Notes:BC1.L&C.Constitution 1

2014/07/10 User:Jeff

• Principles of founding stated in DOI. Moral basis of Constitution.*
• Historians see the founding as the result of a list of things

• Natural law/rights
• Protestantism
• English legal tradition
• Republican virtue
• US Constitution

• Not true - only one makes correct government intelligible - Natural law/rights
• Conservatives equate equality and liberty with 21st century liberalism
• Liberals believe that founders understanding of rights is too narrow.

• It did not include the rights listed in FDR's 2nd Bill of Rights and UN of 1948 universal declaration of Human Rights.

• Essentially a right to a minimum standard of living.

• H Clinton has added that leading object of foreign policy is to protect rights of LGBT worldwide

• Founders clearly opposed slavery. Ended it in 8 states and outlawed it in future new states
• Today, founders views are repudiated because they did not embrace the added rights.

• for example, equality means that every person should have the same resources for the purpose of the UN Declaration.
• For example, progressives today view jobs as benefits to be distributed by government for the benefit of groups considered disadvantaged.

Why focus on the Declaration of Independence.

• A founding document.
• colonial legislatures generally at odds with governors appointed by King or corporation. Legislatures had usually had their way. Not so after 1763.
• Americans appealed to:

• English Constitution - elected representative government
• Idea of natural law and natural rights - a universal standard.

• Americans became more insistent on local legislation and rule.

• but failing that, they appealed more directly to natural law.

Declaration:

• Equality

• All men are created equal

• Men means everyone - not a race or males or property owners
• State Constitutions are indispensable.

• Particularly Virginia's

Each is equally free and independent. Independent of all authority and rule by other humans.

Not a quality of law or government policy

• We can agree to be ruled by others - but all alike in this regard.
• Founder James Wilson: when we say all men are crated equal, we mean not to apply this equality to their virtues, their talents, their dispositions, or their acquirements.
• Nor does it mean that all people have equal access to the good things of life

• People do not have a natural right to a minimum wage, health care, education, social security, paid for by society.

• It only means that no one is by nature the ruler of any other person.

• Natural law

• The Declaration says that all men are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights. - L, L, P of H.
• Rights are a claim of how things should be.
• If everyone is born free and no one has a right to take that away then everyone as the right to LLPofH.
• Founders: except for the temporary state of childhood. . . .
• IN Va Bill of rights two others

• acquiring and possessing property

• just economic order establishes market freedom so that poor can sell their labor to buy property

• free exercise of religion according to one's own conscience.

• These all sum up what it is that humans have by nature and what they deserve to keep - what they are able to claim for themselves against others.
• These cannot be separated from duty - none of us can make a slave of another

we all have a duty not to steal or murder.

• No nation has the right to rule any other nation for the same reason that no person has the right to rule another without their consent.

What does a government do to secure those rights? This is seldom discussed and must be understood to understand the founder's intent. It was important to the founders.

• with few exceptions, the constitution sets up a Division of labor

• State governments handle domestic policy and federal government handles foreign.
• DOI states that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.
• That state where there is no government was seen as "the state of nature".

Madison - Federalist 51.

• So to secure our rights

• government secures those rights against the threats of other nations. Protects our rights and property by the means of armed forces.
• The preamble of the constitution names the common defense as one of the purposes of the union.

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