Federalists, Public Trust, Institutional Guardrails, Baseball, and the Malfeasance Of the President

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

It has been a long and exhausting day, physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually, but it has been rewarding, if nothing else because I was able to speak truth to power and provide personal help and counsel to those without power. I tend to like jousting Against windmills and sticking up for the little guy.  So I am reposting an updated and edited version of something I wrote two years ago.

So until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+ 

Alexander Hamilton wrote:

“If it were to be asked, What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? The answer would be, An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws – the first growing out of the last . . . . A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government.”

The late conservative political commentator Micheal Novak once wrote about baseball connecting it with the heart and soul of the American political system. What he wrote is important for we who live in this day and age to understand, and which all too tragically our President does not. Novak said:

“Baseball is as close a liturgical enactment of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant myth as the nation has. It is a cerebral game, designed as geometrically as the city of Washington itself, born out of the Enlightenment and the philosophies so beloved of Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton. It is to games what the Federalist Papers are to books; orderly, reasoned, judiciously balanced, incorporating segments of violence and collision in a larger plan of rationality, absolutely dependent on an interiorization of public rules.”

The American political system, like baseball is, to use the words of Novak, “absolutely dependent on an interiorization of public rules.” This is something that our founders understood as have the vast majority of America Presidents and other political statesman regardless of their political party or whether or not they were a conservative or liberal. The fact is, that the interiorization of public rules, or rather, how we incorporate public rules, norms of behavior, traditions, customs, and the unwritten yet imperative rules of our social contract into our lives and behavior.

Our current President cannot fathom Novak’s meaning. The man flagrantly flaunts every norm of our American social and political contract that have existed since the days of the Continental Congress. That is why documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States, the Gettysburg Address, and the Four Freedoms are so important. None have the power of law, but all are essential to the functioning of the American political system. The American system is not a business contract, nor is it an Ayn Randish descent into a malstrom of hyper-individualistic social Darwinism. Instead it is about the enlightenment, it is about reason, it is about freedom and responsibility.

In the past two years  the President has continued his assault on that social and political contract drawn up by our founders. At the commissioning of the USS Gerald Ford he urged active duty military personnel to lobby their congressional representatives for his agenda, he turned a Boy Scout Jamboree into a political rally. He did a similar thing when he addressed the CIA at the beginning of his Presidency. But these are not new. Since his campaign began the President has done everything that he can in order to subvert the American political system, and his words and actions show that he has no respect for the Constitution or laws for the land. In the two and a half years of his presidency he has not wavered from his course of destruction. The list of actions that he and his administration to override the Constitutional and institutional guardrails that our founders and their successors cobbled in our laws and system of government is too long to list. In the words of Conservative political advisor Rick Wilson, “Everything Trump Touches Dies.” 

I do not say this with any malice, nor do I say it for any gain. I only say it because the President has stepped so far out from the norms of the American political system that it is impossible to say what he will do next. Our system of government is resilient but at the same time fragile. Unless the GOP majorities in Congress stand up to him our system will not survive in the way that our founders intended. Sadly, I have little hope that they will do so now because for years most of them have fanned the flames of anti-government and anti-Federalist passions that there is no room in their hearts for the very thing that holds our system together, that is the interiorization of public rules, norms, traditions, and behaviors; that is, the interiorization of liberty. As Judge Learned Hand wrote:

“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”