Robert Parry: Romney's Upside-Down Constitution!

Mitt Romney's "liberty speech" to the National Rifle Association demonstrates how central the Right's false narrative of the nation's founding will be in the November elections, as Republicans depict Barack Obama as alien to the nation's First Principles. Essentially, the Right's narrative holds that the Framers of the Constitution were hostile to a strong central government, for anything but national defense, rejected a federal role in addressing the nation's economic problems, leaving that to the private sector, and supported a system in which the states were very powerful. None of these points are true, of course, at least not for the Constitution. They were true for the Articles of Confederation, which governed the original 13 states from 1777 to 1787. But the Framers, especially James Madison and George Washington, came to view the Articles as ineffectual and dangerous. Madison, Washington and most other Founders recognized that a system of 13 "sovereign" and "independent" states within a weak confederation was a threat to the young nation's commerce, for instance, was viewed as an invitation for rich European countries to lure away a state or even a region by offering commercial advantages. Thus, contrary to the Right's notion that the Framers were government-hating ideologues, akin to today's Tea Partiers, the reality was that most of the Framers were pragmatic individuals dedicated to the nation's political independence and economic success. For that, they realized that the Articles, with their weak central government had to be jettisoned in favor of an entirely new system that granted the central government broad powers to tax, to issue currency, to make treaties, to build a military, and to pass laws to "promote the general Welfare." One of the most important new powers was an unlimited one, authorizing the federal government to regulate interstate commerce.