What Would the Founders Think of Defunding Obamacare?

Here’s a post that should have been written on WWTFT.

Bruce Thornton wrote this piece for classical scholar and thinker Victor Davis Hanson’s blog.

Thornton accomplishes several things in this article. His primary purpose is to illustrate the genius of our system of government. Secondarily, he shows the idiocy of the MSM, specifically, CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin.

Baldwin suggested, in somewhat less than eloquent prose, that the Republican’s approach to controlling the House of Representatives was:

“Certainly not the way the Founding Fathers maybe drew this thing up.”

Thornton shows that, like or not, this is precisely how the House is supposed to function.

James Madison in 58 argued for that power as being a necessary check on the less democratic branches of the government. “The house of representatives can not only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of government. They in a word hold the purse, that powerful instrument . . . This power over the purse, may in fact be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.” Clearly, for the Framers the “power of the purse” was intended to be the peoples’ constitutional WMD for checking the other branches when they passed laws or instituted policies contrary to the will of the people.

What Would the Founders Think of Defunding Obamacare? | VDH’s Private Papers.

Big H/T to Jim S.