Down With the Presidency by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

This speech was delivered at a meeting of the John Randolph Club in Arlington, Virginia, on October 6, 1996.

The modern institution of the presidency is the primary political evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. Teachers used to tell school kids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone can go to Hell. It’s not an inspiration; it’s a threat.

The presidency — by which I mean the executive State — is the sum total of American tyranny. The other branches of government, including the presidentially appointed Supreme Court, are mere adjuncts. The presidency insists on complete devotion and humble submission to its dictates, even while it steals the products of our labor and drives us into economic ruin. It centralizes all power unto itself, and crowds out all competing centers of power in society, including the church, the family, business, charity, and the community. I’ll go further. The US presidency is the world’s leading evil. It is the chief mischief-maker in every part of the globe, the leading wrecker of nations, the usurer behind Third-World debt, the bailer-out of corrupt governments, the hand in many dictatorial gloves, the sponsor and sustainer of the New World Order, of wars, interstate and civil, of famine and disease. To see the evils caused by the presidency, look no further than Iraq or Serbia, where the lives of innocents were snuffed out in pointless wars, where bombing was designed to destroy civilian infrastructure and cause disease, and where women, children, and the aged have been denied essential food and medicine because of a cruel embargo. Look at the human toll taken by the presidency, from Dresden and Hiroshima to Waco and Ruby Ridge, and you see a prime practitioner of murder by government.

The Old Republic
by Ryan Setliff

The U.S. Constitution should be viewed as an essentially nomocratic or rule-based document that emphasizes negative liberty as opposed to legal positivism. It was essentially a series of "Thou shall nots..." placed upon the federal government whose constitutional authority extended only to those delegated enumerated objects of power prescribed in the U.S. Constitution. Hence, the inclusion of the opening phraseology of the Bill of Rights, "Congress shall make no law..." Constitutional historian Forrest McDonald gives clarity to the distinction between nomocratic and telocratic constitutions in the forward to Bradford's book Original Intentions: On the Making of the U.S. Constitution:

The nomocratic view is that the Constitution was designed to bring government under the rule of law, as opposed to achieving any specific purposes... [T]he Constitution is primarily a structural and procedural document, specifying who is to exercise what powers and how. It is a body of law, designed to govern, not the people, but government itself; and it is written in language intelligible to all, that all might know whether it is being obeyed. The alternative, teleocratic view, is one that has come into fashion the last few decades and has all but destroyed the original Constitution. This is the notion that the design of the Constitution was to achieve a certain kind of society, one based upon abstract principles of natural rights or justice or or equality or democracy or all of the above. It holds that specific provisions of the documents are of secondary importance or none at all; what counts are the "principles" it supposedly embodies, usually principles based upon the Declaration of Independence or Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, neither of which has any standing in law. ¹

Straussians and neoconservatives revere a teleocratic constitution, and they have conveniently swept the negative nomocratic constitution that limits federal power to the wayside. Too many nominal conservatives have found themselves defending an essentially teleocratic constitution out of ignorance of the U.S. Constitution's historic developments, and misplaced emphasis on abstract Lockean principles. Locke's social contract is not the interpretative lens with which we understand the American constitutional order.

From Union to Empire: Essays in the Jeffersonian Tradition by Clyde Wilson. Hardcover: 304 pages. (Columbia, SC: Foundation for American Education, 2003), Amazon.com $24.95.

Review by Ryan Setliff

From Union to Empire: Essays in the Jeffersonian Tradition is an anthology of essays and writings by historian Clyde Wilson. As Joseph Stromberg writes in the introduction, "Dr. Clyde Wilson is a Christian, a Southerner, an American, an historian and a conservative. For over three decades he has worked on the definitive edition of the Papers of John C. Calhoun, has written on Calhoun and published a collection of Calhoun's most important writings." Wilson is a luminary figure amongst southern conservatives in my humble opinion, and yet modest about his own accomplishments. He has also written a splendid biographical history of General James Johnston Pettigrew and assembled an anthology of essays in tribute to the late Mel Bradford. As Stromberg opines, "His writings—published in Modern Age, Chronicles, Telos, and many other forums—shows Professor Wilson off as the kind of conservative who is a stalwart defender of federalism and republicanism, and the liberties associated with them. Such conservatives are few and far between these days."

Whether or not the Constitution was ratified by a consolidated American people in aggregate or by the people of the several states has been a point of contention for a considerable time. The nationalist theory of Webster-Story-Lincoln contended that an elusive amalgamated American people in the abstract ratified the Constitution, and not the States as sovereign political societies. Nonetheless, most of the founding generation took it for granted that it was the peoples in their corporate capacities of their respective states that ratified the Constitution.

The Law

by Frederic Bastiat

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Preface

When a reviewer wishes to give special recognition to a book, he predicts that it will still be read "a hundred years from now." The Law, first published as a pamphlet in June, 1850, is already more than a hundred years old. And because its truths are eternal, it will still be read when another century has passed.

Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during

States' Rights and the Federal Polity: An Overview
by Ryan Setliff

States' Rights are ostensibly guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people." Jurist Marshall DeRosa observes:

States' rights were antecedent to the national governments under the Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution. The origins of states' rights can be traced to colonial America, during which time townships, counties, and colonial assemblies had increasingly asserted their respective desires for local self-government and indepedence from British control.¹

1. DeRosa, Marshall, “States' Rights,” American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia. Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson, eds., (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), p. 812

State Sovereignty and Reserved Rights

The nature of State sovereignty from the impetus of the Union

“That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do.” –The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.