By George Will
Ted Cruzs victory in Tuesdays Texas Republican runoff for the U.S. Senate nomination
is the most impressive triumph yet for the still-strengthening 
tea party impulse.
And Cruzs victory coincides with something conservatives should celebrate: the centennial of
the 20th centurys most important intraparty struggle. By preventing former president Theodore Roosevelt from capturing the 1912 Republican presidential nomination from President William Howard Taft the GOP deliberately doomed its chances for holding the presidency but kept its commitment to the Constitution.
Before Cruz 41 earned a Harvard law degree magna cum laude he wrote his Princeton senior thesis on the Constitutions9th and 10th Amendments which if taken seriously would revitalize two bulwarks of liberty: the ideas that the federal governments powers are limited because they are enumerated and that the enumeration of certain rights does not deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Both ideas are repudiated by todays progressives as they were by TR whose Bull Moose Party the result of his bolt from the GOP convened in Chicago 100 years ago Sunday Aug. 5 1912.
After leaving the presidency in 1909 TR went haywire. He had always chafed under constitutional restraints but he had remained a Hamiltonian construing the Constitution expansively but respectfully. By 1912 however he had become what the Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson was an anti-Madisonian. Both thought the Constitution the enumeration and separation of powers intolerably crippled government.
Espousing unconstrained majoritarianism TR disdained James Madisons belief that the ultimate danger is wherever ultimate power resides which in a democracy is with the majority. He endorsed the recall of state judicial decisions and by September 1912 favored the power to recall all public officials including the president.
TRs anti-constitutional excesses moved two political heroes to subordinate personal affection to the public interest. New York Sen. Elihu Root had served TR as secretary of war and secretary of state and he was Roosevelts first choice to succeed him in 1908. Massachusetts Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge had long been one of TRs closest friends. Both sided with Taft.
As the Hudson Institutes William Schambra says (in The Saviors of the Constitution" National Affairs Winter 2012 and elsewhere) by their lonely principled" stand Root and Lodge along with Taft denied TR the powerful electoral machinery of the Republican Party which would almost surely have elected him and then been turned to securing sweeping alterations" of the Constitution.
Wilson won with 41.8 percent of the vote (to TRs 27.4 percent). Taft won 23.2 percent carrying only Vermont and Utah but achieved something far grander than a second term: the preservation of the GOP as an intellectual counterbalance to the Democrats thorough embrace of progressivism and the living" actually disappearing Constitution.
Today many of the tea partys academic despisers portray it as anti-democratic and anti-intellectual. Actually it stands as did the forgotten heroes of 1912 with Madison the most intellectually formidable Founder. He created and the tea party defends a constitutional architecture that does not thwart democracy but refines it on the fact that in a republic which is defined by the principle of representation the people do not directly decide issues they decide who will decide. And the things representatives are permitted to decide are strictly circumscribed by constitutional limits on federal power.
TR sought to make these limits few and as flimsy as cobwebs when the people chose to amend them by plebiscitary methods. The New Republic then a voice of progressivism ridiculed Root for being committed to the theory of government based upon natural rights" the Declaration of Independences theory of pre-political rights.
Schambra however argues that for Root and Lodge as for todays tea party the rights proclaimed in the Declaration and the restrictions that the Constitution imposes on government are inseparably linked as Root said to the end that individual liberty might be preserved."
The GOPs defeat in 1912 like that in 1964 under Barry Goldwater whose spirit infuses the tea party was profoundly constructive. By rejecting TR it preserved the Constitution
from capricious majorities.
Assuming Cruz wins the general election in his crimson state he and like-minded Republicans in the Senate Utahs Mike Lee Kentuckys Rand Paul South Carolinas Jim DeMint Wisconsins Ronald H. Johnson Pennsylvanias Patrick J. Toomey Floridas Marco Rubio and if they win Indianas Richard Mourdock Arizonas Jeff Flake and perhaps others can honor two exemplary senatorial predecessors by forming the small but distinguished Root-Lodge Caucus.
George F. Will writes on politics & domestic affairs. A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist journalist and author he is a best known for his conservative commentary on politics.
