Repairing Jefferson's America: A Guide to Civility and Enlightened Citizenship by Clay S. Jenkinson

Repairing Jefferson's America: A Guide to Civility and Enlightened Citizenship by Clay S. Jenkinson

Author:Clay S. Jenkinson [Jenkinson, Clay S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781646630967
Google: p-g7zQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 51636469
Publisher: Koehler Books
Published: 2020-06-15T13:19:28+00:00


Presidential Power

Jefferson favored a weak executive. Like others who grew up under what they took to be the despotism of British monarchy, and because he had a principled commitment to legislative supremacy, Jefferson would be deeply alarmed by the power now held by American presidents and their administrative aides. Jefferson believed that power is dangerous when concentrated in the hands of the few or in the hands of one, safer when diffused—his word—among as many individuals or entities as practicable. He believed in the clarifying and distilling power of majority rule, where good sense could argue against nonsense, and every idea would be refined by debate and sustained scrutiny.

The modern presidency is so powerful that it effectively negates the intentions of the founders. Jefferson was a good enough student of history to realize that as America ceased to be a republic and became a continental empire, the original Constitution might not any longer manage public affairs well or efficiently. That’s why he advocated tearing up the Constitution every generation, and writing a new constitution better suited to the actual needs and conditions of the new era. In other words, he would probably prefer a revised constitution that recognized the executive needs of a world that works by the speed of sound rather than the three-mile-per-hour world he lived in. That might grant the executive more power than Jefferson the republican was comfortable with, but it would permit the new constitutional fathers and mothers to find the balance between giving the executive much of the power it needs to function in the twenty-first century and also hemming it in with intelligent and enforceable restraints.

The situation as it has developed is nearly the worst of all possible worlds for Jefferson. The modern president has enormous and largely unchecked power, and yet we continue to pretend that a constitution written before steam power or hygiene or the immune system was understood can somehow be made to fit conditions essentially alien to the Founding Fathers.

Above all, Jefferson believed that matters of war and taxation must begin in the House of Representatives, because that is the branch closest to the sovereign, the people, and they must be consulted as directly as possible on questions of that gravity and magnitude.



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