Will Our Founding Fathers Thwart Cap and Trade?

The Cap and Trade legislation recently rushed through the House of Representatives has some people giddy and others absolutely petrified.

But, our Founding Fathers put up a roadblock for such legislation - or at least a formidable hurdle. It's called the Senate.

Thomas Jefferson stated that, "The Senate was intended as a check on the will of the Representatives when too hasty."

James Madison said the Senate “may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.”

Madison further declared, “There are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind?”

That's why there are some in the know who feel Cap and Trade will simply not make it: http://www.businessandmedia.org/printer/2009/20090603094659.aspx.

And, that's why the giddy can blame our Founders and the petrified will bend a knee and thank them...

THOMAS JEFFERSON SPEAKS OUT AGAINST BUDGET

President Jefferson expressed concern that our current budget places an unfair burden on future generations.

He stated, "The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

"To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy," the former president said.

Albert Ellery Bergh

That Host of Worthies

In 1826, due to declining health, Thomas Jefferson regretted that he could not accept the invitation to travel to Washington D.C. and celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence - the Fourth of July:

"I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined us on that day in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made.

May it be to the world what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them."