Utah Sen. Mike Lee, like Kentucky’s Rand Paul and Texas’s Ted Cruz have added much to the discussion this past semester, but I would like to suggest they misunderstand their forum. As a business model, the Senate today should be looked at as a pirate ship where full and honest discussion is considered seditious and principled management models are eyed suspiciously as cloaking dissent.
In a speech to the Heritage Foundation on Monday, Lee said: “The single most important policy would be federalism,” which means making “as many decisions at the most local level as possible.”
This does indeed get to the crux of the matter, but you cannot get there from here. A hundred years of centralization cannot disappear overnight; it goes back further, to Jay’s Treaty in 1794 when Washington cast his lot with Alexander Hamilton and the New Yorkers in opposition to Jefferson, Madison, the South and western regions. The die was cast. But the end game of centralization came in 1913 with passage of the difficult-to-explain 17th Amendment, which fatally shifted focus from states to Wall Street in the election of senators.But this needs more discussion, more explanation, and I have heard Lee explain it perfectly on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s groundbreaking TV show “Freedom Watch,” which rose in a creative arc with the Pauls, Lee and Sarah Palin, and was suddenly pulled by its network a year before last President’s Day.
We need it back.
But the pull of empire is deeply embedded in American minds and hearts and has been here since the first moments. Possibly this jewel from The Life and Death of Sam Crow tells why: “Einstein said that any intelligent fool can make something bigger and more complex. But it takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to make something in the opposite direction.”
Perhaps there needs to be a different place for discussion outside of Washington and New York; something more central to America today as Washington was central to the colonies. Possibly Richard Nixon’s idea of a regional matrix for states should be reconsidered, an idea that did not fit the times or the contours of culture back then. The great ambassador George Kennan has advanced a similar suggestion with a model more suited to the fully developed regional cultures of America today.
But “getting big” is not necessarily in our DNA. It is in the model of the post-WWII power arc. Possibly senators cannot solve this, and it must be the work of governors. There needs to be a counterweight to the 17th amendment if states are to countervail the pull of Washington and New York.
Virginia Del. Jim Lemunyon suggested a few years back a Constitutional Convention. And it may take that, but it is really the red states, the heartland states, that are left behind by the centralization of power. It is they that need to find their own center. Possibly a “super committee of governors” for the time being could meet to discuss — hopefully in some centralized location such as Louisville or Indianapolis — but first of all we need to bring back Judge Nap and “Freedom Watch.”
Because right now we are and have been heading hell-bent in the direction of China, a totalitarian matrix for 5,000 years, many of those centuries a slave state; or ancient Egypt, not a state at all, but a vast and timeless universe in the shifting sands of wandering hordes.
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