Residents were encouraged to visit various operating rooms in order to observe the procedures that were being done. One day I walked into an operating room without knowing what I was walking into, and the doctors were in the middle of performing a C-section. It was actually an abortion by hysterotomy. The woman was probably six months along in her pregnancy, and the child she was carrying weighed over two pounds. At that time doctors were not especially sophisticated, for lack of a better term, when it came to killing the baby prior to delivery, so they went ahead with delivery and put the baby in a bucket in the corner of the room. The baby tried to breathe, and tried to cry, and everyone in the room pretended the baby wasn’t there. I was deeply shaken by this experience, and it hit me at that moment just how important the life issue was.
I have heard the arguments in favor of abortion many times, and they have always disturbed me deeply. A popular academic argument for abortion demands that we think of the child in the womb as a “parasite” that the woman has the right to expel from her body. But the same argument justifies outright infanticide, since it applies just as well to an infant
outside
the womb: newborns require even more attention and care, and in that sense are even more “parasitic.”
If we can be so callous as to refer to a growing child in a mother’s womb as a parasite, I fear for our country’s future all the more. Whether it is war or abortion, we conceal the reality of violent acts through linguistic contrivances meant to devalue human lives we find inconvenient. Dead civilians become “collateral damage,” are ignored altogether, or are rationalized away on the Leninist grounds that to make an omelet you have to break some eggs. (The apostle Paul, on the other hand, condemned the idea that we should do evil that good may come.) People ask an expectant mother how her baby is doing. They do not ask how her fetus is doing, or her blob of tissue, or her parasite. But that is what her baby becomes as soon as the child is declared to be unwanted. In both cases, we try to make human life into something less than human, simply according to our will.
When
Roe v. Wade
was decided in 1973, striking down abortion laws all over the country, even some supporters of abortion were embarrassed by the decision as a matter of constitutional law. John Hart Ely, for instance, wrote in the
Yale Law Review
: “What is frightening about
Roe
is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure.” The decision, he said, “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”
The federal government should not play any role in the abortion issue, according to the Constitution. Apart from waiting forever for Supreme Court justices who will rule in accordance with the Constitution, however, Americans who care about our fundamental law and/or are concerned about abortion do have some legislative recourse. Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution gives Congress the power to strip the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, of jurisdiction over broad categories of cases. In the wake of the 1857
Dred Scott
decision, abolitionists spoke of depriving the courts of jurisdiction in cases dealing with slavery. The courts were stripped of authority over Reconstruction policy in the late 1860s.
If the federal courts refuse to abide by the Constitution, the Congress should employ this constitutional remedy. By a simple majority, Congress could strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over abortion, thereby overturning the obviously unconstitutional
Roe
. At that point, the issue would revert to the states, where it constitutionally belongs, since no appeal to federal courts on the matter could be heard. (I have proposed exactly this in H.R. 300.)
Let us remember, though, that the law can do only so much. The law isn’t what allowed abortion; abortions were already being done in the 1960s against the law. The courts came along and conformed to the social and moral changes that were taking place in society. Law reflects the morality of the people. Ultimately, law or no law, it is going to be up to us as parents, as clergy, and as citizens—in the way we raise our children, how we interact and talk with our friends and neighbors, and the good example we give—to bring about changes to our culture toward greater respect for life.
To those who argue that we cannot allow the states to make decisions on abortion since some will make the wrong ones, I reply that that is an excellent argument for world government—for how can we allow individual
countries
to decide on abortion or other moral issues, if some may make the wrong decisions? Yet the dangers of a world government surely speak for themselves.
Let us therefore adopt the constitutional position, one that is achievable and can yield good results but that shuns the utopian idea that all evil can be eradicated. The Founding Fathers’ approach will not solve all problems, and it will not be perfect. But anyone expecting perfection in this world is going to be consistently disappointed.
The same holds true for issues like prayer in schools. Such issues were never meant to be decided by federal judges. The whole point of the American Revolution was to vindicate the principle of local self-government. The British had denied that the colonial legislatures were exclusively endowed with the power to make political decisions for their peoples. The colonists, on the other hand, insisted that they would be governed only by their elected representatives. That remained the operative principle in the Articles of Confederation as well as the Constitution: local legislatures are presumed to hold authority except in areas in which they have expressly given up that authority.
We have come to consider it normal for nine judges in Washington to decide on social policies that affect every neighborhood, family, and individual in America. One side of the debate hopes the nine will impose one set of values, and the other side favors a different set. The underlying premise—that this kind of monolith is desirable, or that no alternative is possible—is never examined, or at least not nearly as often as it should be. The Founding Fathers did not intend for every American neighborhood to be exactly the same—a totalitarian impulse if there ever was one—or that disputes over competing values should be decided by federal judges. This is the constitutional approach to deciding all issues that are not spelled out explicitly in our founding document: let neighbors and localities govern themselves.
The Founding Fathers would be astonished to observe how politicized our society has become, with every matter on which people differ becoming a federal issue to be resolved in Washington. Jefferson warned, “When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.” Are we listening?
In short, just as we should reject empire abroad, we should also reject it at home. One-size-fits-all social policy, dictated by unelected judges from an imperial capital, is not the system Americans signed on for when they ratified the Constitution, and they have never formally sanctioned such a thing.
Some people claim that the doctrine of states’ rights, one of Thomas Jefferson’s central principles, has been responsible for racism. But racism, a disorder of the heart, can become entrenched in any political environment, whether highly centralized like Hitler’s Germany or highly decentralized like our own country. In
Mein Kampf
, Hitler spoke with delight of the process by which governments around the world were becoming more centralized, with states and local governments having less and less power. It was a trend he wanted to see continue in Germany, in order to build “a powerful national Reich” in which the central government could impose its will without having to worry about recalcitrant states. Hitler wrote:
National Socialism as a matter of principle, must lay claim to the right to force its principles on the whole German nation without consideration of previous federated state boundaries, and to educate in its ideas and conceptions. Just as the churches do not feel bound and limited by political boundaries, no more does the National Socialist idea feel limited by the individual state territories of our fatherland. The National Socialist doctrine is not the servant of individual federated states, but shall some day become the master of the German nation.
No form of political organization, therefore, is immune to cruel abuses like the Jim Crow laws, whereby government sets out to legislate on how groups of human beings are allowed to interact with one another. Peaceful civil disobedience to unjust laws, which I support with every fiber of my being, can sometimes be necessary at any level of government. It falls upon the people, in the last resort, to stand against injustice no matter where it occurs.
In the long run, the only way racism can be overcome is through the philosophy of individualism, which I have promoted throughout my life. Our rights come to us not because we belong to some group, but our rights come to us as individuals. And it is as individuals that we should judge one another. Racism is a particularly odious form of collectivism whereby individuals are treated not on their merits but on the basis of group identity. Nothing in my political philosophy, which is the exact opposite of the racial totalitarianism of the twentieth century, gives aid or comfort to such thinking. To the contrary, my philosophy of individualism is the most radical intellectual challenge to racism ever posed.
Government exacerbates racial thinking and undermines individualism because its very existence encourages people to organize along racial lines in order to lobby for benefits for their group. That lobbying, in turn, creates animosity and suspicion among all groups, each of which believes that it is getting less of its fair share than the others.
Instead, we should quit thinking in terms of race—yes, in 2008 it is still necessary to say that we should stop thinking in terms of race—and recognize that freedom and prosperity benefit all Americans. As Thomas Sowell points out, lobbyists for various racial groups will spend all their time trying to enact programs that specifically help their own group, even though that group would reap far more benefit from advancing economic freedom in general. He gives the example of taxi licensing restrictions, a government policy that disproportionately hurts blacks. But since it is not thought of as a racial issue per se, racial pressure groups do absolutely nothing to overturn it. That’s another reason we should stop thinking in terms of race. Consider Sowell:
Politically, however, it makes far more sense for a black leader to fight tooth and nail for a hundred more CETA [Comprehensive Employment and Training Act] jobs in the Philadelphia ghetto than to fight for an end to taxi licensing restrictions, even though the latter would probably mean thousands more jobs for blacks—jobs with far higher pay than CETA jobs and of permanent duration. Ghetto jobs are an earmarked benefit, however few, tenuous and low paid.
Benefits to blacks as members of the general public are no feather in a black leader’s cap, even if blacks are benefited more than others by gaining access that was nearly impossible for them before
[emphasis added].
As I discuss in Chapter 5, the federal war on drugs has wrought disproportionate harm on minority communities. Allowing for states’ rights here would surely be an improvement, for the states could certainly do a better and more sensible job than the federal government has been doing if they were free to decide the issue for themselves. And although people studying my record will discover how consistent I have been over the years, they will uncover one major shift: in recent years I have dropped my support for the federal death penalty. It is a dangerous power for the federal government to have, and it is exercised in a discriminatory way: if you are poor and black, you are much more likely to receive this punishment.
We should not think in terms of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and other such groups. That kind of thinking only divides us. The only us-versus-them thinking in which we might indulge is the people—
all
the people—versus the government, which loots and lies to us all, threatens our liberties, and shreds our Constitution. That’s not a white or black issue. That’s an American issue, and it’s one on which Americans of all races can unite in a spirit of goodwill. That may be why polls in 2007 found ours the most popular Republican campaign among black voters.
If our government were scrupulously faithful to the Constitution, we would not need to be especially concerned when a person who represents a philosophy different from our own takes political office. Our Constitution delegates relatively few tasks to the federal government, so it should almost be a matter of indifference who is elected. We wouldn’t have to worry that a social policy of which we disapproved would be imposed on our neighborhood at the whim of the new president and his court appointees, or that more of our money would be stolen to fund yet another government boondoggle. And we would also be spared the spectacle of countless American individuals and corporations frantically donating to candidates for political office during election years in order to reserve a place on the federal gravy train if their favorite should win.
I’ve often cautioned conservatives who are tempted to give more power to the federal government in general or the executive branch in particular that those additional powers will be available to whoever takes office next—and that person may not be to your liking. I now find myself offering the same words of caution to liberals: whatever temptation you may have to exceed the powers granted under the Constitution, understand that you are opening a Pandora’s box. Once we lose our respect for the Constitution and begin interpreting it so that it happens to permit our pet programs, we have no right to be surprised when our political opponents come along with their own ideas for interpreting the Constitution loosely.