What US Government Rules?

Who has the power to govern in the United States? It is an historical fact that the Federal Government has been weakening the sovereignty of the states since the Civil War. Practically, this has meant that the state governments who do 80% of the work governing have been given less and less support by Washington which has never seen any problem with weakening their power. As long as Washington by its governmental actions took up the slack, there was no problem. Or better it seemed there was no problem until now. The coronavirus epidemic means that the states must now govern as the Constitution originally intended. They must act as though their sovereignty was very nearly as strong as in nation states. Governor Cuomo is governing New York state just as the Constitution originally intended. He looks to Washington for support just as the Constitution intended that he do, that is, it was intended that there be a central government with limited powers because states need a central government to do certain things they can not do or that Washington can do better. But there is a more important question to ask now about the historical fact that Washington for generation after generation has been weakening state power. The question is: what government do the American people accept as having the right to govern them? The truth is that the people have never accepted that Washington alone had the power because they could never escape the reality that they were governed for the most part by one of the states. But they accepted passively state authority and accepted Washinton as the government. Now with the coronavirus they are being governed actively and vitally by a state. There are many signs that they don’t like it. Men have invaded state capitol buildings armed with rifles to prottest state rule. The American political system has always been a kissing cousin with anarchy because no one of our 51 governments, state and federal, are fully sovereign. Once the people decide they can do whatever they want because there is no government strong enough to stop them thay may in fact be able to do what they want. Remember what Henry Thoreau wrote in his article Civil Disobedience: “That Government Is best which governs not at all.” Washington may yet regret the drastic way it has been weakening over the years state sovereignty. It may have been teaching the American people to be indifferent to all governments and to rule themselves. A dangerous state of things. Now Washington needs the states to act as sovereign states and they may not have enough power to prevent anarchy.

Daniel McNeill

www.amazon.com/author/graceisall

The Silent Generation Is Dying Silently

They are in their eighties now. They were young in the 1950s. They were silent then because they were too young to fight in the war and as a result they missed out on the creative bustle of the 1940s.They were young in the 1950s but nothing happened then worth getting excited about. They enjoyed being young silently. Those who survived until now are either quarantining silently  or in hospitals dying silently. The big difference  is that now everyone else of all ages everywhere in the world is also silent. Nothing is happening because nothing can happen. The coronavirus won’t allow it to happen. It is shutting us all up.  We have all become suddenly silent like the silent generation which is still silent waiting for the death that is hitting it harder than other people of other generations because its survivors are in their eighties.Silence is not golden. Silence is the first cousin of loneliness which is silence with an ache added. Dark bitter aching loneliness, as Thomas Wolfe wrote, that knows “the roots of silence in the night”.

Daniel McNeill

www.amazon.com/author/graceisall

The New Humpty Dumpty In Washington

What will the replacement for Humpty Dumpty be like? Joe Biden is waiting quietly on the sidelines ready to put back up on the wall the old Humpty Dumpty. It won’t work. His pieces can be fastened back together but the old power he had before Trump and the coronavirus is gone. He was whole and solid when he used his power to unify with his financial and military power the global economy. The coronavirus has ended the world’s need for the US government to be a champion of globalism. The old nationalistic economies are already back. Exports and imports will never come back in the volume they had before. States have closed their borders. They will make due with what they have and import and export only bare necessities. What if the new Humpty Dumpty decided he should be a global champion of political freedom? What if Washington decided to admit any new state to its union of states who wanted to join? What if poor states all over the world decided that the best thing they could have was democratic freedom? If they can’t be rich why would they not vote to be free by becoming a new American state? The new Humpty Dumpty in Washington is ready to receive new states. He will fall off his wall again unless he gains for himself some new bold role. He can still keep dollars and other currencies roaming the world looking for limited possibilities. But fighting for a new form of political freedom for the globe will keep the new Humpty Dumpty sitting solidly on his wall. Daniel McNeill
www.amazon.com/author/graceisall

Chatting About A Constitutional Power

Article IV Section 3. of the American Constitution reads, “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union…” This means that Pelosi, the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, and McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate have the power to admit any state in the world as the 51st state of the United States. They could perhaps meet for lunch and chat about what states to admit. It might overwhelm their merely human minds with august excitement if their chat led to talk of admitting Germany and France. Both admitted would add at least 150 million new Americans to America. A truly august yet improbable proposition. But what about Guatemala? Yesterday I heard of a man from Guatemala working in the US who lost his job because of the coronavirus. He was sending $300 a month to his family in Guatemala. If Pelosi and McConnell admitted Guatemala, that man would not complain. He and his family could move to any one of 51 states and earn up to $15 an hour. Many unemployed Americans speak Spanish and might move to Guatemala and take one of the thousands of new jobs that would open up in Guatemala as American government units and private businesses develop in the new state. It’s worth chatting about over lunch. The Constitution doesn’t mince its words. It gets right to the point. It dropped a power on the head of Congress that makes possible right now a radical transformation of the whole world. For good. All the past efforts to transform the world were bad. Very bad. This one is good. It would definitely be good for Guatemala. And even for Germany and France. It’s worth at least chatting over.

Daniel McNeill

www.amazon.com/author/graceisall 

A Worldwide Union of States

Anyone anywhere in the world should have the unalienable right to live and to work and to have full rights as a citizen in any state in a great union of states worldwide. How can any American disagree? Why should we not believe that millions of people will be able to move freely some day from state to state worldwide? We can do this now now in our union of 50 states and we should try to add new states. The men who wrote the Constitution did not mean that the right to universal citizenship should be restricted to our original 13 states. In Article IV, Section 3, of the Constitution, they wrote, “New states may be admitted by the Congress into this Union.” And that is what the Congress did. Over a period of 200 years it admitted 37 new states. Was any American belittled when Hawaii was admitted in 1959? How can it not be of momentous importance to us and our descendants if another 25 or another 50 states are admitted to our union? People from every race on the planet are already living among us in our states with the right to full citizenship in any state they choose. They come to the US to develop themselves in a political environment that guarantees them universal rights that are denied  them in their native states. Their states should also become parts of our union. Nothing will develop any state anywhere as well as union with states whose central government forces states to govern their people democratically and to allow them universal freedoms.
Daniel McNeill
www.amazon.com/author/graceisall

World Unity 52

The union of the thirteen original sovereign American states was a unique construction. The American Constitution is generally understood to have been a masterful creation using doctrines of revolutionary European political theorists of the age of enlightenment. This is not true. Rationalist philosophers in Europe railed against the endless wars among their European nation-states but none of them theorized about setting up some kind of new supranational government whose purpose and being was designed to unite states rather than to be only just another national state among national states. The government of the United States of America was just such a supranational creation. The government in Washington set up by the Constitution was “The Government of the United States”. It had a purpose and a being for the united states not over the united states. Washington D.C., a non-state located in no state, was the seat of a government of a union of 13 sovereign states who had each dared to legally limit their sovereignty to receive the benefits of free interstate commerce and citizenship. The government of a nation-state restricts the freedom of its citizens by imprisoning them within borders. A union of states continually opens up for its citizens grand possibilities beyond all borders. European nation-states limit for their citizens what is possible. The 50 American states teach their citizens that there are no limits and that everything is possible.

Daniel McNeill

Read: The United States of the World by Daniel McNeill at: amazon.com/author/graceisall

 

World Unity 51

Our government in Washington recognizes no national frontiers of foreign states as beyond its reach. Since it does not act only as a nation, we should base our patriotism on our total and absolute loyalty to the federal government. That is enough. Since we recognize Washington’s laws as superior in their proper place to state laws, we should regard it as the leader of a nation only in a very limited sense. Since Washington is already a de facto world government, we should think of our loyalty to Washington also as loyalty to its worldwide goals.  It is part of the fundamental character of our political identity as Americans that we have been continually admitting new states to our union since the union's beginning in 1790, in all 37. The Constitution that rules state and federal actions asserts in article IV section 3 that Congress has the power, an unlimited power, to admit new states. Our political identity must be triple to be true. The United States with characteristics of both a union of states and a nation and with a dominant role in the world can never fulfill itself except by admitting new states from all over the world and by transforming its federal government in Washington DC to the central government of a united states of the world. Only if we Americans act in harmony at the same time with the three elements of our political identity - state,national and international - can we create our true good and the world’s true good.

Daniel McNeill

Read: The United States of the World by Daniel McNeill at: amazon.com/author/graceisall