Historian Challenges Bachmann to Debate

Fri May 20, 2011 at 09:36 PM PDT
Historian Challenges Bachmann to Debate

by Bill Turner May 20, 2011

Dear Michele Bachmann:

As of this writing, I have seen no reports of any response on your part to the recent challenge high school student Amy Myers issued to you to debate “The Constitution of the United States, United States History and United States Civics.” Ever calculating, you have decided that you can safely ignore this challenge, and apparently fail to denounce your followers who have allegedly threatened this young woman with physical violence, including rape, because you know that many people will dismiss her challenge as a childish prank.

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You cannot so easily dismiss me. This is no childhood prank. I’m serious. Let’s get down and dirty and talk about the elitists who wrote the U.S. Constitution in order to create a central government that was significantly more powerful, particularly with respect to the power to tax, than the predecessor under the Articles of Confederation. Let’s talk about Madison’s fear, evident in Federalist Number Ten, of the unchecked power of popular majorities. Let’s talk about the elitism obvious in the Constitution from the fact that the original document envisioned no necessary role for a popular vote at all in choosing the President, or in allocating to state legislatures the power to choose the states’ senators, or in granting “unelected” federal judges tenure “on good behavior” and in prohibiting Congress from reducing or eliminating their pay, thereby insulating them as much as possible from political interference. Let’s talk about the Founders who were slave owners and who wrote slavery into the Constitution knowing that their fellow slave owners would never adopt the document otherwise. Let’s talk about the three-fifths compromise that counted each slave as three-fifths of a person, thereby giving slave owners disproportionate power in Congress as they gained representation for their slaves without, need we even say it, allowing them to vote.

Oh, and let’s talk about your loyal followers and their propensity to attack anyone who challenges you. I’m sure they’ll have a field day with me, since they can now pick on someone their own size who isn’t the least bit afraid of them (not to disparage Ms. Myers’ poor father, who is only being a good parent in looking out for his daughter’s well-being).

So, in the popular parlance of the day, bring it on.

Very truly yours,

William B. Turner, Ph.D., J.D.
drturner@mindspring.com
404-695-6081
http://beingliberal.net



http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/21/977937/-Historian-Challenges-Bachmann-to-Debate?via=siderec

But I think I remember from school, that part of the Constitution was to allow it to change and grow also as society changed.

So you could say that the ideas of the Constitution, should be separate from that actual implementation within the framework of some period of time.

So some specific law that was not achievable then, would not be a reflection of the constitution, unless that same social or cultural thought on that topic exist today.

The idea of popular consent of the governed made slavery not be able to be addressed until enough people would stand against it many years later.

In that context the Constitution is not a set of rules, but a set of rules created to maintain the dual concepts of rights of the majority, and protection of minorities by checks and balances, and the ideas of how to do that with as many safeguards against consolidations of power as possible.


So the Constitution can be thought of as a document to promote ideas, separate from those ideas when they include a cultural context of that time.

Slavery in the Constitution was an affirmation of the right of the governed to make decisions, within the framework, even if wrong at the time, of what most people thought were the governed.


Although he makes a good point that the idea that someone said to be owned as property, counting as a vote is a gross error and not only obviously wrong, but also hypocritical. It is actually like those that say property should give more votes, since that was there frame of mind then, where some people were thought of as property. So not only did they say slaves were not people, but they said they were people, so they had to say they were partial people to get the vote count, and not let them vote or be free.

The mental frame of mind to rationalize the hypocrisy makes sense, even if wrong.

Note that some HR departments still think that way, although not about race, but about any person.

because she's an ignorant, uninformed, ReTHUG asshole