NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #19/NN_1992_19.iso/spool/sci/math/10924

Internet Message Format | 1992-09-02 | 10.6 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!olivea!mintaka.lcs.mit.edu!zurich.ai.mit.edu!ara
From: [e-mail] (Allan Adler)
Newsgroups: sci.math
Subject: Re: Godel and the US constitution
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Date: 3 Sep 92 10:39:02 GMT
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In-Reply-To: [e-mail]'s message of Wed, 02 Sep 1992 13:41:07 GMT

Maybe Lincoln got away with a lot of abuses of power, but that doesn't
mean that they were consitutional or that they are now consitutional.
For example, mention has been made of Lincoln suspending habeas corpus.
During WWII there was a Supreme Court decision that the army did not
have the right to suspend habeas corpin Hawaii even though it was
under martial law.

There are lots of examples of imperfect implementation of the constitution.
For example, in around 1797, COngress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts,
which were clearly unconstitutional (if you look at the debates, the
first thing that happened after the bill was read was that someone asked
that the bill of rights be read), but they passed it anyway and the
supreme court never declared it unconstitutional. Instead, the bill
had a built in expiration date of 1801, I think. It was passed while
Adams was president and it was used by Federalists to put Republicans
in jail.Adams' vice president was a Republican, namely Jefferson, even
though Adams was a Federalist. After the Republicans won the election,
they used the law to put Federalists in jail. The states Virginia
and Kentucky both decided that the law was null and void in their
borders, something that would again be regarded as unconstitutional,
since for example states do not have the right to declare civil rights
decisions and legislation null and void in their own states.

The constitution system is not that much like an axiomatic system.
First of all, it is self referential. Second, the axioms change as
a function of time. Third, it contains contradictions. However, I
am reminded of something I was told once, namely that there are
axiom systems which are inconsistent but that the smallest integer
N such that there is a contradiction which can be proved in N steps
from the axioms is quite large, hence any results derived in shorter
time are valid. An instance of this is Harold Stark's trick of
convincing himself something is true by deriving it from the
assumption that there is a 10th quadratic imaginary field of class
number one. This argument is persuasive if the result in question seems
like a lower level of difficulty than proving that there is no
10th quadratic field, hence if the result were false there would be
an easy proof that the 10th field didn't exist, whereas there is no
easy proof of that. Similarly, I believe that physicists use inconsistent
systems to derive certain results because they know that the results
they are deriving with them are not at the level where the contradictions
are.

But to return to my point, the real danger to the constitution is not
the provisions it makes and the possible loopholes that could allow
a dictatorship to come into being, but in the more real possibility
that the provisions of the constitution will be ignored and interpreted
out of existence. For example, we have freedom of speech. Now, there
was during the debates on the Alien and Sedition Acts someone who got
up and said that of course we have free speech but is freedom
of speech the right to vilify and calumnize public officials, attributing
to them the worst of motives and scandalous behavior? Well, he convinced
his colleagues that it didn't. And now people will argue that freedom of
the press does not mean the right to print porn. The Bush Administration
during the recent Supreme Court case about prayer at the graduation in
Providence had its lawyers present briefs to the Court  arguing that the
amendment "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion"
did not mean the US could not have a state religion! These examples only
scratch the surface. The enemies of freedom, democracy and civil liberties
are well organized and powerful.

There are some members of Congress, for example Henry Hyde, who became a
kind of folk hero after the Iran-Contra hearings, who describe themselves
as Presidential Royalists. They believe that when the constitution gives
to congress the power to declare war, that means that the president really
has the right to go to war and that the congress has the right to pass
a resolution saying they like it, or not to bother. They think that the
War powers act is unconstitutional. This leaves congress with the power
of the purse and the power of impeachment as they only recourse to
stop a president intent on war. Nixon tried to mitigate the power of the
purse by impounding funds that were to go for things he didn't like
and using them for things that he did like. The point of keeping the
power of the purse in congress is to make sure that the purse and the
sword are never held in the same hand. Of course a president doesn't
like that. Nixon didn't get away without impounding funds, but now
Bush is hard at work trying to persuade people to give him a
line item veto by amending the constitution.

Anyway, as long as we are on the topic of the logical properties of the
consitution, I think I should mention that from a logical point of view,
the constitution is completely illegal. After all, when the constitution
was written, the US was governed by the Articles of Confederation.
One of the provisions of the Articles of Confederation was that it could
only be amended by unanimous vote. On the other hand, the ratification
clause of the constitution says that it will be ratified by 3/4 of the
states, if I remember right. Now, that clause does not take effect until
the constitution does, and until then the Articles of Confederation
are in effect, which require unanimous consent. Accordingly, the
Constitution was never legally ratified. What happened instead was that
the states that did ratify it formed their own country and began
erecting tariffs against the other states, who then capitulated and
ratified the constitution.

When we were studying the constitution in high school, I noticed this
logical difficulty and pointed it out in class. My teacher did not
scold me for being a smart ass, as I expected. Instead, he said,
"You're absolutely right. It was a revolution! The adoption of the
constitution was a revolution!".

Another remarkable feature of the constitution, from a logical point of
view, is that even though it is apparently inconsistent, it is nevertheless
incomplete. The evidence is the occurrence of constitutional crises in
which it is discovered that some result is not provable from the
constitution. One remarkable example is the election of Hayes vs. Tilden
in 1876. We usually think of that election as the one where Hayes won
in the electoral college but lost in the popular vote, which is true and
interesting, but it is not the whole story. Three years earlier,
there had been a dispute in the state elections in Louisiana and,
I think, Arkansas and Florida. In Louisiana, two men both claimed to
be governor and one of them seized the gubernatorial mansion. There
were also two groups of people both claiming to be the legislature
and both were passing laws. The followers of each of the two "governors"
tried to arrest the other governor" for sedition and in order to
avoid civil war in these states, Grant sent in troops to keep them
apart. Someone who was never elected, named Pinchback, wound up as
acting governor of Louisiana and Federal troops occupied these three
states for years. This affected the election of Hayes and Tilden in
the following way: during the presidential election, two groups of
people showed up in Washington both claiming to be the electors from
that state, this being a legacy of the unresolved dispute in the
state elections. The crisis was that THE CONSTITUTION MADE NO PROVISIONS
FOR HOW TO SETTLE DISPUTES IN A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. It says that
the vice president will read the votes, but it doesn't say the vice
president has the right to decide which are the votes.
It turned out that these three staes were exactly what Hayes needed
to win the election in the electoral college, and therefore the
entire election hinged on settling the issue of which group of
electors were the legitimate ones. Naturally, the Democrats had one
opinion as to who were the real electors and the Republicans had
the opposite opinion. Finally they worked out a deal where there
would be a carefully balanced committee of 15 that would decide.
At the last minute, the guy who was supposed to head the committee
dropped out to accept a judgeship somewhere and the deal fell apart.
The Democrats threatened to filibuster to prevent the votes from ever
being counted! Finally, the Republicans made a deal with the Southern
Democrats that the Southern Democrats would kill the filibuster and
let Hayes win the election and in exchange the Republicans would pull
the troops out of Louisiana, Arkansas and (I think) Florida and let
the governments there fall. My information for this comes from dim
recollections of a biography of Hayes and some articles I read in
the 19th century magazine The Independent, written while these events
were taking place. The Independent was published by the so-called
radical wing of the Republican party.

There have been a lot of recent proposals for constitutional amendments:
Line item veto. No flag burning. No abortion. Equal rights. Balanced
budget. School prayer. I was under the impression that almost enough states
had ratified one of them that if only a few moe followed suit, it would
cause there to be a constitutional convention, during which it would
be possible to completely rewrite the constition.

I don't know much about Perot, but his ideas about making decisions using
national town meetings on television raise an interesting point, if I
am not mistaken. Namely, the constitution makes no provision for
national referendum on issues. The model of government is a
still, like the articles of confederation, based on the idea that
the Federal government is an association of stateWhat has changed
is the relative power of the Federal government versus the states
and the organization of the Federal government into the three branches.
So maybe we will start also to hear calls for an amendment to allow for
national referendum of the entire electorate of the US.

Allan Adler
[e-mail]

Disclaimer: These opinions are my own, not those of MIT as far as I know.