A very different Republican
Harrisburg this week celebrated the 100th anniversary of the dedication of Pennsylvania's beautiful State Capitol. Republican President Theodore Roosevelt spoke at the ceremony on Oct. 4, 1906. If you go to the Capitol Rotunda, you can see the spot marked where he stood and delivered a long speech that blistered his foes among the wealthy plutocrats. Heck, you'd think you were listening to a Jesse Jackson speech, not a speech from someone in the same party, at least in name, of George W. Bush and Pat Robertson.
The Harrisburg Patriot reprinted TR's speech in full on Oct. 5, 1906. It's too long for me to include it all, but here's the section that had flames licking around the words:
"Our Union is firmly established. But each generation has its special and serious difficulties, and we of this generation have to struggle with the evils springing from the very material success of which we are so proud, from the very growth and prosperity of which, with justice, we boast. The extraordinary industrial changes of the last half century have produced a totally new set of conditions under which new evils flourish; and for these new evils new remedies must be devised.
"Some of these evils can be grappled with by private effort only, for we never can afford to forget that in the last analysis, the chief factor in personal success, and indeed in national greatness, must be the sturdy, self-reliant character of the individual citizen. But many of these evils are of such a nature that no private effort can avail against them. These evils, therefore, must be grappled with by government action. In some cases this governmental action must be exercised by the several states individually. In yet others, it has become increasingly evident that no efficient state action is possible, and that we need through executive action, thru legislation, and through judicial interpretation and construction of the law, to increase the power of the Federal government.
"If we fail thus to increase it, we show our impotence and leave ourselves at the mercy of those ingenious legal advisors of the holders of vast corporate wealth, who, in the performance of what they regard as their duty, and to serve the ends of their clients, invoke the law at one time for the confounding of their rivals, and at another time strive for the nullification of the law in order that they themselves may be left free to work their unbridled will on these same rivals, or on those who labor for them, or on the general public. In the exercise of their profession and in the service of their clients these astute lawyers strive to prevent the passage of efficient laws and strive to secure judicial determinations of those that pass which shall emasculate them.
"They do not invoke the Constitution in order to compel the due observance of law alike by rich and poor, by great and small; on the contrary, they are ceaselessly on the watch to cry out that the Constitution is violated whenever any effort is made to invoke the aid of the national government, whether for the efficient regulation of the railroads, for the efficient supervision of the great corporations, or for efficiently securing obedience to such a law as the national eight-hour law and similar so-called “labor statutes.”
"The doctrine they preach would make the Constitution merely the shield of incompetence and the excuse for governmental paralysis; they treat it as a justification for refusing to attempt the remedy of evil, instead of as the source of vital power necessary for the existence of a mighty and ever-growing nation."
(If anyone would like to read Roosevelt's entire speech, send me an e-mail and I'll send it to you as an attachment)
If you think this is musty old history, the weak-sister interpretation of the Constitution that TR rails against is popular once again among the most conservative lawyers and jurists, especially those in the Federalist Society. They call it the "Constitution in Exile." If you can turn the Constitution into an enemy of the people and a friend of big business, well, you can do just about anything. Or nothing at all.