Our American Story

Fixing the Sausage Grinder

Hank Thomas

• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781662446436
• eBook ISBN: 9781662446443
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Almost nobody approves of the way our government is working. Almost everybody agrees that money in the form of political donations is a major part of the problems we witness. Corporate and special interest donations are seen as the most egregious parts of the political finance problem.

Our history books are not as complete as they arguably should have been when it comes to some of our more controversial historical events. It is difficult to imagine any reason for these omissions that does not involve malice on the part of the author. After all, when was the last time someone came to you with information they did not want you to have?

The goal of this book is to offer ideas about how we might fix the political dysfunction that dominates our daily news and conversation. The reader will, I hope, find themselves drawn into a conversation that will be comfortable and productive when it comes to their involvement. The more we talk to one another, the more likely it will be that we begin to agree on solutions to our current political problems.

Chapter 1

Continuing Areas of Disagreement

We are pretty much all in agreement that our federal government process is broken and needs to be fixed. I think we can also pretty much agree that the main thing we want from our government is an atmosphere of greater civil debate and compromise on legislation that is helpful to our citizens in their daily lives. We need work on a comprehensive reform of our health-care system to make it conform to the needs of more of our citizens, a comprehensive immigration reform, a comprehensive tax reform, a balanced budget with commitment to remain in that posture for the long term, a comprehensive reform of the Social Security program to put it on a sustainable financial footing, and all these many things need to be accomplished while staying true to the values we all believe our country should be standing for on the world stage.

I think it is obvious to us all that government is not necessary when we have agreement. I also think we understand that the purpose of the government is to establish laws and regulations to control our society for the benefit of the majority of our members. It is a process—the government defines a process by which we maintain order within our society while we sort out our differences.

We might like to think that when the government imposes a law or regulation on our society, it will become part of the fabric of our community and everyone will accept it as part of our way of life, but we are human, and our disagreements do last. Sometimes our disagreements are even reinforced and turned into deeply felt anger as a consequence of a new law or regulation and the way in which it is implemented. The following paragraphs will attempt to examine some of those lasting disagreements and find a continuous thread of events relating to them from start to the present. No one should think that I am claiming my work to be all-inclusive; rather, I am offering a continuous thread of events with the hope that you, my readers, will fill in some additional details where you think it appropriate. We might think of it as me offering a skeleton of facts and you adding some meat on those bones at your pleasure.

I am hoping that as we have this conversation, we will arrive at a mutual understanding of our disagreements. It would be nice to think that some of our disagreements would be softened in the process, but even if that is not the case, I think we will be better prepared to understand one another and find opportunities to re-engage legislatively for the purpose of turning some of our lasting disagreements in the direction of greater agreement.

We turn on the television to watch the evening news and we are assaulted by the dysfunctional content that our politicians have created. They argue about everything and agree on almost nothing. In some cases, we can trace the disagreement back to the very birth of our nation. What follows in this section of the book are chronicles of the more significant disagreements that continue to the present. I offer you a continuous thread of events from the first evidence of division up to the present incarnation of the debate. It is my consistent goal to give you the facts as they have actually evolved up to their current character. Sometimes the chronology is lengthy, and sometimes it is sparse, but as Sergeant Friday used to say, these are just the facts, and I have intentionally tried to leave out a lot of embellishment.

Christianity

Why should I have a conversation about Christianity in a part of my book that contains a discussion about continuing areas of disagreement? Good question! Allow me to explain myself.

I have yet to discover any research that would speak clearly and credibly to the religious makeup of the colonies. There is probably little disagreement that Christianity was the predominant religious denomination in the colonies, though I suspect that within the Christian community there were some numbers of differing sects. There might not have been so many differences in any particular colony, but we probably would find more differences between some of the colonies. I’m thinking about Pennsylvania and Virginia as an example. We also know that as the colonies prospered and grew, their populations became less homogenous in many of their characteristics, and religion would certainly be one of those characteristics.

There is no question in my mind that Christianity, in its many forms, remained the most widely practiced denomination, but as time went by, other denominations also arrived in the colonies. My guess would be that the non-Christian population remained just a small portion of the total, but the size of that population was probably growing and becoming more significant as the Revolutionary War approached. As the various states were busy writing their first constitutions, we find Christianity referenced in several of them and I have yet to find other religions mentioned in those texts, and that should offer some indication of the prominence of Christianity within the population at that time.

The Articles of Confederation organized the thirteen colonies into the thirteen United States of America, and their ratification certified them to be our first governing document. The articles were silent when it came to religion in the various states, thus leaving the provisions of the many state constitutions to stand within their respective jurisdictions. Remembering that the articles were written with strong recognition of states’ rights helps to explain some of the behaviors we are finding at the time. The Constitution of the United States was a different matter.

The Constitution came into being because the various states were not recognizing the sovereignty of the other states in all matters pertaining to their mutual interests, and so it was necessary to form a more centralized government to deal with some of the deficiencies. Within that context we find the whole Bill of Rights issue welling up into central prominence as part of the negotiations. In the end, the Bill of Rights, containing the first ten amendments to the Constitution, was ratified by the states, and with that ratification came the certification of the mutually agreed-to civil rights to be observed in all the United States of America.

Our discussion here is about religion in these United States, and so we will concentrate on the First Amendment:

Amendment I—Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Keeping in mind that our government is a composite of all of us when it comes to such things, what are these words about religion telling us: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”? Congress in this instance is the federal legislature, so it is the legislative actions of the federal government that are being restricted. What about the state legislatures? Great question! Let’s take a look at a letter written by President Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802. He was referring to the First Amendment to our United States Constitution when he wrote thus:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

You might wonder about any opinions from the United States Supreme Court on the subject, and sure enough we can find a few. The most relevant reference I have found is an opinion written in 1947 in the case of Everson v. Board of Education. In that opinion, the court closed some remaining questions on the incorporation of religious liberty as applies to the states. The specific question was dealing with the use of public funds to reimburse parents of parochial school students’ use of public school buses.

Everson claimed such payments crossed the separation between church and state, but the court disagreed, in a close 5–4 vote:

The “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect “a wall of separation between Church and State.”

To my way of thinking, this opinion clearly shows the Supreme Court’s intent that the First Amendment prohibitions apply to both federal and state governments. Where does that leave us in this conversation?

We could lay this conversation on the table, but there is one more element of it we must think about, and that is the relationship between Christianity and our national motto. All the way back in 1782, the United States Congress adopted “E Pluribus Unum” as our national motto. We survived quite nicely with it until the mid-1950s, when Congress decided that we needed a clear way to differentiate ourselves from the irreligious and anticlerical ideology of the Soviet Union.

The new national motto, “In God We Trust,” had been used on some of our coins prior to the mid-1950s, but it was not universally endorsed, nor was it used universally on all our currency prior to the passage of this new law. Just a couple of years earlier, the Congress had added “under God” to our Pledge of Allegiance with little resistance.

The constitutionality of the modern national motto has not gone unchallenged with respect to the separation of church and state as outlined in the First Amendment. In 1962 the United States Supreme Court decided a case coming from the state of New York that, while not related to our currency, is still relevant to the discussion about the separation of church and state. That case, Engel v. Vitale, came out of legislation approved by the state of New York that encouraged students to start their school days with the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer with the text “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country. Amen.” The Supreme Court, in a 6–1 decision, held that reciting government-written prayers in public schools was unconstitutional, violating the establishment clause of the First Amendment. But that wasn’t the end of it.

A 1970 case, Aronow v. United States, was the first case to challenge the inclusion of “In God We Trust” on U.S. currency. According to Wikipedia, in 1970, “Stefan Ray Aronow, having been found without standing to sue by the District Court, appealed his case to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit challenging ‘the use of expressions of trust in God by the United States Government on its coi...

Table of contents

• Continuing Areas of Disagreement
• Food for Thought
• How the Government Is Supposed to Work
• Nobody Said It Was Perfect
• How the Government Is Working
• How the Government Got Broken
• Money
• We the People of the United States
• Constituency
• Our Personal Areas of Influence
• Conclusions
• An Action Plan