Opinion: This Is No Way to Keep a Republic – Inside Sources

Most of us are acquainted with Benjamin Franklin’s famous reply to the Philadelphia lady asking if the Constitutional Convention gave us a republic or a monarchy.  “A republic,” he said, “if you can keep it.”  

Alexander Hamilton explained in “The Federalist 1” that the new Constitution would be a historical test “to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

In his answer to the Philadelphia lady, it doesn’t sound as if Franklin had doubts the Framers’ innovative republic would actually work. The open question for Franklin was whether “We the people” would be able to keep it.

The American people did keep it, it turned out, or at least they did for more than two-and-a-quarter centuries. But right now, in 2022, the question isn’t if we can keep it but if there’s even enough of the republic the Framers Republic gave us for us to keep?

At the conservative website American Greatness, Claremont Institute fellow Glenn Ellmers grimly points out that, at this point, “We are in a post-constitutional, even a post-political, environment.”

“The constitutional republic created by our founders no longer exists. … Congress doesn’t write, the executive does not enforce, and the judiciary does not interpret the laws. … Federalism, judicial review, executive authority, the legislative process, appropriations — none of this remains operational in a way James Madison would recognize. And now, the country’s most powerful corporations are in active collusion with the federal security apparatus to enforce the regime’s authority. That’s practically the definition of fascism.”

Indeed, at least half of “we the people” either don’t care if we keep our republic (or even know we have one) or are actively trying to destroy it as irredeemably evil. One of our major parties openly yearns to abolish constitutional pillars like the Electoral College, an independent, non-political Supreme Court, and the expressly enumerated right of the states to conduct their own elections.

Showing his contempt for the First Amendment, President Biden created a “Disinformation Governance Board” to censor his critics and thwart “free speech absolutists,” and on numerous occasions, his administration has been exposed colluding, illegally, with big-tech social media outlets to censor and control “disinformation,” i.e., truths the administration doesn’t want Americans to hear.

The Democratic Party’s current line is that they’re fighting to save “democracy” — a term they mention incessantly but flatly refuse to define. That way, they can stretch the term to include whichever tactic circumstances require for protecting their power. Biden said the word “democracy” 31 times in his hateful, militaristic speech in Philadelphia in September, the pretext for which was that “the threat to American democracy is real.” The closest his speech comes to giving any meaning to the word is his wild falsehood that democracy means never, ever questioning an election. Especially his election.

To illustrate Ellmer’s point that we’re in a “post-constitutional … environment,” there’s the overheated Democratic rhetoric, such as Biden’s bombastic, “I will defend our democracy with every fiber of my being.” As often as they claim to champion “democracy,” they infrequently mention the Constitution. Not only will they rarely engage it in any substantive way, but on the rare occasions a Democrat does acknowledge any fundamental liberty guaranteed in the Bill of Rights (the freedom of speech or the right to bear arms), it’s invariably to diminish it as “not absolute,” and needing limits only a wise government can provide.

The embarrassing (and dangerous) reality is that such governance is the opposite of what the Framers gave us. The fact that what they gave us is a government of strictly limited powers, whose object is to guarantee our rights and liberties — not to endlessly concoct schemes to limit them — is why Democrats don’t want to talk about the Constitution. Or govern by it.

If the Constitution mattered in Washington, Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice wouldn’t be unleashing federal law enforcement to target Americans for their political views; it would be unimaginable that the chief executive would, as a matter of policy, refuse to enforce federal immigration laws, or hamstring America’s energy sector; and no speaker of the House would ever dream of wiping her shoes on the Constitution with a bill to eliminate the enumerated right of the states to legislate their own manner of elections.

If we had kept the republic created by the Framers, could the Biden administration have spent months defaming the Supreme Court for doing its duty while tacitly approving the waves of terrorist violence by abortion extremists driven mad that their “autonomous” right to commit arbitrary murder should now be dependent on the consent of the people?

We’re seeing now a regime of reactive opportunism — accident and force — rather than the “reflection and choice” previous generations proved they were capable of.

Unfortunately, Ben Franklin isn’t around to predict for us what’s next if we reach a stage when we can’t keep our republic. That one we’ll have to answer for ourselves.

But judging by the outcome of the recent elections, the answer won’t be a long time coming.