Tag: Alexander Hamilton

Commentary: The Crucial Importance of an Independent Judiciary

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Supreme Court

The independent judiciary established by our Constitution has inspired the world. Even British law, which developed and preserved constitutional liberties, and whose firm sense of political rights inspired the American Founders, has only in the last two decades undertaken to separate its judiciary from Parliament’s supremacy.

The Framers of the Constitution were keenly aware of how Britain’s constitution had failed them. Britain’s judiciary had no power to keep Parliament in check when it passed the Intolerable Acts and the other outrages to which the Declaration of Independence objected. Previously, the courts proved unable to rein in the Stuart kings’ grabs for supremacy; war resulted.

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Commentary: Americans Must Criticize Our Corrupt Courts

RealClearWire

In the wake of his conviction in a New York court, President Trump has complained that the process was rigged against him, that the whole proceeding was a corrupt effort to persecute him with a view to influencing the 2024 presidential election. In response, many of his opponents have criticized him for undermining public confidence in our system of criminal justice and thus harming our democracy—a criticism that has been magnified by many in the media.

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Commentary: Yes, They’re Coming for Your Guns

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handgun with ammo

Perhaps, like me, you’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that the un-American Left is ignorant of many things. But then they open their mouths and remove all doubt. 

The most recent example comes from the gaping maw of Elie Mystal on MSNBC, where he claimed that, like everything else in this country apparently, the Second Amendment is the creation of long-dead, racist white supremacists who supported it for the sole purpose of putting down slave revolts keeping the enslaved populations in bondage. Of course, there is as much “truth” to that as there is in the 1619 Project. Progressives use such revisionist history to discredit the founders so that they can dismantle the founders’ republic.

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House Democrats Censure Arizona Rep. Gosar over Tweeting Cartoon Parody, Remove Him from Committee Posts

Rachel Alexander

The House of Representatives narrowly voted 223-207 to censure Rep. Paul Gosar (R-04-AZ) and remove him from his committee posts for tweeting an animated video showing his head on the body of an anime character stabbing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-14-NY) and lunging with a knife at President Joe Biden. Twitter did not take the video down, merely labeling it “hateful content” and stating that it was in the public’s interest for it to remain.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-23-CA) denounced the action before the vote. “It’s an old definition of abuse of power: rules for thee, but not for me. That’s exactly what’s happening here today,” he said. “House Democrats are preparing once again to break another precedent of the United States House of Representatives.”

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Commentary: Turn to the Founders to Remind Ourselves of What We Stand to Lose

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Founding Fathers

In just about 70 days, you and I will be called upon to decide the fate of the American Republic. Make no mistake, this is no ordinary election. American voters have not faced such a momentous choice since an earlier generation was presented with the Constitution and called upon to decide its fate. The vote to ratify the Constitution established a new regime, the amazingly successful American Republic, which showed the world new possibilities for liberty and prosperity and set a standard still unmatched by any country in the history of the world.

A vote for the Democratic Party this time is a vote for regime change as surely as the original vote for the Constitution was a vote for regime change.

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Commentary: The Turbulent True History of the ‘Good Ole Days’ of Politics

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Founding Fathers, Reagan-Bush, Trump

by Jeffery A. Rendall   It’s only natural in times of political turmoil – like what we’re experiencing now and for as long as I can remember – that people harken back to yesteryear for a more tranquil period when everyone got along swimmingly and went out for drinks after each encounter regardless of the rhetorical fights they engaged in earlier that day. We all recall the good ‘ol days as if there was never any conflict; people had manners “back then” and even political enemies found it within their beings to bury the hatchet in their minds rather than in someone else’s back. But was it really that way? A thorough perusal of history reveals that today’s political brawls aren’t much apart from those of the past. Even America’s Founding Fathers were hardly immune from the backbiting and triviality that’s so much in evidence today. Take James Madison and Alexander Hamilton for example. Jay Cost wrote at National Review last week, “One point that I do not linger on in [my new book] is how the two of them came to ascribe bad motives to each other. In Madison’s reckoning, Hamilton was a would-be monarchist who sought the destruction of the republic itself.…

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Constitution Series: How and Why Thirteen States Ratified the Constitution: 1787 – 1790

Tennessee Star Staff
Tennessee Star - Constitution Series

    This is the fourth of twenty-five weekly articles in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Series. Students in grades 8 through 12 can sign up here to participate in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Bee, which will be held on September 23. When Benjamin Franklin emerged from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787 and told Mrs. Powel the delegates had given Americans “a republic, if you can keep it,” he was anticipating that at least nine of the thirteen states who were joined together under the Articles of Federation would eventually ratify the Constitution. Franklin was right, of course, but it would take three long years before all thirteen states were in the fold of the new republic. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention believed in the concept of the sovereignty of the people, so they made sure that the new republic would not be formally organized until two-thirds of the states–nine out of thirteen–held conventions to ratify the Constitution and their participation in the new republic. Until then, the United States of America, as a country, existed, but under the weak terms of the Articles of Confederation. Once nine states ratified the Constitution, that old form of…

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Constitution Series: The Electoral College and the Selection of the President

Tennessee Star Staff
Tennessee Star

    This is the third of twenty-five weekly articles in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Series. Students in grades 8 through 12 can sign up here to participate in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Bee, which will be held on September 23. The method of selection of a President to head the executive branch for a term of four years is the most notable illustration of the foundational concept of Federalism seen in the body of the text of the Constitution of the United States that emerged from the Constitutional Convention. Federalism, as we explained earlier in this series, “defines the relationship between the national government and each of the state governments that comprise our republic. Both entities–the national government and each state government–remain sovereign, while the powers of governance and responsibilities to the citizenry are balanced between the two.” And it was the Tenth Amendment, ratified in 1791 and part of the original constitutional “compact” or “covenant” between the states and the national government upon which our republic was organized: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. “The executive Power…

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Constitution Series: Federalism

Tennessee Star Staff
Tennessee Star

    This is the second part of the second of twenty-five weekly articles in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Series. Students in grades 8 through 12 can sign up here to participate in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Bee, which will be held on September 23.   Federalism is a foundational concept framed in the Constitution of the United States which defines the relationship between the national government and each of the state governments that comprise our republic (thirteen such state governments in 1789, fifty now in 2017). Both entities–the national government and each state government–remain sovereign, while the powers of governance and responsibilities to the citizenry are balanced between the two. Federalism, along with The Separation of Powers within the national government (which we will discuss in tomorrow’s article) are the two foundational concepts of the Constitution that protect the freedoms and liberties guaranteed to individual citizens. “In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments,” James Madison, probably, or Alexander Hamilton, possibly, wrote of “the federal system of America” in Federalist Paper #51, one of the famous series of essays…

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Constitution Series: A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Claudia Henneberry
Tennessee Star

  This is the first of twenty-five weekly articles in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Series. Students in grades 8 through 12 can sign up here to participate in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Bee, which will be held on September 23.   Minutes after the Constitutional Convention adjourned in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787, Elizabeth Powel, a friend of George Washington who hosted many social events for the political class of the time, asked Benjamin Franklin if the convention had given us a republic or a monarchy. “A republic, madam, if you can keep it,” the venerable 81-year-old delegate, ambassador, and inventor responded. Fifty-five delegates, from all the states except Rhode Island, attended that convention, which began four months earlier in May of that year under the premise of forming a more perfect union by revising the Articles of Confederation. You see, the United States of America was not officially formed as the republic of which we are currently citizens in 1783 when the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain acknowledged the independence and sovereignty of its former colonies, was signed. The Continental Congress of the thirteen rebellious colonies, convening in York Town, Pennsylvania (now simply called York), adopted the…

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