Then why do you discount the last 63 years of jurisprudence and precedence? That is more than a quarter of our nation's history.
I agree not to use the Alien and Sedition Acts as an example since they were later declared unconstitutional.
No, there were never ruled on. As I mentioned earlier, the SCOTUS rarely ruled on BOR cases before the 20th Century. Even if it had, the Alien and Sedition Acts would still call into question the practice of relying on all the actions of the Founders for examples that should be followed in the present day. Our law is the Constitution, not the assembled quotes (or misquotes) of random statesmen nor their actions in the rough and tumble of the early republic.
Alien and Sedition Acts
1798, four laws enacted by the Federalist-controlled U.S. Congress, allegedly in response to the hostile actions of the French Revolutionary government on the seas and in the councils of diplomacy (see XYZ Affair), but actually designed to destroy Thomas Jefferson?s Republican party, which had openly expressed its sympathies for the French Revolutionaries. Depending on recent arrivals from Europe for much of their voting strength, the Republicans were adversely affected by the Naturalization Act, which postponed citizenship, and thus voting privileges, until the completion of 14 (rather than 5) years of residence, and by the Alien Act and the Alien Enemies Act, which gave the President the power to imprison or deport aliens suspected of activities posing a threat to the national government. President John Adams made no use of the alien acts. Most controversial, however, was the Sedition Act, devised to silence Republican criticism of the Federalists. Its broad proscription of spoken or written criticism of the government, the Congress, or the President virtually nullified the First Amendment freedoms of speech and the press. Prominent Jeffersonians, most of them journalists, such as John Daly Burk, James T. Callender, Thomas Cooper, William Duane (1760?1835), and Matthew Lyon were tried, and some were convicted, in sedition proceedings. The Alien and Sedition Acts provoked the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and did much to unify the Republican party and to foster Republican victory in the election of 1800. The Republican-controlled Congress repealed the Naturalization Act in 1802; the others were allowed to expire (1800?1801).
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001.
Your example of the Massachusetts established Congregationalist church is out of order, since the First Amendment did not then apply to Massachusetts law.
Fair enough.
Quite right. Indeed that is one of Everson's flaws. TJ's infamous wall of separation blown way out of proportion. I hurt my case by doing something similar. Our law is the Constitution. But if we know for certain what a particular word meant in that Constitution, then that meaning is important. Do you agree?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.
Why did SCOTUS expand the definition of the word establishment, causing us all this trouble? I don't buy for a minute that if SCOTUS decided very few Establishment cases up to 1947, then the territory is up for grabs for any runaway activist court who wants to fill the vacuum. What was the extra problem they were trying to solve? Had the modern age changed the equation somehow?
My thesis is that Everson was a terrible mistake and should be rolled back. This aligns with what a legitimate Constitutional movement of originalists is trying to do. What I have been saying should be right at home on this Conservative forum.
The 56 years between then and now make it familiar, but not right.