The American Spectator

Mary| 11.11.08 @ 11:52AM

George Will has an excellent piece out today. In fact, it should be on the Must Read list. If that's maxed out, chuck Brooks' piece or at least try to come up with a name for the Reformed "Conservative" movement. Is the upshot to his piece: "20% subsidization will not increase social pathologies, but 30% will?

Threading the Neibhurian needle is the Sermon on the Mount, please hold the Jesus. The legacy of Christ The King is not one of enervation. The cri du sacré coeur was never a dirge. Makes you really long for the spirit of men like Jean-de-Brébeuf.

From George Will’s piece:

James W. Ceaser, professor of politics at the University of Virginia, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, notes that, contrary to conventional understanding, the Constitution created not three but four “national institutions.” They are the Congress, the Supreme Court, the presidency—and the presidential selection system, based on the Electoral College. “The question of presidential selection,” Ceaser writes, “was just that important to the Founders.”
Under their plan, the nomination of candidates and the election of the president were to occur simultaneously. Electors meeting in their respective states, in numbers equal to their states’ senators and representatives, would vote for two people for president. The electors’ winnowing of aspirants was the nomination process. When the votes were opened in the U.S. House of Representatives, the candidate with a majority would become president, the runner-up would become vice president. If no person achieved a majority of electoral votes, the House would pick from among the top five vote getters. Note well: The selection of presidential nominees was to be controlled by the Constitution.

The Founders’ intent, Ceaser writes, was to prevent the selection of a president from being determined by the “popular arts” of campaigning, such as rhetoric. The Founders, Ceaser says, “were deeply fearful of leaders deploying popular oratory as the means of winning distinction.” That deployment would invite demagoguery, which subverts moderation. “Brilliant appearances,” wrote John Jay in The Federalist Papers 64, “… sometimes mislead as well as dazzle.” By telling members of the political class how not to get considered for the presidency, the Founders hoped to (in Ceaser’s words) “make virtue the ally of interest” and shape the behavior of that class.

Can there really be such a thing as “Reformed Catholicism?” I don’t think so. Whatever it could produce would be Kmiecian, and at its center, false.

You can’t pluck one of the Commandments leaving the rest to be like the walking petrified of Vesuvius. Can there be something equivalent that passes itself off as reformed conservatism while eschewing the core of conservatism? I don’t think so.

Of the "reformers" I wonder who will decidedly play the role of Kmiec?