If only Col. Mason could pick brackets this well...

March 27, 2006 9:44 PM by S.M. Oliva | Other posts by S.M. Oliva | Comments (2)

George Mason University's men's basketball team has reached the “Final Four� of the NCAA Division I championships. Some libertarians have interpreted this as divine inspiration given GMU's namesake and ties to Austrian economics. I don't know about that, but I did read a curious paragraph in an article by ESPN.com basketball writer Andy Katz:

It's hard to gauge what this historic win has done for this university located just 20 miles from here, one that is named after one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, an idealist who refused to sign the document because he wanted the abolishment of slavery included (history lesson courtesy of head coach Jim Larranaga). Given that history, though, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the basketball team that bears George Mason's name has plenty of passion.

Mason did oppose slavery, but his objections to the Constitution were far deeper than Coach Larranaga suggested. Indeed, Mason's formal statement of objections to the Constitution only mentioned the slave trade; he said the provision in Article I preventing Congress or the states from ending the importation of slaves before 1808 would “render the United States weaker, more vulnerable, and less capable of defence.� But even if slavery had been abolished, Mason would still not have signed the Constitution given his other objections.

And those objections were numerous. Here is an abbreviated list of the ones he gave to the Convention on September 15, 1787:

1. There was no Declaration of Rights, and because the Constitution would be the supreme law of the land, the protections of state constitutions would be inadequate.
2. The office of Vice President improperly mixes the executive and legislative branches. Government appointments should not be vested in the President or Congress, but rather a Privy Council of six members chosen by the Senate.
3. There is no protection for the common law or the rights guaranteed by state constitutions.
4. The House of Representatives has “not the substance but the shadow of representation�.
5. The Senate, which is “not the representatives of the people or amenable to them� has the power to alter all taxation and spending bills, as well as determine the salaries of government officers confirmed by it.
6. The Senate's joint exercise of executive powers—i.e., treaty-making—means that it will be “almost continually sitting�—thus destroying “any balance in the government�.
7. The federal judiciary will “absorb and destroy� the state courts, “enabling the rich to oppress and ruin the poor.�
8. The President has no Constitutional Council to provide him with proper information, “a thing unknown in any safe and regular government�. The President will therefore become dependent on the Senate.
9. The President has unrestricted power to grant pardons for treason, which could be used to “screen from punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the crime, and thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt�.
10. The President and Senate can use their treaty-making powers to claim an “exclusive power of legislation�.
11. A simple majority can pass regulations of commerce and navigation, enabling the majority of Northern states to impose “ruinous� laws against the minority of Southern states.
12. “Congress may grant monopolies in trade and commerce�.

The overriding theme of Mason's objections were as follows:

The government will set out a moderate aristocracy: it is at present impossible to foresee whether it will, in its operation, produce a monarchy, or a corrupt, tyrannical aristocracy; it will most probably vibrate some years between the two, and then terminate in the one or the other.

In a sense, Larranaga is correct. Mason did oppose the Constitution because it protected slavery. But Mason understood slavery to mean all forms of tyranny—particularly at the hands of government power—that restricted the liberty of men.