William Howard Taft Quotes
The Federal Constitution has stood the test of more than a hundred years in supplying the powers that have been needed to make the Central Government as strong as it ought to be, and with this movement toward uniform legislation and agreements between the States I do not see why the Constitution may not serve our people always.
William Howard Taft, 1857-1930, 27th President of the United States (Republican, OH), Address, Governors’ Conference, The White House, January 18, 1910
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
One of the conundrums of our constitutional system is who has the last word as to what the Constitution means. Essentially it is the judicial branch headed by the Supreme Court. But there are those who believe that the current popular majority should have a say in what is or is not constitutional. If so the legislative branch should have the last word. Still others say that the President is the only person elected by ALL the people, so his opinion most reflects the will of the public. And then there are most who argue that the Constitutional system was created just to avoid the power of currently popular majorities, and the courts should decide based on the Constitution itself. So the statement has very little meaning except that Phillips thinks that the courts have too much power. Whoever gets to decide what is or is not Constitutional will be accused of being “over” the Constitution by those who don’t like the decisions. In our system, that is the courts.
When President Grover Cleveland balked at introducing legislation that might be unconstitutional, he was asked:
Marshall did not crate this concept or some its phraseology out of whole cloth. See Rufus King {610245} for a Constitutional Convention basis for the statement.
A Bill of Rights was needed Left before it ended.
See John Marshall's later (1803) use of the concept and term "repugnant." {606483}
Mason’s view prevailed. What is interesting is that Mason saw the State as the State Legislature as opposed to the people of the state directly voting for the Senators as we do today.
This is a classic type of fallacious political logic. The author claims that there are no powers in the constitution to make laws in a number of important areas of our society. What is true, is that there is no explicitly and uniquely specified statements in the Constitution regarding the areas he specified (and some he didn’t like education). However the power to make laws in these areas comes from the “Commerce Clause” where the Federal Government was given the power to regulate Interstate Commerce. And that is what the Federal Government does make laws about. Food that is sold in the state where it is grown is regulated by the states. But interstate agriculture is. Medicines and weapons are also sold and transported in interstate commerce. Even housing is in part covered as financing and mortgages, building materials, working conditions of the building companies are part of Interstate Commerce. A succession of Congresses have recognized this and so has every Supreme Court in our history. McManus however believes that all these legislators and judges have been wrong and worse, part of a conspiracy to subvert the Constitution. See {630683} for his tendency to see conspiracies in politics.
In a 1949 dissenting opinion in Terminiello v. Chicago Jackson claimed the majority view would “convert the Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
William Howard Taft was the 27th president of the United States (1909–1913) and the tenth Chief Justice of the United States (1921–1930), the only person to have held both offices. Taft was elected president in 1908, the chosen successor of Theodore Roosevelt, but was defeated for reelection by Woodrow Wilson in 1912 after Roosevelt split the Republican vote by running as a third-party candidate. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft to be chief justice, a position he held until a month before his death.
