The New Realist Podcast

The other day I spoke with "The Asia Trade" with Shery Ahn and Avril Hong about the ICE raid at a Hyundai plant in southeast Georgia where almost 500 workers were detained, many of them Korean nationals.

In particular, we spoke about the significant political and economic fallout which has resulted from the raid - which is to date the largest workforce raid in American history - including: (a) increased tension with our allies, specifically South Korea (b) heightened investor anxiety and (c) mounting risk for companies investing (or interested in investing) in the US.

Most importantly, we focused on how this raid highlights a conflict between two of Trump’s most critical policy commitments – immigration reform and re-shoring/bringing manufacturing back to the US.

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I spoke with Joe Mathieu on Bloomberg’s Balance of Power today about the difference between President Trump’s comments on the assassination of Charlie Kirk and Utah’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox.

When asked on Fox News this morning what his administration is doing to combat political extremism, Trump said

I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right are oftentimes radical because they don’t want to see crime… The radicals on the left are the problem. They’re vicious, and they’re horrible. And they’re politically savvy.

Juxtapose this with the Governor’s comments urging people to summon their better angels.

We can return violence with violence, we can return hate with hate, and that’s the problem with political violence — is it metastasizes… Because we can always point the finger at the other side. And at some point, we have to find an off-ramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse… History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country, but every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us.

Leadership matters and Cox should be commended for exhibiting it repeatedly over the last few days.

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On 11 September I was on Bloomberg’s Balance of Power with Joe Mathieu to discuss the horrific events that took place at Utah Valley University yesterday when a gunman shot and killed conservative activist, Charlie Kirk. Amongst other things, I spoke about the root causes of the spate of political violence we have been witnessed over the last few years, which includes everything from the arson attack on the Governor of Pennsylvania and the plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, to the killing of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, two assassination attempts against then candidate Donald Trump, the attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, the killing of the United Healthcare CEO and two young Israeli staffers on the streets of NYC and WDC respectively.

I also counseled both sides of aisle to be careful when using the term ‘but’ while expressing sorrow for the loss of Kirk or any victim of political violence (i.e., “violence is never acceptable but… “, “he was so young and no one should have to go through that but…”).

The reason, as a dear friend often says, anything before a but is a lie.

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This is the ninth video in a series I am recording in honor of the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the release of my most recent book, American Democracy in Crisis. If you have not had a chance to listen to the previous videos, I invite you to do that.

As usual I am going to begin with a quote, then say a few words about it.We are told that America is divided and polarized as never before. Yet when it comes to many important areas of policy, that simply isn’t true.

Columbia law professor Tim Wu said this in an editorial published in 2019.

A few weeks ago, another editorial entitled “Americans are not so polarized” was published. This one by pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, who makes a similar claim.

What is going on? After all, the popular narrative in the media is that we are living in polarized times. Today, Americans are more polarized than ever.

And in fact, if you ask someone what’s wrong with American democracy, they often tell you, it’s due to polarization. But in fact, as Wu and Anderson show, the American public is not nearly as polarized as we are often led to believe.

Wu points to several policies supported by super-majorities: more than nine out of every ten Americans back Medicare negotiating for lower drug prices; more than eight out of ten favor net neutrality; seven out of ten approve of higher taxes for the ultra-wealthy; and three-quarters believe we should be able to buy drugs imported from Canada.

Likewise, as Anderson shows, “few Americans live at the extremes. In my data, only 13 percent of Americans hold views that could be categorized as “strong liberal” and only 11 percent as “strong conservative.” But it is the remaining three-quarters of Americans who are fascinating to categorize — they defy what many people may think of as America’s political center.”

Given these numbers, the major problem we are facing may not be polarization.

This is why as opposed to asking why people don’t agree and why we are so polarized, maybe we should be asking: why is the government incapable of acting on the wishes of most Americans? Why in the oldest democracy in the world is the majority so often ignored?

The answer is the system itself; the US has a governmental system that has largely succeeded in doing what it was originally designed to do, i.e., to frustrate majority rule and responsiveness.

In the last several videos I have discussed why the Framers designed the system this way (the answer is to preserve liberty).

I have also discussed what the earliest Americans did to try to make the system work, they turned to political parties. Of course, parties have proven to be a semi-solution to the problem.

In this video, and the next, I address what are the consequences of this structure as it pertains to specific policy areas.

The first consequence is a lack of responsiveness to the majority. We can illustrate this using several issues, but I am going to focus on one that America has faced for decades – illegal immigration.

Even though people across the political spectrum agree the U.S. immigration system is in crisis, the federal government for decades failed to rectify the problem. Like most Americans, President Obama came to office in 2009 convinced that something had to be done, at the very least to protect the most vulnerable population, the undocumented young people who were brought to the United States as children. His concerns about the Dreamers were shared by most Americans.

Polls at the time showed that three quarters of respondent’s support legalization for people who were brought to the United States as children.

Several years into his administration, however, an exasperated Obama finally declared he could no longer hold out hope for congress to resolve the issue and he launched an initiative called “We Can’t Wait.” In the absence of congressional authorization, he proceeded unilaterally. Despite concerns about the constitutionality, he issued an Executive Order ‘Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals [or DACA] to protect the dreamers.

Obama was not alone in his efforts to address this challenge, as Louis Fisher notes:

Efforts to pass legislation dealing with immigration have

persisted for many decades, often leading to deadlocks within

Congress in the search for bipartisan agreement. Both Presidents

George W. Bush and Barack Obama attempted to pass immigration

legislation, without success.

While Obama ultimately took unilateral action, comprehensive immigration reform must come from Congress.

In the decade since Obama left office, however, Congress has taken no such action, and the problem has grown more acute.

This helps explain why immigration has played a key role in each subsequent election including the most recent when a poll found that, for the first-time, immigration surpassed inflation as the most important issue on the minds of voters.

Despite this, in early February 2024, a bipartisan bill described as the toughest piece of border security legislation drafted in over one-hundred years, died after failing to garner the votes necessary to override a filibuster in the Senate.

Immigration was at the forefront of all three of President Trump’s campaigns and he began his first and second terms promising to address the issue. In this current term he has moved to address this issue more forcefully than perhaps any other issue and he has done so using the same tactic Obama used EO.

Regardless of what you think about Trump and his immigration views, the fact remains – for a long time large majorities of Americans – members of the public and officials on both sides of the aisle - have agreed that illegal immigration is a major problem and yet, efforts to address it via regular order (by way of congressional legislation) have been ineffective. Leaving presidents to either do nothing or try to address it unilaterally via an EO which is both constitutionally questionable and ineffective from a wholistic policy perspective.

-----

Notes

Tim Wu, “The Oppression of the Supermajority”

Kristen Soltis Anderson “Politicians Are Polarized. American Voters, Not So Much”

“In a Recent Poll We Mapped Voters in the Likely Electorate...”

Jeanne Sheehan, American Democracy in Crisis

“With DREAM Order, Obama Did...”

“DACA, 2012”

Louis Fisher, President Obama: Constitutional Aspirations and Executive Actions

“Immigration Overtakes Inflation as the Top Voter Concern”

“TheCollapse of BipartisanImmigration Reform,”

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On 29 August 2028, I was on Bloomberg’s Balance of Power with host, Joe Mathieu and Rick Davis about the White House firing of the CDC Director, the Chair of the BLS a few weeks ago, sending in the National Guard Troops to DC and potentially Chicago going forward. What these all have in common is that the administration’s dangerous attack on facts they don’t like, or which don’t align with their goals, evidence-based research and the experts who collect it. When we do this, as Timothy Snyder says in “On Tyranny” we abandon freedom. “If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.”

-----

Notes

Timothy Snyder On Tyranny

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, Lesson 10

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This is the 8th video in a series I am recording in honor of the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the release of my most recent book, American Democracy in Crisis. If you have not had a chance to listen to the previous videos, I invite you to do that.

As usual I am going to begin with a quote, then say a few words about it.

The quote today is from a political scientist, V.O. Key, who said:

For [American] government to function the obstructions of the

constitutional mechanism must be overcome,

and it is the party that casts a web... over the dispersed organs

of government and gives them as semblance of unity.

This quote helps explain why, even though the Framers described parties as evil and believed they were a threat to liberty, they turned to them as the only institution capable of bridging the divisions they themselves built into the system.

Why did they divide the system in the first place?

The Framers were so concerned about majority factions taking control of the state and tyrannizing the minority, they constructed a system to frustrate, stop, and impede them. This includes adopting separation of powers, checks balances, etc.

The problem is that in doing this, they failed to distinguish between factions that are tyrannical and those that are not. As a result, all majorities, regardless of intention, are frustrated and checked in our system.

This has been a problem since the Founding – how to get things done, things that most Americans agree with, in a divided system?

Alexander Hamilton was the first of many leaders to recognize this problem and to find a solution to it – or as I call it a semi- or partial- solution – political parties.

As he struggled to get his fiscal plan passed, Hamilton became what Ron Chernow called, the unlikely “flash point for the formation of the first parties.”

He unified his backers and supporters, creating a loose coalition that would later become known as the Federalists, in the process he gave his opponents reason, motive, and cause to unite against him.

The opposition started in Congress, led by another unlikely source - Hamilton’s former co-author and friend, James Madison. While Madison had spoken out forcefully about the dangers of majority factions in “Federalist #10” and elsewhere, he nevertheless spent much of his early years in Congress organizing the “anti-Federalists” into what some would eventually refer to as “Madison’s” party and what would later become known as the Democratic-Republicans.

Hamilton was largely successful in pushing, persuading, and bargaining with members of Congress to get his fiscal plans passed; the result was to further unite the opposition against him and the administration.

So united was the opposition that by the end of Washington’s first term – roughly 1793 – the first parties in the U.S. had begun to emerge. While these fledgling groups were not fully formed political parties of the type we are familiar with today, this did not stop them from engaging in several vicious and very public clashes.

As critical as the development of the party apparatus was in the early years of the republic, it has proven at best to be just a semi-solution to the problem of anti-majoritarianism for many reasons.

I’ll just give you three.

First, parties help mitigate division in periods of unified government – when the same party controls the First and Second branches, as they did during Jefferson’s time. There is, however, no guarantee that the president’s party will control one or both houses of Congress. And while periods of divided government were once a rarity, they have become increasingly common.

Between 1954 and 2022, nine presidential and fourteen midterm elections have resulted in divided government. Compared with the previous fifty years when no presidential elections resulted in divided government and only four midterm elections did.

Second, even when the president’s party is in control of Congress, there is no guarantee the president will be able to move his agenda through congress. Since Congressmen and women are elected independent of the president and serve different constituencies they are not incentivized to act in accordance with the president and, much to the dismay of many Executives, they often don’t.

In June 1979, after many years of careful deliberation, President Jimmy Carter finally signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union. He was able to negotiate an agreement with the nation’s bitterest rival, but he was unable to get his own Democratic Senate to support it. Carter is not alone, several of his successors – including Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden all enjoyed periods of unified government early in their tenures. Despite this, each was frustrated by stalemate that left them unable to address key challenges of the day.

In 2017, even though President Trump came into office with a Republican led Congress he was unable to fulfill many of his campaign promises, including repealing and replacing ‘Obamacare’ (The Affordable Care Act), building the southern border wall, and reforming the nation’s immigration system.

Finally, even during periods of unified government there are other structural divisions in the system which parties cannot always surmount. One example is bicameralism. The Framers were not just content to divide the First and Second branches, they also divided the First branch into two distinct and separate chambers creating a strong bicameral legislature. While many European nations have a bicameral system, most have what can best be described as a weak bicameral system; weak to the extent that the two houses are not equal in power. Great Britain, for instance, has a bicameral parliament, but the House of Lords has not wielded nearly as much power as the House of Commons since the early 1900s.

By contrast in the U.S., the two chambers are equal in power and yet, different in terms of their makeup, constituency, etc. The fact they are both equal in power and yet distinct in composition often makes it difficult to come to agreement and pass legislation, even when the 2 houses are controlled by the same party.

While the early Founders turned Framers found a semi-solution to the problem of divided government, it was only a partial solution. The problem of how to respond to the needs of the majority and how to address the critical problems facing the masses continues today; not only making governing difficult, but frustrating citizens and public officials alike.

-----

Notes

Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

V.O. Key, Politics, Parties, & Pressure Groups

James Madison/Publius, Federalist #10

Jeanne Sheehan, American Democracy in Crisis

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On 28 August 2025, I was on Balance of Power on Bloomberg TV/Radio with host, Joe Mathieu, and fellow panelist Lisa Camooso Miller. We spoke about the Trump administration’s attempts to fire the Director of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), Dr. Suan Monarez. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s efforts to remove Monarez prompted a handful of other high-ranking members of the agency to resign in protest, including the CDC’s chief medical officer, Dr. Debra Houry and Dr. Demetre Daskalis, who oversaw the center that issues vaccine recommendations. Monarez’ case is just the latest in a string of attacks on science, evidence-based research, facts and the experts/institutions responsible for collecting and disseminating them.

“Now and in the years ahead, we need, more than anything else, the honest and uncompromising common sense of science. Science means a method of thought. That method is characterized by open- mindedness, honesty, perseverance, and, above all, by an unflinching passion for knowledge and truth. When more of the peoples of the world have learned the ways of thought of the scientist, we shall have better reason to expect lasting peace and a fuller life for all.”

~President Harry S. Truman 1948 speech to the AAAS

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Notes

Dr. Demetre Daskalis, Resignation Letter

President Harry S. Truman’s Address to the Centennial Anniversary AAAS Meeting

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You’re going to need congressional approval

and you don’t have the votes... Winning was easy,

Young man. Governing’s harder.

~Cabinet Battle #1

I begin a quote that is familiar to many. Lucky for you, I am not going to attempt to either sing or rap it - a promise which probably gives away its roots.

Of course, it is from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s great musical Hamilton.

I am starting with this quote because in the previous video I explained how and why the Founding the Framers divided the government.

As it pertains to the why, they did this for a good reason, to preserve liberty.

On the downside, however, it makes it difficult to get things done.

The Framers-turned-earliest American-public-officials recognized this almost immediately. And we see this depicted beautifully in the musical Hamilton.

Act II of Hamilton finds the new Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson locked in a bitter battle with the newly appointed Secretary of Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. Much to the dismay of Jefferson and his fellow Southerners, Hamilton’s fiscal plan includes several controversial proposals such as assumption of state debts by the federal government and the formation of a national bank.

The rap that ensues pits Hamilton against Jefferson in a musical prelude of what was to become one of the most notorious political feuds in American history.

“If New York’s in debt,” Jefferson asks “Why should Virginia bear it?...This financial plan is an outrageous demand.”

Before Hamilton can defend his proposal, Washington adjourns the meeting and pulls his frustrated Treasury Secretary aside to remind him that there is only one way to get the legislation passed:

“You need the votes…

You need to convince more folks…

You have to find a compromise”

It is a musical reminder that one of the biggest challenges US officials faced in the earliest days of the republic was how to form a majority governing coalition, capable of passing policies in the public interest.

More than two centuries later, little has changed. This remains one of our greatest challenges.

Hamilton not only lays out this problem but provides some insight into Washington’s advice to Hamilton; to get his plan approved he must either convince others or be willing to compromise.

A few scenes later, in famous song, “The Room Where it Happens,” the audience watches Hamilton take Washington’s advice and reach a compromise. At one of history’s most famous private dinner parties the “Compromise of 1790” is born.

In exchange for agreeing to relocate the capitol to the base of the Potomac, Jefferson and Madison agreed to support Hamilton’s fiscal plan.

In the musical version of events there is a lot of focus on compromise as a means of bridging the divisions in the system.

Little attention is paid, however, to the more critical and longer-term solution the Framers found to the problem of division and the difficulties associated with getting policy passed in a system so divided - political parties.

One of the great paradoxes of our constitution is that those who framed it were openly critical of parties.

Let’s not forget, in Federalist #10, Madison – the Father of the Constitution – called ‘factions’ the greatest threat to “popular government.” Likewise, in his 1796 Farewell Address, Washington warned of ‘the baneful effects of parties.’ Their views were widely shared at the time.

Many Americans today continue to hold equally negative views of the institution of political parties.

Despite this, very shortly after the birth of the republic and despite their disdain for parties, they realized these institutions were essential to the nation’s existence.

As Richard Hofstadter says, the Founders:

“did not believe in political parties … yet, almost

as soon as their national government was in operation,

[they] found it necessary to establish parties…

they gradually began to realize that they could not

govern under it without the help of such organizations.”

The Framers realized “they could not govern” without them because they were the only institution capable of bridging the numerous structural divides in the system.

And bridging the divisions of power that they instilled in the system to protect liberty was necessary to govern; and govern they must if the country was going to survive its early adolescence.

_____

Notes:

Cabinet Battle #1, Hamilton

Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda

The Room Where it Happens, Hamilton

The Compromise of 1790, National Archives

Federalist #10, Publius/Madison

Washington, 1796 Farewell Address

Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System

Jeanne Sheehan, American Democracy in Crisis, Post J-6

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Today I am beginning with a quote that is near and dear to my heart, so much so that it has a prominent place at the beginning of my book.

It is a quote by Professor Bernard Hennessey who, in 1963 described the US political system as:

conceived for deadlock and inaction. And, despite some brilliant, if fitful displays of presidential leadership, It remains today as it was conceived, a system for deadlock and inaction.

The quote sums up what I have said and in a previous column/video, I talked about the need to upstream, to go back to the Founding to try to understand why the government is so unresponsive, or to use Hennessey’s words, so prone to “deadlock” and “inaction.”

The short answer is it was designed this way.

The reason why the US Framers structured the system this way, however, is a longer story.

After their experience living under the King of England, who they described as a tyrant, the Framers were committed to setting up a free government.

About three decades prior to the American Revolution, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, wrote a monumental text called Spirit of the Laws. It had an enormous impact on thinkers around the world, including the Framers of the US.

Montesquieu recognized the historic import of the book, writing shortly after its publication:

I can say that I have worked on it my whole life… I swear that this book nearly killed me; I am going to rest now; I shall work no more.

True to his word, following the book’s release, Montesquieu never published again.

Montesquieu may have retired from writing, but the impact of his work was far reaching.

In Spirit he argued that the end, or purpose, of a free government was to ensure liberty or freedom.

While we commonly define liberty today as freedom from governmental power, Montesquieu defined it more specifically as freedom from the state or “right to do everything the law permits” unencumbered by the state.

If we reflect on the fact that many of the colonists came to the New World to escape governmental persecution, most prominently to protect their right to worship as well as the fact that they fought a bloody Revolutionary War to throw off a despotic government that was not respecting the rights of the people rights, it is not surprising that Montesquieu’s message resonated with the Framers.

The colonists, revolutionaries, and Framers main and shared goal was to protect liberty and ensure against the abuse of governmental power.

We see this reflected in Declaration of Independence which reads

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Likewise in the Pledge of Allegiance where we pledge to the ‘U.S. Flag and the republic for which it stands... with liberty and justice for all."

The only question then for the Framers was how to design a system which achieved this goal of protecting liberty?

They found their answer in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws where he said the best way to protect liberty is ‘trias politica’ or separation of power.

Which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense. How else to protect liberty but divide governmental power.

And in Montesquieu’s case he advised dividing the power of the state, which had until that point been in the body of one person, the king, into three parts: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. Each of which possesses different powers and responsibilities.

The US Constitution, as well as many other state constitutions, have adopted Montesquieu’s tripartite system.

What we sometimes describe as the “Madisonian system” is Montesquieu’s separation of powers, coupled with other, additional, divisions of power that Montesquieu did not even imagine.

It is fair to ask why the Framers were intent on dividing power even more than Montesquieu counseled?

The answer is that they feared that mere separation of power, of the kind Montesquieu advised, may not be enough to guard and protect liberty.

So the Framers, worked in an additional divisions, such as checks and balances, the process by which each branch is given some power over the primary activities of the others.

For instance, the legislature has the power to make laws, but they gave the executive a little bit of that power over when they gave the president the power to veto the laws.

Likewise, while the president is the Commander in Chief of the military, the legislature has a bit of that power because they have the power to declare war, and so on – there are many other checks and balances built into the system

On top of these two types of divisions of power – separation of powers and checks and balances – they added others as well, such as bicameralism (i.e., the division of the legislature into two bodies, the House and Senate) and federalism (i.e., the separation of power between national, state, and local governments).

I sometimes say, that when it came to dividing power to protect liberty, the Framers were Montesquieu on steroids; particularly Madison who never met a division of power he didn’t want to adopt.

One of my favorite anecdotes about Madison is that despite the amount of div he built into the system as the Convention came to an end he wrote to Thomas Jefferson, who was still in France, that they had not gone far enough in dividing power to ensure liberty.

From our vantage point today, it is shocking to imagine that Madison’s primary concern was that they had not gone far enough to divide power. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it is not an overstatement to suggest that if anything they succeeded too well.

This is why Hennessey and others describe the US system as ‘conceived in inaction and built for deadlock.’

There is no question that the Framers adopted these divisions for a very good reason, to preserve liberty.

There is also no question that as a result, getting things done in the US, except in times of crisis, has been difficult from the start.

_____

Notes:

Jeanne Sheehan American Democracy in Crisis

Bernard C. Hennessey The Deadlock of Democracy

Montesquieu

Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws

Declaration of Independence

Pledge of Allegiance

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We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which

fitted him when a boy, as civilised society to remain ever

under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

~Thomas Jefferson, 1816

It is patriotic to revisit, reconsider, and revise the Constitution.

Anyone who says otherwise or suggests that the Constitution is “too sacred to be touched” needs to re-read what the Framers had to say on this issue.

This is why I am starting with this quote from Thomas Jefferson.

In fact, there are so many quotes I could have started with to illustrate the Framers consensus on this issue, that I had trouble choosing.

I settled on this one because it reflects three points that almost all of the Framers agreed on.

First, the Constitution that emerged from the Convention was imperfect, but should be ratified.

Second, the Constitution should not be changed for ‘light and transient causes’

Finally, over time, the Supreme Law of the land will need to be revised and perfected, this is the job of future generations.

Let me underscores these points using the words of the Framers themselves.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

The Jefferson quote comes from a letter he wrote in 1816 in which he said the following

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.

In short, the Constitution that emerged from the Convention and the men who wrote it were far from perfect.

He then went on to say

I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with... But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.

In short, he argued future generations should proceed cautiously with amendments and changes, but he understood sometimes given the passage of time and human advancements they may be necessary.

He finished by calling the idea that future generations would live under a regime constituted by their Founders “preposterous.”

ALEXANDER HAMILTON

Hamilton conceived of the Federalist Papers, the famous essays three of our Founders (Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay) wrote to convince New Yorkers to ratify the Constitution.

The essays were his brainchild, he wrote the majority of the text, and oversaw its printing.

In the final essay Hamilton implored New Yorkers to ratify the Constitution despite its obvious and inherent imperfections.

I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man.

The result of the deliberations of all collective bodies must

necessarily be a compound, as well of the errors and prejudices.

In short, he too acknowledged the imperfections and despite that, pushed for ratification arguing that once the document was adopted it could be amended.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

Shortly after the Convention, George Washington wrote a letter in which he spoke openly about the deficiencies in the document:

The warmest friends to and the best supporters of the

Constitution, do not contend that it is free from imperfections;

but these were not to be avoided, and they are convinced if

evils are likely to flow from them, that the remedy must come

thereafter.

JAMES MADISON

Similarly, the man commonly known as the Father of the Constitution (although that is more than a bit of an overstatement) James Madison said the following in a letter he wrote shortly after the Convention:

I am not of the number if there be any such,

who think the Constitution,

lately adopted, a faultless work.

GOUVERNEUR MORRIS

Finally, I am going to end with a lesser-known Founder, Gouverneur Morris. Known as the penman of the Constitution, he wrote the seven most famous words in American history – the preamble to the Constitution “We the people of the United States.”

He was present at almost every day of the Convention and one of its most active members. He also said the following about the Constitution in a letter he wrote in 1815, shortly before he died.

Nothing human can be perfect. Surrounded by difficulties,

we did the best we could; leaving it with those who

should come after us to take counsel from experience,

and exercise prudently the power of amendment.

There is no question the original document was flawed. Paramount among the defects was that it sanctioned the sin of slavery.

When the idea of revisiting and revising the document is raised, it is often followed by charges that those engaged in this type of ‘reform talk’ are unpatriotic.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

To a one, the Framers:

* understood the Constitution as written was imperfect (nothing human is), but they felt it should be ratified it despite its imperfections

* were not in favor of frequent changes to the document and argued it should only be reformed after careful thought and long consideration

* left it to future generations to reform and revise the Constitution

As Jefferson said, it would be “preposterous” to suggest that anyone should live under rules set by their ancestors; almost as preposterous as a man being forced to wear the coat he wore as a boy.

_____

Notes:

Thomas Jefferson, Letter, 1816

Alexander Hamilton, AKA Publius, Federalist #85

George Washington, Letter 1789

James Madison, Letter 1788

Gouverneur Morris, Letter, 1815

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