Free Republic

The Constitution of the United States of America is the most important document in the country. It lays the groundwork for our entire system of government, protects our natural rights as human beings, and sets limits on what the government can do. When you look at the history immediately proceeding its adoption, everything makes perfect sense. After all, they’d just fought a war to get away from what they saw as a tyrannical government that wasn’t accountable to the people. They damn sure didn’t want to replicate those mistakes in their new country. Yet now, a couple of centuries later,...

Article 1 section 8 clause 1 of the Constitution reads: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States…” From this clause, many have construed the “general Welfare” statement to grant practically unlimited power to Congress to collect and spend the tax payers’ money on whatever cause Congress may invent for the “good” of the government or the people. Is that what the designers of our Constitution intended when they penned those words “general Welfare?” James Madison, the...

I've had it with pundits, politicians, and people who should know better that continuously refer to our country as a democracy. The latest such reference was by renowned political commentator Thomas Friedman, who has never been confused with an intelligent person. But he has lots of company among the chattering classes, and even more so from among our so-called educators. At every educational level, teachers, professors, administrators, and even the elite collegiate Boards-of-Directors erroneously refer to the United States as a democracy and, in general, display an overall ignorance of American history and its Founding principles. And unfortunately, our youth...

The word Republic has all but disappeared from our political lexicon.  It has erroneously been replaced by Democracy.  The Founders must be turning over in their graves.  They had nothing but contempt for democracy.  They sought to, and did, create a constitutional republic, but not before doing their homework. Unlike today's politicians, talking heads, and academics, the Founders had an acute, in-depth, and nuanced understanding of history and political systems.  Prior to the 1787 constitutional convention, James Madison undertook a comprehensive study of every known republic in recorded history to ensure that the Founders didn't repeat their mistakes.  The Founders...

The first essay in this three-part series about Noah Feldman’s “The Three Lives of James Madison” discussed how Madison’s theory of war powers was focused heavily on internal dangers to liberty and republican governance from war or standing armies. The allocation of the declare war power to Congress played only a small role in his theory. More important were structural checks on national-level military establishments, especially constitutional provisions that preserved state militias as the primary source of military manpower and that required Congress to fund—and then keep funding—a national army. Without an army, the president couldn’t fight a war regardless...

I have long believed two things about constitutional war powers, which my reading of Noah Feldman’s “The Three Lives of James Madison” largely confirmed. First, James Madison was brilliant and prescient about many things, but the strategy and politics of war were not among them. Second, modern constitutional critics of an imperial presidency place too much weight on the declare war clause—and especially Madison’s statements about it. Madison, indeed, worried deeply about unchecked presidential war powers. But Feldman’s book shows that Madison did not emphasize the same risks and checks so often ascribed to him today, especially by congressionalists who...

What percentage of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves? It's about 73%. What percentage of delegates to the Constitutional Convention owned slaves? It's just under 50%. Problem is, this data set is complete, and it is purposefully structured to give the Founding Fathers short shrift. Even among slave-holding Founders, there is a clear number of them who even though they owned slaves, they weren't happy or fond of the issue. I came across this "data" while looking up something tangentially unrelated, but I didn't see any conservative blogs or news sites who had directly addressed this so...

As a young person, my first encounter with the word LIBERTY came from the verse “Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is Liberty”. Naturally inquisitive, I wondered, “So then, what is LIBERTY?” because “wherever the Spirit of the Lord is” there IT is…right? Another encounter I had with this word came from the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident…that we are endowed by our creator with Life, LIBERTY, and the Pursuit of Happiness…” At the time, I thought to myself, “it’s easy to know what Life and Pursuit of Happiness are, but again, what...

Donald Trump made a lot of hay on the campaign trail by decrying the foreign adventurism of previous administrations. Trump positioned himself as the righteous outsider ready to rein in the executive overreach of his predecessors. None of that began with Barack Obama or George W. Bush, but Americans with short historical memories readily identified illegal and ill-advised wars as a major problem in America, particularly since some of those wars were often carried on without any congressional input. See Obama in Libya for example. But what if the problem of executive overreach in foreign policy began long before either...

When a woman asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government had been created by he and the other gathered founders, Franklin famously replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” One key to keeping that Republic exists in understanding how the Constitution was designed to function. The Constitution of these United States is not arbitrary. It is a document of standards established to keep the GOVERNMENT from becoming arbitrary. These standards were not invented by the men who created the document. These standards were axiomatic truths that had proven themselves for over a millennium. Many of these truths can be...

Having now endured a more than two-year orgy of adoration for the Broadway hip-hop musical, Hamilton, the public surely deserves a historical corrective. Historian Brion McClanahan's latest work on the Revolutionary period, How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America, is being released Monday. Ron Paul, the Libertarian and Republican candidate for president and longtime U.S. Representative from Texas, has written the foreward, which he graciously shared in advance with Reason. The central government has always been the greatest threat to liberty in America, but most Americans don't understand how modern America became the warfare state. How did the president acquire so...

It was only a matter of time. The "Dallas Independent School District included schools named after three of America’s Founding Fathers on a list of schools that the district is exploring renaming," Peter Hasson reported in The Daily Caller yesterday, on Constitution Day. "The DISD administration has already recommended renaming four schools named after Confederate generals, including Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson."

What role should religion play in a free society? More and more people today would answer: none. That would not have been the answer of the Founders of the United States – the men who fought the American Revolution and wrote the country’s Constitution. To them the issue of religion and freedom were inextricably linked. You couldn’t have freedom without religion. In fact, the political philosophy of the Founders necessitated a divine foundation. Thomas Jefferson makes this clear in the Declaration of Independence when he writes that “all men…are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” The purpose of...

As someone who had never really thought much about our political system in the U.S, I was drawn to the 2016 Presidential election as never before. I knew what the Electoral College was, yet after the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Albert Gore Jr.--when Gore won the popular vote but not the election--I remember thinking it was unfair to Gore that Bush should win the Presidency. In 2016 I was more involved, opinionated and became more informed about the candidates and the process. When it came to the actual election, I watched as electoral votes stacked up for...

The Library of Congress has put the papers of Alexander Hamilton online for the first time in their original format. The Library holds the world’s largest collection of Hamilton papers—approximately 12,000 items concentrated from 1777 until Hamilton’s death in 1804, including letters, legal papers and drafts of speeches and writings, among other items. Now, for the first time, these original documents—many in Hamilton’s own hand—will be available for researchers, students or the generally curious anywhere in the world to explore, zoom in and read at loc.gov/collections/alexander-hamilton-papers/.

The Charlottesville, VA tragedy is another step in Communism's march to destroy America. By reading the 1963 Communist Goals for the Takeover of America, we understand what is happening in our beloved country. "Discredit the American Founding Fathers, present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the common man," along with "Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history," are two of 45 important Communist goals that the Charlottesville protests advanced in major ways as the Democrat Party's leftist march to destroy the USA gains steam. The publisher of the DeLand (FL) COURIER...

As the left mobilizes mobs to tear down confederate statues (and peace monuments) from city-to-city, it was only a matter of time before they would be going after our Founding Fathers. On CNN Thursday morning, liberal analyst Angela Rye argued that our nation’s first president was as detestable as Robert E. Lee because he was a slave owner. “To me, I don't care if it's a George Washington statue or Thomas Jefferson, they all need to come down,” she said before ranting about America’s “very violent past.” In a panel discussion with the Daily Beast’s John Avlon, journalist Farai Chideya...

Two days after President Trump questioned whether tearing down Confederate statues would lead leftists to targeting statues and monuments to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers, CNN commentator Angela Rye did exactly that. “We have to get to the heart of the problem here and the heart is the way many of us were taught American history. American history is not all glorious,” Rye said in a heated segment on Thursday. “George Washington was a slave owner. We need to call them out for what they are, whether we think they were protecting American freedom or not. He...

CHICAGO (CBS) — A Chicago pastor has asked the Emanuel administration to remove the names of two presidents who owned slaves from parks on the South Side, saying the city should not honor slave owners in black communities. A bronze statue of George Washington on horseback stands at the corner of 51st and King Drive, at the northwest entrance to Washington Park. Bishop James Dukes, pastor of Liberation Christian Center, said he wants the statue gone, and he wants George Washington’s name removed from the park.

A Chicago pastor has asked the Emanuel administration to remove the names of two presidents who owned slaves from parks on the South Side, saying the city should not honor slave owners in black communities. A bronze statue of George Washington on horseback stands at the corner of 51st and King Drive, at the northwest entrance to Washington Park. Bishop James Dukes, pastor of Liberation Christian Center, said he wants the statue gone, and he wants George Washington’s name removed from the park. “When I see that, I see a person who fought for the liberties, and I see people...