Free Republic

Consent of the People http://www.wiseandfrugalgovernment.blogspot.com/ Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 22 writes : The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority. That's us. That's we, the people. In Federalist 23, he writes of the "principal purposes" of a union of the states: "...the common defence of the members; the preservation of the public peace, as well against internal convulsion as external attacks; the regulation of commerce with other nations and between the States;...

"Obama's Stash" http://www.wiseandfrugalgovernment.blogspot.com/ I have not been able to shake the Friday soundbite of the Detroit woman waiting in line to apply for a government voucher. When journalist, Ken Rogulski of WJR in Michigan asked why she was waiting, she replied, To get some money." What kind of money he asked? "Obama money. " In reply to his query regarding where did Obama get his money, she replied: "I don't know, his stash." The first time I heard the clip I laughed. But the more I thought about it the less funny I found it. How many people think there...

How New York’s opportunity society became America’sWe New Yorkers imagine our city’s history begins in earnest with the Gilded Age and the Great Migration that brought many of our forebears sailing under the Statue of Liberty’s torch to supercharge a nascent metropolis with a jolt of new energy. But this summer, when a handful of square-bearded, antique-garbed Pennsylvania German Baptists jacked a yellow clapboard house up over a Harlem church and wheeled it around the corner to a new site in St. Nicholas Park, we recalled that more than a century earlier Gotham took center stage as the nation’s first...

Learning From Conservative History: Main Trails . . . and Less-Traveled Paths - 01/02/09 This is part three of a symposium on contemporary conservatism hosted by ISI at Yale in November, 2008. Read part one. Read part two.By training, I am an historian. I love the discipline and believe that historical mindedness—the ability to see and understand the grounding of current institutions, issues, and events in the complex matrix of the past—this is the superior way to make sense of reality.All the same, I have been troubled for over a decade by the growing interest of American conservatives in...

Last month, workmen jacked up a 206-year-old yellow clapboard house, levered it onto a set of remote-controlled dollies, and trundled it two blocks to a new site in St. Nicholas Park, overlooking East Harlem in New York City. The Grange, as it is called, was the home of Alexander Hamilton, best known as co-author of the Federalist papers and America's first secretary of the Treasury. But this founding father also had an extraordinary role in the infant nation's attempt to come to grips with the curse of slavery. Born in the West Indies, Hamilton was one of the most ardent...

NEW YORK - Two hundred and eighty tons of American history were on the move Saturday in Harlem. The home of Alexander Hamilton, who conceived the country's banking system and was killed in a duel with a political rival, rolled inch by inch down a Harlem hillside to its new location overlooking a park. "This was the only home Hamilton ever owned," said Steve Laise, a National Park Service official dressed in a vest, tie and pants typical of the 1800's. "It represented the consummation of Hamilton's lifelong dream — a successful social position for a man who came to...

NEW YORK — Two hundred and eighty tons of American history were on the move Saturday in Harlem. The home of Alexander Hamilton, who conceived the country's banking system and was killed in a duel with a political rival, rolled inch by inch down a Harlem hillside to its new location overlooking a park. "This was the only home Hamilton ever owned," said Steve Laise, a National Park Service official dressed in a vest, tie and pants typical of the 1800's. "It represented the consummation of Hamilton's lifelong dream — a successful social position for a man who came to...

MARTINEZ -- Alexander Hamilton, who was 18 when he murdered Pittsburg police Officer Larry Lasater, should die by execution, a jury recommended today. The Contra Costa County jury that heard evidence over two weeks in Hamilton's penalty trial reached its verdict in less than a day of deliberations. The jurors convicted Hamilton and his co-defendant, 20-year-old Andrew Moffett, last month of murder, robbery and special circumstances. The duo robbed a Pittsburg Raley's supermarket and a Wells Fargo Bank branch inside the store on April 23. Hamilton shot 35-year-old Officer Larry Lasater as the officer pursued him on the De Anza...

"Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants." -- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 1, 27 October 1787) "The reformation was preceded by the discovery of America, as if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither friendship nor safety." -- Thomas Paine (Common Sense, 1776) “The prevailing spirit of the present age seems to be the spirit of skepticism and captiousness, of suspicion and distrust in private...

When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated. -- Thomas Jefferson, 1821 Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain, quoted in A.B. Paine's Mark Twain: A Biography (Harper, 1912, Vol. 2, page 724). The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop. --...

Today is Alexander Hamilton’s 250th birthday. Unless, of course, it’s his 252nd. He claimed to have been born in 1757, but there is considerable nearly contemporary evidence that he was actually born in 1755. But there is no argument that he was not yet 50 when he died at the hands of Aaron Burr in 1804. And there is no argument that despite his brief life he had more influence on the future of the United States than all but a very, very few of the Founding Fathers. Hamilton was not like the other Founding Fathers. He was the only...

The following is todays Founders' Daily Quote from the Patriot Post "[T]he present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes - rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provides for amendments." -- Alexander Hamilton (letter to James Bayard, April 1802) Reference: Selected Writings and Speeches of Alexander Hamilton,Frisch, ed. (511)

Last week US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, in Detroit, Michigan, ruled that the National Security Agency’s overseas communications intercept program was unconstitutional. This is tied for the worst decision I’ve ever read, in 36 years as a member of the bar, both federal and state. Dozens of pundits have already written about aspects of her decision that are egregiously wrong. Even the august New York Times, which opposes the NSA program and favors Judge Taylor’s result, still has called her opinion “badly reasoned.” It’s important that lawyers, legal writers, and experienced laymen be able to recognize a thoroughly incompetent...

Peering into spaces that have not seen the light of day for two centuries, architectural archaeologists are dissecting Alexander Hamilton’s country home, the Grange, to figure out how to take it apart and put it back together again. The National Park Service plans to move the Hamilton Grange National Memorial from Convent Avenue and 141st Street, where it is so boxed in by neighboring buildings that two of its porches had to be cut off, to St. Nicholas Park, about 300 feet to the southeast. There, it can be reassembled in a form that Hamilton would have recognized, with porches...

~Clip~ Think of the most famous duel in American history: The shooting of Alexander Hamilton by a pistol-wielding Aaron Burr, vice president to Thomas Jefferson, on the New Jersey banks of the Hudson River in 1804. Hamilton died the next day. Burr and Hamilton had a long-standing political rivalry, and Hamilton made no secret of his distrust for Burr when Burr, who had narrowly missed beating Jefferson, ran for governor of New York in early 1804. When Burr got wind of a newspaper article that reported Hamilton had a "despicable opinion" of him, he challenged Hamilton to a duel near...

Perhaps this duel is the most famous in history. Its results certainly meant the end of both Hamilton and Burr. They carried Hamilton from the field and the next day he died. Burr lived for years, but the shadow of his own doom was ever before him. It is reported that late in life he observed that, had he been wiser, he would have known that there was room enough in the world for both Hamilton and himself. Had Hamilton been equally wise, he would have known that calumnies and lies bring forth but bitter fruit. When the news of...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version January 13, 2006, 10:53 a.m. Vigilance & Responsibility Alexander Hamilton’s strategic sobriety. This past week (January 11) marked the 251st anniversary of the birth of Alexander Hamilton, whom Richard Brookhiser described as the greatest of the Founders except for George Washington. Hamilton's detractors, beginning with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams did not deny his greatness, but feared his motives. They described him as a lover of monarchy whose goal was to corrupt the republican virtue of the American people by means of his economic schemes. Since then, many...

FEDERALIST No. 21 Other Defects of the Present Confederation By Alexander Hamilton for the Independent Journal To the People of the State of New York: HAVING in the three last numbers taken a summary review of the principal circumstances and events which have depicted the genius and fate of other confederate governments, I shall now proceed in the enumeration of the most important of those defects which have hitherto disappointed our hopes from the system established among ourselves. To form a safe and satisfactory judgment of the proper remedy, it is absolutely necessary that we should be well acquainted with...

Imagine if Bill Clinton had nominated his personal attorney and White House counsel to a post on the U.S. Supreme Court. Somehow, I can't imagine my conservative friends supporting the nominee – particularly if there were questions about controversial documents being destroyed that might actually shed light on scandals of the past. The stunning series of articles by WND columnist Jerome Corsi, raising serious and nagging questions about Harriet Miers' role as chairman of the Texas Lottery Commission and the cover-up of the way that story intersects with George W. Bush's National Guard service, points up why this kind of...

Starting this year, every educational institution receiving federal aid must teach about the U.S. Constitution on the September 17 anniversary of its signing (September 16 in 2005...) The requirement is ironic, given that it came from the Senate's leading Constitutional scholar, yet clearly conflicts with the Constitution, and on many grounds. Last year, Senator Robert Byrd (D.-W.Va.) inserted it into a spending bill packed with pork that was blatantly inconsistent with Americans' general welfare, which is the Constitution's rationale. There is nothing in the document that permits the federal government to tell local schools what they can and cannot teach....

Our nation's founders were firmly convinced that an independent judiciary was essential to the free society they were hoping to create. In Federalist 78, for instance, Alexander Hamilton elaborated at length on Montesquieu's dictum, "There is no liberty, if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers," explaining (among other things) why the Constitution's provision of life tenure for judges was particularly appropriate. Hamilton maintained that, while in individual cases judges might act oppressively, the overall tendency of an independent judiciary would be to protect rather than subvert our freedoms, "The general liberty of the...

When I was a boy my family had a Time-Life book on the mind which featured a chart of the presumed IQs of famous dead men. Goethe, as I recall, led the pack, at 210. But the Founding Fathers did very well: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington all scored over 150. As the Fourth of July approaches, we'd do well to remember that the Founders were a smart lot, with few gentleman's C's among them. Yet they didn't know everything. They were strongest in law, political philosophy and history--all essential subjects for revolutionaries and statesmen. But another subject,...

WAYNE - Alexander Hamilton was no stranger to what is now Passaic County. He stood alongside George Washington, acting as his aide at the Dey Mansion in Wayne during the Revolutionary War. And he played a major role in establishing Paterson as one of the country's early industrial centers. Now the county has another reminder of Hamilton's legacy: a legal decision penned by him more than 200 years ago. The document belonged to the Hamilton Club, a social club that formerly met in Paterson until the early 1990s. Last week the club's president, Walter Hunziker, presented it to the county...

CHESTERTOWN, Md. -- Historian Ron Chernow received the inaugural $50,000 George Washington Book Prize, the nation's largest literary prize for early American history. Chernow was honored Saturday for his biography "Alexander Hamilton," a look at the co-author of The Federalist Papers and the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury. The prize . . . recognizes books about George Washington or the founding era. Ted Widmer, director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College, said Chernow's book brings "new life to an often-overlooked founder."

"Gettin' chilly down in Philly..." This interactive flash of the Founding Fathers is hilarious! Submitted for your enjoyment... http://www.jibjab.com/32.html

To the People of the State of New York: THE President is ``to NOMINATE, and, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States whose appointments are not otherwise provided for in the Constitution. But the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers as they think proper, in the President alone, or in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments. The President shall have power to fill up ALL VACANCIES which...

  "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" by John F. McManus November 6, 2000   Knowing that a democracy is a government of men in which the tyranny of the majority rules, America's Founding Fathers wisely created a republic - a government ruled by law.On Constitution Day, September 17, 2000, President Bill Clinton spoke at the ground-breaking ceremony for a National Constitution Center at Independence Mall in Philadelphia. On that occasion the president remarked that the men who signed the Constitution "understood the enormity of what they were attempting to do: to create a representative democracy." He heaped praise...

Alexander Hamilton was one of the most influential of the United States' founding fathers. As the first secretary of the treasury he placed the new nation on a firm financial footing, and although his advocacy of strong national government brought him into bitter conflict with Thomas Jefferson and others, his political philosophy was ultimately to prevail in governmental development. Hamilton's own career was terminated prematurely when he was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804. ~ Early Life ~ Hamilton was born on the West Indian island of Nevis, probably in 1755. Since he was the illegitimate son...

Under the “collective right” view, the Second Amendment is a federalism provision that provides to States a prerogative to establish and maintain armed and organized militia units akin to the National Guard, and only States may assert this prerogative. (1) There is Always a Kernel of Truth in Any Good Propaganda Today’s “progressive” interpretation of the Second Amendment contends that the militia was intended by the Founders to mean organized state armies. For clarification, let us examine the writings of Alexander Hamilton, one of the leaders of the Federalist movement during the debates that created our Constitution. In his writings,...

The nation of commoners Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin were skeptical about the common man and government. By PERRY TREADWELL Tuesday, December 14, 2004 This has been the year of Alexander Hamilton, with a new biography and a museum exhibit in New York City. All that I remember about Hamilton from high school senior history taken more than a half-century ago is a quote attributed to him, "The People is a Beast." More recently, a poem Hamilton may have read by a 17th century Italian cleric, Tommaso Campanella, has appeared. The first stanza goes: The People is a beast of...

Two centuries after their famous forebears met on the banks of the Hudson, the Hamiltons and the Burrs are still at it."LOOK AT THIS," said Antonio Burr. "Look at what they're selling." Standing in the gift shop of the New-York Historical Society on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Burr held a magnet to the light. On it were portraits of his ancestor Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States, and Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, whom Vice President Burr killed in a duel 200 years ago. Each man's portrait stared coldly at the other's.It was...

James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. If they were alive today, they may well be sentenced under the Campaign Reform Act of 2002. While the government is at it, they might also charge them with RICO violations - so immense was their conspiracy. You see, Madison, Jay & Hamilton were the . . .

This is a movie review, a reminder of one of the most reprehensible people in American history, and a well-deserved pranging of James Carville and Lanny Davis. Both of them appeared last week on every TV program in the known universe to decry the criticisms of John Kerry by 254 Swift Boat veterans because “they were not on the same boat.” This is a bald-faced, brass-plated lie in a number of ways. But before we count those up, a review of M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, The Village, is in order Yes, this will connect up. And so will a...

Theory of a founding father's African ancestry Friday, July 23, 2004                                              By LAWRENCE AARONAS MUCH as I thought I knew about Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary, nobody ever told me he was black. Yes. You heard it here first, folks.And you'll think about it from now on every time you take out a $10 bill.Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow is the latest one to explore the theory.I was totally blown away by that information when a friend casually mentioned Hamilton's link to two significant anniversaries - the 250th anniversary of Columbia University, originally Kings College where he was schooled, and...

After two centuries, it's still a sore point. Descendants of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr will reenact the nation's most famous duel when they meet today in Weehawken, N.J., on the 200th anniversary of that sordid event. Alexander Hamilton, a brilliant secretary of the treasury under George Washington but his career on the skids, took one bullet in the midsection from a dueling pistol fired by his bitter foe, Aaron Burr. The mortally wounded Hamilton fell to the ground and died the next day at age 50. Burr, 48, was unscathed. Burr, an equally brilliant politician and vice president under...

WEEHAWKEN, N.J. (AP) -- The bitter grudge between their ancestors has long faded, but on Sunday descendants of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr marked their paces with pistols in hand. Antonio Burr, a descendant of Burr's cousin, arrived by rowboat in period costume and fired a replica of the .54-caliber pistol that mortally wounded Hamilton 200 years ago in the July 11, 1804 duel. Douglas Hamilton, a fifth-great-grandson of Hamilton, feigned the historic hip wound, dropping to one knee and then falling to the ground in a sitting position. The event was the families' first meeting in two centuries. "It...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Two hundred years ago today, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton squared off in a sunrise duel on a wooded ledge in Weehawken, N.J., above the Hudson River. Burr was vice president when he leveled his fatal shot at Hamilton, the former Treasury secretary, who died the next day in what is now the West Village of Manhattan. New Yorkers turned out en masse for Hamilton's funeral, while Burr (rightly or wrongly) was branded an assassin and fled south in anticipation of indictments in New York and New Jersey. To the horror of Hamilton's admirers, the vice president, now...

"Wise politicians will be cautious about fettering the government with restrictions that cannot be observed, because they know that every break of the fundamental laws, though dictated by necessity, impairs that sacred reverence which ought to be maintained in the breast of rulers towards the constitution of a country."- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 25

WEEHAWKEN, N.J. -- Douglas Hamilton plans to pay tribute to the family name, even if it means losing _ again. Next month, Hamilton, a fifth great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton, will stand in for his founding father ancestor when the Weehawken Historical Commission re-enacts the July 11, 1804, duel with Aaron Burr that left Hamilton mortally wounded. Antonio Burr, a descendant of Aaron Burr's cousin, will stand in for his equally famous ancestor. There are no direct descendants of Aaron Burr. "Some people in the family questioned re-enacting somebody getting shot, but I have received assurance the re-enactment will be done...

http://www.cnn.com/

This week we formally dedicated the World War II Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The center of the Memorial is a reflecting pool in front of a curved wall on which there are 4,050 golden stars, each of them representing one hundred Americans who gave the last full measure of devotion in that conflict. This was the long-delayed memorial for the 16 million Americans who served in that conflict, only a quarter of whom are still alive. A substantial number of those were in attendance at the dedication. Of course, World War II was not the war in...

He is remembered today less for the way he lived than for the way he died, but the life of Alexander Hamilton was "so tumultuous that only an audacious novelist could have dreamed it up." Such is the assessment of Ron Chernow in this splendid new biography of Hamilton. Relying on exhaustive research in several countries, in "Alexander Hamilton" Chernow has crafted an incredibly thorough account of the life of a man who had a "unique flair for materializing at every major turning point in the early history of the republic." "Hamilton was the supreme double threat among the founding...

In our imagination, the founding fathers are so embedded in their native states - Washington, Jefferson and Madison on their Virginia plantations, John Adams on his New England farm - that Alexander Hamilton can seem the footloose exception. The first treasury secretary prided himself on his broad, continental perspective, and even fervid admirers have been loath to cast him as a New Yorker, lest this tarnish his gleaming national vision. Yet in five years of research, I have found that Hamilton, loaded with brash charm, bottomless energy and worldly cunning, was in fact the classic New Yorker and a quintessential...

Here we have one of the world’s smaller nations. A weak nation, though rich in natural resources. It has just endured a national war fought on its soil, combined with a civil war. Its population is riven with political and religious differences that have set neighbor against neighbor. Some people have fled in terror from attacks by their fellow citizens. Many have had their homes and businesses destroyed. Some have been killed. What are the prospects that democracy, like Kool-Aid, can be established quickly in such a nation? Just add water and stir? In a nation that has no experience...

FEDERALIST PAPERS Federalist No. 78 The Judiciary Department From McLEAN'S Edition, New York. Author: Alexander Hamilton To the People of the State of New York: WE PROCEED now to an examination of the judiciary department of the proposed government. In unfolding the defects of the existing Confederation, the utility and necessity of a federal judicature have been clearly pointed out. It is the less necessary to recapitulate the considerations there urged, as the propriety of the institution in the abstract is not disputed; the only questions which have been raised being relative to the manner of constituting it, and to...

"If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority...the majority...must conform to the views of the minority.... Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of he public good." --

Character assassination and other slimeball tactics probably will be on full display today as leftist interest groups try to transform the humane and honest Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor into the image of an ogre. Pryor -- a brilliant, popular, fair and progressive elected official -- is a presidential nominee for a judgeship on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing today to consider the nomination. Arrayed against Pryor will be the usual witches' brew of hard-left pressure groups. First they will bludgeon the AG for a while with some harsh-sounding...

<p>PATERSON, N.J. — As the threat of imminent war looms over Iraq, Middle Eastern immigrants and Americans of Middle Eastern heritage in this New Jersey town continue to hope that President Bush can somehow steer clear of using military force.</p>

The The Bill of Rights Preamble Congress of the United States begun and held at the City of New-York, on Wednesday the fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine. THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the...