Candidates for the Republican nomination to the Alabama U.S. Senate seat currently held by Democrat Doug Jones reacted to the mass gun slaughter of the past week in El Paso and Dayton just as you’d expect them to.
Huntsville TV station WHNT published comments made by U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne, Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, Alabama state Rep. Arnold Mooney, and former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville that ranged from blaming Congress in general, to blaming Democrats, to calling for implementation of “the laws that are already on the books.”
And then, of course, there was former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore:
Mass shootings and senseless murders of innocent people are evidence of a moral problem in our country, not a lack of gun control. Liberals who want to take our guns continue to protest our inalienable right to acknowledge God in our schools, our courts, and in the public square. Without God and recognition of the Christian religion which once formed the basis of our society, we will continue to suffer national immorality, as according to George Washington, the father of our country, in his farewell address. As U.S. Senator, I will continue to support our rights under the 1st and 2nd Amendments in the U.S. Constitution.
You will, of course, search in vain for the word “Christian” in Washington’s farewell address. However, you will find distinct warnings against too much of “the spirit of party,” foreign influence and corruption, and the consolidation of power in one branch of government over the others. A long excerpt from the 32-page handwritten address is worth a read, and as relevant today as it was in 1796.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.
It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositaries, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them. If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield.