The Thomas Jefferson Hour; Constitutional Amendments; Part 2

Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with our third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. The Thomas Jefferson Hours produced by High Flames Public Radio and New Enlightenment Radio Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the search for truth in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson. Today's program was recorded in early March of 2004 and it covers several topics ranging from constitutional amendments to libertarianism. Please join us as our host, Phil Crystal Speaks with Thomas Jefferson, portrayed by Humanity Scholar Clayton. Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with the third president of the United States. Today, Mr. Jefferson, we're going to turn to our listener base and we're going to answer questions from our listeners. I know that's one of the things that you look forward to the most. I do believe in a democratic culture that we must listen to the people and in my time we had very few technologies by which we were able to hear what actual citizens thought about important events. In your time, you

have these marvelous systems whereby you can gather public opinion. I would think that that would make statesmen much more responsive to the people than ever before in human history. One would hope. Answer, we're adding a couple of new features for our listeners each week. The first is a letter that you wrote to someone. You wrote 22,000 letters during your lifetime of which we are aware and we will quote from one of those letters that usually will be something that amplifies the discussion that's taken place in the context of our program. And we're also going to indicate what a contemporary of yours had to say about you. Interesting. It should be quite interesting and hopefully it will add a great deal to what our listeners are able to gain in this program. And a third feature of course is to read a passage from Professor Clay Jenkinson's book Thomas Jefferson Man of Light. So you will have another window on your life. These are features that we're hoping will bring a little bit of variety and greater interest to the program. But let's get to our topic.

Do your today. I had to speak French to you sir because I know you were quite the Frankophile. Trabium. We'll look at several listener questions. The first is of course to bring to mind the process of constitutional amendment. There's a specific context in our time that's taking place. It's the it's the idea that we need a constitutional amendment. The president has proposed it to ban same-sex marriages to make legal the idea that marriage only exists between a man and a woman. That's not really our topic. We're really not interested in debating that. But rather to look at the process of constitutional amendment as it exists in the United States today. Now in your time it was somewhat easier to amend the Constitution perhaps than it is low these many years later. Well there was a smaller population base and the country was controlled more by the elites and the people had not spoken as emphatically as they tend to speak in your own time. So you have logistical issues that we perhaps didn't have in our

time. But I do believe that that the Constitution should be amended frequently in order for it to keep up with the changes that occur in any dynamic society. I mean nobody could have predicted that a Constitution written in 1787 would still be useful in every possible way 50 years later 100 years later or my goodness 200 and more years later. So we built in the idea that if this social compact were going to be useful in the long term it would have to be amended quite frequently. And as I'm sure you know the genius of the amendment system is that it needs to be quite difficult. You don't want frivolous amendments. What I call light and transient causes in the Declaration of Independence. But you don't want to make it too difficult either. And that's not unknown in this country. I mean I think the the amendment that prohibited alcohol was considered by many light and transient. In fact many people openly defied it. That was indeed a situation in which one

amendment prohibited the consumption of alcohol by the American people and then just a few years later there was the repeal by way of a second amendment of that experiment. So it's it's in a way it's amazing that that twice in a in the space of a decade the American people were able to show enough unanimity of spirit first to prohibit the consumption of alcohol in the United States and then to think twice about it. I mean an amendment is so very difficult to get passed to the United States Constitution that in your 200 plus year history you've only had 26 of them. And that's a very small number in that length of time given the number of technological, political, social, demographic changes that have occurred in the world. And if you look at those amendments, the 26 amendments to the Constitution of the United States well over half of them might be called procedural. How do you replace a dead president? What age does someone have the opportunity to vote? Is a poll tax an

imposition of unfair burdens upon minorities? These are what I would call procedural amendments about how the process works, but they are not substantive about the very nature of American society and really only after the Bill of Rights only a handful of your amendments have been substantive enough to really change the basic way Americans see the world. And two of them were prohibition and anti-prohibition. So the process is difficult and it needs to be difficult. You're saying light and transient. How does one define light and transient? Well, let me quickly review the the constitutional mechanism for those who may not be fully aware of it. In order to amend the Constitution of the United States, it is required that two thirds of each of the houses of the National Congress, the House of Representatives and the Senate, two thirds of

each of those bodies must pass the proposed constitutional amendment. So it has to be approved by what in your time would be called a supermajority of both houses of the National Congress. And at that point, it is promulgated to the states and then it must be approved by the legislatures of three quarters of all of the states. So that produces an almost impossible trigger for a constitutional amendment, assuming that a proposed amendment passed both houses of Congress that then needs to circulate through a country of great diversity north and south, east and west, industrial and rural, coastal and interior. These are so varied these regions of the country and each state has so different a basic political signature that the idea that an amendment would substantive amendment would pass in your time appears to be a chimera to to an 18th century philosopher like myself. In other words, on any given day, if a

constitutional amendment is proposed by a congressman by a citizen by the president of the United States, the chances that it actually will ever become constitutional law are extraordinarily limited. Indeed, I think it was not too long ago that a balanced budget amendment was sought and it languished. It was not able to make its way through that labyrinthine process. And a flag-burning amendment has come and gone several times in the course of the last numbers of years in your era. And of course, people who are old enough will remember that one of the great constitutional amendment issues of the 1960s, 70s and 80s was an equal rights amendment that would have formalized women's equal rights in the American Republic. That one had widespread support, but not enough constitutional support to become a constitutional law and amendment to the United States Constitution. Well, your test may be light and transient. By the way,

we are the Thomas Jefferson hour, the weekly conversation with the third president of the United States for any of you who are tuning in at this moment. Mr. Jefferson is talking about the process of constitutional amendment, which is being even as we speak proposed by the president of the United States. Light and transient, Mr. Jefferson, light and transient, do you you've just enumerated a number of things in recent years that have been proposed as constitutional amendments? Do many of them seem to you to be light and transient? Or are these indeed the kind of thing that should be constitutional amendments? Well, I think that to just look for a moment at same-sex marriage without getting into the substance of it or the morality of it or the the reason why it's it's a question of such concern to the American people, but staying only with what what should gain the attention of the Constitution and what is beneath the attention of the Constitution? I would say that determining something as central

to any society as marriage does in fact have the gravity that one would expect of a constitutional amendment. In other words, that would seem to mean if if the nation is fundamentally divided on this question and there is the need for this to be clarified for for lots of different reasons, then that does seem to be to be the kind of issue that would be an appropriate amendment to the Constitution. I think alcohol is not an appropriate issue for a constitutional amendment because I'm a libertarian and I believe that people should be enabled to ingest into their bodies whatever they please as long as they don't pick my pocket or break my leg and that clearly seems to me to be a transient issue. If you study the history of culture, we know that that all peoples in every society all over the world at all times in history have intoxicated themselves and that in some cultures, modest intoxication has been seen as a

social good. So the idea that that a republic would would suddenly take on a puritanical phase and try to outlaw the consumption of intoxicants strikes me as as the silliest sort of notion. It would be like saying that human beings will never engage in sexual intercourse again. Well, you can say that as often as you want in your Constitution, but the human nature of humanity will express itself and there will be violations of these sorts of codes whether you like it or not. So one of the issues that you have to keep in mind with any law and certainly with any constitutional provision is this enforceable. There's no point in any culture ever creating unenforceable claims. You know, a tax code is enforceable and it's not 100% but you can create a tax code that will enforce itself. You cannot enforce private behavior behind closed doors. The only way you can enforce that behavior is if there are two conditions. One is if that

private behavior spills out into the street or the other is if you intrude within the sanctity of the private residents to surveil upon private behavior. Neither one of those seems to me to be desirable in a discrete society. It seems to me rather than using words like light and friendship, we might adopt your aphorism if it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg as a kind of standard for the necessity for constitutional amendment. And if one if one employed a standard such as that flag burning either picks your pocket or breaks your leg. Exactly. But something like the question is would marriage, would the definition of marriage pick the pocket of somebody not involved? In other words, let's say you're the rational man on the street and you discover that two women have chosen to marry each other and they have obtained a state license to marry each other. Does that pick your

pocket or break your leg? Well, I mean, it could be argued no that it makes no difference to you what how people pair off in the world. So these if that's a very severe test. That's a very severe libertarian test. And if you use that test, most of the amendments to the Constitution of the United States would go away. The ones that would stay, for example, are the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. It was clear that slavery was not going to go away in some routine way that slavery was going to have to be adjudicated by a major constitutional movement because it was too deeply rooted in the South. And the people who had slaves were too unwilling to do justice by them. And so when this finally happened, it came after your civil war, but it took it took a fundamental social code to do this thing. That I would regard as worthy. That because that did pick pockets and break legs clearly. It not only it not only

required a rethinking of a social code, it required the disenfranchising of the white Southern people who be cut and end the period in which they were no longer able to vote and had no rights as citizens at that point in time. Southern legislators voted in a way that they would not have voted had they been represented by the same people who represented them years earlier. This is the time of Jefferson hour, your weekly conversation with the third president. We're talking about the process of constitutional amendment. Mr. Jefferson has indicated that amendments should not be taken under for light and transient reasons. We've brought in his aphorism if it neither breaks one's leg nor picks one's pocket. That may be a better ground yet for determining what ought to be the grounds for constitutional amendment and what shouldn't be. I think there are several standards. One is is this a passing phase and there are many phases in culture. I think, for example, the flag burning issue is essentially a

passing phase. It's not that it that some people don't think about a great deal of time through history, but in 25 years historians would look back on an amendment of that sort and say, what was the cause? What happened that that led to this movement? On the other hand, something like an amendment to require a balanced budget is not time-based. That's a fundamental of a free society under what conditions can one generation borrow from the next or can government borrow against the future in some abstract sense to perform functions of today. I think that's a critically important issue and that would seem to me to be constitutional in merit, but notice that when this when this when a kind of movement occurred a number of years ago to create such a constitutional amendment it fell short. So even on questions where it's clearly appropriate that this be constitutionally adjudicated, it is so difficult to amend your constitution that it almost never happens. And in fact, I think the balanced

budget amendment never reached citizens in each state to vote on it. It couldn't even get passed Congress. This often happens, whereas the equal rights amendment of the 1970s and 1980s did get passed both houses of Congress and went to the states and it got very close to the to the trigger point, the three quarters point. It fell short. And in fact, one of the most interesting phenomena of American cultures, you know, you think of yourselves as a dynamic and revolutionary people, but you are actually a profoundly conservative people and you amend the constitution with enormous reluctance. And when the equal rights amendment got very close to reaching passage point, several states rescinded their approval of it while others approved. So there was a trading back and forth, but just below the trigger point. And so it's almost as if when it was clear that this could become constitutional law, there was a conservative backlash in some states to pull away and and be more cautious than mold on a question of this sort. So it's a very fascinating mechanism. And let me just say

this much, when the president of the United States adds his personal prestige to a proposed amendment, it is more likely to pass, but not much more likely. I would be very surprised bordering on astonished if this proposed amendment about the sanctity of marriage gets through Congress. If it gets through Congress, I would be overwhelmed if it passed three quarters of the states in the United States. There are many pundits who are arguing that the president is doing what he must do in an an election year to to gain the support of certain elements of his constituency that this really has nothing to do with with even what he believes necessarily or doesn't believe. But rhetorically, it rallies a certain level of support from this constituency. I don't know how to read that because of course I'm not I'm not aware of the president's motives and one can only speculate about such things. But I will say

this generally speaking, if there is a proposal that has no real chance of passing, but sounds good to some portion of the American people, that's a fairly easy thing for our president to do. In other words, it's much more difficult if if you propose something that has an actual chance of passing into law, then there's a responsibility that you take for it. But if you're saying something that's basically comerical and you and you know that the chances that it will pass are extremely limited. And if it did pass, it would reflect a near unanimity of the American people. You win either way, don't you? Because if the amendment passes, that shows that there is absolutely overwhelming support for it. Otherwise, it couldn't possibly pass if it fails to pass. Well, you've still made your point and won the allegiance of a certain portion of the population. So nothing is lost. So in a sense, it's the it's the easiest thing for a president to do. The only way that this would miscarry dramatically is if you propose such an amendment and had no support and you were suddenly

isolated in your in your lonely position on this question, but that that will never happen in a question of this sort. But I mean, it does as a libertarian, however, I might I might just say it's not quite clear what the state has to do with marriage anyway. Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. An interesting topic, the proposal by the president of the United States that we need a constitutional amendment regarding marriage as to find between a man and a woman. You're listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour. We'll be back in just a moment after we take a short break. You are listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour with humanity scholar Clay Jenkinson portraying Thomas Jefferson and his host Bill Crystal, a congregational minister in Reno, Nevada. Please visit our website, www.thythinjeverson.org, www.thythinjeverson.org. If you would like to leave a question for Mr. Jefferson to answer, please call us at 1-800-274-1240. Please stay tuned. We will be back in just a moment.

Welcome back to the new and improved Thomas Jefferson hour. Your weekly conversation with the third president of the United States, new and improved

because we're adding a letter each week written by Mr. Jefferson to some well-known figure, normally a well-known figure about an important topic, and we are going to include a segment in which we describe how a contemporary looked at Mr. Jefferson as well as a passage from Clay Jenkinson's book, Thomas Jefferson, Man of Light. Mr. Jefferson, before we went to break, you referred to yourself as a libertarian. And just exactly what is a libertarian. I know in modern American society, there's a party that calls itself the libertarian party. Is is this your party today? Well, to a certain degree, it is. A libertarian believes that that government is best, which governs least, and that the individual should govern himself in almost every respect. And only those things that truly can only be done by a corporate system should be done by government. In other words, if it can be done by an individual, it should be take old age pensions, your social security system. Clearly, every human being is capable of

planning for his own retirement, and government has no role in that from a libertarian perspective. But national defense, you can't have citizens defending their own house against an invasion from France. There has to be a coordinated effort. And therefore, that certainly rises to the status of government. But maybe you've just described the reason that we do need certain kinds of programs. I mean, you yourself, let's use you as an example. You said that people ought to be able to plan for their own retirement. You plan for your retirement by borrowing money from other people. You left your your your children's institute. It's true, but that's a private matter. And it shame on me. And that shows a weakness of character and a weakness in my in my life at Monticello, but it's no business of my government. And my government should not try to protect me from this. It should it should assume that the human beings are responsible agents. And if you create a system where you can either succeed nor fail, or you only succeed up to a certain level and only fail down to a certain level, that has perhaps has some social benefits, but it is not a libertarian system. A libertarian system empowers the individual in

the maximum possible way and clearly defences a government issue and finances a private issue. Another thing that I would of course object to as a libertarian is a farm program. I mean, certainly an individual knows what to farm, when to farm, how to farm it, how to sell his crops. But if you have a government saying that you can only use X number of acres of corn and why number acres of wheat and and we'll give you a government guaranteed loan and and so on and so forth. This is clearly not a free market society in any significant sense. A libertarian believes that there should be no tariffs that that Americans should sell their goods to England or France without government intrusion of any sort. The government exists to protect contract. So let's say that that the French repudiate their debts to American merchants. Now the government needs to become involved because there's no there's no entity. There's no judicial international judicial system to protect the sanctity of contract. And so government has no choice then but what to defend its own

its own residents. I think we need a program down the road that discusses this issue more more completely. But if this be so, if this is what a libertarians agenda looks like and you yourself are a libertarian. Was it my time? Yes. What what sorts of amendments would a libertarian want to see to the constitution of the United States? Well, that's a good question. I wanted a balanced budget amendment because I believe that a national debt is not only immoral because it taxes the unborn and we after all the rallying cry of our revolutionary movement was no taxation without a representation. And so I feel that that one generation simply has to be restrained constitutionally on questions like this. And that certainly is an amendment that I proposed but I also feel that that amendment is important because if you have the power to borrow from the future as government, this will enable adventurism in the

world. I mean, if you look historically at the history of Britain, wars were usually fought in British history by governments borrowing to pay for them. But if those governments had had to go to parliament and say we can only fight this war if you will provide a subsidy, most of those wars would never have been fought. And so I see a balanced budget amendment as a way of raining in the military adventurism of governments and forcing it to always turn to the people for whatever it seeks to do. So it's a democratic amendment in addition to being one that that I think protects the unborn. You're listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour, you're weekly conversation with the third president, Mr. Jefferson has described himself as a libertarian and is now suggesting that given this this philosophy of less government and the least possible government and the most individual freedom, one amendment that he would suggest to the to the Constitution would be a balanced budget amendment, which was

tried recently and didn't fare very well. What would be another area in which you would want to amend the Constitution, sir? Keep in mind that the ones that I'm proposing are procedural, essentially, that are about the way we constitute ourselves. They're not about our moral code. So although I would be probably offended by overt, publicly recognized same-sex human sexual relationships, because I'm a believer in nature and in discretion both, I don't really regard those as constitutional in their base. They seem to be the habits of the heart, but not the basic ways we constitute ourselves as a republic. And so I'd like to keep that distinction. I wanted to abolish the electoral college, and that would require an amendment. You certainly had better reason than any other. I was a victim of president. I also think I also am against it in theory, because it's essentially to create a college of cardinals between the people and their choice for president. And I think that's

a mistake. It's an anti-democratic element of the Constitution, and I would have liked to see it gone. That was a compromise between large states and small states. Was it not? Yes, it was, because the small states like Rhode Island and Delaware felt that they would be swallowed up by the larger states, and so there were a series of compromises, including of course the great compromise at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. I should hasten to remind everybody that I was not there. I was in Europe at the time, and I only know about it through James Madison and the reports of the Constitution. But the electoral college has two purposes. One is to equalize the differential somewhat between large states and small popular states, and sparsely settled states. And secondly, to create a safety mechanism, less the people elect a bad man or a demagogue. And if the people voted in a bad man, and this became clear, days or weeks after the election, this college of cardinals, the electoral college could come in and effectively veto the people's choice. And the

founding fathers who met in Philadelphia were conservatives. It was a kind of a counter revolution after the the heavy early years following 1776, and they wanted to put in protections against too much power by the people. And this was seen as one of them. I would have abolished that. The only amendment that was passed during my administration, which lasted from 181 to 189, was the 12th amendment. You know, the first ten are the Bill of Rights, and they came in the first Congress of the United States, and were ratified in 1791, before I even got back into this country, really. I had been in France for five years. And so the first ten amendments don't count in this in this discussion, because they are in a sense a second constitution. But the 11th amendment passed in 1795, and it was about judicial events, and it really basically said that a citizen cannot sue a state. And so it was just a little clarification of what kind of lawsuits are acceptable under our Constitution. But the and I had

nothing to do with it whatsoever. The 12th amendment I did play a role in, and it goes again to the problem of parties and elections. The original Constitution was a nonpartisan one, and it argued that the person who got the most electoral votes would be president, and the person who got the second most electoral votes would be vice president, and that this would somehow be a contest of excellence and not a contest of parties. There were no parties when this system was that's exactly right. proposed there was there was really the American people at that point in time. And the way this worked best, of course, was the first election when George Washington was unanimously elected the first president of the United States. So he was the one most respected by the American people. And John Adams was voted to be the vice president. So he got the second most electoral votes. He didn't run as Washington's running mate. He didn't run at all. But the American people decided that they wanted Washington, but in the in the tally of votes, Adams clearly got the second largest number, and

therefore he became the vice president. And it wouldn't have mattered whether they were both federalists or both Republicans or one of each or neither. This system was a nonpartisan tallying system. Well, in 1800 when I stood for the presidency reluctantly, I beat John Adams by a small number of electoral votes, but I tied with my vice president Aaron Burr. And you assume that Mr. Burr knew that he was to be the vice president and not in an actual numerical tie to be president. That is correct. And everyone else knew it too. That everyone knew that I was to be the president, Burr, the vice president, and that we were in a sense a ticket. We were in a way, the first ticket in American history that we stood against against the Adams administration. And but the way the electoral college system worked did not differentiate balloting for president from balloting for vice president. And that's what created the problem. And so once this this was resolved in the spring of 181, you know, it took 36 ballots in

the House of Representatives and it was the first constitutional crisis in American history. I think if Abigail Adams had been president, she might have said, Mr. Jefferson, that the serpent you nurtured, you know, this two-party system came back to bite you. The things that a man will do to to get the state of New Jersey on his own side. I'm sure she would have said just that. But the point that I was making is that once this had been resolved in the House of Representatives, I proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would separate balloting for president, vice president, and it was passed during my term in office in passed in 184. In fact, in time to be used in the 184 election to the to the presidency when I was when I stood for reelection and was overwhelmingly returned. And then that that then did not become an issue again. So that was a that wasn't that was procedural indeed. But it was also a fine tuning. In other words, the founding fathers had not anticipated the emergence of parties. If they had, they would have clarified this from the beginning. But because this is a social political dynamic that had emerged in

the course of our of our national experiment, it was important to go in and clarify an ambiguous set of clauses in the Constitution and the in the 12th Amendment simply did that. That was 184. Interestingly enough, the next amendment to the Constitution did not come until after the Civil War. So the first two were purely procedural after the after the Bill of Rights. The 11th about judicial lawsuits, the 12th about the Electoral College, 184 was the 12th. It wasn't until post civil war that the next amendment to the Constitution was ratified. And it was as you say ratified in a sense illegally because the Southern states had been effectively disenfranchised when all this occurred. And that was the abolition of slavery. So the post war amendments 13th, 14th and 15th all slave related came about after a civil war, a national tragedy of when which hundreds of thousands were killed on both sides

and be without a real canvassing of the of the people. If it had if it had been an honest plebiscite in which the the all the white males of the culture had voted, it could not have passed. It was only passed because the Southern whites had been defeated in war and effectively cowed by northern interests. But the point that I'm making is that it was 60 years more than 60 years between the 12th Amendment of procedural one and the 13th of very substantive one. Here listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour, Mr. Jefferson is talking about the process of amending the Constitution. And he points out to us that after after the 12th Amendment, which really clarified the whole business of the electoral college, who's president, who's who's vice president, constitutional amendments do not happen for more than 60 years. Mr. Jefferson is interesting to note that 60 years passed, but then in the next hundred year history of this

country, an equal number of amendments or more than an equal number of amendments to the Constitution are ratified. Well, you have 13 up until 13, including the one we're talking about, which abolished slavery in the United States. That was an that occurred in just after the Civil War. Then for the rest of American history from 1865 until 2004, there have only been 13 more and most of those have been procedural income tax rights for women. The income tax amendment is an interesting one when when the people voted to tax themselves, they were not voting the kind of income tax they pay each year now. They really were voting attacks on the wealthy Americans, were they not? Well, apparently it was designed to be a progressive income tax, but the point is that the Constitution, as

originally written, had forbidden this sort of tax. And so when the American people decided that this was an important source of national revenue, they couldn't legislate this into being because any legislation enabling an income tax would theoretically be struck down by the Supreme Court as violating specific provisions in the Constitution. And so if you want a national income tax in a Constitution that forbids one, the only remedy is to amend the Constitution to allow this to happen and this occurred. And so that would be one of those situations where clearly there was something like unanimity of national opinion. Well, the unanimity of national opinion was that the rich people were going to pay the pay the tax and the amendment was was ratified by the far more numerous people who assumed others would be taxed in that thing. Well, then the thing to do is to go in and have a clarifying amendment that says we really meant it when we design this as a progressive tax. And therefore, we will establish a floor under which there can be no income tax. And this would be certainly within the rights of the American

people. The problem is that it will be very difficult to gather enough national support for such an amendment. I think most people are absolutely shocked when they realize that the American people voted to tax themselves. And I think as they steady that whole proposition, they realize that there was a bit of hoodwinking going on. Well, perhaps perhaps not. I think you're perhaps being too cynical for anything to become an amendment to the Constitution requires so great a unanimity that it can't be there can be chicanery involved in the selling of it. But but it only occurred if three quarters of all of the legislatures of the United States voted for it. I mean, this is not something that can be called light and transient. Just think of what's going to happen now with this proposed amendment for the sanctity of marriage, the definition of marriages between an adult male and adult female. In the next three or four years, every state will have protracted legislative debates about this question. It will be tabled in some states and brought back. But at a time when there are x number of things for states

to consider a central discussion for the years coming will be about the marriage, the proposed marriage amendment. That's assuming that there is a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate. And I think that the opportunity of that occurring is probably probably not going to come about. Well, you know, the amendment process works both ways. The states can propose amendments that then the Congress has to take up. In other words, the three quarters of the states can generate an amendment themselves by way of proposing this to the Congress of the United States and the Congress can come in sort of it late in the game. But the point that I'm making is that if you asked seven months ago or two years ago, if you'd asked most of the American people, what are the fundamental issues of American life that have to get sorted out as we enter the 21st century? Almost nobody would have said the definition of marriage. They might have said terrorism. They might have said globalization. They might have said abortion. Who knows? But this would not even

have registered in the in the consciousness of the American people a couple of years ago or even a few months ago. But suddenly it's become the fat or the zeitgeist or the the the issue of the hour. And it's suddenly taking on this momentum. And it's going to then, in my opinion, trip up the legislative process for the entire country for a certain amount of time while this constitutional procedure plays itself out. Well, it's a good thing, Mr. Jefferson. We don't have the opportunity to delve into this particular issue any more deeply. We have devoted our time to substantive things, the process of amending the Constitution, how it should be undertaken. And for what reasons? And we thank you very much for all of your all of your insights, which as always are wonderful. We will be back in just a minute with new features of the Thomas Jefferson Hour. You are listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Please stay tuned. We will be

back in just a moment. Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Seated across from his clay, Jenkinson

Clay. This last segment of our program is a busy one now because of the introduction of several new elements, the first of which is a Thomas Jefferson letter. Every week we're going to have a letter that you read to us by Mr. Jefferson to someone about a topic relevant to our discussion. Tell us a little bit about today's letter to whom Mr. Jefferson wrote it in regarding what subject? Let me start by explaining why I want to do this new feature. We've all talked about this at some length. And it strikes me that Jefferson was a writer of letters. And most of us are not writers of letters anymore, although many of us are writers of email. But Jefferson's preferred way of seeing the world and communicating with it was the polite letter written to an individual not to the not to the public wasn't published in a newspaper. Sometimes leaked to a newspaper. But what we know about Thomas Jefferson comes from these private epistles and we have more than 22,000 of them. They've been published in our

time together by the University of Princeton and by the people of Monticello. And the letters are extremely rich. And I think sometimes even I who am Jefferson try to be Jefferson forget that we're seeing Jefferson's way of looking at the world through letters that he wrote on paper and sent through the males or through couriers to other people. And so we've in a sense out of Jefferson because much of what he wrote was private and was was not known to the public after Jefferson's death in 1826. His grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph put together a couple of volumes of Jefferson's letters. And when they were published I believe in 1831 they outraged John Quincy Adams who discovered a lot of things about Jefferson that he did not like. And those were only the things that Jefferson's grandson was willing for the world to see. If John Quincy Adams could have read all 22,000 letters of Jefferson he would have just popped. He would have just probably died right there because Jefferson was was a lot more candid in his private utterances than he ever was in

public which is one of the one of the criticisms leveled about him that he was a Machiavell that he would always say the thing that you wanted to hear in public but but he was working somehow behind the scenes. So the issue of Jefferson the letter writer and kind of recentering Jefferson in his life as a writer of letters is something that I'm wanting to do with this program. So here's with that long preface. Here's here's this letter. I'll only read a portion of it. It was to John Colvin. I don't know anything about him frankly. It was written on September 20th 1810 from Monticello and it's about constitutional interpretation and it really is a fabulous letter and it bears. It's one of Jefferson's key constitutional letters and it bears on the Patriot Act and the security regime that we're now in. He says the question you propose whether circumstances do not sometimes occur which make it a duty in officers of high trust to assume authorities beyond the law is easy of solution and principle but sometimes embarrassing in practice. So the question is when can the executive

act beyond the rule of law or the social compact says Jefferson a strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the highest duties of a good citizen but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity of self-preservation of saving our country when in danger are of higher obligation to lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means. Now that is if I were John Ashcroft I would quote this letter because it says the times sometimes require activities that would appear to violate the social compact but they may be necessity because says Jefferson if you if you're over scrupulous in adhering to the system the the legal restraints and that loses you your very country then that's an absurdity that you have to do the thing of self-preservation first.

Doesn't sound like much of a libertarian at that point though does he? No it's very it's very interesting it's I think it's basically about the Louisiana purchase in Jefferson you know behaved in a slightly extra constitutional way because he was convinced that the Constitution did not authorize the acquisition of this empire and he's he's saying you know sometimes a leader has to take risks and do things that he knows are not within his own set of ideals or principles or that even violate the rule of law but if he does them he may have to pay a price for it but it's a price that's worth paying if it's in the national interest in some deep sense so you see the problem that gives you know that gives Richard Nixon latitude and it gives Thomas Jefferson latitude but that that's I think that's one of the key issues is how do we play by the rules of the game but we also know that there are times when those rules will have to be stretched in order for us to stay in the game I think it all

comes back to the prayer that John Adams uttered when he first moved into the White House may may only wise and honest men rule in this house I think it comes down to the system works just as well as the people we have in it they will use that latitude for good or ill virtue in the man or the leader is more important in some sense than the the rules of the game once more a strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen but is not the highest the laws of necessity of self preservation of saving our country when in danger are of a higher obligation so we're going to post that passage the whole letter in fact on our website www.th hyphenjefferson.org and we'll have an accumulation of letters that we read one a week out of character and comment on and we'll ask listeners sometimes to comment on to give us a sense of Jefferson as a text writer not just as a person with a point of view well speaking of text writing you also plan to

read a passage from your own book Thomas Jefferson Man of Light I thought I would I this is a book that's been out now for a short amount of time and it's about to go to an entirely new edition this is the we have a second printing first edition we're about to go to the second edition which will be greatly expanded but I I thought I would just read a few paragraphs from time to time to give people a sense that we're scholars at work here and I know in your own work on John Adams we want to read from biographies of Adams from your own thinking about Adams but we want to we want to deepen the out of character segment of this program and talk more contextually about the world of Jefferson but you are also Hamiltonian you'd like people to buy this book would you not that of course I would never you know of course not I wrote it for good of the people they can get the book if they are Hamiltonians by contacting our website www.th hyphenjefferson.org and there's a whole linkage to our catalog there but here's a here's a piece from this book on

constitutions Jefferson was in principle a strict constructionist he believed the constitution should be literally rather than broadly interpreted and that government projects however useful convening or attractive must not be undertaken unless they were directly authorized by the United States Constitution or enabling amendments Jefferson's narrow concept of enumerated powers meant that he chose not to pursue such quintessentially Jeffersonian projects while serving as president this is in an essay on his presidency such quintessentially Jeffersonian projects as a national university a national museum and such internal improvements as canals coastal waterways and a network of roads into the interior so that was Jefferson's philosophy that really convenient and wonderful national activities like a national museum or national university however desirable they were couldn't be authorized without amendments to the constitution so he probably wouldn't be in favor of the great dig in Boston being financed by all of us citizens of the United States not without amendments saying

that the government of the United States has the the authority to fund public works projects within individual states but then they probably wouldn't be in favor of improving swimming pools in sparks Nevada either which ever said was a believer that the constitution was the set of power codes of our culture and that if it weren't in it you're probably going to have to seek further authority if you want to expand the powers of government and if he could just be airlifted into our world and see the number of things that are funded by the national government of the United States without any enumerating powers whatsoever in the constitution i think he would be flabbergasted impressed appalled i don't know which which one exactly upset and amazed that these things happen with so little debate that now we we basically shrugged our shoulders as a people instead of course the national government is going to do a very large number of very different things and that some of these are going to be based in the constitution and some of them are really not or if they're based in it they're very vaguely

based in it and that this is just the way we are and there's no point in in ringing our hands too much over this and you know once in a while build the libertarians cry foul and say these things are all technically illegal but no one takes that very seriously but yeah jefferson understood quid pro quo which is really the philosophy i think that underlies a lot of these omnibus spending bills you do something for me i'll do something for you you benefit my district in some form refashion and i will vote for something that benefits yours he understood that because that kind of horse trading has existed through all time you know in every constitutional culture and those that are not even constitutionally based but what he thought would happen is that the states would be sovereign nations so that we would be at least canada and maybe the european union in other words the virginia would have its own public works projects and virginia would have roads and bridges and schools and would maybe undertake old age pensions or coordinate agriculture within its state

you know that the state would take on more responsibilities as the nation unfolded but he didn't think that the nation would the big surprise for jefferson would be how little the states actually do and how much the nation super intends i think that's the where he got it wrong and would be upset and indeed that shift i mean i think we've seen it dramatically in our own lifetimes i mean it seems to me the shift toward the federal government is the font of all of all funding i think is is is a feature that has come come home to us in the last thirty forty years and it's certainly i mean you could look historically that the the government of the united states was a relatively minor in hands-off entity until sometime between world war one and world war two and the with the with the coming of the two world wars of the 20th century and the rise of the welfare state in response to the crisis of the new deal gigantism and government came and is probably here to stay and

listeners will remember that moment when president clinton at his lowest ab not about monica loinski but when the gingrich revolution occurred clinton actually said the age of big government is over but of course he was wrong um the age of big government is not nearly over and we are going to have a much bigger government than we have today and not just on the security issues but on every other issue because the world is getting so complex and the globalization is so profound that the national government becomes in a sense the only entity large enough to sort out some of these issues well and i think we've seen in the last several years ourselves that what happens when the federal government has less money they don't give money to the states and the states are suddenly in crisis so not just over major projects but over every day every day things like fire and police and and and all of the the activities of every day human life well that i mean there are several issues there one is how do you fund all the things you want to do in an advanced industrial society and if we taxed ourselves enough to do all the things that we think are desirable we none of us could

could ever do anything because we'd be taxed at 90% of our income and so government is always starved because we want more things from government and government can realistically do and so there is there's an automatic starvation point in in modern governments because they simply can't generate the revenues to do all of this if you just just the welfare state alone of pensions and unemployment and and basic health care and so on those things are ruinously expensive even if you didn't have things like roads and bridges and you know regulation of the meat packing industry and so on so that's one issue is that is that our desires greatly exceed our ability or willingness to pay the second issue is how do you how do you do this where do you funnel the money Jefferson's view is you keep it local our view is you run it through the national government and the national government redistributes it around the country but that has its own set of issues one of them is that of course the and I don't mean this in a cynical way but the national government will skim

some off the top obviously and and Nevada may pay in more than it gets back North Dakota may get back more than it pays in each state's going to have a different differential on how much it pays in and how much it gets back and how that comes but it's also the case that when monies are sent from Dayton, Ohio to the national government when they come back by the way of road projects or school projects they often come back with conditions that the national government has set upon the use of those money so from a Jeffersonian point of view that's a profound outrage you tax the people of Dayton, Ohio for roads in their community the money goes to Washington some of it comes back and when it comes back it comes back with conditions about how the people of Ohio shall spend money that began in their own pockets I think Jefferson would regard that as actual tyranny but it is routine business in the United States in our time so we are not we are not a republic that Thomas Jefferson would recognize we are not a republican that we don't have a limited government we are not a republican that we don't really control how our money is spent we're not a republican that the national government has swallowed up state and

local governments and we're not a republican that we don't pretend in any sense that individuals should handle their own lives Bill I just want to move to the last segment of this program and you'll hear the voice of our wonderful producer Janie Guil who sometimes is the host of this program she is going to give us each week another voice on Jefferson I've collected about 200 comments on Jefferson by others of his time each week we're going to feature one it'll be in the voice of our own Janie Guil Janie what do you have for us today? Today's contemporary quote is by Edmund Randolph Jefferson's cousin and the Attorney General of the United States Edmund Randolph had to say about Thomas Jefferson he panted after the fine arts and he discovered a taste in them not easily satisfied with such scanty means as existed in a colony what was part of Mr. Jefferson's pride to run before the times in which he lived Bill let me ask you a question you heard Jefferson panted after the fine art I was thinking he panted after other things but that that would not be a problem here's my question and I think it's the question in the minds of all of our listeners what do you and I pant after?

I am a struck speechless at last at last in honor of the Jeffersonian leadership series that we will begin within the next month Clay Jenkins and his producer Janie Guil have been selecting leadership tools from today's marketplace for a $40 donation you will receive the first of the modern day Jeffersonian leadership tools a single CD entitled little voice management systems please call 1-888-458-1803-1888-458-1803 to order your copy today music for the Thomas Jefferson hour was provided by Steven's friend her to Reno Nevada you can visit Mr. Jefferson's home page on the worldwide web at www.thifantjefferson.org again our website is www.thifantjefferson.org to ask Mr. Jefferson a question or to donate $9 and receive a copy of today's program on CD

please call 1-888-458-1803 again the number is 1-888-458-1803 thank you for listening and we hope you join us again next week for another entertaining historically accurate and thought-provoking commentary through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson