Design Review

"What are you prepared to do?"
--Sergeant Jim Malone (The Untouchables)

As shenanigans ramp ever higher on Capitol Hill related to the health care bill, it would be interesting to eavesdrop on the Founders as they watch this process from afar. I'm pretty sure there would be many "I told you so"s uttered as they watch the extortion, grandstanding, and thuggery. The Founders correctly anticipated the corruptive nature of the State and tendency of governments to centralize power over time.

However, I wonder if our Founders might not plead guilty to naivety. In the Constitution they sought to capture the spirit and intent of limited government design. In the system of checks and balances, they sought to keep the urge for corruptive power in check.

Presuming that such a system would be followed, and that politicians would not seek ways to circumvent it, now appears to have been a bad bet.

"What could we have done differently?" they may be asking. My guess is that they would have opted for a more decentralized design, more consistent with the Articles of Confederation that the Constitution superceded. Indeed, there were many at the time who thought the Constitution positioned the country for Big Government trouble down the road. A few such 'anti-federalists' walked out of the Constitutional Convention before the document's signing. Some AF writers predicted with astonishing accuracy many problems that we face today (examples here).

A couple Founders appeared to recognize some design defects early on. Thomas Jefferson, who was across the pond in Europe during the Constitution's development, expressed sadness when reading the ratified doc upon his return. One of his motives for running for president in 1800 in attempt to correct some of the design's problems. James Madison, who as the lead author of the Federalist Papers was a leading proponent of the Constitution as written, was expressing regrets as well by the mid 1790s.

So, perhaps the Founders had an inkling as to where this design was headed while they were still alive.

In any event, I sure wish we had their wisdom on-the-ground today.