Reining in Congress: An Enforceable Balanced Budget Amendment
There is growing sentiment that one or more constitutional amendments may be necessary to rein in the runaway Congress. The principal mechanism the Founders built into the Constitution for such contingencies is the procedure in Article V by which two thirds of the state legislatures force what the Constitution calls a “Convention for proposing Amendments.” […]
The 1798 “Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen:” Yet another “progessive” irrelevancy
As Tom Woods points out on his blog, advocates of Obamacare have dug up a 1798 federal statute that, they say, shows that the original understanding of the Constitution is broad enough to authorize federal health care programs. The statute authorized creation of federal hospitals for sailors. After I entered a brief response to his […]
Time Mag’s Constitutional Baby Babble
Several readers sent me for comment a lengthy cover article in Time Magazine by managing editor Richard Stengel. Stengel’s piece is one result of new public interest in our Constitution and in “first principles”—interest that has forced political liberals (Stengel has been a paid Democratic activist) to think about the document’s real meaning. Previously, of […]
Control of the state courts—the latest federal takeover target?
[T]his bill . . . is an attack on state courts and on the civil jury system itself.
Is health insurance “Commerce among the States?”
Behind the current constitutional debates over ObamaCare, there is an assumption that Congress has power to regulate health insurance as “Commerce among the States.” However, in various decisions over 150 years, the Supreme Court ruled that “insurance” was not within the Constitution’s definition of “Commerce.” Only a single aberrant Supreme Court case says it is. […]
Obama’s Libyan Operations are Unconstitutional
You can sympathize with the humanitarian motives of our Libyan intervention while still doubting its constitutionality. The Constitution prescribes the rules about how the United States is to enter a war, and the Obama administration has violated those rules. The administration argues that the hostilities, because limited, do not rise to the level of “war,” […]
Corrective Constitutional Amendments?
“A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risque the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished most religiously to preserve.” – Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in 2 Select Works of Edmund Burke 108 […]
The U.S. Budget Situation is Worse than Even You Imagined
Last week, Senator John Kerry (D.-Mass) was unhappy with a Republican plan to cut as much as $61 billion out of the federal budget. “I think it’s an ideological, extremist, reckless statement,” Kerry said of the plan. I hadn’t kept up on all the numbers recently, so I took a look at President Obama’s 2012 […]
A Constitutional Guide to Fighting Federal Overreach
The Independence Institute presents A Constitutional Guide to Fighting Federal Overreach: A Program for the Grassroots Sunday, May 15, 2011 1:15 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. The Community Room Red Rocks Community College 13300 W. Sixth Avenue (West end of Red Rocks Community College, lower level) Lakewood, CO 80228 Park in South lot Campus Map This program […]
Supreme Court’s New First Amendment Decision Unrelated to the First Amendment
Commentators and journalists sometimes describe the current U.S. Supreme Court as “conservative.” But that’s not true if your definition of a conservative justice is a traditional or “originalist” jurist—that is, one who applies the Constitution as the American people understood it when they adopted it. Consider, for example, the Court’s latest First Amendment case. The […]
New paper summarizes rules for amending the Constitution
Our sister institution, The Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, Arizona has just published my paper, Amending the Constitution by Convention: Practical Guidance for Citizens and Policymakers. Using my prior research and new findings, it summarizes the rules you should use in drafting Article V applications, answering objections, heading off congressional interference, and so forth. As I’ve […]
Amendments Convention: Answering Those Not-So-Tough Questions
Are you a state lawmaker or reform advocate challenged to answer “tough questions” about a Convention for Proposing Amendments? If so, here are some answers. Recently I traveled to Indianapolis to testify before the Indiana legislature. While there, I learned that opponents of an amendments convention are circulating questions about a convention, apparently designed to […]
