Tuesday, September 20, 2011 5:01:37 AM
'Tea Party Patriots' Constitution Coloring & Activity Book, Just for Patriots (8.5"x11")
Cover
Page 7
Page 28
Page 31
Back
Designed by the Tea Party Patriots organization, this coloring activity book introduces children to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and to some of the brilliant, honorable men who participated in those debates in Philadelphia and will help children and adults gain a better understanding of the Constitution and the events that shaped our nation. The cover proudly displays the Tea Party Patriots shield logo.
http://www.coloringbookpublishers.com/teapartyconstitutionbook.aspx
*
Official Tea Party Patriots Coloring Book (8.5"x11")
This book is designed by the official Tea Party Patriots Organization. So children and parents may learn more about the fundamentals of freedom. This book is mixed with songs, puzzles and tons of coloring fun.
This 36 page coloring, activity and game book is the official fundraising coloring book of the Tea Party Patriots. Reviewed by teachers, educators and patriots, this book is designed, not only to educate, but to inform and raise money for Tea Party Patriots throughout the country.
http://www.coloringbookpublishers.com/teapartypatriotscoloringbook.aspx
===
Just for Patriots! Yet Another Tea Party Coloring Book
Chris Good
Sep 16 2011, 12:33 PM ET
Last fall, the group Tea Party Patriots caused a stir by releasing Leadership, Freedom and Jobs [just above], an "Official American Grassroots Activity and Coloring Book." "When taxes are too high, the high tax takes away jobs and freedom. In 1773 we had a Tea Party and this led to freedom from high taxes," the book warned children. St. Louis-based publisher Wayne Bell of Really Big Coloring Books, Inc. said he received death threats.
Today, the nation's largest tea-party membership group is at it again: Tea Party Patriots announced the release of a Constitution coloring book [first above], available by order online from the same publisher. The release was timed to tomorrow's anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia on Sept. 17, 1787.
From the group's press release:
"The Constitution Coloring Activity Book is an incredible tool for educating the next generation of Patriots." Said Mark Meckler, Co-Founder and National Coordinator of Tea Party Patriots.
The new book uses puzzles, games and songs to present fundamental and core American values and how children can become involved in "preserving the liberty our Founding Fathers enshrined for We the People."
The group made no mention of tea-party politics in its announcement, and the publisher Bell insisted last year that the group's first book was not intended as political. Still, the books conjure a familiar marketing motto: Get 'em while they're young.
Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/09/picture-of-the-day-just-for-patriots-yet-another-tea-party-coloring-book/245225/ [with comments]
===
On Day Devoted to Constitution, a Fight Over It
The Tea Party handed out coloring books that show the government as bigger than what the Constitution allows.
By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: September 16, 2011
In the 100 years since Constitution Day was first established, most Americans have lumped it with holidays like Grandparents’ Day and Administrative Assistants’ day — a noble cause, lightly observed.
But this year, with the Tea Party making the Constitution sexy again, the holiday (which, for those rusty on their civics, falls on Saturday) has become occasion for battle.
Tea Party groups, armed with lesson plans and coloring books, are pushing schools to use the day to teach a conservative interpretation of the Constitution, where the federal government is a creeping and unwelcome presence in the lives of freedom-loving Americans.
Progressive groups, accusing the Tea Party of selectively reading the founding document, have responded with a campaign to “take back the Constitution.” They are urging Americans and lawmakers to sign a pledge to honor the whole Constitution, even the parts many Tea Party supporters would prefer to ignore — say, the amendments allowing an income tax, and granting birthright citizenship. And they are trying to get people to see the Constitution not as a limit on federal power but as the spirit behind progressive laws.
The struggle over the holiday is yet another proxy in the fight over the proper role of government. On one side are those who embrace an “originalist” view of the Constitution, where New Deal judicial activism started the country down the path to ruin. On the other are those who say that its language — allowing Congress to levy taxes to provide “for the general welfare,” to regulate commerce, and to do what is “necessary and proper” to carry out its role — affirms the broad role of the federal government that has developed over the last 100 years.
“It has evolved to the point where it seems many in the Tea Party believe the entire 20th century is unconstitutional,” said Doug Kendall, the president of the Constitutional Accountability Center and a leader of the progressive coalition behind the effort to, in his words, “rebut the fairy tales being peddled by the Tea Party.”
This may seem like a fight reserved to costumed Revolutionary War re-enactors — or Ron Paul supporters, who will commemorate the holiday, as they have the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, with a fund-raising event. But the question of who owns the Constitution has very current implications in the fights over Social Security and Medicare, and most immediately, in the court challenges to the health care overhaul that Democrats passed and Tea Party supporters loathe.
In one respect, the Tea Party has already won. When groups on the left talk about the Constitution, they are increasingly emphasizing the original text — as the originalists do — rather than the Supreme Court decisions that have upheld programs like Social Security.
Tea Party Patriots, a large umbrella for groups across the country, began encouraging its members this year to “adopt a school” for the Constitution Week, next week. It provided local groups with templates for a series of letters to school superintendents, to inform them about a law passed in 2004 that requires schools that receive federal money to teach about the Constitution on Sept. 17, or the adjacent days.
(The letters did not mention that the law was the work of Senator Robert C. Byrd, who was famous as a champion of the Constitution, but also of the kind of big government liberalism that the Tea Party believes the Constitution is intended to constrain.)
Tea Party groups were instructed to ask schools how they planned to observe the law, and to suggest that they use a curriculum provided by the National Center for Constitutional Studies [ http://nccs.net/ ].
The center, based in Arizona, offers books and courses now popular among Tea Party groups — including “The 5000 Year Leap,” made a bestseller by Glenn Beck’s recommendation. They emphasize the 10th Amendment in arguing for states’ rights, and argue that the income tax was a progressive perversion of the Constitution and that the founding fathers did not intend the separation of church and state. (The course materials also show how to memorize the preamble to the Constitution using sign language.)
Tea Party Patriots also distributed a new coloring book that argues that the government has “grown far beyond what the Constitution allows,” and casts modern-day Tea Party groups in the role of the original colonists, fighting for freedom against an overbearing government.
“A lot of what happens in Washington is not the process we agreed to in that Constitution,” said Bill Norton, who coordinated the adopt-a-school program for Tea Party Patriots.
But he said the program was not political. “We go right back to the founders when it comes to the Constitution,” he said. “The material we’re bringing in is very historical, there’s no agenda in either direction.”
Mr. Kendall’s group marked the holiday with a new Web site, constitutionalprogressives.org [ http://constitutionalprogressives.org/ ], which attempts to rebut Tea Party arguments about the Constitution.
While the Tea Party talks about the 10th Amendment and states’ rights, and argues against the role of the Federal Reserve, the Web site argues the ways in which the Constitution gives the federal government the authority to do things like set up a central bank, and to regulate health care.
The Web site also tries to get progressives as excited about the Constitution as conservatives are — arguing it as the basis for progressive goals, including the right to same-sex marriage.
Constitution Day is hardly sweeping the nation — Tea Party Patriots could not quantify how many schools it had persuaded to participate. Still, if both sides want Americans to be talking more about the Constitution, they are succeeding. Many schools were passing out pocket-size Constitutions, in addition to the Tea Party Patriots coloring books.
In Orange County, Calif., high school students planned to watch a reenactment of Gideon v. Wainwright, the landmark case concerning the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee to a fair trial, including right to counsel. And in Nevada City, Calif., middle schools planned to show the now classic “Schoolhouse Rock [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLP_HGKq-jg ]” segment about the Constitution, with the preamble, sung folky, as its refrain.
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/us/constitution-has-its-day-amid-a-struggle-for-its-spirit.html
===
Tea party vision closer to Articles of Confederation, not Constitution
Tea Party members protest in Washington in this September 2010 file photo.
NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
By Jonathan Mercantini
Published: Friday, September 16, 2011, 9:30 AM
As schools across the state celebrate Constitution Day today, it seems especially appropriate to look more closely at the nation’s founding document, particularly because so much of today’s political debate concerns the powers and limits of the federal government.
Many who associate themselves with the tea party movement say their beliefs are rooted in the original principles of the Constitution. Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann describes herself a “constitutional conservative.”
Few have asked precisely what that means. A close inspection of Bachmann’s views, however, reveals a vision of government closer to the Articles of Confederation than the Constitution.
The Articles of Confederation created an extremely limited central government during and just after the Revolution. Under the Articles, the federal government had no power to tax, no national currency, no executive branch — hence, little real authority. The result was a government with extremely limited revenues and, therefore, with little power or relevance. The power to levy taxes was reserved to the states.
The Articles of Confederation made sense in the context of the American Revolution. It was exactly the type of government you would create in the midst of a revolt against a distant, external authority perceived as too powerful and out of touch.
Yet the Articles proved to be woefully deficient. Foreign creditors were unwilling to loan money to the fledgling nation — they could see that the government, lacking the authority to tax and dependent on contributions from the states, would struggle to pay back those loans.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, considered by many to be the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has emphasized his refusal to accept federal money for some purposes, most notably education. His position highlights the perceived conflict between state and federal authority and the resurgent belief in returning power to the states. Fear of federal power was a key argument used by the Anti-Federalists who opposed ratification of the Constitution, preferring the weak national government of the Articles.
Fewer than four years after the end of the Revolution, a group of concerned founders met in Philadelphia, ostensibly to discuss ways to amend and improve the Articles of Confederation. Yet several delegates, chief among them James Madison of Virginia, recognized that the Articles were inadequate to the task of governing the new nation. The result of that convention in 1787 was, of course, the Constitution. It created an entirely new form of government intended to cure the ills of the Articles of Confederation. And chief among the cures was the power to levy taxes, not just on imports but internal taxes as well.
As Alexander Hamilton would later emphasize in the Federalist Papers — the famous series of essays held up by so many tea party members as the true embodiment of the Constitution — taxation was perhaps the most necessary power to be wielded by the new government in order for the United States to succeed.
During the first domestic crisis under the new Constitution, President George Washington led federal troops to the back country of Pennsylvania when farmers there refused to pay new excise taxes on whiskey. While today, the tea party crowd seeks every opportunity to “starve the beast,” Washington, the most famous founder of all, was willing to use the threat of force to compel citizens to pay their taxes, not just for defense, but for all of government’s costs.
As my eighth-grade social studies teacher taught us, the most important legacy of the Articles of Confederation is that it showed how not to run a government. Washington and the other founders quickly recognized that a government without revenue is no government at all. They knew from experience that a strong central government was essential for the new nation to survive and flourish.
While the debate over the appropriate role for the federal government has grown contentious, we would be wise to recall the failure of Articles of Confederation.
Jonathan Mercantini is a fellow at the Kean University Center for History, Politics and Policy.
© 2011 New Jersey On-Line LLC
http://blog.nj.com/njv_guest_blog/2011/09/tea_party_vision_closer_to_art.html [with comments]
===
Tea Party Gets the Constitution Wrong
Exclusive: The Tea Partiers love to cite the U.S. Constitution as supporting their contempt for the federal government. But they don’t realize that the Constitution represented the most important assertion of central authority in American history, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
September 18, 2011
It is now an article of faith in the Tea Party and on the American Right that the Founders wrote the U.S. Constitution to restrict the power of the federal government and protect states’ rights. But that analysis is simply wrong.
Like any government document, the Constitution can only be understood in the context of what it replaced – and why. The Constitution superseded the Articles of Confederation, which guided the new country starting in 1777. The Articles granted broad authority to the states with only a weak national government.
As the Revolutionary War wore on and during the early years of peace, many American leaders – including George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson – came to view the Articles as unworkable and a threat to the survival of the new nation.
The Continental Army was especially disdainful of the Articles because they didn’t grant taxing authority to the national government and thus – when the states reneged on promised funding, which they did frequently – soldiers were left without pay and munitions.
The answer to this political crisis took shape in 1786 with a growing movement for a much stronger federal government, leading to secret meetings in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft a new governing document, the Constitution.
The Constitution created the framework for a powerful federal authority that could not only declare war and negotiate treaties, but could tax, print money, regulate interstate commerce and undertake a host of other governing activities.
Besides the sweeping federal authority delineated by the Constitution, the document also dropped key language from the Articles of Confederation that had suggested the supremacy of the states.
The Articles had described the United States not as a government or even a nation, but as “a firm league of friendship” among the states “for their common defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare.”
If that suggestion of the states’ supremacy wasn’t clear enough, the Confederation’s Article II declared: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated.” And very few powers were delegated to the federal government.
That powerful states’ rights language was either eliminated by the Constitution or substantially watered down.
The Tenth Amendment Argument
Tea Party activists will often cite the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution as evidence that the Founders were strong advocates for states’ rights, since it says “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
But again the Tea Partiers are missing the point. The Constitution granted broad powers to the federal government – even over the regulation of national commerce – so there were far fewer powers left for the states. The Tenth Amendment amounted to a sop to mollify the anti-federalist bloc that was trying to block ratification of the Constitution by the 13 states.
To further appreciate how modest the Tenth Amendment concession was, you also must compare its wording with Article II of the Confederation. Remember, Article II says “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence,” while the Tenth Amendment simply says powers not granted to the federal government “are reserved to the States” or individuals.
Stripped out of the new national governing document were the principles of state “sovereignty” and state “independence.” In effect, American “sovereignty” had been transferred to the Republic that the Constitution had created. States were no longer dominant; they were subordinate to “we the people” as represented in the “union,” the United States of America.
Of course, the anti-federalists did not entirely go away, especially when it became clear to the agrarian South that its economic model, based on slavery, was losing ground to the growing industrial power of the North and the influence of the emancipation movement.
In the early 1830s, Southern politicians led the “nullification” challenge to the federal government, asserting that states had the right to nullify federal laws, such as a tariff on manufactured goods. But they were beaten back by President Andrew Jackson who threatened to deploy troops to South Carolina to enforce the federal supremacy established by the Constitution.
In December 1832, Jackson denounced the “nullifiers” and declared ”the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.”
Jackson also rejected as “treason” the notion that states could secede if they wished, noting that the Constitution “forms a government not a league,” a reference to the line in the Articles of Confederation that had termed the fledgling United States ”a firm league of friendship” among the states, not a government.
The nullification crisis was defused, but a few decades later, the South’s continued resistance to the constitutional preeminence of the federal government led to secession and the formation of the Confederacy. It took the Union’s victory in the Civil War to firmly settle the issue of the sovereignty of the national Republic over the states.
However, the defeated South still balked at the principle of equal rights for blacks and invoked “states’ rights” to defend segregation during the Jim Crow era. White Southerners had amassed enough political clout, especially within the Democratic Party, to fend off civil rights for blacks.
Ending Segregation
The battle over states’ right was joined again in the 1950s when the federal government finally committed itself to enforcing the principle of “equal protection under the law” as prescribed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Many white Southerners were furious that their system of segregation was being dismantled by federal authority.
The South’s anger was reflected in the prevalence of the Confederate battle flag on pickup trucks and in store windows. White Southerners were expressing the bravado of secession even if it was more tough talk than anything real.
Gradually, the American Right retreated from outright support of racial segregation and muffled the threats of secession (although the idea still surfaces once in a while as it did in recent comments by Texas Gov. Rick Perry).
Instead, the Right has sought to impose a reinterpretation of the Constitution by revising the history of the United States and pretending that the Founders designed the Constitution as a document to establish the supremacy of the states over the federal government.
This revisionist view is now at the heart of the Tea Party movement and has powerful propaganda support from the right-wing news media. Since few Americans understand the reasons for the Constitution – or the fact that it represented a major consolidation of federal power – this right-wing disinformation campaign has proved effective.
Tea Party activists add to the misimpression about the Founders’ intent by dressing in Revolutionary War costumes and channeling the Founders’ supposed hatred of the federal government. The Tea Partiers wave “Don’t Tread on Me” flags as if the American revolutionaries were addressing that to their own government, not the British colonialists.
(Interestingly, the Tea Partiers ignore another common banner of the era, showing a serpent representing the 13 colonies cut into pieces with the instruction, “join or die.” That banner recognized the need of the disparate American states to cooperate as one nation or perish.)
The Right’s so-called “originalist” thinking about the Constitution – how the Founders allegedly disdained federal authority – also ignores the fact that nearly all the Founders were advocates of replacing the Articles of Confederation (the state sovereignty document) with the Constitution.
Among its biggest advocates was George Washington who commanded the Continental Army when it was hamstrung by the lack of resources caused by the absence of federal taxing authority in the Articles of Confederation. Washington presided at the Constitutional Convention and was elected the nation’s first president under the Constitution.
Though the Tea Party doesn’t want to admit it – and it is an inconvenient truth for the American Right – the Constitution represented the most important expansion of federal power in American history.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book,Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com [ http://www.neckdeepbook.com/ ]. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.
Copyright © 2011 Consortiumnews
http://consortiumnews.com/2011/09/18/tea-party-gets-the-constitution-wrong/ [with comments]
===
Recovering the Constitution from conservatives
By Ruth Marcus, Published: September 15, 2011
Tea Party types and other conservatives talk about how they’d like their country back.
I’d like my Constitution back.
The rise of these self-proclaimed constitutional conservatives is an ominous development that has received too little notice — and too little push-back.
Until now. Under the banner of “Constitutional Progressives [ http://constitutionalprogressives.org/ ],” a coalition of liberal groups has begun making an important, two-part argument: first, that a progressive government agenda is consistent with constitutional values; and second, that the constitutional conservative approach represents a dangerous retrenchment of the government’s role.
This bid to “rebut the constitutional fairy tales being peddled by the Tea Party,” as Douglas Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center [ http://www.theusconstitution.org/ ] put it, could not be more timely, with the dizzying rise of Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R).
The constitutional conservative critique, as articulated by Perry, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and others, goes far beyond the familiar laments about activist judges. It is, at bottom, an argument against the 20th century — specifically against the notion that the Constitution envisions and empowers a muscular federal government able to ensure that its citizens have clean air, healthy food and safe workplaces.
To grasp the radical nature of the constitutional conservative approach, consider the record of every Republican president since the New Deal.
Richard Nixon ran on the pledge of appointing “strict constructionist” judges, but he created the Environmental Protection Agency [ http://environment.about.com/b/2010/12/02/epa-celebrates-40-years-of-environmental-protection.htm ], telling Congress that “our national government today is not structured to make a coordinated attack on the pollutants which debase the air we breathe, the water we drink and the land that grows our food.” Nixon didn’t doubt — as do the modern constitutional conservatives — that environmental regulation was an appropriate and constitutional role for the federal government.
Likewise, George W. Bush inveighed against judges “legislating from the bench.” Yet he presided over the largest expansion of Medicare — the addition of a prescription drug benefit [ http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/speeches/06.16.05.html ] — in the history of the program and oversaw a sweeping new role [ http://ed.gov/nclb/overview/intro/execsumm.html ] for the federal government in assuring quality education by local schools. Bush didn’t question — as do the constitutional conservatives — whether these were permissible activities for the federal government.
The constitutional conservative vision is dramatically different. It sees a hobbled federal government limited to a few basic activities, such as national defense and immigration. The 10th Amendment, reserving to states the powers not granted to the federal government, would be put on steroids. The commerce clause, giving the federal government the authority to regulate commerce among the states, would be drastically diminished.
Certainly, there’s a legitimate debate about the proper role of the federal government and the scope of federal vs. state power. But that is a different argument than the one long thought settled during the New Deal: that the Constitution grants the federal government power to regulate a broad array of activities in the national interest.
The danger posed by the constitutional conservative approach is to attempt to lash together debates about what the federal government should do and what the Constitution allows it to do.
A white paper by the liberal Center for American Progress [ http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/09/tea_party_constitution.html ] spells out the potential consequences of the constitutional conservative vision. Programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would be deemed to exceed the federal government’s enumerated powers.
The federal government would cease to have any role in education, eliminating funding for public schools and college financial aid, and in combating poverty, ending food stamps and unemployment insurance. Laws on everything from child labor to food safety would be overturned.
None of this is likely to happen, of course, for the simple reason that most Americans don’t want it to. When Perry was pushed during a debate about the implications of his views on the constitutionality of Social Security, for example, he waved off the question as an interesting intellectual exercise.
But the emergence of the constitutional conservative argument has real-world consequences — even without a constitutional conservative in the White House. It shifts the legal debate significantly rightward, energizing and empowering conservative judges and justices. And it changes the nature of the political debate as well by narrowing the turf on which, at least in the view of some lawmakers, the federal government is deemed authorized to operate.
“This is a way to weaponize the Constitution to prevent a real debate about how the government can solve national problems,” Kendall told me.
Strong words, but the constitutional conservative vision is too extreme to continue to ignore it in the hope that it will fade on its own.
ruthmarcus@washpost.com
© 2011 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/recovering-the-constitution-from-conservatives/2011/09/15/gIQAQ2EfVK_story.html [with comments]
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Cover
Page 7
Page 28
Page 31
Back
Designed by the Tea Party Patriots organization, this coloring activity book introduces children to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and to some of the brilliant, honorable men who participated in those debates in Philadelphia and will help children and adults gain a better understanding of the Constitution and the events that shaped our nation. The cover proudly displays the Tea Party Patriots shield logo.
http://www.coloringbookpublishers.com/teapartyconstitutionbook.aspx
*
Official Tea Party Patriots Coloring Book (8.5"x11")
This book is designed by the official Tea Party Patriots Organization. So children and parents may learn more about the fundamentals of freedom. This book is mixed with songs, puzzles and tons of coloring fun.
This 36 page coloring, activity and game book is the official fundraising coloring book of the Tea Party Patriots. Reviewed by teachers, educators and patriots, this book is designed, not only to educate, but to inform and raise money for Tea Party Patriots throughout the country.
http://www.coloringbookpublishers.com/teapartypatriotscoloringbook.aspx
===
Just for Patriots! Yet Another Tea Party Coloring Book
Chris Good
Sep 16 2011, 12:33 PM ET
Last fall, the group Tea Party Patriots caused a stir by releasing Leadership, Freedom and Jobs [just above], an "Official American Grassroots Activity and Coloring Book." "When taxes are too high, the high tax takes away jobs and freedom. In 1773 we had a Tea Party and this led to freedom from high taxes," the book warned children. St. Louis-based publisher Wayne Bell of Really Big Coloring Books, Inc. said he received death threats.
Today, the nation's largest tea-party membership group is at it again: Tea Party Patriots announced the release of a Constitution coloring book [first above], available by order online from the same publisher. The release was timed to tomorrow's anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia on Sept. 17, 1787.
From the group's press release:
"The Constitution Coloring Activity Book is an incredible tool for educating the next generation of Patriots." Said Mark Meckler, Co-Founder and National Coordinator of Tea Party Patriots.
The new book uses puzzles, games and songs to present fundamental and core American values and how children can become involved in "preserving the liberty our Founding Fathers enshrined for We the People."
The group made no mention of tea-party politics in its announcement, and the publisher Bell insisted last year that the group's first book was not intended as political. Still, the books conjure a familiar marketing motto: Get 'em while they're young.
Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/09/picture-of-the-day-just-for-patriots-yet-another-tea-party-coloring-book/245225/ [with comments]
===
On Day Devoted to Constitution, a Fight Over It
The Tea Party handed out coloring books that show the government as bigger than what the Constitution allows.
By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: September 16, 2011
In the 100 years since Constitution Day was first established, most Americans have lumped it with holidays like Grandparents’ Day and Administrative Assistants’ day — a noble cause, lightly observed.
But this year, with the Tea Party making the Constitution sexy again, the holiday (which, for those rusty on their civics, falls on Saturday) has become occasion for battle.
Tea Party groups, armed with lesson plans and coloring books, are pushing schools to use the day to teach a conservative interpretation of the Constitution, where the federal government is a creeping and unwelcome presence in the lives of freedom-loving Americans.
Progressive groups, accusing the Tea Party of selectively reading the founding document, have responded with a campaign to “take back the Constitution.” They are urging Americans and lawmakers to sign a pledge to honor the whole Constitution, even the parts many Tea Party supporters would prefer to ignore — say, the amendments allowing an income tax, and granting birthright citizenship. And they are trying to get people to see the Constitution not as a limit on federal power but as the spirit behind progressive laws.
The struggle over the holiday is yet another proxy in the fight over the proper role of government. On one side are those who embrace an “originalist” view of the Constitution, where New Deal judicial activism started the country down the path to ruin. On the other are those who say that its language — allowing Congress to levy taxes to provide “for the general welfare,” to regulate commerce, and to do what is “necessary and proper” to carry out its role — affirms the broad role of the federal government that has developed over the last 100 years.
“It has evolved to the point where it seems many in the Tea Party believe the entire 20th century is unconstitutional,” said Doug Kendall, the president of the Constitutional Accountability Center and a leader of the progressive coalition behind the effort to, in his words, “rebut the fairy tales being peddled by the Tea Party.”
This may seem like a fight reserved to costumed Revolutionary War re-enactors — or Ron Paul supporters, who will commemorate the holiday, as they have the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, with a fund-raising event. But the question of who owns the Constitution has very current implications in the fights over Social Security and Medicare, and most immediately, in the court challenges to the health care overhaul that Democrats passed and Tea Party supporters loathe.
In one respect, the Tea Party has already won. When groups on the left talk about the Constitution, they are increasingly emphasizing the original text — as the originalists do — rather than the Supreme Court decisions that have upheld programs like Social Security.
Tea Party Patriots, a large umbrella for groups across the country, began encouraging its members this year to “adopt a school” for the Constitution Week, next week. It provided local groups with templates for a series of letters to school superintendents, to inform them about a law passed in 2004 that requires schools that receive federal money to teach about the Constitution on Sept. 17, or the adjacent days.
(The letters did not mention that the law was the work of Senator Robert C. Byrd, who was famous as a champion of the Constitution, but also of the kind of big government liberalism that the Tea Party believes the Constitution is intended to constrain.)
Tea Party groups were instructed to ask schools how they planned to observe the law, and to suggest that they use a curriculum provided by the National Center for Constitutional Studies [ http://nccs.net/ ].
The center, based in Arizona, offers books and courses now popular among Tea Party groups — including “The 5000 Year Leap,” made a bestseller by Glenn Beck’s recommendation. They emphasize the 10th Amendment in arguing for states’ rights, and argue that the income tax was a progressive perversion of the Constitution and that the founding fathers did not intend the separation of church and state. (The course materials also show how to memorize the preamble to the Constitution using sign language.)
Tea Party Patriots also distributed a new coloring book that argues that the government has “grown far beyond what the Constitution allows,” and casts modern-day Tea Party groups in the role of the original colonists, fighting for freedom against an overbearing government.
“A lot of what happens in Washington is not the process we agreed to in that Constitution,” said Bill Norton, who coordinated the adopt-a-school program for Tea Party Patriots.
But he said the program was not political. “We go right back to the founders when it comes to the Constitution,” he said. “The material we’re bringing in is very historical, there’s no agenda in either direction.”
Mr. Kendall’s group marked the holiday with a new Web site, constitutionalprogressives.org [ http://constitutionalprogressives.org/ ], which attempts to rebut Tea Party arguments about the Constitution.
While the Tea Party talks about the 10th Amendment and states’ rights, and argues against the role of the Federal Reserve, the Web site argues the ways in which the Constitution gives the federal government the authority to do things like set up a central bank, and to regulate health care.
The Web site also tries to get progressives as excited about the Constitution as conservatives are — arguing it as the basis for progressive goals, including the right to same-sex marriage.
Constitution Day is hardly sweeping the nation — Tea Party Patriots could not quantify how many schools it had persuaded to participate. Still, if both sides want Americans to be talking more about the Constitution, they are succeeding. Many schools were passing out pocket-size Constitutions, in addition to the Tea Party Patriots coloring books.
In Orange County, Calif., high school students planned to watch a reenactment of Gideon v. Wainwright, the landmark case concerning the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee to a fair trial, including right to counsel. And in Nevada City, Calif., middle schools planned to show the now classic “Schoolhouse Rock [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLP_HGKq-jg ]” segment about the Constitution, with the preamble, sung folky, as its refrain.
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/us/constitution-has-its-day-amid-a-struggle-for-its-spirit.html
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Tea party vision closer to Articles of Confederation, not Constitution
Tea Party members protest in Washington in this September 2010 file photo.
NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
By Jonathan Mercantini
Published: Friday, September 16, 2011, 9:30 AM
As schools across the state celebrate Constitution Day today, it seems especially appropriate to look more closely at the nation’s founding document, particularly because so much of today’s political debate concerns the powers and limits of the federal government.
Many who associate themselves with the tea party movement say their beliefs are rooted in the original principles of the Constitution. Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann describes herself a “constitutional conservative.”
Few have asked precisely what that means. A close inspection of Bachmann’s views, however, reveals a vision of government closer to the Articles of Confederation than the Constitution.
The Articles of Confederation created an extremely limited central government during and just after the Revolution. Under the Articles, the federal government had no power to tax, no national currency, no executive branch — hence, little real authority. The result was a government with extremely limited revenues and, therefore, with little power or relevance. The power to levy taxes was reserved to the states.
The Articles of Confederation made sense in the context of the American Revolution. It was exactly the type of government you would create in the midst of a revolt against a distant, external authority perceived as too powerful and out of touch.
Yet the Articles proved to be woefully deficient. Foreign creditors were unwilling to loan money to the fledgling nation — they could see that the government, lacking the authority to tax and dependent on contributions from the states, would struggle to pay back those loans.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, considered by many to be the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has emphasized his refusal to accept federal money for some purposes, most notably education. His position highlights the perceived conflict between state and federal authority and the resurgent belief in returning power to the states. Fear of federal power was a key argument used by the Anti-Federalists who opposed ratification of the Constitution, preferring the weak national government of the Articles.
Fewer than four years after the end of the Revolution, a group of concerned founders met in Philadelphia, ostensibly to discuss ways to amend and improve the Articles of Confederation. Yet several delegates, chief among them James Madison of Virginia, recognized that the Articles were inadequate to the task of governing the new nation. The result of that convention in 1787 was, of course, the Constitution. It created an entirely new form of government intended to cure the ills of the Articles of Confederation. And chief among the cures was the power to levy taxes, not just on imports but internal taxes as well.
As Alexander Hamilton would later emphasize in the Federalist Papers — the famous series of essays held up by so many tea party members as the true embodiment of the Constitution — taxation was perhaps the most necessary power to be wielded by the new government in order for the United States to succeed.
During the first domestic crisis under the new Constitution, President George Washington led federal troops to the back country of Pennsylvania when farmers there refused to pay new excise taxes on whiskey. While today, the tea party crowd seeks every opportunity to “starve the beast,” Washington, the most famous founder of all, was willing to use the threat of force to compel citizens to pay their taxes, not just for defense, but for all of government’s costs.
As my eighth-grade social studies teacher taught us, the most important legacy of the Articles of Confederation is that it showed how not to run a government. Washington and the other founders quickly recognized that a government without revenue is no government at all. They knew from experience that a strong central government was essential for the new nation to survive and flourish.
While the debate over the appropriate role for the federal government has grown contentious, we would be wise to recall the failure of Articles of Confederation.
Jonathan Mercantini is a fellow at the Kean University Center for History, Politics and Policy.
© 2011 New Jersey On-Line LLC
http://blog.nj.com/njv_guest_blog/2011/09/tea_party_vision_closer_to_art.html [with comments]
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Tea Party Gets the Constitution Wrong
Exclusive: The Tea Partiers love to cite the U.S. Constitution as supporting their contempt for the federal government. But they don’t realize that the Constitution represented the most important assertion of central authority in American history, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
September 18, 2011
It is now an article of faith in the Tea Party and on the American Right that the Founders wrote the U.S. Constitution to restrict the power of the federal government and protect states’ rights. But that analysis is simply wrong.
Like any government document, the Constitution can only be understood in the context of what it replaced – and why. The Constitution superseded the Articles of Confederation, which guided the new country starting in 1777. The Articles granted broad authority to the states with only a weak national government.
As the Revolutionary War wore on and during the early years of peace, many American leaders – including George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson – came to view the Articles as unworkable and a threat to the survival of the new nation.
The Continental Army was especially disdainful of the Articles because they didn’t grant taxing authority to the national government and thus – when the states reneged on promised funding, which they did frequently – soldiers were left without pay and munitions.
The answer to this political crisis took shape in 1786 with a growing movement for a much stronger federal government, leading to secret meetings in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft a new governing document, the Constitution.
The Constitution created the framework for a powerful federal authority that could not only declare war and negotiate treaties, but could tax, print money, regulate interstate commerce and undertake a host of other governing activities.
Besides the sweeping federal authority delineated by the Constitution, the document also dropped key language from the Articles of Confederation that had suggested the supremacy of the states.
The Articles had described the United States not as a government or even a nation, but as “a firm league of friendship” among the states “for their common defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare.”
If that suggestion of the states’ supremacy wasn’t clear enough, the Confederation’s Article II declared: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated.” And very few powers were delegated to the federal government.
That powerful states’ rights language was either eliminated by the Constitution or substantially watered down.
The Tenth Amendment Argument
Tea Party activists will often cite the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution as evidence that the Founders were strong advocates for states’ rights, since it says “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
But again the Tea Partiers are missing the point. The Constitution granted broad powers to the federal government – even over the regulation of national commerce – so there were far fewer powers left for the states. The Tenth Amendment amounted to a sop to mollify the anti-federalist bloc that was trying to block ratification of the Constitution by the 13 states.
To further appreciate how modest the Tenth Amendment concession was, you also must compare its wording with Article II of the Confederation. Remember, Article II says “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence,” while the Tenth Amendment simply says powers not granted to the federal government “are reserved to the States” or individuals.
Stripped out of the new national governing document were the principles of state “sovereignty” and state “independence.” In effect, American “sovereignty” had been transferred to the Republic that the Constitution had created. States were no longer dominant; they were subordinate to “we the people” as represented in the “union,” the United States of America.
Of course, the anti-federalists did not entirely go away, especially when it became clear to the agrarian South that its economic model, based on slavery, was losing ground to the growing industrial power of the North and the influence of the emancipation movement.
In the early 1830s, Southern politicians led the “nullification” challenge to the federal government, asserting that states had the right to nullify federal laws, such as a tariff on manufactured goods. But they were beaten back by President Andrew Jackson who threatened to deploy troops to South Carolina to enforce the federal supremacy established by the Constitution.
In December 1832, Jackson denounced the “nullifiers” and declared ”the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.”
Jackson also rejected as “treason” the notion that states could secede if they wished, noting that the Constitution “forms a government not a league,” a reference to the line in the Articles of Confederation that had termed the fledgling United States ”a firm league of friendship” among the states, not a government.
The nullification crisis was defused, but a few decades later, the South’s continued resistance to the constitutional preeminence of the federal government led to secession and the formation of the Confederacy. It took the Union’s victory in the Civil War to firmly settle the issue of the sovereignty of the national Republic over the states.
However, the defeated South still balked at the principle of equal rights for blacks and invoked “states’ rights” to defend segregation during the Jim Crow era. White Southerners had amassed enough political clout, especially within the Democratic Party, to fend off civil rights for blacks.
Ending Segregation
The battle over states’ right was joined again in the 1950s when the federal government finally committed itself to enforcing the principle of “equal protection under the law” as prescribed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Many white Southerners were furious that their system of segregation was being dismantled by federal authority.
The South’s anger was reflected in the prevalence of the Confederate battle flag on pickup trucks and in store windows. White Southerners were expressing the bravado of secession even if it was more tough talk than anything real.
Gradually, the American Right retreated from outright support of racial segregation and muffled the threats of secession (although the idea still surfaces once in a while as it did in recent comments by Texas Gov. Rick Perry).
Instead, the Right has sought to impose a reinterpretation of the Constitution by revising the history of the United States and pretending that the Founders designed the Constitution as a document to establish the supremacy of the states over the federal government.
This revisionist view is now at the heart of the Tea Party movement and has powerful propaganda support from the right-wing news media. Since few Americans understand the reasons for the Constitution – or the fact that it represented a major consolidation of federal power – this right-wing disinformation campaign has proved effective.
Tea Party activists add to the misimpression about the Founders’ intent by dressing in Revolutionary War costumes and channeling the Founders’ supposed hatred of the federal government. The Tea Partiers wave “Don’t Tread on Me” flags as if the American revolutionaries were addressing that to their own government, not the British colonialists.
(Interestingly, the Tea Partiers ignore another common banner of the era, showing a serpent representing the 13 colonies cut into pieces with the instruction, “join or die.” That banner recognized the need of the disparate American states to cooperate as one nation or perish.)
The Right’s so-called “originalist” thinking about the Constitution – how the Founders allegedly disdained federal authority – also ignores the fact that nearly all the Founders were advocates of replacing the Articles of Confederation (the state sovereignty document) with the Constitution.
Among its biggest advocates was George Washington who commanded the Continental Army when it was hamstrung by the lack of resources caused by the absence of federal taxing authority in the Articles of Confederation. Washington presided at the Constitutional Convention and was elected the nation’s first president under the Constitution.
Though the Tea Party doesn’t want to admit it – and it is an inconvenient truth for the American Right – the Constitution represented the most important expansion of federal power in American history.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book,Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com [ http://www.neckdeepbook.com/ ]. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.
Copyright © 2011 Consortiumnews
http://consortiumnews.com/2011/09/18/tea-party-gets-the-constitution-wrong/ [with comments]
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Recovering the Constitution from conservatives
By Ruth Marcus, Published: September 15, 2011
Tea Party types and other conservatives talk about how they’d like their country back.
I’d like my Constitution back.
The rise of these self-proclaimed constitutional conservatives is an ominous development that has received too little notice — and too little push-back.
Until now. Under the banner of “Constitutional Progressives [ http://constitutionalprogressives.org/ ],” a coalition of liberal groups has begun making an important, two-part argument: first, that a progressive government agenda is consistent with constitutional values; and second, that the constitutional conservative approach represents a dangerous retrenchment of the government’s role.
This bid to “rebut the constitutional fairy tales being peddled by the Tea Party,” as Douglas Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center [ http://www.theusconstitution.org/ ] put it, could not be more timely, with the dizzying rise of Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R).
The constitutional conservative critique, as articulated by Perry, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and others, goes far beyond the familiar laments about activist judges. It is, at bottom, an argument against the 20th century — specifically against the notion that the Constitution envisions and empowers a muscular federal government able to ensure that its citizens have clean air, healthy food and safe workplaces.
To grasp the radical nature of the constitutional conservative approach, consider the record of every Republican president since the New Deal.
Richard Nixon ran on the pledge of appointing “strict constructionist” judges, but he created the Environmental Protection Agency [ http://environment.about.com/b/2010/12/02/epa-celebrates-40-years-of-environmental-protection.htm ], telling Congress that “our national government today is not structured to make a coordinated attack on the pollutants which debase the air we breathe, the water we drink and the land that grows our food.” Nixon didn’t doubt — as do the modern constitutional conservatives — that environmental regulation was an appropriate and constitutional role for the federal government.
Likewise, George W. Bush inveighed against judges “legislating from the bench.” Yet he presided over the largest expansion of Medicare — the addition of a prescription drug benefit [ http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/speeches/06.16.05.html ] — in the history of the program and oversaw a sweeping new role [ http://ed.gov/nclb/overview/intro/execsumm.html ] for the federal government in assuring quality education by local schools. Bush didn’t question — as do the constitutional conservatives — whether these were permissible activities for the federal government.
The constitutional conservative vision is dramatically different. It sees a hobbled federal government limited to a few basic activities, such as national defense and immigration. The 10th Amendment, reserving to states the powers not granted to the federal government, would be put on steroids. The commerce clause, giving the federal government the authority to regulate commerce among the states, would be drastically diminished.
Certainly, there’s a legitimate debate about the proper role of the federal government and the scope of federal vs. state power. But that is a different argument than the one long thought settled during the New Deal: that the Constitution grants the federal government power to regulate a broad array of activities in the national interest.
The danger posed by the constitutional conservative approach is to attempt to lash together debates about what the federal government should do and what the Constitution allows it to do.
A white paper by the liberal Center for American Progress [ http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/09/tea_party_constitution.html ] spells out the potential consequences of the constitutional conservative vision. Programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would be deemed to exceed the federal government’s enumerated powers.
The federal government would cease to have any role in education, eliminating funding for public schools and college financial aid, and in combating poverty, ending food stamps and unemployment insurance. Laws on everything from child labor to food safety would be overturned.
None of this is likely to happen, of course, for the simple reason that most Americans don’t want it to. When Perry was pushed during a debate about the implications of his views on the constitutionality of Social Security, for example, he waved off the question as an interesting intellectual exercise.
But the emergence of the constitutional conservative argument has real-world consequences — even without a constitutional conservative in the White House. It shifts the legal debate significantly rightward, energizing and empowering conservative judges and justices. And it changes the nature of the political debate as well by narrowing the turf on which, at least in the view of some lawmakers, the federal government is deemed authorized to operate.
“This is a way to weaponize the Constitution to prevent a real debate about how the government can solve national problems,” Kendall told me.
Strong words, but the constitutional conservative vision is too extreme to continue to ignore it in the hope that it will fade on its own.
ruthmarcus@washpost.com
© 2011 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/recovering-the-constitution-from-conservatives/2011/09/15/gIQAQ2EfVK_story.html [with comments]
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