Imagine the founders' reaction if they heard a prominent senator saying that, not with regret, but exultantly, as though he relished the idea. I can't bring myself to accept that this was what they intended to launch into the world.
I remember often hearing pundits claim that "17 intelligence agencies had confirmed Russian meddling in the 2016 election"
Now, it turned out that "meddling" amounted to buying facebook ads. Not really a huge deal.
But more importantly, since you brought up the founders - what would they say about the fact that we apparently have at least 17 federal agencies dedicated to spying.
> Among other honorifics, George Washington—known as Agent 711 in the Culper Spy Ring—is often heralded as a great “spymaster,” and indeed, he was. Under Washington’s astute watch, several networks of spies operated in both close-knit circles and far-reaching societies.
> Washington recognized the need for an organized approach to espionage.
> The original Committee members—America's first foreign intelligence agency—were Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Johnson and subsequently included James Lovell, who became the Congress' expert on codes and ciphers and has been called the father of American cryptanalysis.
> On June 5, 1776, the Congress appointed John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Edward Rutledge, James Wilson, and Robert Livingston "to consider what is proper to be done with persons giving intelligence to the enemy or supplying them with provisions." They were charged with revising the Articles of War in regard to espionage directed against the American forces. The problem was an urgent one: Dr. Benjamin Church, chief physician of the Continental Army, had already been seized and imprisoned as a British agent, but there was no civilian espionage act, and George Washington thought the existing military law did not provide punishment severe enough to afford a deterrent.
Washington sent an army to squash the Whiskey Rebellion, and John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts into law. They were quite happy to go after threats to their power.
It depends a lot on how you define “their”. In both those cases you could also argue that the president was still establishing the supremacy of a democratically elected republican government as the process for achieving change rather than perpetual revolution. It’s different then having elected officials undermined by permanent bureaucracies.
I’m not defending the sedition act, but it’s quite important that it was implemented during a quasi-war and was still barely passed. There’s also a reason that two hundred years later it’s constantly held up as a paragon of bad law and there’s no way it would pass judicial review at any point since then (it didn’t at the time either, because it expired 2 years after it was passed and before judicial review was established).
Dead on, and those are a couple excellent illustrations of why, no matter how good a chief executive had been before taking office, you have to watch them relentlessly.
not to mention that we're speaking of colonists who intentionally set out to genocide the native population on a regular basis. and most were slavers, putting the lie to any talk of freedom. in the end, little mattered to them in that revolution than removing English fetters on themselves. that people identify with a group that would almost certainly would have denied them the right to legal personhood and look to them as guarantors of freedom only speaks to their historical illiteracy.
The context is really key when you consider the information that the prominent senator is aware of about the subject that you as a random member of the public may not.
If you look at the fate of people like Aaron Burr, I think it’s quite clear that the founders were not supermen, but humans who dealt with similar problems that we do today. Likewise, the post-revolution treatment of tories wasn’t exactly magnanimous either.
