Raoul Berger Quotes
The Founders were far more concerned about checking Congress than the States
Raul Berger, Legal Scholar, Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
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.
The 10th Amendment was created to take care of this objection which Jefferson and many others had.
Clark was one of those who believed the Founding Fathers to have been divinely inspired.
A Bill of Rights was needed Left before it ended.
The first Georgia legislature had been corrupt and had been bribed to sell huge tracts of land at cheap prices to four large speculators who in turn sold smaller parcels of land to thousands at huge profits. Over a decade later a new state legislature realizing the mistake that had been made, voted to invalidate all the sales and treat the land as public land. This solution had great popular support. However, the Supreme Court in upholding private rights ruled that the State legislature could not invalidate a legal private contract. More important, it established the precedent, still argued to this day.
This constitution was written 7 years before the national constitutional convention. It shows that there was concern about the separation of powers in United States even before the Constitution was drafted. See {616750} for an even clearer statement of the separation of powers principle.
Raoul Berger was an American attorney and professor at The University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Law School. While at Harvard, he was the Charles Warren Senior Fellow in American Legal History. He is known for his role in the development of originalism.
