printThe essence of democracy is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “general will,” a “national purpose” that must be implemented by an all-powerful state. “Democratic voting is done, not only to select officials but also to determine the functions and goals and powers of the government,” writes legal scholar (and friend) James Ostrowski. “The guiding principle of republics is that they exercise narrow powers delegated to them by the people, who themselves, as individuals, possess such powers.”
James Madison was not a democrat. He denounced popular rule as “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” Democracy, he observed, must be confined to a “small spot” (like Athens). Madison and the other founders attempted to forestall democracy by devising a republic, the hallmark of which was the preservation of individual liberty. To that end, they restricted the federal government to a handful of enumerated powers.
Decentralization, devolution of authority, and the restrictions on government imposed by a Bill of Rights were to ensure that few issues were left to the adjudication of a national majority.
When you consider every bit of legislation written by our democratically elected despotic lawmakers—the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (S.744),” for example—contemplate the words of Benjamin Barber:
It is hard to find in all the daily activities of bureaucratic administration, judicial legislation, executive leadership, and paltry policy-making anything that resembles citizen engagement in the creation of civic communities and in the forging of public ends. Politics has become what politicians do; what citizens do (when they do anything) is to vote for politicians.
And where, pray tell, in the immigration tyranny is the Tenth-Amendment Center? Its scholars used to advocate for the right of the residents of the states to determine how they lived their lives. Unless I am doing him a disservice—in which case I apologize profusely—the last time Michael Boldin applied the Tenth Amendment creatively to the political steamroller that is immigration was when he distinguished between immigration and naturalization in 18th century nomenclature, back in … April 28, 2010.
Has the Tenth Amendment Center fallen to the Beltway bigwigs of the Cato Institute?