As for the Antifederalists before ratification: sure, they opposed many aspects of nationalism, including funding a public debt, but the “constitutional conservatives” whose reading of history my piece criticizes don’t cite the Antifederalists in seeking founding support for their anti-tax policies. It’s actually a point of my piece that intellectual honesty would dictate that they should! If they’d only call themselves “anti-constitutional conservatives,” we’d all know what we’re talking about.See also: Why Debt Ceilings and Balanced-Budget Requirements Violate the Original Intent of the Constitution
Where he says:
But no ratified amendment has ever qualified Congress’s power of the purse, which in the minds of the framers explicitly involved the power to take on debt and fund it. In their tweets and blogs, “constitutional conservatives” have been promoting a balanced-budget amendment with reference to the tired notion that since households and small businesses must balance their budgets (as if!), government must too. They link that economically useless prescription to the widespread fantasy that our Constitution was written, amended, and ratified for just such a purpose. The framers saw it just the other way.
