subgenius wrote:You conveniently leave out facts, whereas a standing navy is provided for, and a standing militia is provided for. Point being, a standing military has always been intended, and this is further confirmed when a most famous founding father established the marine corps.
Your post is mostly ignorant of Article 1 Section 8, but I suggest you read it...as in read the actual text, not someone else's opinion of the text.
Nevertheless, the poster's blanket claim for what the FFs wanted is proven to be wrong. The poster's fallacy of appealing to authority has been exposed and that claim can be rightfully dismissed.
Article 1 section 8 lists powers enumerated to Congress. Relevant to this conversation, it includes:
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
The reason that there is no time limit on the Navy, but there is on the army is specifically because of skepticism of standing armies. No where in this section does it call for a standing army. It merely gives Congress the power to temporarily fund an army and/or call up militias. You are citing a section that favors the point I made.
Founding father writing is rife with fear of standing armies and the idea of a massive military triumphantly marching down the capital at the behest of a demagogue president is about as clear cut an example of something they'd dislike as is possible. You try to repel this point by pointing out they weren't a hive-mind, which is true, but we can speak to general cultural themes that existed among the political leaders of the revolutionary and early Constitutional period. One of those quite plainly is a belief that standing military force is a profound threat to liberty to be ever guarded against. It's one of the most universal assumptions you can find in the political views of the period. That line of argument also undercuts common cultural conservative appeals to what the founding fathers thought that I'm specifically criticizing. "The founding fathers didn't think anything" doesn't exactly rescue my criticism of conservatives who are obsessed with citing what the founding fathers thought. I merely find it a little funny and a little maddening that Donald Trump is anathema to what the founding fathers thought insofar as we can pull out themes from the period.
