Hendrik Hertzberg: Armey Flunks Pop Quiz

[babylonsister]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2010/03/armey-flunks-pop-quiz.html

Armey Flunks Pop Quiz
Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg


HH fave bloggers Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait both pick up on a gem from the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank.

(We join Dick Armey, formerly the House Republican Leader, now a lobbyist and Tea Party financier, toward the end of his history lecture Monday at the National Press Club.)

A member of the audience passed a question to the moderator, who read it to Armey: How can the Federalist Papers be an inspiration for the tea party, when their principal author, Alexander Hamilton, “was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government”?

Historian Armey was flummoxed by this new information. “Widely regarded by whom?” he challenged, suspiciously. “Today’s modern ill-informed political science professors? … I just doubt that was the case in fact about Hamilton.”

Alas, for Armey, it was the case. Hamilton favored a national bank, presidents and senators who served for life and state governors appointed by the president.

As a historian, Armey was all hat and no cattle. But at least he had a good hat—a “downright stylish and manly” Stetson 200X beaver, which he donned for the audience.

By the way, having state governors federally appointed was Hamilton’s fallback position. He actually favored eliminating the states altogether and replacing them with freshly-drawn administrative districts of roughly equal population. This would have been an excellent idea for many reasons, one of which is that it would have avoided the absurd business of cities (e.g., New York) that are stuck in a multi-jurisdictional “tri-state area.”

No doubt Armey is equally unaware that Hamilton favored a federal “negative”—that is, investing Congress with the power to nullify state laws at will. Madison was on board with a federal negative, too. Jemmy was also against the two-senators-per-state nonsense. He argued that states with bigger populations should have more senators, an idea he called “proportional representation.”

You won’t find this stuff in the Federalist Papers, which were written after the Constitution’s text was a fait accompli. Once the deals were done, Hamilton and Madison (and Jay) loyally sucked it up and presented a united front. But what they wrote for post-convention public consumption tells you very little about the government they would have designed if they hadn’t had to make so many compromises with hard-core slavocrats and wee-state paranoids.

[Historic NY]

1. They like to claim what the Founding Fathers had in mind...must be using Texas textbooks.

[bulloney]

2. I've said for years there's a direct correlation

between how conservative you are and how ignorant you are on history.

If not, the Republicans wouldn't be so boisterous about their presidents and policies. They hold Reagan at the highest esteem, yet, his policies were nearly 180 degrees from real conservative beliefs:

Record federal spending and deficits

Record expansion of the military

Expansion of federal government employment and bureaucracy

Our only divorced president

Conceived a child out of wedlock

Armey obviously received his education from the Texas school system with their crazy revisions of history.