“We are not a people who fear the future. We are a people who make it. And on this July 4th, we need to summon that spirit once more. We need to summon the same spirit that inhabited Independence Hall 233 years ago today.”
– Barack Obama, Independence Day 2009
Does President Obama really understand what he is saying when he calls on Americans to summon the spirit that inhabited Independence Hall 233 years ago?
It seems to me that Independence Hall 233 years ago was inhabited by the spirit of 56 predominantly wealthy, upper-class men who had gathered to represent their respective colonies in declaring independence from a government they believed had failed to deal fairly with them regarding issues of economy and taxes.
Central to that belief was their rejection of the British Crown’s objective of taxing the colonies to pay for government programs that failed to benefit most of the British subjects in the colonies while serving to enrich the friends of the Crown, to enrich the Crown itself, and to expand the size of the government collecting the taxes.
If President Obama indeed wants Americans to summon the spirit of the Founding Fathers, then what he is calling for is for Americans to rise up against the very policies he has spent the past few months crafting by demanding that the federal government of the United States return the power increasingly concentrated in the hands of the federal government to the states and the people as demanded by the Tenth Amendment. If the federal government fails to do so, the he seems to be demanding that the people “dissolve the political bands which have connected them” to that federal government in order to “and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”.
It is clear, however, given the president’s response to the recent exercise of the constitution of Honduras, that this spirit of the Founders is not what he is trying to summon at all.
What spirit does he want to summon then? It will be interesting to see how the next few years answer that question for all of us.
DLH
