Thomas McIntire Cooley Quotes
A constitution is not to be made to mean one thing at one time and another some subsequent time when the circumstances may have changed…. the meaning of the Constitution is fixed when it is adopted.
Thomas McIntire Cooley, 1824-1898, Jurist & Legal Scholar, Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, Dean, University of Michigan Law School, A Treatise on Constitutional Limitations
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The quotation he gives from the first Chief Justice is from McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819. The issue is one that has divided jurists and politicians ever since the Constitution was ratified was should it be interpreted literally giving credence only to that which the framers specifically intended or as Hughes, Marshall and most modern interpreters believe that the principles should be interpreted in the light of the times. The Founding Fathers never envisaged an Internet or a potential enemy who could kill millions of Americans without sending large contingents of soldiers to our shores.
He uses the term, “Non-interpretivism”, in a judge’s decision to indicate a judge who does not accept the interpretation of the Constitution as written and intended by the framers. His bias is a conservative one and this is how he views decisions that he does not like. When liberals see an opinion with which they do not agree, they also very often accuse the judge of activism and not adhering to the framer’s intentions. Generally it is a question of “whose ox is gored?”
From this quotation, {615902} and {615901} it is clear that the framers of the Constitution intended the treaty making powers to be shared by the President and the Senate. In practice, in modern times treaties are usually initially negotiated by diplomats under the supervision of the President and the Senate gets to concur or not in the ratification process. However, there have been a number of treaty failures including the League of Nations where the lack of coordination has resulted in a situation where the Senate had to accept or reject something which the President had negotiated and the Senate rejected the treaty.
This quotation is particularly important because it summarizes one of two opposite schools or thought regarding judicial interpretation of the Constitution that politicians have been arguing about since the Supreme Court first sat. The other is Original Intent where only the original intentions of the writers and ratifiers of the Constitution should be considered—assuming that it can be determined.
Cummings was arguing against a Constitutional amendment. His alternative led to Roosevelt's court packing schema.
There are some Americans who believe that the courts should look to the original intent of the framers of the Constitution to determine the constitutionality of a law. Most jurists believe that original intent is but one factor that should influence the decision.
The Chief Justice at the time was an ultra-conservative judge, who together with his 8 colleagues—all conservative—had blocked much of the democratic and progressive legislation that the Congress had passed. FDR had a much different legal and philosophical view of the Constitution than the Chief Justice, and the court would declare much of his New Deal legislation, passed in the emergency of the Great Depression, unconstitutional. Almost all of those “unconstitutional” things were years later passed again and this time a more modern court found they were Constitutional.
This is one of the clearest statements showing that the founding Fathers did not see the Constitution as a mechanism that would deal with all details of all problems in the future. It was to contain only the essential principles,
Referring to the Brown v. Board of Education, the Topeka, KS, Supreme Court school desegregation decision:
