Thoughts on Federalist No. 2

This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties. John Jay in Federalist No. 2

In large measure, due to the efforts of Jay and other Federalist writers, the Constitution was ratified and the nation united under it.  A recent Goldwater Institute report describes a different sort of separatism threatening unity now.

In an, hitherto little known, provision of the new health care law is a section pertaining to grants and contracts provided by the Obama administration to training hospitals and medical schools. The Institute reports, “In awarding this federal money, the law requires the administration to give preferences to hospitals and schools based on the racial makeup of their student body. Moreover, hospitals and schools who receive these federal funds must engage in race-based student recruitment as well.”

According to Goldwater, the US Civil Rights Commission wrote several letters to Congress calling the provisions “unconstitutional” and “racially discriminatory” and challenging the premises upon which the provisions are based.

The Commissioners wrote,

These provisions are apparently included in the bill because it is thought that racial health care disparities are caused by a lack of minority health care professionals or by a deficiency in the “cultural competency” of these professionals. Testimony provided to the US Commission on Civil Rights however, calls this assumption into serious doubt. Racial preferences in the Senate Health Care Bill, in addition to being unconstitutional, will not improve health care outcomes for minority patients.

Singling out individuals on the basis of race for special benefits, whether based on good or evil intentions, is divisive. As Thomas Sowell and others have pointed out, the result of such policies is that the favored individuals are placed in the unfair position of having to defend their competence against the demeaning assumption that they would not have been among the chosen had they been considered on their merits.

Bad policies based on false premises are standard procedure among those whose ideology blinds them to unintended but disastrous consequences.

Human-caused global warming, although now mostly discredited*, continues to be the justification for economy-destroying legislation; tax policies designed to redistribute wealth dry up the sources of reinvestment and jobs. The list is long and augmented by Congress on an almost daily basis.

In Federalist 2, Jay argued for a unified nation and warned against separating people into “unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.“

Today the nation is far more diverse than in Jay’s time, but it has always been bound by the values Americans share.

This administration, in its zeal to replace equality under the law with equality of outcome, weakens those bonds by pitting groups against one another, letting loose modern versions of “unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.”

It is the practice these days to divide Americans by hyphens. Yet, in the not so distant past, whatever their origins, all citizens were simply… Americans. Diversity need not divide, unless it is manipulated to do so.

Most recently the Black Congressional Caucus was told to rally black voters to the polls. The racist nature of this appeal is revealed by imagining the justified outrage that would result had a white politician said the same to a white group.

Jay rejoiced that “one connected, fertile, widespreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty.”  Those who would divide their progeny into warring groups play an ugly game in which the nation will be the loser.

*Recent Articles and Studies Disputing Man-made Climate Change

• Sizzling study concludes: Global warming ‘hot air’
• Disaster Losses From Global Warming Debunked
• Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate
• The Tip of the Climategate Iceberg
• Climategate analysis