Please join us for an in-person round table at 9:00 am on Tuesday, June 28, at Landmark Center to consider the state of our constitutional republic. Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives allege an unconstitutional insurrection occurred on January 6, 2021; Dinesh D’Souza alleges in his new documentary, 2,000 Mules, an unconstitutional stuffing of ballot boxes funded by plutocrats to steal the presidency in 2020.
Fifty years ago, the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters by agents of the executive branch took place on June 17. As a result, President Nixon resigned from office after the constitutional process of impeachment for abuse of power exposed his personal involvement in a cover-up of that burglary. Was that extra-constitutional political act of seeking electoral advantage the beginning of the erosion of our constitutional democracy?
The issues we face today were clearly and precisely foreseen in the Federalist Papers.
Madison wrote that a well-constructed republic has a “tendency to break and control the violence of faction.” Faction, he said, introduces into public councils “instability, injustice and confusion.” Sounds like the USA of our time.
Federalist 51 advises that a republic must be so contrived that the interior structure of the government and its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition;” “… the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other – that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.”
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
When a jury in Washington, D.C. condones lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, can federal courts ply their proper role in providing a check on the police power of the federal government? If law is not enforced, of what use is a constitution to check the corrupting vice and destructive power of faction?
In his written Farewell Address to the American people, Washington wrote:
“All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations under whatever plausible character with the real design to direct, control, counteract or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction; to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community.
However, combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
Let me now take a more comprehensive view and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.
It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”
So, right now, in our time, what is the role for morality in our republic? Or rather, whose morality?
Cost to attend is $10 per person.
A light breakfast will be served beginning at 8:30 am.
To register, please email Jed at jed@cauxroundtable.net.
The event will last about an hour and a half.