The Whites of Their Eyes by Jill Lepore

Author:Jill Lepore [Lepore, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History, Religion, Politics, cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780691150277
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

At the Green Dragon Tavern, I asked Austin Hess whether he was worried Sarah Palin was hijacking the Tea Party. He shrugged. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” he said. “I don’t agree with her about a whole lot of things, but we’re not conducting purity tests. We’re building coalitions.” Patrick Humphries came by, handing out flyers about Tax Day. Humphries didn’t have much use for Palin, either. “She’s flamboyant. She’s matured a lot. She has the right mind-set, but she’s not our leader. We don’t need a leader. We’re all about devolution. We’re going back to the Constitution. If she were running for president, would I vote for her? Eh.”

Humphries was born in Indiana and grew up in Iowa. “I have always been a conservative,” he told me, taking a seat. “I register Republican once a year, for the primaries, and then reregister as an Independent. I was not a supporter of McCain, who wasn’t a true conservative.” He went to his first Tea Party meeting in March 2009. “The radical change that is going on has to be stopped. The losses of liberty are startling. I don’t think people understand the government takeover of the economy, but it will represent a loss of freedom.” Humphries and I kept talking past one another. He started talking about the Louisiana Purchase. I thought he meant Jefferson’s deal with Napoleon, in 1803. No, he meant the payoff of $300 million in federal money to the state of Louisiana to buy Democratic senator Mary Landrieu’s support for the health care plan.

Humphries didn’t vote for Barack Obama; he didn’t like what he was doing; he didn’t want to foot anyone else’s bills; he sent Scott Brown to Washington to stop all that, and Nancy Pelosi thwarted him. Humphries was concerned about his liberty. He handed me a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution, printed by the National Center for Constitutional Studies, whose website refers to the Constitution as a “miracle” and also sells a biography series called “The Real Founding Fathers,” as endorsed by Glenn Beck. “I don’t think the Founding Fathers wanted lobbyists running around Washington,” Humphries said. He quoted the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Humphries felt both powerless and poorly represented and even disenfranchised; he wanted that power he was supposed to get from the Tenth Amendment. “The Constitution gave us a bedrock. Ours was meant to be a very simple, straightforward government. The more power and money that goes to Washington, the less that’s available to the states and to the people.”

The National Center for Constitutional Studies was started in Utah in 1967, to promote originalism, the idea that the original intent of the framers is knowable and fixed and the final word. When the framers were still alive, people who wanted to know what they meant, by, say, a particular phrase, couldn’t really ask them.

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