Free Republic

Power, Legitimacy, and the 14th Amendment by Joseph E. Fallon The justification for the vast, intrusive, and coercive powers employed by the government of the United States against its citizens from affirmative action to hate-crimes legislation, from multilingualism to multiculturalism, from Waco to Ruby Ridge is the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution adopted in 1868, or, more specifically, the authority conferred upon Washington, explicitly or implicitly, by the privileges and immunities and equal protection clauses of that amendment. The government of the United States, as established by the U.S. Constitution in 1789, was effectively abolished by the 14th Amendment....

Constitutional Topic: The Second Amendment - The U.S. Constitution Online - USConstitution.netAddress:http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_2nd.html Here are Steve Mounts thoughts on our 2nd: [T]he amendment does appear to have been designed to protect the militias, and it was also designed to protect an individual's right to own and bear a gun. The question, then, is do we have to adhere to both tenets of the amendment today? If we decide to do away with the individual ownership aspect of the Amendment, reinterpreting the amendment to allow highly restricted gun ownership, we seem to open the door to radical reinterpretation of other, more basic...

THE ORIGINAL MEANING OF THE COMMERCE CLAUSE   Randy E. Barnett           The U.S. Supreme Court, in recent cases, has attempted to define limits on the Congress's power to regulate commerce among the several states. While Justice Thomas has maintained that the original meaning of "commerce" was limited to the "trade and exchange" of goods and transportation for this purpose, some have argued that he is mistaken and that "commerce" originally included any "gainful activity." Having examined every appearance of the word "commerce" in the records of the Constitutional Convention, the ratification debates, and the Federalist Papers,...

Conservatism vs. the Constitution by Roger Pilon Roger Pilon is the founder and director of Cato's Center for Constitutional Studies. In a tone more pugnacious than thoughtful, Mathew J. Franck has taken me to task (over in "Bench Memos") for my op-ed in Friday's Wall Street Journal (reprinted here at Cato's site) wherein I criticized the D.C. Circuit's en banc decision last Tuesday, overturning an earlier panel that had found a constitutional right of terminally ill patients to access potentially life-saving drugs not yet finally approved by the FDA. Expressing sympathy for the terminally ill, Franck urges them to seek...

  The Second Amendment as a Window on the Framers' Worldview (Glenn Harlan Reynolds)               I won't waste readers' time by revisiting the points offered by my coauthors here:  I too find it beneficial to teach the Second Amendment as a way of focusing on the Constitution without dwelling on what the Court said about it last week or last year, and of addressing a subject that is of considerable popular interest.  Instead, I'd like to talk about some things I do that are different.               I teach the Second Amendment as part of a fairly typical "Bill...

Clarence Thomas' Use of Historical Sources - in United States v. Lopez By: Wick Schmidt Until very recently, the largest portion of the Supreme Court's constitutional cases involved arbitrating differences between the federal government and the states over the extent of their respective powers. The U.S. Constitution, in its original incarnation, created a federal republic-- neither a loose confederation, in which individual states obeyed the central authority only when it pleased them to do so, nor a unitary state, in which the federal government could overrule the states in any and all matters. The Constitution delegated certain specified powers to...

Heinlein the Libertarian "Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me," shows yet another side to the Heinlein paradox. As a literary influence on the emerging libertarian movement, Heinlein was second only to Rand. Yet his statement about self-sacrifice and duty to the species seems as un-Randian as you can get. Heinlein, a human chauvinist, always believed freedom and responsibility were linked. But he would never have thought it proper to impose the duty he saw as the highest human aspiration. Heinlein once told a visitor, "I'm so much a libertarian that I have no use for the whole...

No End in Sight" is the most coolheaded of the Iraq war documentaries, the most methodical and the least polemical. Yet it's the one that will leave audiences the most shattered, angry and astounded. Directed by Charles Ferguson, making his feature debut, the film relies mainly on interviews with people who were either inside the Bush administration or on the ground in Iraq in those crucial early months following the fall of Baghdad. Most of those interviewed are either career diplomats or career military officers, not anti-administration types by any stretch. Some, like Richard Armitage, were in the White House...

THE MOTHER OF ALL LOOPHOLES D.J. Connolly The author is a reformed bureaucrat living in northern Ohio          If it wasn't for the Fourteenth Amendment, federal judges would have to think up another way to protect nude dancing in bars. They'd have to make up totally different stories to use to outlaw school prayer and protect abortionists. They'd have a much tougher time keeping criminals out on the streets. For the last fifty years, or so, judges have used the Fourteenth Amendment, along with the due process scam, to grab control of an endless variety of state and local issues....

The Framers as DesignersSuppose that instead of viewing the Constitution as representing a command by a long-ago majority whose intentions we need somehow to discern, we view the Constitution as the blueprint for a machine that was designed to perform a certain function. In this case, the machine is designed to make laws to accomplish certain ends--laws that are supposed to be binding in conscience upon the citizenry.Think of the Constitution the way you might think of a machine designed to make sausages. We want a sausage-making machine to provide us with food, but we also want to ensure that...

The Framers as WardensLet me begin by posing a question: does a law enacted by Congress and signed by the President create a duty of obedience in the people? Would it be appropriate not merely to punish, but also to condemn a person who disobeys a law for having done something morally wrong? To put the matter starkly, did the Branch Davidians in Waco have a duty in conscience to submit to the commands of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms agents who came calling one morning? Did Randy Weaver do something wrong, not merely illegal, when he failed...

Patriotism is that pull of affection and loyalty, which the normal man feels toward his home. Home is a term that should be broad enough to embrace whatever form of political arrangement is dominant in the time and place under consideration. Thus, 'Home' for the ancient Greeks would manifestly refer to the city-state, and for the mediaeval Christian to the local province, while for modern man it refers most prominently to the territorially expansive nation-state that we often designate with the word country. The modern patriot is the man who feels affection, tenderness and loyalty for his country. Here in...

Faith-based patriot fails to pursuadeBy: Justyn DillinghamDavid Gelernter, author of "Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion," believes very strongly in a good many things, all of which he explains very well. The trouble is that most of these things contradiction another. The result is a book with no real point. The book's thesis, as the title suggests, is that "Americanism" is a "global religion" that transcends America itself, to rank with Christianity, Judaism and Islam. (Or even above them: Christianity and Judaism have entries in the index, but Islam does not. "Islamic terrorism" does, of course.) Gelernter's devotion to this...

When You Wish Upon a Star ...by L. Neil Smith         Was it Frederick Pohl or Alexei Panshin who first observed, "The future isn't what it used to be"? Maybe it was Karl Marx. Maybe it was Groucho Marx. Whoever said it, that's more or less what science fiction seems to be telling us right now.          If you stood in front of your bathroom mirror every morning and repeated a hundred times, "I'm a stupid, worthless pile of excrement and I'm not fit to live," how long would it be -- days, weeks, months -- before you started to believe it? How...

Constitutional Topic: The Second Amendment - The U.S. Constitution Online - The 2nd Amendment, starting in the latter half of the 20th century, became an object of much debate. Concerned with rising violence in society, and the role firearms play in that violence, gun control advocates began to read the 2nd Amendment one way. On the other side, firearm enthusiasts saw the attacks on gun ownership as attacks on freedom, and defended their interpretation of the 2nd Amendment just as fiercely. If the authors of the 2nd Amendment could have foreseen the debate, they might have phrased the amendment differently,...

SUMMARY OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN COLLECTIVISTS AND INDIVIDUALISTS 1. A collectivist believes that rights are derived from the state. An Individualist believes that rights are intrinsic to each human being. 2. A collectivist believes the state may perform acts that are forbidden to individuals. An individualist believes the state may do only what individuals have a right to do. 3. A collectivist believes individuals may be sacrificed for the greater good of the greater number. An individualist believes individuals must be protected from the greed and passion of the greater number. 4. A collectivist believes coercion is the best way to...

Jefferson commented that the purpose of a constitution is to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power, doing so by the chains of the Constitution.    While the binding capacity of the Constitution comes into play in the area of structural principles such as federalism and the separation of powers, perhaps the prime example of that capacity is its role in the problematic relation between majority rule and individual rights. As fundamental law, the Constitution, supposedly above politics, is always drawn into political controversies between majority rule and individual rights precisely because of its binding function. Through...

The Ron Paul Smear Campaign Doug Kendall By now, it is painfully obvious to most people in the freedom movement that Republican presidential hopeful, Ron Paul, has been targeted for elimination—by his own Party. The politically-connected elite within the Republican Party, along with allied organizations and operatives, are working overtime to make sure that Ron Paul is burned at the stake for daring to speak the truth and defy the Good Ol' Boy system. In all honesty, Dr. Paul should have known that he would be set up in the second debate—after he scored so high in poll after poll,...

Who really did kill Kennedy? BROTHERS THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE KENNEDY YEARS BY DAVID TALBOT Reviewed by Dan Cornford THE AUTHOR WILL CONVINCE MANY NOT WEDDED TO THE WARREN COMMISSION FINDINGS THAT THE LIKELIHOOD OF A CONSPIRACY TO ASSASSINATE JFK (AND MAYBE RFK) IS SIGNIFICANT. NOTWITHSTANDING THE DEFICIENCIES OF SOME SOURCES, TALBOT'S HIGHLY READABLE, AT TIMES GRIPPING BOOK MAKES THE CASE FOR RELEASING THE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS PERTAINING TO THE JFK ASSASSINATION. TALBOT SUMMARIZES MORE COMPELLING AND TROUBLING EVIDENCE. IN PARTICULAR, QUESTIONS REMAIN ABOUT THE ROLE CIA AGENT GEORGE JOANNIDES MAY HAVE PLAYED. DECLASSIFIED JFK FILES REVEAL THAT IN 1963,...

I see trees of green, red roses too I see them bloom for me and you And i think to myself: "What a wonderful world!" I see skies of blue and clouds of white The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night And I think to my self: "What a wonderful world!" The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky Are also on the faces of people going by I see friends shaking hands saying "How do you do." They really say: "I love you!" I hear babies cry I watch them grow They'll learn much more than...