Harry V. Jaffa - Government Quotes

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But the South became a closed society on the eve of the Civil War, and it became a closed society after the end of Reconstruction. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute for some time circulated a book edited by my late friend Mel Bradford, The Essays of Andrew Litell; was one of the Southerners who took their stand in 1931, I think it was. And one of those essays, written in 1934, praised lynching as a legitimate exercise of the reserve powers of the states when the government didn't fulfill its duty to take care of racist agitators. So the South was a closed society on the subject of race right up until World War II.

Harry V. Jaffa
Now, the truth of the matter is that the idea of the meaning of the word 'federal' underwent a change from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. Under the Constitution, the states gave up their sovereignty in the Calhounian sense. And if you have any doubt about that, let me just read a sentence from George Washington. 'It is obviously impracticable in the federal government of these states to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and yet provide for the interest and safety of all'. So all the rights of independent sovereignty, or some of those rights, have been surrendered.

Harry V. Jaffa
And so, the idea of slave property contradicts the idea of private property, and the Southerners taking their stand on their property rights and their slaves were, in fact, taking their stand on a principle which was incompatible with the idea of constitutional government.

Harry V. Jaffa
The 43rd Federalist deals definitively with this question. There was no question but that the Constitutional Convention, simply as a convention, had no authority of any kind. It did not form a government. But it said that the ratification of nine states shall then bring this new government into existence. The Congress of the Confederation transmitted the results to the country, the ratifications took place, and the government came into existence.

Harry V. Jaffa
It was recognized as a necessary evil at the time, and the justification for the ratification of the Constitution with slavery is that any alternative arrangement would have been more favorable to slavery than the Constitution itself. The Constitution created a government strong enough to deal with the question of slavery when it became what it did become in 1860.

Harry V. Jaffa
I think if Obama is reelected, then that'll be a disaster of immeasurable proportions. If the government takes over large segments of the economy, we will become a socialist state. The salvation of the Republican Party, and of the country and of the world, will be changing the conservative moment to reflect the principles of Abraham Lincoln. The platform on which Lincoln was elected in 1860 quoted part of the Declaration of Independence. Government is based on the consent of the governed.

Harry V. Jaffa
Now there's a little story to that. Chief Justice Taney, in the Dred Scott decision—which said that the Missouri Compromise restriction of slavery in 1820 and any other one, was unconstitutional—said that there was no power in the Congress to forbid slavery in the territories. And he added as a kind of obiter dictum that the only power of Congress over slavery in the territories was the power coupled with the duty of protecting the owner and his rights. Now the seven states of the Deep South interpreted that to mean that the police power of the federal government had to guarantee the integrity of the property of any slave owner going into any United States territory.

Harry V. Jaffa
South Carolina cites, loosely, but with substantial accuracy, some of the language of the original Declaration. That Declaration does say that it is the right of the people to abolish any form of government that becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established. But South Carolina does not repeat the preceding language in the earlier document: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal'.

Harry V. Jaffa
George W. Bush has said he wants to change things in Washington. On this President's Day, we find him attempting this change in a most profound way. President Bush is to be commended for his recent Proclamation of National Sanctity of Human Life Day, in which he reminds his fellow citizens of the true principles of free government. But those principles today are usually ignored, or scorned. By taking up the challenge of defending these principles, President Bush aligns himself with the greatest President of our nation's history.

Harry V. Jaffa
We have these inalienable rights, and in the exercise of these same inalienable rights, we agree with each other to form civil governments. And Madison has an essay on sovereignty, which is a sort of simplified repetition of John Locke's argument in the second chapter of the Second Treatise.

Harry V. Jaffa
In the tradition of American constitutionalism, all men are equally endowed by their Creator with certain rights. The equality of man is understood in the light of man's inequality with God: because men are not and never can become God or gods — because unqualified wisdom is never available to human beings — only government by the consent of the governed, and under the rule of law, is intrinsically in accordance with the eternal order.

Harry V. Jaffa
Yeah, I'd like to comment. In the first place, the idea that the Federal government in 1860 should have offered to buy the slaves is a political absurdity. Any claim by Lincoln or his party of any jurisdiction over slavery in the states would have been regarded, and justly regarded, as completely unconstitutional, and advocating the overthrow of the Constitution.

Harry V. Jaffa
Unless we as a political community can by reasoned discourse re-establish in our own minds the authority of the constitutionalism of the Founding Fathers and of Lincoln, of government devoted to securing the God-given equal rights of every individual human being, we will remain ill equipped to bring the fruits of freedom to others.

Harry V. Jaffa
You can not have free government if you can not bind the people who participate in the government to accept the results of the election. It is the exercise of our inalienable right to life that enables us, and justifies us, in forming legitimate governments. When those governments are formed, we cannot reject them because we don't like the results.

Harry V. Jaffa
If the people in this room were not citizens of the United States, if they were not citizens of any state, or of any sovereign government, and if we decided that we needed to, for our own protection, first beginning with safety—September 11th told us why we need each other for the sake of safety—form a government, we have to recognize, each one of us, that this government shall protect the right to life, and to liberty, and property of each one of us. No one of us can say that he deserves protection for the government to be formed, but not somebody else, or that somebody is entitled to more protection than anybody else. Anybody who demands more protection from the government than his fellow citizens won't be accepted as a fellow citizen.

Harry V. Jaffa
Now the Constitution doesn't say how this right is to be enforced, but it says it shall be done. And from 1793 to 1850 it depended upon the states honoring the Act. Well, that was not working, and so this federal law was substituted which provided enforcement procedures under the auspices of the federal government.

Harry V. Jaffa
Douglas's doctrine of 'popular sovereignty' meant no more than that: in a democracy justice is the interest of the majority, which is 'the stronger'. Lincoln, however, insisted that the case for popular government depended upon a standard of right and wrong independent of mere opinion and one which was not justified merely by the counting of heads.

Harry V. Jaffa
According to Abraham Lincoln, public opinion always has a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate. The central idea of the American Founding—and indeed of constitutional government and the rule of law—was the equality of mankind. This thought is central to all of Lincoln's speeches and writings, from 1854 until his election as president in 1860. It is immortalized in the Gettysburg Address.

Harry V. Jaffa
Now this was a demand for the indefinite extension of slavery, so the choice facing the country was whether slavery will be restricted or whether it will be extended indefinitely with the whole power of the federal government behind the extension of slavery.

Harry V. Jaffa
"This nation was founded," President Bush wrote, "upon the belief that every human being is endowed by our Creator with certain 'unalienable rights.'" The President, in using the exact language of the Declaration of Independence, including the archaic "unalienable," has expressed the conviction that "the laws of nature and of nature's God" furnish the moral foundation of constitutional government. "President Jefferson's timeless principle," he wrote, "obligates us to pursue a civil society that will democratically embrace its essential moral duties..."

Harry V. Jaffa
But once we have reached this agreement and we then elect a government and that government functions—and the election for that government is one in which there's freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, so that it is a legitimate government—then that government commands our obedience. We have no right to reject our duty to obey because we don't like the result of the election—provided the election is conducted fairly and Constitutional rights are observed.

Harry V. Jaffa
In other words, Lincoln's belief was that slavery could be ended peacefully through the action of the states themselves. It couldn't be done through direct intervention by the Federal government, but it could be done within the states themselves. And after all of the states north of the Mason-Dixon line had adopted plans for emancipation—slavery was lawful in every one of the 13 colonies, and the 13 states which declared their independence.

Harry V. Jaffa
By the principles of the Declaration of Independence, majority rule in a free society is not an end in itself, nor is it a source of the purposes served by free government. Majority rule exists to secure the rights with which all human persons are "endowed by their Creator." The recognition of the origin of these rights, in God and nature, comes before any action of any majority. Only as we all recognize that "the just powers of government" exist to secure the equal rights possessed by every human being, whether in the majority or minority, can tyranny be prevented.

Harry V. Jaffa
Now, during the Civil War, Lincoln did endorse a program of compensated emancipation. In his 1862 message to Congress, he proposed a series of Constitutional amendments that would have authorized the Federal government to reimburse states that adopted programs of compensated emancipation. He was very anxious. This was before the Emancipation Proclamation, the final one, was issued on January 1, 1863.

Harry V. Jaffa