Original Intent

Author : David Barton
Publisher : Wallbuilder Press
ISBN 13 : 9781932225266
Total Pages : 548 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Original Intent written by David Barton and published by Wallbuilder Press. This book was released on 2000-03 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In their own words, the Supreme Court has become "a national theology board," "a super board of education," and amateur psychologists on a "psycho-journey." The result has been a virtual rewriting of the liberties enumerated in the Constitution. A direct victim of this judicial micromanagement has been the religious aspect of the First Amendment. For example, the Court now interprets that Amendment under: a "Lemon Test" absurdly requiring religious expression to be secular, an "Endorsement Test" pursuing an impossible neutrality between religion and secularism, and a "Psychological Coercion Test" allowing a single dissenter to silence an entire community's religious expression. Additional casualties of judicial activism have included protections for State's rights, local controls, separation of powers, legislative supremacy, and numerous other constitutional provisions. Why did earlier Courts protect these powers for generations, and what has caused their erosion by contemporary Courts? Original Intent answers these questions. By relying on thousands of primary sources, Original Intent documents (in the Founding Fathers' own words) not only the plan for limited government originally set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights but how that vision can once again become reality. Book jacket.

Author : Leonard W. Levy
Publisher : Ivan R. Dee
ISBN 13 : 1461730287
Total Pages : 544 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Original Intent and the Framers' Constitution written by Leonard W. Levy and published by Ivan R. Dee. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than two hundred years a debate has raged between those who believe that jurists should follow the original intentions of the Founding Fathers and those who argue that the Constitution is a living document subject to interpretation by each succeeding generation. The controversy has flared anew in our own time as a facet of the battle between conservatives and liberals. In Original Intent and the Framers' Constitution, the distinguished constitutional scholar Leonard Levy cuts through the Gordian Knot of claim and counterclaim with an argument that is clear, logical, and compelling. Rejecting the views of both left and right, he evaluates the doctrine of "original intent" by examining the sources of constitutional law and landmark cases. Finally, he finds no evidence for grounding the law in original intent. Judicial activism—the constant reinterpretation of the Constitution—he sees as inevitable.

Author : Donald L. Drakeman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521119189
Total Pages : 383 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Church, State, and Original Intent written by Donald L. Drakeman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative book shows how the justices of the United States Supreme Court have used constitutional history, portraying the Framers' actions in a light favoring their own views about how church and state should be separated. Drakeman examines church-state constitutional controversies from the Founding Era to the present, arguing that the Framers originally intended the establishment clause only as a prohibition against a single national church.

Author : Melvin Eustace Bradford
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780820315218
Total Pages : 165 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Original Intentions written by Melvin Eustace Bradford and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This persuasively argued, decidedly partisan work aims to recover the original United States Constitution by describing its genesis, ratification, and mandate from the perspectives of its original framers. Openly challenging contemporary orthodoxy, M. E. Bradford employs principles of legal, historical, rhetorical, and dramatic analysis to reveal a Constitution notably short on abstract principles and modest in any goal beyond limiting the powers of the government it authorizes. From the beginning of Original Intentions, two sharply divergent convictions about the Constitution emerge. Bradford, arguing from a nomocratic viewpoint, regards the Constitution as an essentially procedural text created expressly to detail how the government may preside over itself not its people. He decries the currently predominant teleologic view, which is based upon the "principles" embodied by the Constitution, and holds that the document was designed to achieve a certain kind of society. By this view, he says, our fundamental laws have been blanketed by a heavy layer of ad hoc solutions to problems they were never intended to address, and then further obscured by the melioristic meddlings of judges, legislators, lawyers, scholars, and journalists. Bradford first shows that the Constitutional convention of 1787 was an enterprise guided by the delegates' hesitancy to impose a higher order over their local, practical, and vastly differing interests. Though all the states would ratify the Constitution, he says, each would interpret it in unique ways. Bradford underscores the dearth of lofty idealism among the original framers by detailing British influences on their political ethos. British common law, on which the framers heavily relied, evolved from a tradition of deliberate responses to practical needs and circumstances, not deductions from abstract utopian designs. In light of these factors, Bradford examines the ratification debates of Massachusetts, South Carolina, and North Carolina - three states that together exemplified the vast range of interests to be accommodated by the Constitution. Next Bradford highlights classic teleologic distortions. Discussing religion and the first amendment, he establishes a pervasive commitment to Christianity among the framers and challenges our notions about the separation of church and state. Warning against anachronistic readings of the Constitution, Bradford also analyzes the rhetoric of the framers to reinforce our awareness of their desire for a government that would contain their multiplicities, not seek to resolve them. In a reading of the Reconstruction amendments (thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen) Bradford argues that they had only a modest impact on the Constitution's original design. By the misconstruction of these amendments, however, the Constitution has been transformed into "a purpose oriented blank check for redesigning American society." In a final chapter Bradford critiques Mortimer Adler's We Hold These Truths and repudiates any broad connection between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Before the Constitution is irreparably damaged, Bradford says, we must realize that it was not the best that the framers could invent but the best that their constituencies would approve. Debates related to normative issues should be settled not within the Constitution but within society, away from the coercive forces of law and politics - or else by amendment.

Author : Joseph M. Lynch
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801472718
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Negotiating the Constitution written by Joseph M. Lynch and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No concept sparks more controversy in constitutional debate than "original intent." Offering a legal historian's approach to the subject, this book demonstrates that the framers deliberately obscured one of their more important decisions. Joseph M. Lynch argues that the Constitution was a product of political struggles involving regional interests, economic concerns, and ideology. The framers, he maintains, settled on enigmatic wording of the Necessary and Proper Clause and of the General Welfare provision in the Spending Clause as a compromise, leaving the extent of federal power to be determined by the political process. During ratification, however, attempts by dissident framers to undo the compromise were repelled in The Federalist: charges of overly broad congressional powers were met with protestations that in fact these powers were limited. Lynch describes how early lawmakers applied the Constitution to such issues as executive power and privilege, the deportation of aliens, and the prohibition of seditious speech. He follows the disputes over the interpretation of this document--focusing on James Madison's changing views--as the new government took shape and political parties were formed. Lynch points out that the first six Congresses and President George Washington disregarded the framers' intentions when they were deemed impractical to follow. In contrast, he warns that the version of original intent put forth in recent Supreme Court opinions regarding congressional power could hinder Congress in serving the nation.

Author : Harry V. Jaffa
Publisher : Regnery Publishing
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 440 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution written by Harry V. Jaffa and published by Regnery Publishing. This book was released on 1994 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique contribution to the debate over the original intentions of the Framers of the U.S. Constitutions.

Author : Keith E. Whittington
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Constitutional Interpretation written by Keith E. Whittington and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With its detailed and wide-ranging explorations in history, philosophy, and law, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the Constitution ought to be interpreted and what it means to live under a constitutional government."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : Donald L. Drakeman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108485286
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Hollow Core of Constitutional Theory written by Donald L. Drakeman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major scholarly defense of the centrality of the Framers' intentions in constitutional interpretation to appear in years.

Author : John T. Noonan
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520235746
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Narrowing the Nation's Power written by John T. Noonan and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-08-21 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The law professor exposes the Supreme Court's systematic unraveling of Federal power since the Reagan administration, revealing its role in transfering power to the states. (Politics & Government)

Author : Jack N. Rakove
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307434516
Total Pages : 464 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Original Meanings written by Jack N. Rakove and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-04-21 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From abortion to same-sex marriage, today's most urgent political debates will hinge on this two-part question: What did the United States Constitution originally mean and who now understands its meaning best? Rakove chronicles the Constitution from inception to ratification and, in doing so, traces its complex weave of ideology and interest, showing how this document has meant different things at different times to different groups of Americans.