Humanitarian Crises, Civil Rights, and Strict Constitutionalism: How to reconcile

This is an entry I wrote in response to a smear article, so I'm sorry it starts off in the second person. They said Ron Paul opposes international intervention in humanitarian crises and they said he would probably would have voted against the Civil Rights Act. I think he *did* vote to abolish the civil rights act. But only because he's smarter than the rest of the legislature. Here's why:


Humanitarian Crises

Dr. Paul does not oppose international intervention in humanitarian crises. He opposes unilateral, state-sponsored, hostile interventions by the federal government without formal declarations of war. I think Dr. Paul would point to the fact that Amnesty International, as a private entity, does more for the world than America does when it steps into world affairs with combative measures. For all the orphans of these crises, there are also orphans of service-members who died in Iraq, Viet Nam, and various other misadventures to liberate the world. Like Dr. Paul and me, you are a veteran, so you know that our blood is just as red as anyone else’s and you know the families of service members suffer as much pain from their loss as anyone else.

The real problem with sending troops to aid foreign countries is not that it is morally wrong. The problem is that it is so difficult to draw a clear line between when it is right and when it is wrong. When in doubt, we should prefer to err on the side of troops staying home to watch their children grow and we should set a high standard for when it’s acceptable to intervene. Fortunately, the Constitution already sets that standard pretty high. It requires that Congress declare war before we commit the brave men and women of the Armed Forces into combat. This has the effect of forcing the Congress to bear the responsibility of its actions and deliberate over the consequences instead of deferring those responsibilities to the executive. It is not a perfect method and it will not always yield the right results, but it is much better than allowing the legislature to altogether abrogate its Constitutionally-mandated responsibility. Any true conservative will recognize that.

For these reasons, Dr. Paul would have Congress take a hard look at the crises in places like Darfur. He would have them first determine whether there are diplomatic methods by which the Congress can achieve similar change. Perhaps Congress can put the offending governments into default on loans. Perhaps it can contract with other nations to cease trade into the region. War should always be a last recourse. And when it comes time to commit our troops into battle, it should be done with a formal declaration, a plan to win, and an exit strategy. These aren’t the policies of an isolationist. These are the policies of a reasonable person.

It is folly to think that Dr. Paul would altogether ignore the plight of suffering people. When that last resort becomes necessary, he would be prepared to take up the challenge. But forcing troops into conflict on whims and half-baked theories of preemptive necessity is as old as Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul. As a civilization, we should have grown since then. Something tells me that he would be more likely to intervene into genocides that prove to disrupt the order of world peace and trade as a last resort, than un-provable theoretical harms in weak and debilitated countries as a first resort. Yet, we have the done the exact reverse, haven’t we? We’re fighting a five-year-and-growing undeclared war in Iraq while we ignore the more immediate threats to humanity. That is the true folly.

Civil Rights

He would probably have opposed the Civil rights Act in practice because it is an example of the Federal Government going beyond the prescriptions of the Constitution, but he would not be opposed to the principles behind it. I suspect that he would point to the facts that Dr. Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott brought Montgomery, Alabama to its knees before the federal government lifted a finger. He would laud King’s civil rights movement as parcel to a greater non-violent, civil-disobedience tradition that includes the movements of Mahatmu Gandhi and Jesus Christ.

When the federal government gets involved, it makes promises it simply cannot keep. There is no doubt that it has good intentions, but it necessarily stymies these movements when it promises to advance their cause by subjecting it to the gridlock of the federal legislature. It claims that if we only write our legislators and use the electoral process we can fix social ills on the senate floor. This is dishonest. We know that adverse political interests and special interests pollute the process at the federal level. Worse yet, when you consider that the battles on the Senate floor fill their coffers more than the victories themselves, we can see that our advocates in the federal government have no real incentive to win: but rather to prolong the battle indefinitely and blame defeat on the opposing party. As an economic matter, this method should produce marginal results: only succeeding when it's absolutely necessary to maintain credibility. As an empirical matter, that's exactly what it does. If legislators truly fought for the causes that they pay lip-service to, we would see more filibustering, more bipartisan appeals, and less vacations. This is what Dr. Paul means when he says liberty, not the government, cures ills. Liberty creates non-violent, civil-disobedient movements. The federal government simply gets in their way.

The Civil Rights Act was therefore a Band-Aid on an egregious wound. It gave the false assurance that the federal government will help to solve our woes, but we’re suffering from that assurance today. We do not take to civil disobedience anymore regardless of the fact that the Patriot Act infringes on our privacy and there are a mounting number of police using semi-deadly weapons on unarmed, non-threatening citizens. Our founders would be horrified to see police using tasers when people don’t supply a driver’s license quickly enough. Yet we offer little resistance because we have been deluded into thinking that our only solution is to change federal legislation. In short, we have forgotten how to get anything done. So how do we achieve the same goals as the Civil Rights Act without using the federal legislature? That leads into the next point: Strict Constitutionalism and Devolved Federalism.

Strict Constitutionalism and Devolved Federalism

One of the principles that justify the ideology of Strict Constitutionalism is that the Constitution can, and should be, amended when the citizens demand it. Without adherence to Strict Constitutionalism activists tend to focus their efforts to achieve things like racial and social equality through the divided federal legislature. This is the wrong method because it results in gridlock and a waxing and a waning of the efficacy of those policies. By contrast, when the people focus their efforts on constitutional amendments, it gives the Congress an unequivocal mandate which they cannot snub. It gives them their marching orders.

In our democracy, the Constitution is only the “law of the land” in name. The true law of the land is the Will of the People as evidenced in the first three words of the Constitution. The People’s Will ratified the Constitution to create and enumerate the powers of the federal government and the People’s Will can amend it. Yet if we allow that government to interpret liberally the very charter that brings it into existence, we suffer from an abrogation of our own power and a necessary disconnect from our control over the government. This is a very dangerous proposition. Nowhere else in the law are contracts so liberally construed. We do not allow corporations to broadly interpret their articles of incorporation because it would be detrimental to shareholders. You can look at the scandals of the Enron Corporation to understand that. Yet we, as the shareholders of this country, are allowing the federal government to create an Enron-like structure out of our Social Security Trust, infringe on our rights, commit us to needless wars, undermine our monetary system, and compromise our national security.

In contrast, when the federal legislature is restrained by a strict-constitutional philosophy, people focus their efforts on creating permanent reform by constitutional amendment rather than subject their Will to the temporary whims of pseudo-representatives in Washington and the special interests that fund their campaigns. This results in more productivity and less political wrangling. It may also result in less political division and more political parties. But as it stands now, we achieve no productivity because politicians fail to appropriately direct us through the proper channels. I have no doubt that major issues like global warming could be addressed more quickly and efficiently if they didn't have to vie against special interests at the federal level.

In contrast, when the efforts are directed toward the local level, they get more purchase. When a group of people trade ideas in a coffee shop, they influence their local governments much more than they influence their federal government. Part of this is because of the aforementioned problems with the federal government, but part of it is because of the unique structure of local governments. Local legislators tend to have term limits and tend to live in close proximity to their electorate. More importantly, the ratio of local citizens to local legislators is much more conducive to change and much more subject to the public will. This makes it harder for special interests to get a foothold.

Fortunately, the framers anticipated the disparity of interests between the people and the federal government and structured the Constitution so that it could be amended by the same method that it was ratified: through the states. Dr. Ron Paul appropriately sees this as our only solution, as did the long line of Republicans before him. He follows in the traditions of the founders and adheres to the Constitution as strictly as we could hope any federal legislator would. His solution provides a paradigm-shift where the people reclaim their power in the way the framers of Constitution and the old Republicans intended. His unwavering dedication to that document in spite of the political shifts in Washington D.C. is all the more reason to believe that he will fight against a bloated and corrupt federal government in the manner that “We the People” already prescribed. In this sense, he is the one true populist candidate because he refuses to deviate from the script that the population gave him.

Senator McCain recently said that the Republicans went to Washington to change Washington, but Washington changed the Republicans. But Paul’s adherence to the Constitution lends itself to certain imperviousness to groupthink as evidenced by his consistency over thirty years. If only every Republican was as Republican as Dr. Ronald Paul.