Some thoughts about _The Grouchy Historian_

Despite the title, the authors have a background as entertainers, not historians.  One point that they make early and often is that «Nothing in the Constitution suggests, let alone enforces, the concepts of limited government [...]».  That's just bonkers.  The Framers wanted something stronger than the articles of confederation, but not infinitely so.

*) At the time, Britain had elections for parliament every 7 years, and for king never.  The constitution calls for elections for the house every 2 years, and for president every 4 years.  That sounds like a limitation to me.

*) It has been the understanding all along that the federal government should have no powers beyond those enumerated in the constitution.  Article I section 8 clause 18 was considered necessary and nontrivial.  The implied powers are somewhat elastic, but not infinitely so.

*) The entirety of article I section 9 is a list of things that the government cannot do.  That sounds like a limitation to me.

*) "The" constitution as we know it today includes the bill of rights, as it has since before the end of George Washington's first term as president.  That includes some very serious limitations on what the government can do.

*) A republic i.e. /indirect/ democracy was systematically and intentionally designed to prevent the majoritarian overreach that can occur in a direct democracy.  Federalist 10.

*) The federal system, with states retaining considerable power, was systematically and intentionally designed to limit the power of the central government.

*) The checks and balances between the three branches of government were systematically and intentionally designed to limit the power of any one branch.  Federalist 51.

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The book is consistently snarky.  It is by turns occasionally insightful and occasionally entertaining, but only occasionally.  There is a market for insult comedy, but these guys are not in the same league as Rickles or Smigel, not even close.

In particular, I found chapter 15 to be obnoxious.  It goes out of its way to portray James Madison in a bad light, on the basis of no information and no insight AFAICT.  It's not meant to be a realistic portrait, but it doesn't even rise to the level of caricature.  A proper caricature is supposed to exaggerate important or interesting features.

Maybe it's just me, but I am always more interested in *issues* than in ad_hominem attacks.  There are plenty of issues that can be discussed as issues -- from the injustice of slavery, to hypocrisy and corruption in general (which has been a problem since the earliest days) -- so why turn a book that purports to "defend our constitution" into a scurrilous personal attack on James Madison?  Why spend orders of magnitude more effort lambasting Madison than (say), Scalia and Thomas?  Overall, there is an astonishing lack of balance, proportion, and perspective.

The subtitle says «an old-time lefty defends tour constitution against right-wing hypocrites and nutjobs».  Asner is a bit old and a bit of a lefty, but only a tiny, tiny fraction of the book is devoted to defending the constitution from hypocrites and nutjobs like Scalia and Thomas.  (Defending the constitution against James Madison is preposterous.)

At one extreme, I don't like the hagiographic chauvinistic discussions of the framers and of the constitution that one finds in typical high-school textbooks -- but the solution is not to leap to the opposite extreme with an unbalanced unhinged polemic.  Both extremes are wrong.