Kicking the Can down the Road

G. Richard Jansen
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523
Published October 17, 2013

It was understood by the Continental Congress in 1776 that slavery was inconsistent with our principles inscribed in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson a slaveholder said this in words inscribed on the Jefferson memorial:

God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.

In 1787 the Northwest Ordinance written by the Articles of Confederation Congress stated that slavery in the Northwest territory would be prohibited. However, also in 1787, the writers of the Constitution rightly understood that there could be no nation that would result if slavery were prohibited in the south. So they kicked the can, i.e. the issue of slavery, down the road. This particular can continued to be kicked down this road in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854. Lincoln understood that popular sovereignty in the Kansas Nebraska Act would mean that slavery would inevitably extend into the territories which he strongly opposed.

Abraham Lincoln and the newly minted Republican party of 1860 not only knew that slavery was inconsistent with the principles of the Declaration of Independence but they also believed it was morally wrong and said so. Lincoln knew that slavery in the south was protected in the Constitution and so he did not favor the views of the abolitionists in his party. It was his view that slavery in the United States had to end eventually and the best way to accomplish this end was to prevent it from spreading into the territories. Lincoln and his fellow Republicans acted on these beliefs and Lincoln was elected with only 40% of the popular vote and seventeen states. The result was the civil war with 400,000 Union deaths and 250,000Conferederate deaths. This was the price that had to be paid and was paid by this terrible bloody war. In his Second inaugural address that Lincoln gave shortly before his assassination and shortly before the end of the war he uttered these immortal words:

The Almighty has His own purposes. Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh. If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

We are involved again in kicking the can down the road this time on an unsustainable and growing debt into the indefinite future. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and a small number of other Republicans have the courage to confront this issue as Lincoln did about slavery with even more courage. Risking default isn’t even in the same league as was slavery. The Republican party in Congress today should insist on significant entitlement reform without which they should not increase the debt ceiling. It would be nice if the Republican party of 2013 would have even 10% of the courage of the Republican party of 1860. The Bikers ride, the Truckers ride, and the Veterans civil disobedience on the Mall and by the White House suggest we may be near a flash point at the present time. The blessings we have in our wonderful country we owe to those who came before and we also owe the same to our posterity, particularly our Constitution, the Bill of Rights the blessings of liberty and the rule of law. By those who came before I include what we inherited from Jerusalem, Rome, Athens, and our inheritance from our mother country, Great Britain.

As so as of today, October 17, 2013, we have kicked the can down the road again. And it continues to go on ad infinitum and the 17 trillion dollars in national debt not to mention 90 trillion dollars in liabilities continues to pile up with no even partial solution in sight.