Preserving Our “Brick House Atop a Lonely Hill”
I’d like to tell you a story. It’s quick, just a page or so, but it’s one that you may find familiar. This story is about a brick house built atop a lonely hill. Robust and sturdy in its design, it housed four brothers who long relied on its structural integrity for safety and security.
One morning, the first of four brothers decided to get some fresh air. As he walked outside, he turned to marvel at the monument of burnt blocks before him. “Its foundation is so strong,” he thought.
His examination of the house’s design reminded him of the fireplace he had been building just inside its walls. He’d been working on it for months, but still needed a few more layers of material to finish its chimney. “A few missing bricks won’t weaken this house in the slightest,” he thought, “Either way, I don’t have time to cast any clay of my own, and if I don’t finish this project soon, we’ll have to suffer through the cold this winter.”
So, the first brother pulled a half dozen bricks from the house’s facade, and completed his fireplace.
Taking note of the ease by which his brother removed these bricks from their mortar bonds, the second brother decided to do the same a few weeks later — this time to refurbish the crumbling wall that protected the house. “Just a few more bricks won’t hurt,” he thought, “After all, the must wall be made strong to defend against the wolves that come in the night.”
So, the second brother extracted a handful of bricks from the house’s foundation and reinforced the damaged wall.
The third brother, having seen his siblings rip the bricks out of their once pristine home, could not help but be horrified by their disregard for the family’s only shelter. “If we continue,” he told them, “neither the fireplace nor the wall will have any use without this house to protect us from the elements.”
But the two brothers dismissed his concerns, declaring that their home was as strong as it had ever been.
Another few weeks passed, and the fourth brother found himself inspecting the house just like his older brothers had. The fire pit where the family cooked their food had fallen apart in a thunderstorm, and he hoped to put it back together. Having seen his brothers so easily remove bricks from the house without consequence, the fourth brother decided to pull out a couple more. “After all,” he thought, “we’ll need a fire for dinner tonight.”
But just as the fourth brother finished removing one final brick, an unexpected gust of wind came upon him. The force knocked him off his feet, and when he finally regained balance, he was shocked at what he saw.
The third brother’s words proved prophetic, and his family, now exposed to the elements without their brick house for protection, prepared for a cold winter atop the lonely hill.
Since the inception of the American republic nearly 250 years ago, various attempts have been made to take “bricks” out of the house that is the American constitutional system. Like the first brother trying to build his family a source of warmth, or the second brother attempting to strengthen their defense against trespassers, some of these attempts to subvert the constitutional order were made in good faith and with the intention of enabling the government to solve very serious societal problems. However, like the brick house, the removal of checks on presidential and legislative power would surely lead to the leveling of our political institutions and the liberties they protect.
Put more directly: like the brothers — who were left out in the cold without the warmth and security that they had removed their bricks for — the benefits of any legislation that we would remove our constitutional bricks for would eventually be rendered meaningless, because the process of doing so would mean the destruction of the basic individual rights that allow for the enjoyment of those benefits in the first place.
Out of all the attempts to rip a brick out of the American system’s foundation, there is perhaps not a single example more significant than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal Era Supreme Court packing scheme.
In February of 1937 — shortly after the Supreme Court unanimously invalidated a slew of unconstitutional New Deal regulations — Roosevelt proposed the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill, which would have given him the power to appoint an additional judge to the Supreme Court for every member of the court over the age of 70. Roosevelt claimed that the bill was meant to inject “younger and more vigorous blood” into the court, but his true intentions were obvious: he wanted to ensure that his New Deal policies were never reversed by the courts again, no matter the collateral — including future violations of the rights of individuals and businesses.
Hoping to quickly shepherd this plan through the Democrat controlled Congress and continue advancing his vision for a “better” America, Roosevelt was shocked to find utter disapproval of the proposal from nearly the entire body. Even Roosevelt’s most ardent New Deal supporters, namely House Judiciary Committee Chairman Hatton W. Summers, refused to endorse the bill, stating that it would “destroy the independence of the judiciary, the only certain shield of individual rights.”
Sumners, and the vast majority of Democrats who joined him in opposing Roosevelt’s proposal, were not only floored by a scheme that was so transparently power hungry in its motivation, but also angered by an action that was so blatantly illiberal as to wholly undermine the authority of the Supreme Court. This led the Democrat led Judiciary Committee — again, filled with some of the most loyal supporters of Roosevelt and his government expanding New Deal policies — to author what would become known as the “Adverse Report.” In it, the committee savagely condemned Roosevelt’s attempt to circumvent the democratic process; an attempt that they knew was made with the express purpose of pushing through policies that the American people had not voted for or consented to.
“The theory of the bill is in direct violation of the spirit of the American Constitution and its employment would permit alteration of the Constitution without the people’s consent or approval; it undermines the protection our constitution system gives to minorities and is subversive of the rights of individuals… We recommend the rejection of this bill as a needless, futile, and utterly dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle.”
These were Roosevelt’s brothers in arms. Men who, in no uncertain terms, were more willing than almost any other political faction in United States history to increase the size of government and centralize its power. And they still defied Roosevelts wishes.
What is truly astonishing about such a large number of progressive Democrats’ refusing to go along with Roosevelt’s scheme, is the fact that, just months earlier, their party had achieved what are still the largest congressional majorities in modern American history. In the 1936 elections there were nearly 5 times more Democrats than Republicans elected to the Senate, and nearly 4 times more elected to the House. From 1937-1939 there were just 16 Republican Senators in Congress compared to the Democrats’ 75, a 59 seat majority that had never been achieved before.
It would have been easy for Democrats to snatch the bricks from our constitutional foundation — effectively throwing out what was unquestionably the most important check on their power: unbiased judicial review of the statutes they passed. After all, it would have guaranteed the implementation of what they believed to be immensely important legislation, and would have likely etched in stone every element of their beloved New Deal for generations to come. But these men refused to take that power for themselves, and they refused it vehemently.
Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee reviewing Roosevelt’s “court-packing plan” (February, 1937).
Why did they do this, and why with such a forceful rebuke? Because, they understood that the massive democratic mandate given to them by the people had to remain just that: democratic. If Democrats had gone along with Roosevelt’s court-packing plan, yes, they would have been able to pass nearly every policy that their hearts desired, but they would’ve also been engaging in a type of government rule that they, and those who held their offices before them, had worked so hard to defend against: tyranny. Tyranny of the majority, to be exact — an evil that these men themselves described in their report as antithetical to “the preservation of the rights of the individual,” “the maintenance of the liberties of [political] minorities,” and “ the independent expression of honest difference of opinion.”
Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives, they all agreed: destroying the process that ensured that American government protected the individual liberty of all citizens — not just those in the majority — would lead the republic to deteriorate into nothing more than a tyrannical regime dictated by whomever happened to control Congress and the White House. They knew that no law, no rule, no regulation was important enough to strip America of her constitutional design, which had, for over 150 years, made the country immune to the kinds of mob rule and despotic regimes that every other experiment in liberty before it had crumbled under. Roosevelt’s progressive counterparts could not have said it any better themselves:
“[The American system] is immeasurably more important, immeasurably more sacred to the people of America, indeed, to the people of all the world, than the immediate adoption of any legislation however beneficial.”
Our ability to embody the spirit of this idea is the lone guardian of our country’s prosperity. It represents a true understanding and a true allegiance to the necessity of maintaining our institutions— no matter the conflicting political incentives or short sighted moral ends that may tempt one to do away with them. This process, laid out by our constitution and over two centuries of institutional norms, has enabled a continent sized nation, with the most culturally diverse population in the world, to enjoy levels of true freedom and prosperity that are unrivaled by countries much more easily governed than our own. It maintains a republic that, more perfectly than any other before it, refuses to sacrifice fundamental freedoms in the name of order, while also ensuring that individuals with completely different political and religious beliefs, cultural customs, and economic interests can live together peacefully under one flag.
In 1937, the rise of the types of despotic regimes that America’s constitutional system was crafted to stop were reaching their peaks in Europe. America’s political class understood that without faithful adherence to the Constitution — with its power diffusing checks and balances and decentralizing divisions between local, state, and federal power — the positive outcomes of legislation would mean nothing if it meant the destruction of these crucial democratic procedures in the process. They knew that disregarding these institutional norms would open the door to making America just as susceptible to the fascist and communist regimes that had taken over entire countries in Europe — countries that, much like the United States, had thought their freedom was impenetrable.
So, in the end, New Deal Democrats did not allow their political affiliation to the president, nor their fierce desire to enact change, to affect their decision. The only calculation involved was their love for liberty and fear of ever allowing it to slip away. They refused to rip the brick out.
Now, 86 years later, we find ourselves in a very similar situation — though, the current pressure campaign is much more intense than it was nearly a century ago.
In 1937, we had one politician casting a court packing trial balloon, doomed to be refused almost unanimously by his own party. Today we have a party — emboldened by its most radical elements — calling for a laundry list of massive structural changes to the ravenous cheers of much of the media.
The complete overhaul of America’s institutions has become a central plank of the radical progressive wing of the Democratic Party. And as their influence over the party expands, so do the anti-democratic nature of their proposals. It seems that Democrats increasingly believe that their preferred policy approach to almost every issue is somehow of such high moral importance, or so critically urgent to the betterment of the country, that the “sacred American system,” a system that their party’s forefathers passionately defended, is now worth sacrificing. Here’s a list of just a few of the hundreds year old institutions that Democrats have offered up as sacrificial lambs at the altar of their progressive policies:
Massively expanding the influence and power of the federal bureaucracy and depriving states the right to govern as their residents see fit.
And, most recently, attempting to misinterpret the 14th amendment to give their party’s president the power to decide how much borrowing and spending our government can do.
These actions, no matter how noble their proponents believe their ends to be, would set a precedent that would make the usurpation of the people’s will an institutional norm. An unelected bureaucracy would control much of the policy dictating our day to day lives. The Supreme Court’s power to invalidate laws that infringe people’s individual rights would become useless. And the ruling majority would effectively be able to pass any law, by any means necessary, with no recourse for those who disagree, no matter how slim the majority-minority split. Put more succinctly, representative government would cease to exist in this country.
If Roosevelt’s court packing plan was an act of brick removal, the Left’s current proposals are akin to a complete excavation. A bulldozing of the entire system, not just to pass “beneficial” legislation in the short term, but to seize complete control of the federal government for decades to come.
At the moment, there are large enough contingents of other Democrats in Congress — who have come out against these ideas just as vigorously as Roosevelt’s Democrats — to rebuff these efforts. But considering the party’s recent embrace of the more radical wing of the party, these members’ influence will almost certainly not last.
It is, after all, human nature to want to mold the communities and societies we live in around our beliefs. Whether it’s for abortion, gun rights, redistribution of wealth, take your pick — many of us would find it quite difficult to resist the power to ensure our desired outcomes on these issues. And as time has passed, and new generations have begun to forget the fragile nature of our freedom, the impulse to force into existence our desired reality has grown. But we must resist that urge. We must reject all notions that the American system is outdated or a hindrance to progress. The American system is only a hindrance to the evil of one group imposing their idea of progress onto another. That is a truth that will never be outdated.
If we allow ourselves to be so blinded by our passion to immediately solve the issue of the day that we can no longer see this, the resulting transgressions against our constitutional order will undoubtedly lead to the destruction of American liberty as we know it.
No matter how important we believe an issue to be, no matter how urgently we believe a problem must be solved, we must learn from the men who rejected those same impulses nearly a century ago. For if we rip one brick from the foundation, we empower the removal of them all, and no groundbreaking legislation or sweeping government program is important enough to tear down the very institutions that allow us to enjoy their benefits.
