Bush v. Gore and Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board – Guest Essayist: James D. Best

Today's essay at Constituting America is Bush v. Gore and Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, which which settled the 2000 presidential election.

The 2000 presidential election came down to who won Florida. Twenty-seven days after the election, the presidency remained undecided. Surrogates for George W. Bush and Al Gore clashed in a close-quarters fight that seemed to have no end.  Both parties persisted and refused to yield. The media filled nearly every broadcast moment and column inch of newsprint with the maneuvers and shenanigans of both parties. The pursuit of minutia, gossip, and a major scoop drove wall-to-wall reporting of the countless twists, turns, and skirmishes.

 You can read or listen to the entire essay here.

7th Annual 90-Day Study

Home Building & Loan v. Blaisdell (1934) – Guest Essayist: James D. Best

Home Building & Loan v. Blaisdell (1934) started the modern trend of interpreting the Constitution to support popular passions. You can read the essay here or listen to it below.

The United States Supreme Court: Landmark Decisions & The Justices Who Made Them

This year, Constituting America's 7th annual 90-Day Study is The United States Supreme Court: Landmark Decisions & The Justices Who Made Them. As in previous years, I'll write a few essays for this year's study. You can read all of the essays here.

Constituting America is committed "to reach, educate and inform America's citizens and youth about the importance of the U.S. Constitution." They do a great job.

Can Words On Parchment Constrain Executive Overreach?

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The Declaration of Independence used these words to legitimize our founding as a nation. Fifteen simple words, but they embodied a world-shattering idea. Kings supposedly derived their authority from God, but the Declaration declared that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These subversive words flipped the divine right of kings on its head. Instead of kings, God endowed all of mankind with natural rights.

Words can be powerful.

That is, unless they’re ignored. The Constitution is the “supreme law of the land,” but many don’t accept that enumerated powers limit government action. Elected officials “solemnly swear … to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” but many view the words as cant uttered during a swearing-in ritual. Lesser laws are based on a reasonable man’s interpretation of the language, but many regard the “supreme law of the land” as a living document that can mean whatever we need it to mean on any particular day.

Celebrate Constitution Day by Buying Tempest at Dawn

Okay, that's a bit self-serving, but if you want to understand the Constitutional Convention, Tempest at Dawn is a good place to start. The novel accurately portrays the convention proceeding and the lifestyle of the delegates who attended. If you prefer a nonfiction account, then I recommend Decision In Philadelphia by Christopher Collier.

John Boehner in a Pickle Quotes Yours Truly

John Boehner

John Boehner posted an article today at Constituting America. Near the beginning, he quotes an earlier article that I wrote for the site: “Concentrated political power frightened the Founders. They especially feared unrestrained executive power.”

It was an honor to be quoted by the Speaker of the House, but I felt his article weak. I suspect that the political turmoil in the 2016 race prompted him to write a reassuring piece claiming that the House was fighting executive encroachment on legislative powers.

Unfortunately, the actions related in the article are old and long ago lost their allure. People are frustrated. They want consequential action, not base appeasement. Few take comfort that the House puts its trust in the glacial judicial branch to protect its prerogatives. The United States Congress has its own powers ... if they can work up the courage to use them.

Here is a link to my essays at Constituting America.

Slavery in the Constitution

If Founders believed in the Founding Principles, then they knew in their heart that slavery was the epitome of oppression. Slavery denied other humans the exercise of their liberty, which the Founders understood to be precious. Yet it was a slaveholder who wrote, “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

Slavery is a difficult issue in our nation’s history. The Founders, especially the Constitutional Framers, have received censure for not taking greater action against slavery. Some of the more prominent Founders are denigrated because they owned slaves. How can the Founders comments be reconciled with their actions? The answer is not simple.

Slavery at the Founding

At the time of the Constitutional Convention, slavery was illegal only in Massachusetts; more than two hundred slave ships regularly sailed out of New England; and over half of the wealth in the South comprised slaves. Both England and the North held a large amount of loans collateralized by slaves. In 1787, slavery was widespread, and a major element of the economy in both the South and the North.

Despite the position of slavery in 1787, many of the Founders believed slavery was already on its way to extinction. The slave trade had been made illegal in ten of the thirteen states. All thirteen states were seeing an increase in free blacks, especially in the North and the frontier areas of the South. Between 1775 and 1800, the number of free blacks in the nation increased from fourteen thousand to one hundred thousand. Virginia had passed legislation that freed slaves who served in the army or navy. In 1780, Quakers in Pennsylvania pressured the state legislature to pass a law declaring all children of slaves free. With the importation of additional slaves prohibited in most of the country, declining slave labor economics, and growing pressure to declare the newborn of slaves free, most of the Founders didn’t want to jeopardize the union over an institution that was already dying. For this reason, even staunch abolitionists like Benjamin Franklin only made peripheral swipes at slavery during the Constitutional Convention.

Author Interview: From Inception to Current Events

I ran across this Jumping in Pools interview from 2010, and it still reflects some good points about the creation of Tempest at Dawn and its relationship to current events. Here's a snippet:

"All of my writing had been highly technical, but storytelling has always fascinated me. Although I now write fiction, I had a bumpy start. I had to read piles of books on the art of fiction, hire a writing coach, and attend numerous workshops. Then I blundered around until I started to get the hang of it. It took years for me to shed the baggage that I had brought from the technical, non-fiction world. The main thing I had to learn was how to relay history and facts without interrupting the flow of the story. Much tougher than I expected."

 You can read the rest of the interview here...

The real story of our nations founding.

Commentary—Cabal Intent on Usurpation

Update: Virginia has now joined the National Popular Vote Compact.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill to join the National Popular Vote compact. This brings the total number of states adopting the initiative to eleven. The movement is an attempt by political power brokers to circumvent the Constitution by promising their state’s total presidential electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, instead of awarding the votes to the state winner.

Will your vote count?

As of now, New York, California, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington have joined this insidious compact. In plain terms, this means that if Vermont citizens vote for candidate A, but candidate B wins the national popular vote, Vermont citizens are disenfranchised because Vermont’s electoral votes will all be awarded to candidate B.  

As the list of states indicates, this is a raw power grab by big city machine politicians. Under this compact, they will have the power to appoint the executive branch.

The Three Clauses That Have Caused Much Mischief

The Founders wanted to bequeath to posterity a straightforward government that inhibited the abuse of power. Their written words remain clear. Certain politicians and judges have skewed their meaning to do what they want, but most of the harm can be attributed to three clauses:

1.         The necessary and proper clause,

2.         The commerce clause, 

3.         And the general welfare clause.

It is nonsensical to assert that the Founders meant for any of these clauses to license general national authority. 

Cicero on Natural Rights

Natural rights did not originate with the Founders, or with the Enlightenment for that matter. Both were highly influenced by Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC–46 BC).  Cicero was the philosophic father of natural rights.