Comments by "Liberty Vault" (@Liberty-Vault) on "Declaration of Independence vs US Constitution" video.

  1. The nationalist counterrevolution thesis is a common one, but I don't think it's totally substantive for a variety of reasons. It mostly comes down to the fact that the most ardent nationalists - like Madison and Hamilton - had almost all of their most nationalist proposals defeated or ignored in the Philadelphia Convention. It's true that the US Constitution granted Congress several new substantive powers, but the federal orientation of the union remained the same - much to the chagrin of Hamilton. Also, it was determined, contrary to Madison's preference, that there wouldn't be two houses of Congress based on apportionment, that Congress would not be able to write law on every imaginable subject, that there wouldn't be a superlative judiciary that could take up every case of perceived importance, that there would not be a national veto of state law, and that treason would consist of levying war against the states rather than the central government. Hamilton wanted the states to be homogenized essentially into a singular body, with an monarch-like executive that served for life, with senators appointed by the executive rather than being elected by the states. Ultimately, both Madison and Hamilton saw the framework as an improvement, but complained about these things routinely. For instance, see Hamilton's quote in Madison's notes that the Constitution was "very remote" from his preference, and Madison's complaints about the document in his letter to Jefferson on October 24, 1787. Under the 1787 Constitution, Congress didn't even contain a general legislative authority that is present in all nationalist constitutions. On the contrary, ratification of the Constitution was secured in the most contentious states through explicit declarations that the general government could assume powers it was not delegated. In Virginia, Edmund Randolph claimed that the general government would endeavor to violate the constitution for exercising any power “not expressly delegated therein.” Maintaining the same position, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina opined that Congress had no right to “exercise powers not expressly delegated to it.” Lending his hand to the cause of ratification in New York, in The Federalist #45 James Madison insisted that the powers delegated to the general government were “few and defined.” At the Hillsborough convention in North Carolina, James Iredell declared that the “powers of the government are particularly enumerated and defined: they can claim no others but such as are so enumerated.” These testimonials, made to assure skeptics in some of the most polarized states, played an enormous role in securing ratification of the Constitution. In this way, the framework was not the national-oriented framework that the archnationalist envisioned - quite to the contrary.
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