Guest Column: Constitution Day

Celebrate by enforcing via Nullification
by Michael Boldin

Constitution DayWhen I think of a “Constitution Day” speech, three things pop into my head.

First, I expect to hear a speech about the greatness of the Constitution and the wisdom of the Founding Fathers.

Second, that speech will likely cover the many ways that today’s Federal government is nothing close to the Founders’ constitutional vision.  I’d hear about some of the ways the supreme court has flipped the constitution on its head, and how politicians from both major political parties only care about the constitution when it fits their political goals.  They ignore or violate it with impunity when it doesn’t. Continue reading

Book Review: Debates at the Constitutional Convention (1987)

Notes at the Constitutional Convention, 1787 (first posted 12/17/10)
by James Madison


Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787All right, unless you have access to some primo bud (really smooth marijuana conducive to cognition), reading this book may prove to be tedious business. Candidly, it needs to be considered a reference, quite an amazing reference, to the founding document of the American nation.[1] Necessarily, a great deal of the back and forth concerns procedural matters, such as how many senators, reps, terms of office, judicial powers, general composition, qualifications, impeachability, and so on. And these questions are of interest to scholars certainly, to laymen as well. For example, you learn fairly quickly that the high-population states and low-population states tended to have opposed objectives: mainly that the one group should not be allowed to run roughshod over the other. Continue reading