Jefferson a Talk With Thomas Jefferson: Understanding

Jefferson A Talk with Thomas Jefferson: Understanding and Explaining the U.S. Government from a Centuries-Old Perspective TJ: Did it work? Am I here? Did I make it as far as I intended? I told Sally to turn the crank as fast as she could, but I'm not sure my temporal advancement device is functioning properly and that Hemmings girl has a mind of her own, sometimes. ME: Umm if you mean you built a time machine to take you to the twenty-first century, then yeah, it worked.

It's 2012, to be exact. And you are…. TJ: Thomas Jefferson, Agrarian Democrat, at your service. As you are at my service. And as we are both at service to society at large, and as society at large is at service to use, all equal in our powers, positions, rights, and responsibilities. Just how a democracy is supposed to work.

ME: Technically the United States is a federalist representative form of government; it's a type of republic TJ: Of course, of course -- you don't have to tell me what type of government this is. I helped design it. Full of checks and balances, free from financial constraints, and even though Hamilton got his national bank I'm sure the system of free education and the free press has continued to place a check on the power of credit.

ME: Well, not exactly….I mean, the checks and balances are still mostly there: the Congress (the legislative branch) makes the laws, the Supreme Court (the judicial branch) interprets the laws and determines how they should be applied when there are questions, and the president (the head of the Executive Branch) oversees the carrying out of the laws.

Political parties have kind of changed the way things actually work though, with Congress basically divided between Republicans and Democrats, and with Representative and Senator becoming long-term occupations rather than temporary positions held by normal citizens. Almost every President in the last 150 years has belonged to one of these two parties, too, and this means there are associations and oppositions between the President and Congress that are more political than they are the intended checks and balances of the government as you designed it.

The President can be very powerful if he (or she, perhaps, in the future) has a Congress that supports him, but a heavily divided or strongly opposed Congress can make the President basically powerless. Similarly, a strongly divided Congress can be made powerless both by its own inability to get things done and through the veto power of the President, which can override a simply majority of agreement in Congress.

So really the two parties rather than any individual branches of government are, at least in some ways, responsible for shaping the trajectory and actions of the government. TJ: But that's…I mean, how could….one man, one vote! ME: Oh, that's still true. One woman, one vote, too. And slavery doesn't exist, so truly ALL men and women that are legal citizens of the United States get to vote.

Most of them don't, though, because they feel (perhaps rightly) that a vote for anyone other than the candidates of the two political parties is wasted, anyway, whether it's for the President, a representative or senator in Congress, or even for state and local offices for the most part.

TJ: The same parties exist for state offices? But the powers of the federal and the state governments are still separated, right? I mean, that was a pretty big deal back in my day ME: Well, they're still separate in some ways. The federal government is pretty powerful, and state's rights have grown in some ways and diminished in others.

The federal government is still the only government that can make a treaty with a foreign nation, and is also supposed to be the only government that can control the nation's borders in terms of travel and immigration, while states are the only entities that can impose taxes for goods and services sold as business commodities and are equipped with the power to enforce state and local laws, which the federal government cannot become involved in.

TJ: What do you mean when you say that the federal government is "supposed to be" the only government that can control the nation's borders, and immigration? The federal government is supposed to be in charge of these areas because it is less reactionary, and less prone to the fear of immigration that can exist in certain pockets in the population (although those Alien & Sedition Acts were pretty bad….) ME: Well, immigration has become a big issue again, and in fact some states have started to make their own laws about how border patrol should take place, how immigrants should be documented, and how enforcement of immigration laws should be carried out.

The Supreme Court and sometimes other District Courts are involved in settling these and other federal/state disputes by interpreting the Constitution, other federal laws, and state laws to determine if there are any conflicts or discrepancies. Ultimately, if the Supreme Court decides that a state law is in violation of federal law or the Constitution, the state law will be struck down; if it is determined that a federal law limits state's rights in violation of the Constitution, the federal law will be struck down.

TJ: Well at least that's still working! Political parties, a lack of voting, and from what you implied earlier there is a growing influence of money on national politics and the governmental structure and a lack of education influencing the voting public in a negative way -- it seems like most of the government we envisioned has been subsumed by modern power structures! ME: Yeah…that pretty much sums it up.

I think the government would be a lot better and a lot more efficient if term limits for election to Congress were imposed, and if there was much stricter regulation of lobbyists, and also TJ: "Lobbyists"? What are those? ME: Oh, yeah, you didn't have those. Lobbyists are people who provide information to government officials.