Word: reformative
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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What alarms Bricker & Co. is the possibility that, in this era of statism and the reform-by-treaty urge, the U.S. might enter into treaties that sooner or later could be used to enlarge the power of the Federal Government or even to dilute or undermine the Bill of Rights. Says Illinois' Senator Everett Dirksen, a red-hot supporter of the Bricker Amendment: "We are in a new era of international organizations. They are grinding out treaties like so many eager beavers which will have effect on the rights of American citizens...
Dangers of the Amendment. Alarmed at the prospect of reform-by-treaty, or revolution-by-treaty, a Seattle lawyer named Frank E. Holman, then president of the American Bar Association, set out five years ago on a crusade to save the Constitution by amending its treaty-power provisions. Among the allies he enlisted was Senator Bricker, who introduced his now-famed resolution in September 1951, and reintroduced it in the first days of the 83rd Congress...
...year in truck license fees, an act that his opponents and even some of his friends said was an unmerited reward to trucking interests for supporting him last year. Some Illinois political observers thought that Stratton had also traded away too many of his aims, e.g., reform of the antiquated judicial system, to get his reapportionment bill through. But Stratton insisted that he would fight for judicial reform in the next session of the legislature. Welfare and education leaders were horrified because he cut the state welfare budget 8% and refused to give the University of Illinois a bigger budget...
...society was losing its soul because it was fascinated by means, forgetful of ends; ("Men, I think, ought to be weighed, not counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their value.") Sir Walter Scott, defending Scotland's ancient laws against Bentham's passion for reform, warning that local tradition could not be erased without damage, writing the Waverley Novels as tracts for conservatism, as reminders of the moral debt that the present owed to principles of liberty and order won by the past; Disraeli, the supple and imaginative politician, yielding with brilliant grace to necessary...
...Recognition that change and reform are not the same things, and that "innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress...