By any metric, no matter from which direction you look at it, the New Deal and the Great Society altered the social landscape of America. Before the enactment of Social Security, in fact before the Great Depression itself, the dilemma of growing old in the United States was the necessity of working until death and the lack of work for the elderly. History tells us the consequence of neglecting the aged, and justice affirms the fate of our grandfathers will likely befall us in our turn. 50 percent of Americans who reached old age died in poverty of exposure, starvation, malnutrition, or violence. This was the fate that awaited half of us all on October 23, 1929. And then the market crashed, and it became the fate of nearly everyone.
A similar dynamic confronted Texas blowhard and America's original expert on all things teabag, President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Social Security had arrested the inevitable slide into an old age of poverty for many Americans, but the high cost of medical care put a drag on Social Security's efficacy at fulfilling its mandate. After some 30 years of trying, an incredibly popular Democratic president and Democratic Congress created Medicare, the single most popular government program in America, and by far the most efficient healthcare insurance organization in the world. On July 30, 1965, at 3:09 PM at the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, MO, President Johnson finished the work Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and President Harry Truman started, and signed into law a bill to create a national health insurance program for the elderly.
In addition to the great societal effect of old age pensions and healthcare insurance, the goodwill of a grateful people rained down on Democrats for doing the right thing. The implementation of Social Security led to what seemed like permanent Democratic majorities in Congress for nearly 50 years. The political capital Johnson gained from signing the Social Security Act of 1965, which created Medicaid and Medicare, helped propel the Voting Rights Act across the finish line later that year. These results had the predictable effect on Republican politicians.
In my opinion, the popularity of socialism, the fundamental sense of fairness at the heart of the American character, is the root cause of Republican angst. Knowing that their platform, corporatist, plutocratic, anti-government, is actually deeply, deeply unpopular without manipulation, forced the technocratic evolution of Republican politics that has finally reached the unsurprising conclusion of a party that very much wants the power of a government they say they don't believe should have any power.
Barely sentient hairdo and current Republican frontrunner, Rick Perry, is the perfect vehicle for a loyal opposition gone deeply off the rails. His rhetoric belies verifiable reality, his state is deeply in the red, his people are neglected, and his plutocrats are fat and happy. By any estimation, Rick Perry is as bad for America as Social Security and Medicare are good for it. Like matter and anti-matter, if ever the two were to come into contact, an explosion of unlikely proportions would result. Which is why it's not particularly surprising that Perry thinks that if anything can save him from the political suicide he seems fascinated with, it's the ghosts of the founders and their deep hatred of political term of art that didn't exist in their time.
I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term “general welfare” in there were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that. From my perspective, the states could substantially better operate those programs if that’s what those states decided to do.
Now, I could trot out several examples of different founding fathers who did have exactly these kinds of programs in mind. Hell, Thomas Jefferson was President of the Senate and John Adams was the President of the United States when the much-referenced "Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen of 1798" founded an unapologetically socialist program that still exists today under the auspices of the United States Public Health Service. This is really easy stuff to find, and it's sort of right there in the Preamble, if you're not looking for vindication of an ideology that would have put you on the side of the Red Coats in 1776. So I won't do that because it's boring and not worth the effort or the inevitable parade of wingnuts in the comments section bringing their own quotes and blah, blah, blah.
And I'll tell you what, it's entirely unnecessary. The Constitution was meant to allow self-rule, not obeisance to the past or imprisonment in the rusty cage of tradition. As Thomas Paine said, "Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies." Or, in other words, "Stop trying to use us as an excuse to destroy Social Security and Medicare, Rick Perry."
So, I don't feel the need to trot out the ghosts of founders past because the document they composed to set up a new nation wasn't ever meant to rule "for all their posterity, forever." It was meant to provide some fundamental principles of governance and the flexibility to change with the times. The only aspect of this mechanism of interpretation that worried the founders was the political nature of, well, politics. Which is why they set up the Judiciary as the secular First Estate of the American system of government and gave them the exclusive authority to rule on matters arising under the Constitution.
Which they have done, both for Social Security, and by extension, for Medicare. So, to make a very long diary only slightly longer, suck it, Perry. Get your gummit hands of my Medicare.