WHEN PENGUINS FLEW AND WATER BURNED This is the true memoir of one US Air Force navigator’s journey from the schoolhouses of Air Training Command to the nuclear alerts of the Cold War to combat in a 35-year-old anachronism called the B-52. It is a first-hand account of life during the last days of Strategic Air Command, the early days of Air Combat Command and the ensuing military drawdown of the 1990s. From peacetime training exercises across the globe to combat operations in Desert Storm, Jim Clonts takes the reader inside the cockpit where life and death are seconds apart. Often comical, sometimes heart-pounding, other times tragic, WHEN PENGUINS FLEW AND WATER BURNED takes you into the world of military aviation, a crucible where warriors learn the true nature of character, conscience and mortality.

Friends of Liberty VOL 57
by Jim Clonts, 2010

06/17/2010

The Federalist Papers were a series of essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay which explained in detail how the government of the United States was intended to work. The ink was not yet dry on the Constitution when the Federalist Papers were published. They were intended to garner support for it and put to rest concerns States had that they were losing too much sovereignty to a centralized Federal Government. I was recently reading the Federalists Papers and came across a gem from James Madison in Federalist #51. He was writing about how our system of government was determined.

Madison said the Founders had taken great pains to educate themselves on as many previous forms of government as possible. They looked to the Ancient Greeks, the Roman Republic and the British Parliamentary system to name just a few. In the end the Founders determined something very crucial to the success of America. Humans are by their very nature flawed, factious and conflicted beings. Any future government could not depend on the benevolence or goodwill of a single man or even a single governing body.

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary," Madison wrote.

They determined that due to Human Nature, the vast differences in opinion, ability, ambition and faction, government works best when in conflict with itself. Therefore, a careful balance of power was required. Any successful, long-lived government must be adversarial in nature.

This adversarial concept is what gave us the Federal System itself, balancing the individual State's interests against the power of a central, Federal Government. The 10th Amendment was instituted to ensure anything not enumerated as a Federal power was retained by the States and the People. The three branches of the Federal Government, the Executive, the Legislative and the Judicial, were the result of further segregation of powers. The Legislative process itself was split four ways, with the House pitted against the Senate, the President being the last hurdle towards passage of any new law and the Supreme Court to challenge its Constitutionality. To further ensure the separation of powers, United States Senators were not elected by the People, but by their respective State Legislatures. This was an attempt to ensure Senators put their State's interests first, since keeping their jobs depended on satisfying the desires of their legislatures back home. And of course, the President was elected by "electors", appointed by the US Congress, ensuring the power of the President was kept in check by the very origins of his election within the legislature.

The Founders felt this system of a "government set against itself" would provide natural checks and balances to prevent the rise of a tyrant and the passage of laws reflecting the winds of the moment. It would keep power decentralized and in the hands of the electorate, always a maximum of two years away from the next election where every seat in the House is up for grabs. It was also intended to keep the Federal Government subservient to the States.

James Madison writes in Federalist 45, "the principle branches of the federal government will owe its existence more or less to the favor of the state governments"

He goes on to say, "The number of individuals employed under the constitution of the United States will be much smaller than the number employed under the particular states."

Unfortunately, this adversarial system, so carefully constructed by the Founders, has been systematically dismantled over the last 100 years. The 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, mandated direct election of senators, eroding state influence over the federal government. Even our presidential elections are essentially by popular vote, albeit on a state by state level. In most states the popularly elected candidate receives all the Electoral votes of that state, again eroding the power of the state legislatures over the federal government. And today the largest employer in the country is the Federal Government.

The adversarial system often finds itself at the mercy of the political pendulum. When there is great public dissatisfaction it has become quite common for the political tide to turn sharply and one party sweeps into office with overwhelming majorities. (Carter in 76, Reagan in 80, the Republican Congress in 94 and Obama in 08 are good examples.) Quite often state legislative and gubernatorial candidates ride on the coattails of the Federal candidates. When Obama won, the force of his candidacy delivered powerful majorities in the House and Senate as well as Democrat victories in state-level positions of power across the country. When this happened, the US House, the US Senate, the Democrat-controlled state legislatures and governors became sounding boards for the Federal agenda, nothing but local yes men for the Obama Administration. The Democrat-controlled states effectively surrendering their adversarial role in support of the Federal Government. The adversarial relationship between the US House and US Senate disappeared like hanging chads in Florida. This centralization of power is what the Founders tried hard to avoid. They knew from history when absolute power goes unchecked, it inevitably results in tyranny.

Personal note: my reading of the Federalist Papers has been both enlightening and sobering. It saddens me to see just how far we have strayed from the original government the Founding Fathers so carefully conceived. Although President Obama and his sycophantic Democrat Congress is the latest in a line of politicians transforming America into something unrecognizable, the truth is this deviation from the Founders' original intent and relentless drive to socialism has been going on for a century.

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