The fact that a mandate was included in a law enacted by key Framers of the Constitution also reflects their "originalist" thinking on the question of mandates. The idea didn't seem to bother them in the slightest. It was just a practical way to achieve a goal, rather than having the government use tax money to buy and distribute muskets.
Indeed, if there was one core "originalist" attitude among the Framers, it was their pragmatism. They created a powerful and dynamic federal government so it could address national problems. They weren't hung up on whether some individual might be upset that his personal "liberty" was facing some slight infringement.
After all, the Founders had just fought a long war for independence and, as Washington explained in his letter on Madison's commerce plan, "we are either a united people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of a general concern act as a nation, which have national objects to promote, and a national character to support."
In other words, Washington wanted the new nation to set aside its squabbles over such issues as state sovereignty and go-it-alone individualism and to do what was necessary to make the country succeed. "If we are not" this unified nation, he added, "let us no longer act a farce by pretending it to be."
Washington's view on the need for a vibrant central government was not universally held by the Founders, but it clearly represented their dominant sentiment since Madison's Commerce Clause did become part of the Constitution, which was ratified by the states.
Ratification consigned the Articles of Confederation, with their "independent" states and weak central government, to the dustbin of history.
But Mitt Romney and today's American Right would have you believe that a different history occurred, that somehow the Articles of Confederation are the Constitution and that the Founders were not the practical men that history shows us they were but rather anti-government zealots.
Romney's NRA speech showed how the Right's false narrative will be repeated again and again, making it the equivalent of truth for the ill-informed and weak-minded.
"The principles of our Constitution are enduring and universal," Romney declared in his didactic speech. "They were not designed to bend to the will of presidents and justices who come and go."
Then, in reference to the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank regulations of Wall Street, Romney added...
"This President is moving us away from our Founders' vision. Instead of limited government, he is leading us toward limited freedom and limited opportunity. ..."My course restores and protects our freedoms. As President, the Constitution would be my guide, and the Declaration of Independence my compass."
But Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, appears to know very little about the real Constitution and the real Founders. After all, they were the ones who chose to place no limiting principle in the Constitution's Commerce Clause, because they knew that for it and the other powers to be effective -- both then and in the future -- that those powers required flexibility.
Despite their shortcomings in tolerating slavery and granting liberties primarily to white men, the Founders still trusted the democratic impulse of the people, expressed through Congress, to use government to "promote the general Welfare" -- much more so than today's conservatives do.
Instead of faith in the democratic decisions of the people, Romney argues that the Constitution restricts the federal government's actions to address America's commercial and economic problems -- like the cost of health care or access to a doctor.
In adopting this crimped view of the Constitution, Romney harks back to a history that never existed and to a self-serving narrative invented by right-wingers who have used this bogus version of the past to mislead the American people into a dreary future.
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