign invasion. Human beings have different interests. Federalist 29 is another perfect example of how the Founders offer an alternative to the supposed wisdom of our day. The federal government, the essay shows, does not help to secure a more perfect Union by taking a general jurisdiction over the affairs of men, but by confining itself to those tasks it is best suited to administer, given the nature of man and government.

In Federalist 29 Hamilton argues that Americans cannot wish away the dangers of domestic insurrection or foreign invasion. Human beings have different interests. Those interests sometimes prompt them to take up arms. Those arms threaten the peace of civil society. It is necessary, therefore, that government act to secure society against these threats.

Since effective military force requires large measures of uniform preparation and coordinated action, the national government was most suited to this task. The project needed no artificial invention. It made perfect sense given the relative instability of the newly-formed states and the nature of international politics. The obvious truth of the matter provided both a winning political argument and a realizable political objective. Thus, among other military provisions, the Constitution empowered Congress “to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia”–providing a necessary professionalization to the citizen army that would form the backbone of the American military for more than a century.

Every power the Constitution explicitly grants to the federal government displays the same marks: a necessary means to a self-evidently national and attainable end. Of how many of the assumed powers of today’s hyperactive state can we say the same?

Which brings us back to the present administration and the grandiose pretensions of its unchastened leader. Last week, the president announced before Congress, the Supreme Court, and the nation that this would be a “year of action.” While his use of his “pen” might have a modest policy impact in the areas he addressed, the precedent he sets will, unfortunately, have a much greater impact on the American regime moving forward.

Let’s, then, hope that this is a “year of action” too for the other branches of the government–not in conniving at executive usurpations for political advantage, but in guarding and restoring the boundaries of our constitutional system.

It would be better to stop this lame duck dynasty before it starts.

David Corbin is a Professor of Politics and Matthew Parks an Assistant Professor of Politics at The King’s College, New York City. They are co-authors of “Keeping Our Republic: Principles for a Political Reformation” (2011). You can follow their work on Twitter orFacebook.

Contributed by Matthew Parks
The Federalist Today
New York, NY

Two hundred twenty-six years ago today [May 14], the Constitutional Convention was scheduled to open in Philadelphia. While it took eleven more days for a quorum of delegates to assemble, it took those delegates less than four months to answer the question that had brought them together: what can be done to make the Articles of Confederation “adequate to the exigencies of the Union”? Their answer: nothing. And so they proposed an entirely new frame of government, justifying this revolutionary act with an appeal to the document that justified the original American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government….”

But since this was the people’s right, not the Convention’s, and since the Declaration had also asserted that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” nothing would be settled until the public at large, acting through specially-called state conventions, ratified the new Constitution. And since ratification was by no means certain, the authors of The Federalist Papers, over eight and one-half months, made the case for the Constitution in eighty-five carefully-reasoned essays. Theirs is perhaps the world’s finest example of rhetorical statesmanship: morally responsible, intellectually profound, and practically-oriented. It is also profoundly republican.

Whatever their claims to political preeminence–and they were great–Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay made no appeal to authority in laying out their case for the Constitution. Publius, their collective pen name, would be only as persuasive as the reasons he gave. This was natural, since from the opening paragraph of the first essay, they recognized that the debate was not just about whether the United States would adopt the Constitution or even whether the union of the states would continue, but also, and most fundamentally, whether “societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

Too often our leaders are not so magnanimous today. A poster in the New York City subway tells it all. Beside a stick figure picture of a man slumped against a support column, the text instructs: “See someone in need? Get help!”and then directs the hopeless citizen to the nearest subway employee or police officer. Let the professionals handle things. From the subways to the State Department, our modern bureaucratic state has been designed to make popular reflection less and less meaningful and choice less and less real. As President Reagan said, “The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program”–guarded by a phalanx of experts impervious to all November election arrows. As we pay deference to their authority, we hand over more and more power to a ruling class that considers itself too sophisticated to talk about “good”government, a quaint or perhaps nefarious notion from a bygone age. What we need today, they believe, is not good government, but effective government. Over the last two centuries, politics has grown up, setting aside childish debates about philosophical abstractions like justice to confront the real scientific facts of social life. And since the most universal fact of all is that our existence is a matter of metaphysical accident, modern statesmanship amounts to artfully applying intellectual force against those who still believe that their reflection and choice is a matter of consequence–against, in other words, the members of the political flat earth society. Thus, President Obama promised in his First Inaugural that his administration would “restore science to its rightful place” and supplied all the necessary graphs to demonstrate the wisdom of his stimulus bill, health care overhaul, and energy policy.

Not surprisingly, then, the biggest players in today’s political arena are the fact-checkers. And they are everywhere–essential members of every post-speech or -debate cable news panel and the best-placed columnists in the best print and online journals. Apparently inspired by the reverence with which media elites receive a judgment of “two pinocchios,” one debate moderator in the last presidential season even took it upon herself to do some real-time fact-checking (at the expense of the unfortunate Republican candidate, as last week’s hearings on Benghazi made abundantly clear). Along the way, the definition of political facts has expanded with the profile of the fact-checkers. As a result, more and more judgments about facts are really just another form of ideological warfare. We naturally wonder: is there any room left for reasonable debate on contestable questions?

There is good reason to dispute the “just the facts” approach to politics–and not only the remarkable distance between the lines on the graphs and the real facts of our experience. The founders, as it turns out, were not as unscientific as we presume. Hamilton’s Treasury Department, composed of the Secretary and a few clerks, gathered and analyzed detailed data on the new nation’s debt, international trade, and manufacturing base. But Hamilton never supposed, as Secretary of the Treasury or advocate of the Constitution, that well-tabulated numbers carried with them necessary policy prescriptions. The national debt was $76 million, but whether and how that should be paid down were moral questions that required careful reasoning from first principles. And since human beings are, in fact, responsible moral agents ultimately accountable to the God who made them, it was not just meaningful, but necessary, to distinguish good government from bad and to challenge the belief that all politics is a matter of accident and force.

What would be required to reintroduce reflection and choice into the public square–and, perhaps more importantly, deliver us from the arbitrary power (“accident and force”) of the ruling class? We would do well as a political community to consider Publius’s opening argument in  Federalist 1 and model our politics accordingly. There he states simply: (1) You have been called to choose; (2) Yours is a fundamental choice between (rare) good government and (common) bad government; (3) Your choice will make a difference for you, your descendants, and the world at large; (4) The flaws of human nature make good choices difficult, but not impossible.

Such a political reclamation project would require leaders who were willing to make arguments, and citizens who were willing to consider arguments and empowered to make choices. The reward for the revival of this type of politics would be the satisfaction of having resurrected reflection and choice as an alternative for mankind, along with all of the associated benefits of peace, prosperity, and human flourishing that typically result from them.  The risk of not reviving this type of politics is the frightening prospect that the kinder, gentler, more palatable employment of accident and force in politics will not remain so; that having lost the taste for governance rightly understood, both rulers and ruled will become more and more accustomed to imposing their will upon one another, making arbitrary government, along with death and taxes, the most reliable fact of all.