Frontiersmen Closing Statements

Ryan L. Teed

POLS 376

Dr. William Niemi

Frontiersmen Closing Statements

Greetings to my fellow delegates and esteemed members of the Jamopolis community! The time has come for us to decide what course we should set for ourselves as well as the future generations of our great nation. Here we must realize our duty “to guard against even the bare possibility of future tyranny.” I will begin by saying that I, like many of my fellow frontiersmen, traveled to this convention without any particular predispositions regarding the proposed constitution. However, having listened carefully to each and every delegate present here, we frontiersmen have come to the conclusion that this constitution absolutely CANNOT be adopted by the state of Jamopolis as is.

It has been made quite obvious throughout our debates that there are many serious problems with this document which should be addressed, and even many of its Federalist supporters can be quoted throughout this convention as saying, “Nothing is guaranteed.” As frontiersmen, we are exposed to the brutal and greedy nature of man constantly, and realize the popular sentiment that “every man has a natural propensity to power.” We do not feel comfortable with putting faith in people’s desire to do good, and wish to see clauses within the constitution which prevent the people form future tyranny; specific clauses, not implied ones.

We found the arguments of the Anti-Federalist constituents regarding Article Two of the proposed constitution to be quite persuading. Why would we fight a war against a tyrant overseas only to turn around and establish for ourselves “an elective king, a prince under a republican cloak, vested with power dangerous to a free people.” If we do such a thing, I can assure you that we will one day become the laughingstock of the world. And yes, delegates, the powers of the executive do resemble those of a monarch, whatever slight semantic deviations from a traditional monarch the Federalists may have pointed out. His powers as commander in chief of the armed forces, which will be a standing army under the proposed constitution, his veto power, and the ambiguous wording presented in this article, all combine to make for a potential future tyrant through the exploitation of potential loopholes to be found within the document. It seems as if “We are getting back fast to the system we destroyed some years ago.”

We frontiersmen propose that the delegation discard Article Two of the constitution. There is no reason that one man should be able to counter legislation which has been approved by a popularly elected legislature. Nor should we rely on that same person to appoint people to powerful positions within the government, when it seems perfectly within the means of congress and the judiciary to do so. As proposed, the constitution states that the president