Schools and nearly all other institutions were controlled and funded by localities and states. Peacetime budgets usually were balanced or in surplus. Peacetime federal spending averaged well under 5 percent of Gross Domestic Product. But to most people, most of the time, it was unfelt and unseen. It ran the post office, the patent office, and the military. In other respects, the federal government was as it always had been: It produced the currency. (Other religious communities had similar dodges.) But Prohibition was doomed and was soon gone. Every second man in my father’s Jewish community had become a “rabbi”-the better to obtain sacramental wine. There also was a new Federal Reserve System, but that was just a national bank, and we’d had national banks from time to time from the founding of the republic.Ī more important change was Prohibition, authorized by the Eighteenth Amendment. But as I have pointed out in previous essays, these changes didn’t have the revolutionary effects some people claim for them. senators directly, and the Nineteenth assured women the right to vote. The Seventeenth allowed the people to elect U.S. The Sixteenth Amendment facilitated a small income tax that affected only a few. Slavery was gone, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments had given Congress power to protect minorities. When he was a teenager during the years following World War I, the federal government was recognizably the same institution it had been after the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791. My father was born in 1911 and grew up in the slums of Brooklyn, New York. A Limited Federal Government in a Free America This series of essays explains how that happened. But the fundamental damage had been done: Much of the original Constitution was lost and has never been recovered. Some justices recognized they had gone too far. Thousands were imprisoned without habeas corpus or trial by jury, and at least one was secretly executed.Įventually, the court began to correct itself. They lost their incomes and the freedom to pursue their livelihoods. But we will never know what they would have supported, because they never were asked.ĭuring this period, Americans became less secure in their right to govern themselves locally. The crises of economic depression and world war probably would have induced Americans to support some constitutional alterations if they had been asked. The most that can be said is that people voted for candidates, some of whom sought the change. Other than the nine justices, no one voted on this change. This time the outcome was different, largely because the Supreme Court refused to defend the Constitution.Īs many scholars have recognized, the justices’ dereliction of duty essentially amended the Constitution without following amendment procedures. But America previously had undergone similar crises without altering her form of government. The change occurred against the backdrop of economic depression and world war. This series focuses on a central cause-perhaps the central cause: the conscious abdication of responsibility by a handful of Supreme Court justices, primarily between the years 19. ![]() Major changes always have multiple causes. So how did it happen that federal functionaries now regulate nearly every aspect of our lives? How did a government designed to protect freedom become arbitrary and authoritarian? When did it start to incentivize bad behavior, both among officials and the people at large? Why does it run deficits every year, and why do those deficits keep getting bigger? It was a frugal institution, designed to “preserve the blessings of Liberty” and to bring out the best in human beings. The Constitution created a relatively small federal government, with powers limited to certain listed subjects. Because the entire series is now in one place, transitional material between installments has become unnecessary and it has been removed. But to make the series easier to read, it is combined and reproduced here. It explains a central event in the conversion of the federal government from the relatively small version created by the Constitution to the dysfunctional, overreaching “monster state” of today: the refusal, by a packed and unprincipled Supreme Court, to enforce constitutional limits on federal politicians.Įach installment was posted to this website. The Epoch Times published this seven-part series from January 17 to February 4, 2022. None had any significant judicial experience before being appointed to the highest tribunal in the nation. Left to right (including both rows): Reed, Byrnes, Roberts, Douglas, Stone (C.J.), Murphy, Black, Jackson, Frankfurter. Above: SCOTUS in 1942-possibly the weakest Supreme Court ever.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |