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 […]
Madison being misread (on an amendments convention)
Sometimes even friends of the Constitution misinterpret the document or the history surrounding it. Throughout the country right now, state lawmakers are advancing constitutional amendments to restrain federal power and federal spending. Because they know that Congress will never propose amendments to restrain itself (2/3 of both the Senate and House would have to approve […]
Does the Constitution really give Congress power over immigration?
Congress’s power to “define and punish . . . Offenses against the Law of Nations” included authority to “define” immigration rules and “punish” those who violated them.
How to amend the Constitution safely and without Congress — according to the Founders
“How to” Issue Papers on obtaining needed constitutional amendments without the consent of Congress.
Was the Constitutional Convention a “Runaway?”
[Rob Natelson is the author of The Original Constitution: What It Really Said and Meant – an objective explanation of the Constitution as understood by the Founders.] There’s an old accusation leveled against the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The Convention was a very long time ago, so the accusation shouldn’t matter any more. […]
Airport searches and the Fourth Amendment
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” – […]
