“People are crazy.”—Billy Currington.

Here’s hoping they hire a genuine scholar of the founding documents instead of someone who will try to twist everything into America bad, hateful, evil.

Clearly, The Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (CWGS) at the University of South Carolina Upstate (USCU) hasn’t completed it’s mission to inspire diversity and inclusiveness … even within their own supporters.

I’ve been following this in my local newspaper. In a letter to the editor, an Upstate history professor took issue with the General Assembly’s move to teach the founding documents. In the Professor’s estimation, conservatives in the Legislature might find: “The principles of these documents are often not congruent with the conservative, anti-federal and pro-state position imagined by members of the Assembly.” So okay, he’s bought the left’s talking points about those awful radical right wingers, but he stepped on history’s toes when he went on to explain that Hamilton, when asked if he wanted to abolish states, replied ‘yes’, then quoted Madison as saying “he would retain the states only so long as they were ‘subordinately useful’–subordinate to the national government.”

It just so happens that the day before this letter to the editor appeared, I had read that specific Madison letter. The phrase came from a letter Madison wrote to Edmund Randolph of April 8, 1787, a month before the Convention met. Context can be a bummer, but what Madison wrote was that “…individual independence of the states…” was “…utterly irreconcilable with the idea of an aggregate sovereignty.” He went on to state, “I think, at the same, that a consolidation of the states into one simple republic is not less unattainable than it would be inexpedient.”

Obviously, Madison found the existing circumstances irreconcilable, considering the failure of the Articles of the Confederation and states squabbling about anything and everything. He also wrote in the same letter his thoughts on a new central government’s positive v. negative rights: “Let the National Government be armed with a positive and complete authority in all cases where uniform measures are necessary, as in Trade, etc. Let it also retain the powers which it now possesses. Let it have a negative in all cases, whatsoever, on the Legislative acts of the states… This I conceive to be essential and the least possible abridgement of the State sovereignties.”

Looks like the Professor thinks the ‘negative’ Madison talked about gave Congress the authority to ‘negate’ State Legislative acts. If he applied a little logic and a few more sentences, he would have seen that the negative right limited Congress to the delegated positive rights that the people agreed state ‘subordination’ would be ‘useful’. Or he’s never read the letter and just burped up a line he’d read somewhere.

Hamilton denied wanting to abolish the states in the Convention, but this was construed by others from a statement, one of his few at the convention, he made in the opening suggesting supreme federal authority over state legislature. The ramification of what he said didn’t go unnoticed. Dr. Johnson called him on being “…one gentleman alone…” who “boldly and decisively contended for an abolition of the State Government.”

Hamilton also denied the abolishment sentiment multiple times after the Convention when he was accused of being a monarchist. Records tell us that his participation in Convention discussions was minimal and that he readily voted for, and supported, the final draft of the Constitution, as he himself noted later in his own defense. Regardless of Hamilton’s intent, any suggestion of abolishing the states or their sovereign interests was soundly rejected. It was never considered.

And, btw, the word ‘national’ was stricken from the Constitution and replaced with United States. The framers rejected the connotations of the word in favor of a Republic that blended limited nationalism and federalism, with distinctly divided authorities between the central government, its branches, state governments and the people. Madison’s Convention Records tells us this, as does the Constitution.

I’m afraid the Professor made the General Assembly’s point about the necessity of ‘meddling’ in academia, as the Prof. put it, but I’ll give him credit where credit is due; it’s always fun when someone like him inadvertently makes the other guy’s point with gleeful, supreme arrogance.

The woman with the green sign should change it to read “Education; not re-education.

Alumni? How many is he?