Ratifying the U.S. Constitution

America went from being a loose union of individual states to being a nation with a central government when the Constitution was ratified. This was more important than the War for Independence, because it dictated the type of government we would have. The Federalists, led by Hamilton, wanted a strong central government. The Anti-Federalists wanted every state to be its own government. The guiding question of this essay is: Should the U.S. have ratified the Constitution or stayed a loose confederation? This paper will show why the U.S.

was better off not ratifying the Constitution and remaining a loose confederation of states. An interesting article at Mises Institute by Gary Galles argued that history has proven that the Anti-Federalists were right in their fears of what would happen should a central government be founded. As Galles notes, the Anti-Federalists were opposed to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution because they were worried it would lead to the same kind of tyrannical government the U.S. had just opposed in the Revolutionary War.

Many of the Anti-Federalist supporters were farmers and people living in rural regions (U.S. History). They did not want a central government telling them what to do. Rather they wanted to keep government at the local level. That way they could have more control over their own lives without some group of people a thousand miles away in some other part of the country deciding what was best for them. Alexander Hamilton was one of the main authors of the Federalist Papers.

The Federalists wanted to ratify the Constitution and have a strong central government overseeing things among the states for various reasons. They wanted a strong central government because they did not want the people at the local level getting in the way of their grand ambitions. They wanted to have the final say over the whole of the land. So they thought up reasons for why the states themselves could not be trusted to govern themselves.

Hamilton wrote: “America, if not connected at all, or only by the feeble tie of a simple league, offensive and defensive, would, by the operation of such jarring alliances, be gradually entangled in all the pernicious labyrinths of European politics and wars” (Federalist No. 7). He wanted to scare the states into thinking that they all needed to be ruled by one central authority who would have the good sense to keep everyone out of any foreign wars. History shows just how true that is.

One glance at the 20th century shows an America led around by the central government getting into war after war all over the world. So in this perspective, Alexander Hamilton was dead-wrong about the Constitution keeping the states out of foreign entanglements. The 20th century is one, big long foreign entanglement, from the Spanish American War to WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, to the post-9/11 wars, including the Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

And on whose behalf were these wars fought? The state’s? No, but rather the federal government’s behalf. The Federalists also believed that the Constitution would protect the states from “domestic factions and convulsions” and provide them with a sense of unity and cohesion that they would need to survive (Federalist No. 6). Yet, just the opposite happened here, too. The Constitution gave power to the federal government, led by the President, which then assumed more power than it actually legitimately had.

The states protested and in the end an enormous war broke out over states’ rights—the Civil War of the 1860s. So not even a century after the Constitution was ratified, Hamilton was being proved to be wrong: the Constitution did not provide unity and cohesion but exasperation and discord. The states wanted to be the authorities over their own affairs and the central government was trying to tell them what they could and could not do. The Anti-Federalists argued against the Constitution’s ratification.

They did not want to see the states hand over their newfound rights and powers to a central government. They viewed a federal government as being a pathway to “despotism, or, what is worse, a tyrranic aristocracy” (Brutus No. 1). The Anti-Federalists were led by men like Patrick Henry who did not trust the Northern “Federalists” like Hamilton. Henry wanted his state to be independent from any decisions the northerners made.

He did not want the bankers or the big business interests of New England assuming control over the Southern states. The Anti-Federalists stated that the Constitution would give power to a small, tight-knit group of people in the North, who would “possess absolute and uncontrollable power, legislative, executive and judicial” and that “intervention of the state governments” would be impossible (Brutus No. 1).

As far as the Anti-Federalists were concerned, the Constitution was just a way of concentrating power in the hands of a small cabal of powerful elites hiding behind the mask of “federal” government. Not all of the Anti-Federalists were southerners, though. As Galles points out, “One of the most insightful of the Antifederalists was Robert Yates, a New York judge who, as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, withdrew because the convention was exceeding its instructions. Yates wrote as Brutus in the debates over the Constitution.

Given his experience as a judge, his claim that the Supreme Court would become a source of almost unlimited federal over-reaching was particularly insightful.” This turned out to be true when President Jefferson challenged some appointments made by the outgoing President Adams. The Supreme Court took up the case and showed that it had the power of judicial review.

Judicial review was defined as the power of the Supreme Court to determine whether a piece of legislation violated the Constitution, which the Supreme Court determined to be the law of the land and which the Supreme Court determined it alone had the power to interpret. This power to interpret the law was exactly what “Brutus” of the Anti-Federalist papers feared would lead to judicial tyranny.

Today the Supreme Court and the minor courts have a kind of judicial tyranny over the government, as many critics argue—so, again, it appears that the Anti-Federalists were correct in their warnings. How have the other views of the Anti-Federalists turned out today? The states seem to have not much power when it comes to deciding things for themselves. Today, the federal government has become so ridiculously big that it is like a giant behemoth of a bureaucracy.

And there is still a cabal of elites who have special power in the government. This was made clear in the aftermath of 9/11 when a cabal of individuals in the State Department cooked up bogus intelligence about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction just to get rid of Saddam Hussein. The whole thing was a plot to further the agenda of a single state in the Middle East that has one of most powerful lobbies in the U.S.

(AIPAC) and whose Prime Minister gets standing ovations dozens of times during his speeches to Congress whenever he visits because all the Congressmen know who writes their checks when it comes time for re-election. Had the Anti-Federalists won, the situation never would have ended up this way. And as Galles states, Brutus predicted that the Supreme Court would adopt "very liberal" principles of interpreting the Constitution.

He argued that there had never in history been a court with such power and with so few checks upon it, giving the Supreme Court "immense powers" that were not only unprecedented, but perilous for a nation founded on the principle of consent of the governed. Given the extent to which citizens' power to effectively withhold their consent from federal actions has been eviscerated, it is hard to argue with Brutus's conclusion.

Thus, one can see that the Anti-Federalist position was most likely the correct one in terms of states losing their power to a branch of government that consisted of unelected officials (judges are appointed by the President and confirmed by Congress). The idea of so many diverse people being represented by so few in the federal government was irrational, as the Anti-Federalists pointed out: “One man, or a few men, cannot possibly represent the feelings, opinions, and characters of a great multitude.

In this respect, the new constitution is radically defective” (Brutus No. 3). The Anti-Federalists wanted a loose confederation of states, with state governments having independence and autonomy from one another and freedom from a central government intervening and stepping into their affairs. Each state was supposed to be like its own sovereign nation. The United States was supposed to be something like the EU, though the EU also has a kind of tyrannical central government that now tries to tell the member states what they can and cannot do.

Just look at how difficult it is for a nation like England simply to withdraw from the Union. Of course, when the South tried to withdraw from the Union, a war followed in the U.S.—so it may be that one follows in Europe soon, too. And because the U.S.

is governed by a federal government that now has powers to go to war whenever it sees fit without any permission from Congress thanks to legislation that was passed following 9/11 giving the President immense powers, it could so happen that the Hamiltonian central government could get the states involved in even more foreign entanglements. As History.com points out, the U.S. Constitution is “the oldest written constitution in operation in the world.” But does that make it the best—or does that mean it.