Free Republic

George Washington, our first president, is probably our greatest and most decent statesman. We celebrate Washington's Birthday each February. But March 16th marks the birthday of probably the second-most important and decent American, James Madison. Madison became our fourth president, but his presidency is not the chief source of his greatness. There would have been an entirely different America without Madison's enormous input and foresight at the contentious 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. There were 55 delegates to the convention. Like Madison, some had a formal college education, while others did not. From Madison's notes about the quality of the...

John Adams said, “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God … anarchy and tyranny commence. Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist.” I am not a politician or public figure. I am one of many Americans whose property is under assault by government. I am a student of self-governance living in New Jersey. My state and local governments make a habit of redistributing privately held property among the private parties it chooses. This is absolutely forbidden by the U.S. Constitution. If it can happen here in my...

We learned it in school. America is a democracy, right? It’s stated as a fact in third grade social studies textbooks. Politicians give speeches about our great democracy. We hear it on TV, radio, in political debates, and from the White House. We even aspire to spread democracy around the world. But is it true? Is our form of government a democracy? Say the pledge of allegiance. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic…” There’s that pesky word Republic. How did that word get in there? Democracy or republic – what’s...

Perhaps you missed this small and unimpressive candidate for president, for his physical presence was as weak as the voice that delivered his message. At barely five feet, two inches tall, he stood up and criticized our government’s expensive actions, focusing on the problems before us instead of engaging in the sound bite war waged by the other candidates. Some in the audience craned their necks to hear his timid presentation, but most quickly dismissed him as being horribly incompetent in today’s media society. However, his words hit home with some people as he spoke about how Congress was wreckfully...

Ben Franklin is the prototype for the celebrity-as-politician. His autobiography is still in print; if he were alive, he’d be on Drudge’s columnists’ list, and command speaking fees that would turn Hillary Clinton green with envy. A popular T-shirt has a quote erroneously attributed to Franklin: ‘Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.’ But John Witherspoon? He wasn’t a fan of self-promotion, which was no less prevalent then. Today, in D.C., his statue stands at a tiny triangle where Connecticut Avenue intersects with N Street and 18th Street N.W. It is routinely ignored. At...

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia reaffirmed his commitment to defending the Constitution while speaking to the Federalist Society in his home state of New Jersey on Friday. Scalia, the preeminent conservative firebrand of the court, told the audience it is the structure of the government under the Constitution and not the liberties guaranteed under the Bill of Rights that makes us free. As reported by The Daily Signal: “Every tin horn dictator in the world today, every president for life, has a Bill of Rights,” said Scalia, author of the 2012 book Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. “That’s...

Public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one. As there are cases where the public opinion must be obeyed by the government; so there are cases, where not being fixed, it may be influenced by the government. This distinction, if kept in view, would prevent or decide many debates on the respect due from the government to the sentiments of the people. In proportion as government is influenced by opinion, it must be so, by whatever influences opinion. This decides the question concerning a Constitutional Declaration of Rights, which requires an influence...

In what has been described as a new front in the battle over same-sex marriage, legislators in several states under judicial orders to confer marital status on same-sex couples have introduced bills to forbid state or local officials from issuing marriage licenses to couples of the same gender. The bills would also strip the salaries of employees who issued the licenses, the New York Times reported Thursday.The bills have been introduced in the legislatures of Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas, with South Carolina also considering a bill that would allow officials to opt out of issuing such licenses if it...

Liberals have been attacking the 2nd amendment for years. THE CONTEXT HAS CHANGED! IT WAS FOR HUNTING! In this video, James Madison sits down to write exactly what they think it is that he wanted. This one's going to sting!

23/02/2006 - Duke: Duke study posits presidents had mental illness U-Wire via NewsEdge Corporation : By Haley Hoffman, The Chronicle (Duke) DURHAM, N.C. -- No one would ever expect the general who led the Union army to victory in the Civil War to have a debilitating fear of blood. But Ulysses S. Grant was among the 49 percent of former U.S. presidents afflicted by mental illness, according to an article published recently by psychiatrists at the Duke University Medical Center. Jonathan Davidson, professor of psychiatry and director of the Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Program, has a particular interest in history,...

Bill Federer, the author of a “quote book” featured repeatedly in Ben Carson’s America the Beautiful, defends the neurosurgeon-turned-presidential aspirant from charges of plagiarism. “In my estimation, he has used my material exactly the way I wanted my material to be used,” Federer tells National Review Online. “The fact that he had cited me 16 times shows that his intention was to be honest and up front in his use of my material and the two times that the BuzzFeed article cited that he had not, in my estimation, is an editor’s oversight, errata, and it’s not plagiarism.” The conservative...

As Constitution Daily counts down to the debut on December 15 at the National Constitution Center of an exhibition featuring an original copy of the Bill of Rights, we are looking at some fascinating facts about the iconic document. When James Madison spoke to the First Congress he proposed 20 amendments for a Bill of Rights, and not the 10 we all know about. So what did Congress delete from the final list that was ratified by the states?

Few Americans who entered polling booths for the Nov. 4 election and pulled the lever for their favorite candidate for Senate realize that for most of American history, senators were chosen by the state legislatures. It wasn’t until 1913 that the 17thAmendment was passed, granting American voters the constitutional right of directly electing their senators.While this important amendment may seem innocuous, the reality is that few other changes to our Constitution have had the same detrimental effect on our nation than this single, nearly forgotten alteration.The passage of the 17th Amendment was driven largely by the populist movement of the...

The “Smithsonian” magazine compiled a list of the “100 most significant Americans,” and to the dismay of his fan base President Obama failed to make the cut. Adding insult to injury, former President George W. Bush made the list. But it gets even better, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was also included. The liberal website Raw Story bemoaned the very idea that the Smithsonian Institution “decided that George W. Bush is a more ‘significant’ figure in U.S. history” than the exalted one. Curiously, the only redeeming qualification Raw Story named when mentioning Obama is that he was the country’s first...

On Aug. 24, 1814, the British started a fire — and ultimately kindled a capital’s future. The day began like so many days in Washington, with a painfully long meeting marked by confusion, misinformation and indecision. The British were coming. They were on the march in the general direction of Washington. The precise target of the invaders remained unclear, but their intentions were surely malign. James Madison, the fourth president of these young United States, had raced to a private home near the Navy Yard for an emergency war council with top generals and members of his Cabinet. The secretary...

August 16, 2014 College Board Erases the Founding Fathers. By Patrick Jakeway The classic novel Brave New World describes a future in which people have lost all of their liberty and in which they have become drugged robots obedient to a central authority. It also details how this control was first established. First, the rulers had to erase all history and all the people’s memory of a time before their bondage. Today, the history of George Washington's leadership has been erased in the new Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History test/curriculum, taking effect in the fall of 2014. The College Board,...

House Speaker John Boehner’s idea to sue the president gained steam last week as the House passed, largely along party lines, a resolution authorizing a suit charging the president with failing to uphold his constitutional duties by unilaterally delaying the implementation of the Obamacare employer mandate. boehner obamacare The Left has expended much effort to show that the lawsuit is a gateway to IMPEACHMENT, despite consistent Republican protestations to the contrary. Five million dollars of online donations suggests President Obama isn’t the only one who believes his own baloney. But one might as easily argue that the speaker’s lawsuit is...

It’s hard to find a history of the American Revolution from academia that actually tries to recapture it rather than engage in a deconstruction project. Fortunately, the Liberty Fund has re-issued a classic that tries to reconstruct America’s founding, and largely succeeds. “That the American Revolution and the American people—of all the world’s peoples the most materialistic and most vulgar and least disciplined—should have produced a governmental system adequate to check the very forces they unleashed; this was the miracle of the age, and of the succeeding age, and of all ages to come,” Forrest McDonald wrote in E Pluribus...

Happy Independence Day everybody! I would like to introduce my largest project to date: Attempting to put together one voice per Founder in the most important debate in American History. The most important debate which nobody has ever heard. We are going to make sure people can finally hear it. You can listen to as well as download the files, here. This is still very much a work in progress. I do not believe it is enough that people can read these notes, nor think that simply making the notes easier to read is enough. Given how they are written,...

Coming soon: a lawsuit filed by House Speaker John Boehner challenging President Obama’s usurpation of legislative authority. According to the Speaker’s legal theory (summarized in a memo that closely follows a recent George Will column), the courts can resolve disputes between the legislative and executive branches when (a.) no private party has standing to sue; (b.) there is no legislative remedy; (c.) one branch of the Congress has voted to authorized such a lawsuit. Barack Obama Predictably, President Obama has called it a “stunt” and Nancy Pelosi “subterfuge.” But, as the distinguished former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy pointed out recently,...