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November 1, 2023 Heather Cox Richardson

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A follow-up to some stories I’ve mentioned:

Egypt has opened its border crossing into Gaza, permitting ambulances to carry 76 badly injured Palestinians to Egypt, while 335 people who hold foreign passports were able to cross.

Jonathan Lemire, Nahal Toosi, and Alexander Ward of Politico reported today that the White House suspects Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanhayu’s days in office are numbered. 

Here at home, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has scored the House Republicans’ bill to provide $14.3 billion in aid to Israel and to “offset” that spending with $14.3 billion in cuts to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). As those of us who have followed the economics of adequately funding the IRS predicted, the CBO found that the cuts to the IRS would cost far more than they save. As it is currently constructed, the bill would add $26.8 billion to the national budget deficit.

New House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) tried to spin this information in a way that can only be described as dishonest: “Only in Washington when you cut spending do they call it an increase in the deficit,” he said.

Johnson rejects the separation of church and state in our government, saying that the framers’ idea “clearly did not mean…to keep religion from influencing issues of civil government. To the contrary, it was meant to keep the federal government from impeding the religious practice of citizens. The Founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.”

Actually, James Madison of Virginia, the key thinker behind the Constitution, had quite a lot to say about why the government and religion must be kept apart.

In 1772, when he was 21, Madison watched as Virginia arrested itinerant preachers for attacking the established church in the state. He was no foe of religion, but by the next year, he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices; he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience. 

In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights, on which our own Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—would be based. It reads: “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”

In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” Madison explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants. 

Madison believed that a variety of religious sects would balance each other out, keeping the new nation free of the religious violence of Europe. He drew on that vision explicitly when he envisioned a new political system, expecting that a variety of political expressions would protect the new government. In Federalist #51, he said: “In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.”

In order to make sure men had the right of conscience, the First Amendment to the Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” 

In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson called this amendment “a wall of separation between Church & State.” In a letter of January 1, 1802, he explained to a group of Baptists from Danbury, Connecticut, how that principle made him refuse to call for national religious days of fasting and thanksgiving in his role as head of the government.  

Like Madison, he maintained that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship.” “[T]he legitimate powers of government reach actions only,” he wrote, “[and] not [religious] opinions.”

“[T]hat act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’” he wrote, built “a wall of separation between Church & State.” It prevented him even from such religious practices as declaring a day of fasting in times of trouble, or thanksgiving in times of triumph.

Notes: 

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-gops-israel-aid-bill-adds-268-billion-deficit-budget-office-says-rcna123160

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/01/biden-administration-thinks-netanyahu-may-not-last-politically-00124849

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67284694

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=628702608614710&set=a.426385065513133

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/01/mike-johnson-christian-nationalism-guns-political-violence/

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-01-02-0027

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/virginia-declaration-of-rights

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0163#JSMN-01-08-02-0163-fn-0014-ptr

https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danbury.html#:~:text=The%20unedited%20draft%20of%20the,was%20an%20offense%20to%20republicanism.

https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html

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Seven Objects—And What They Say About the Election The Editors

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The Trump Bible, Kamala’s coconut tree, and J.D. Vance’s couch. The Free Press nominates symbols that sum up this insane race.

(All images via Getty, illustration by The Free Press)

The most physically imposing picture of Donald Trump is the one he almost didn’t survive. You’ve seen it: The former president stands silhouetted against the sky, fist pumped, jaw jutted, bright red blood streaked across his face like war paint. The blood is from a bullet that missed its mark; the blood means that Trump should be dead, but isn’t. He’s still standing, all six-plus feet and 200 pounds of him, in the flesh, as corporeal as it gets.

In the wake of the assassination attempt, many commentators declared the election over. That raised fist, that frayed ear, the way Trump’s top teeth bore down on his lower lip as he shouted his defiance: It was powerful. It was undeniable. You’d never see Joe Biden standing up like that after taking a bullet in front of a crowd of thousands.

(Evan Vucci via AP)

The image of Trump was symbolic, iconic, and instantly viral. Within 24 hours, it had appeared on the front page of virtually every newspaper in the world—by which time millions of people had made it their social media avatars and memed it into oblivion. It adorned miniskirts, coffee cups, and balaclavas; supporters displayed it in their homes and tattooed it onto their bodies. Most importantly, the assassination attempt caused a bump for Trump in swing states; if he wins the presidency, it will be at least in part because of that photograph.

But while that image of Trump may be the most powerful symbol of this insane race, it’s not the only one. Like the coconut emoji that became synonymous with Kamala Harris’s campaign. Or the cats beloved by liberal women (or, allegedly, eaten by immigrant hordes). These and more have been nominated by our staff as symbols of the 2024 election. Read on for the list of (mostly) inanimate objects that we’ll never see the same way again. —The Editors


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November 2, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

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November 3, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

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I’m home tonight to stay for a bit, after being on the road for thirteen months and traveling through 32 states. I am beyond tired but profoundly grateful for the chance to meet so many wonderful people and for the welcome you have given me to your towns and your homes.

I know people are on edge, and there is maybe one last thing I can offer before this election. Every place I stopped, worried people asked me how I have maintained a sense of hope through the past fraught years. The answer—inevitably for me, I suppose—is in our history.

If you had been alive in 1853, you would have thought the elite enslavers had become America’s rulers. They were only a small minority of the U.S. population, but by controlling the Democratic Party, they had managed to take control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They used that power to stop the northerners who wanted the government to clear the rivers and harbors of snags, for example, or to fund public colleges for ordinary people, from getting any such legislation through Congress. But at least they could not use the government to spread their system of human enslavement across the country, because the much larger population in the North held control of the House of Representatives. 

Then in 1854, with the help of Democratic president Franklin Pierce, elite enslavers pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through the House. That law overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept Black enslavement out of the American West since 1820. Because the Constitution guarantees the protection of property—and enslaved Americans were considered property—the expansion of slavery into those territories would mean the new states there would become slave states. Their representatives would work together with those of the southern slave states to outvote the northern free labor advocates in Congress. Together, they would make enslavement national. 

America would become a slaveholding nation. 

Enslavers were quite clear that this was their goal. 

South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explicitly rejected “as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’” He explained to his Senate colleagues that the world was made up of two classes of people. The “Mudsills” were dull drudges whose work produced the food and products that made society function. On them rested the superior class of people, who took the capital the mudsills produced and used it to move the economy, and even civilization itself, forward. The world could not survive without the inferior mudsills, but the superior class had the right—and even the duty—to rule over them. 

But that’s not how it played out. 

As soon as it became clear that Congress would pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Representative Israel Washburn of Maine called a meeting of thirty congressmen in Washington, D.C., to figure out how they could fight back against the Slave Power that had commandeered the government to spread the South’s system of human enslavement. The men met in the rooms of Representative Edward Dickinson of Massachusetts—whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poems—and while they came to the meeting from all different political parties, often bitterly divided over specific policies, they left with one sole purpose: to stop the overthrow of American democracy.

The men scattered back to their homes across the North for the summer, sharing their conviction that a new party must rise to stand against the Slave Power. They found “anti-Nebraska” sentiment sweeping their towns; a young lawyer from Illinois later recalled how ordinary people came together: “[W]e rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.” In the next set of midterm elections, those calling themselves “anti-Nebraska” candidates swept into both national and state office across the North, and by 1856, opponents of the Slave Power had become a new political party: the Republicans. 

But the game wasn’t over. In 1857, the Supreme Court tried to take away Republicans’ power to stop the spread of slavery to the West by declaring in the infamous Dred Scott decision that Congress had no power to legislate in the territories. This made the Missouri Compromise that had kept enslavement out of the land above Missouri unconstitutional. The next day, Republican editor of the New York Tribune Horace Greeley wrote that the decision was “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.”

By 1858 the party had a new rising star, the young lawyer from Illinois who had talked about everyone reaching for tools to combat the Kansas-Nebraska Act: Abraham Lincoln. Pro-slavery Democrats called the Republicans radicals for their determination to stop the expansion of slavery, but Lincoln countered that the Republicans were the country’s true conservatives, for they were the ones standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. The enslavers rejecting the Founders’ principles were the radicals.  

The next year, Lincoln articulated an ideology for the party, defining it as the party of ordinary Americans defending the democratic idea that all men are created equal against those determined to overthrow democracy with their own oligarchy.

In 1860, at a time when voting was almost entirely limited to white men, voters put Abraham Lincoln into the White House. Furious, southern leaders took their states out of the Union and launched the Civil War.

By January 1863, Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending the American system of human enslavement in lands still controlled by the Confederacy. By November 1863 he had delivered the Gettysburg Address, firmly rooting the United States of America in the Declaration of Independence. 

In that speech, Lincoln charged Americans to rededicate themselves to the unfinished work for which so many had given their lives. He urged them to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

In less than ten years the country went from a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that human beings are created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses, to a defense of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and to leaders who called for a new birth of freedom. But Lincoln did not do any of this alone: always, he depended on the votes of ordinary people determined to have a say in the government under which they lived.

In the 1860s the work of those people established freedom and democracy as the bedrock of the United States of America, but the structure itself remained unfinished. In the 1890s and then again in the 1930s, Americans had to fight to preserve democracy against those who would destroy it for their own greed and power. Each time, thanks to ordinary Americans, democracy won.

Now it is our turn. 

In our era the same struggle has resurfaced. A small group of leaders has rejected the idea that all people are created equal and seeks to destroy our democracy in order to install themselves into permanent power. 

And just as our forebears did, Americans have reached for whatever tools we have at hand to build new coalitions across the nation to push back. After decades in which ordinary people had come to believe they had little political power, they have mobilized to defend American democracy and—with an electorate that now includes women and Black Americans and Brown Americans—have discovered they are strong. 

On November 5 we will find out just how strong we are. We will each choose on which side of the historical ledger to record our names. On the one hand, we can stand with those throughout our history who maintained that some people were better than others and had the right to rule; on the other, we can list our names on the side of those from our past who defended democracy and, by doing so, guarantee that American democracy reaches into the future. 

I have had hope in these dark days because I look around at the extraordinary movement that has built in this country over the past several years, and it looks to me like the revolution of the 1850s that gave America a new birth of freedom. 

As always, the outcome is in our hands. 

“Fellow-citizens,” Lincoln reminded his colleagues, “we cannot escape history. We…will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”  

–-

Notes:

James Henry Hammond, Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina (New York: John F. Trow and Company, 1866), 126.

https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm

New York Tribune, March 7, 1857, p. 4.

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