Read THIS: Tom Woods complete. detailed smackdown of a Princeton "history professors" distortion of Jefferson's view of nullification

The Ivy League Hates Nullification
by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Recently by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.: Left and Right Against War, Part 87


Over the past few years, but especially during the past several months, there has been an extraordinary revival of interest in Thomas Jefferson’s idea of state nullification of unconstitutional federal laws. According to Jefferson, if the federal government were to monopolize constitutional interpretation, it would of course interpret the Constitution in its own favor and consistently uncover previously unknown reservoirs of additional federal power. Only a fool would consent to such a system, thought Jefferson, and the peoples of the states were not fools.

Needless to say, nullification is nowhere to be found on the three-by-five card on which our betters have written out the range of allowable opinion, so it has been greeted with the usual hysteria from predictable quarters.

The latest, and to my mind most laughable, example comes from Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton, writing in The New Republic. The subtitle of Professor Wilentz’s article "The Essence of Anarchy" is "America’s long, sordid affair with nullification." What Professor Wilentz omits in his alleged history of that "long, sordid affair" could fill an entire book, and indeed just weeks ago I announced the impending release of my own book on precisely this subject. (Nullification will cover the origins and theory of nullification, its forgotten nineteenth-century history, modern applications of the idea, and much else.) For now I’ll note the New England states that appealed to nullification (or interposition) against President Jefferson’s embargo, against what they considered the unconstitutional calling up of the New England militia during the war of 1812, against the use of military conscription, and against a law providing for the enlistment of minors.

Pretty "sordid," huh?

In addition to other examples, we might also refer to the legislature of Wisconsin, which as late as 1859 was quoting from Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 in opposition to unconstitutional aspects of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Sordid, I tell you. Here’s the text of a handbill that circulated in Milwaukee in the 1850s:

All the People of this State, who are opposed to being made SLAVES or SLAVE-CATCHERS, and to having the Free Soil of Wisconsin made the hunting-ground for Human Kidnappers, and all who are willing to unite in a STATE LEAGUE, to defend our State Sovereignty, our State Courts, and our State and National Constitutions, against the flagrant usurpations of U.S. Judges, Commissioners, and Marshals, and their Attorneys; and to maintain inviolate those great Constitutional Safeguards of Freedom – the WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS and the RIGHT OF TRIAL BY JURY – as old and sacred as Constitutional Liberty itself; and all who are willing to sustain the cause of those who are prosecuted, and to be prosecuted in Wisconsin, by the agents and executors of the Kidnapping Act of 1850, for the alleged crime of rescuing a human being from the hands of kidnappers, and restoring him to himself and to Freedom, are invited to meet at YOUNGS’ HALL, IN THIS CITY, THURSDAY, APRIL 13TH, at 11 o’clock A.M., to counsel together, and take such action as the exigencies of the times, and the cause of imperiled Liberty demand.

What’s that? A "state league" to defend "state sovereignty" on behalf of human freedom against the "flagrant usurpations" of the federal government? How sordid!


Do you suppose Professor Wilentz teaches that at Princeton? Does he even know about it?

What Professor Wilentz also omits, and perhaps doesn’t know, is that abolitionists who opposed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 expressly endorsed nullification and even referred to John C. Calhoun by name in support of their ideas. A shame Professor Wilentz wasn’t around to tell them that only a "racist" would refer to the wicked Calhoun, and that mature adults should never be allowed simply to consider his ideas on their merits.


Wilentz spends some of his time giving us a 60-year-old interpretation of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, where nullification and interposition were first expressly advanced, as if no scholarship had appeared since then. He tells us that Jefferson was "in a panic" when he drafted the Kentucky Resolutions. In other words, Jefferson wasn’t really in his right mind, so we can excuse him for dreaming up crazy constitutional ideas that irritate Princeton professors.

Whether he realizes it or not, Wilentz is here repeating the thesis of Adrienne Koch and Harry Ammon, from their 1948 William and Mary Quarterly article "The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions: An Episode in Jefferson’s and Madison’s Defense of Civil Liberties." Koch and Ammon suggest that nullification was really just an ad hoc response to an emergency situation rather than an enduring constitutional doctrine in its own right.

Unfortunately for Wilentz, the subject has been explored a teensy bit further in the six decades since then. As Kevin Gutzman shows in his book Virginia’s American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776–1840, Jefferson did not invent nullification in a moment of haste. The germ of nullification is directly traceable to the Virginia ratifying convention of 1788 (and indeed even into the colonial period). There, supporters of the Constitution insisted that the federal government would possess only the powers "expressly delegated" to it, and that Virginia would be "exonerated" should the federal government ever reach for a power beyond those delegated. Edmund Randolph and George Nicholas assured Virginians of these principles in so many words. Both men served on the five-man committee that was to draft Virginia’s ratification instrument. Randolph went on to serve as U.S. attorney general, and Nicholas as attorney general of Kentucky.

Throughout the 1790s, Virginians kept returning to the assurances they had been given in 1788. To give just one example: appalled by Alexander Hamilton’s financial program, and particularly the federal assumption of state debts, Patrick Henry introduced a resolution, passed by the Virginia legislature, that cited Hamilton’s program as an example of precisely what Virginians had been assured could not happen – the exercise by the federal government of a power it had not been delegated. Henry reminded his fellow Virginians that they had been sold the Constitution on the grounds that the federal government would have only those powers expressly delegated to it, and that the state government would be a sentinel watching over federal officials and remaining on guard against federal encroachments. Is that really so far from what Jefferson would later say?


By the time Jefferson drafted the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, therefore, he was merely developing these longstanding principles. He certainly was not spinning out an ad hoc response. Much less was he acting merely "in a panic."

My favorite part of the whole piece comes when Wilentz offers us this aside: "Madison also wrote of nullification that ‘[n]o man’s creed was more opposed to such an inversion of the Repubn. order of things’ than Thomas Jefferson’s."

Folks, Wilentz may not know it – and the automatons posting the fawning comments at the New Republic’s site obviously don’t know it – but that remark alone proves he has no idea what he is talking about. First of all, Madison’s statement about Jefferson is clearly false, as any competent historian knows. Jefferson included the very word "nullification" in his draft of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798! How can Wilentz, a Princeton historian, not know this?


But here’s the real kicker. Wilentz neglects to mention that the elder Madison, in his zeal to separate nullification from Jefferson’s legacy, tried denying that Jefferson had included the dreaded word in his draft of the Kentucky Resolutions. Madison had seen the draft himself, so he either knew this statement was false or was suffering from the effects of advanced age. When a copy of the original Kentucky Resolutions in Jefferson’s own handwriting turned up, complete with the word "nullification," Madison was forced to retreat.

You see what this means? Nearly 180 years later, Sean Wilentz is still trying to defend a claim that Madison himself withdrew. Whether that speaks poorly of Wilentz’s honesty or his competence is something only he himself can know.

As for Madison’s claim at an advanced age that the Virginia Resolutions had never contemplated nullification, and Wilentz’s related claim that nullification supporters wickedly and perversely misinterpreted Madison, my book addresses this point directly. For now we might note that (1) the other state legislatures understood Madison at the time as saying precisely what Madison (and Wilentz) later tried to deny he was saying; (2) Madison did not correct this alleged misunderstanding when he had the chance to in the Report of 1800 or at any other time during those years; and (3) the text of the Virginia Resolutions clearly indicates that each state was "duty bound" to maintain its constitutional liberties within its "respective" territory, and hence Madison did indeed contemplate action by a single state as supporters and opponents alike took him to be saying at the time.

Faced with a bipartisan, cross-ideological push for the decentralization of political power, all Sean Wilentz can think to do is – you’ll never guess! – revive the specter of 1950s resistance to civil rights. Few today would defend the indignities to which American blacks were subject at that time, though it seems safe to assume that the grievances of civil-rights activists would have been greatly alleviated from the start had the constitutional remedy of enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment been actively and consistently applied. But I wonder if, just as Wilentz expects us for that reason to repudiate the principle of decentralized power, we can expect him to denounce his own beloved federal government – after all, didn’t Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter World War I lead to the deaths of 116,000 Americans for no good reason? Weren’t Japanese individuals rounded into detention camps in the 1940s? (Incidentally, I wonder how "sordid" it would have been had California and Washington state interposed to prevent the internment of these poor souls.)


And really, even Wilentz’s acute hypochondria would presumably stop short of declaring that the fourteen states allowing medical marijuana in defiance of the federal government’s prohibition must be a bunch of "racists" who secretly aim to oppress people. California is even considering legalizing marijuana across the board – a clear act of nullification. What, pray tell, does this have to do with race? May it be possible that people who advocate decentralized power might actually favor – wait for it – decentralized power? Or do we automatically assume that their stated principles conceal a sinister conspiracy to oppress, even though centralized power is what made possible the unprecedented oppressions and atrocities of the twentieth century?

To be sure, Wilentz grudgingly concedes that nullification supporters are "not currently concerned with racial supremacy" (not currently concerned, you understand – you never know what people who don’t subscribe to The New Republic may think of next). But then why smear them by writing an entire article on the subject that never soberly considers the relevant questions on their merits, and instead associates the idea exclusively with racial oppression? Hitler despised states’ rights; does that make him a model of enlightenment and toleration?


Wilentz is not entirely wrong, of course. Dangers exist at all levels of government. Libertarians understand that better than anyone. The question that supporters of the states against the federal government are asking today is this: right now, where are the greater threats to our liberties liable to come from, Utah or D.C.? I cannot come up with an adequate word to describe someone who, having observed the enormities of twenty-first-century Washington no matter which party is in control, is more concerned about the potential for abuse of power in Boise or Santa Fe.

I suppose I don’t need to tell readers what we are all supposed to do now that Professor Wilentz has handed down his ex cathedra pronouncement, but I’ll tell you anyway. We’re supposed to abandon all non-approved opinions forthwith; promise in the future to run everything by Sean Wilentz first, lest we incorrigible haters fall back into our wicked ways; and show proper remorse for having disturbed our left-neocon overlords at The New Republic. Here they are trying to drum up another round of war propaganda (which has nothing to do with hatred, you understand), and we have the gall to distract them with Thomas Jefferson!


Oh, and Sean: nobody buys the "racism" smears anymore. No one in his right mind believes, with Keith Olbermann, that people who drive pickup trucks are likely to have sinister intentions, or that "arrogant" as an adjective to describe Barack Obama is a "racist code word." That game is over. The non-zombie population, which is growing all the time, just tunes it out. At this point, "racist" now encompasses, at the very least, the Tea Party, the GOP, constitutionalists, libertarians, anarchists, anyone who has ever said a kind word about the South (since what reason other than "racism" could anyone have for doing that?), anyone who opposes Obama, and anyone who opposes health mandates. That pretty much leaves, as a working definition for "racist," someone who doesn’t subscribe to The New Republic.

All these groups I’ve just mentioned probably amount to more than half the country. If the American population is so full of "hatred" and "racism" that every other person is liable to be a Klansman, I wonder if Professor Wilentz can explain to us why he favors open immigration. Doesn’t he instead have a moral obligation to warn potential immigrants to stay away from such a cauldron of "hatred"?

Supporters of nullification today, says Wilentz, "take refuge in a psychodrama of ‘liberty’ versus ‘tyranny.’" He then says that the constitutional doctrine they promote would allow "racial segregation and inequality up to the point of enslavement." So people who are concerned about a government that makes up the rules as it goes along are engaged in "psychodrama," but people who think the repeal of the Thirteenth Amendment is likely enough to be worth mentioning are the very model of reason.

Sean Wilentz is supposed to be a great Princeton professor. He is a reliable court historian of the regime (which by some definitions may indeed make him a great Princeton professor). He thinks he can parry opponents of the central government by means of distortions, omissions, outright falsehoods, hysteria, and name-calling. This is the best the Establishment can do against nullification? Professor Wilentz’s poor students should demand their money back.

April 6, 2010

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. (visit his website; follow him on Facebook; send him mail), holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and his master’s, M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. His nine books include the critically acclaimed study The Church Confronts Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2004) and two New York Times bestsellers: Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. His new book, Nullification, will be released on June 29.

Everything You Wanted To Know About Constitutional Conventions But Were Afraid To Ask...

This is a special treat today folks, a conversation between Mike Church and Dr. Kevin Gutzman about how to implement a Constitutional Convention to stop our runaway government.



Dr. Kevin Gutzman: We want to have a convention at which we would discuss revision of the Constitution.

Mike: And is this limited to any particular articles? Is it open-ended? How is it convened? How is it conducted? There are a lot of questions that people have out there.

Kevin: Right. Well, what Article 5 says is the states, if 38 of them call it, the Congress will have to convene a convention. And the short answer is, no, the matters that the convention could take up cannot be limited. However, the proposals the convention makes would not be law. That is, they would be only proposals. So just as in 1787 in Philadelphia there was a convention that proposed what supposedly was a federal constitution, so – and then that had to be sent to the states for their separate ratification. So in case a Constitutional Convention made proposed amendments, those would have to be referred to the states for their ratification.

Now, people commonly say, well, you know, they’re just going to – Pelosi will dominate it, and Das Kapital will become the Constitution of America. I think this is really absurd. It’s the kind of scare tactic that people have taken against the idea of constitutional amendment ever since the beginning of the 19th Century. It’s extremely unlikely to the point of a vanishing amount of likelihood that having called for a convention because you were worried that the federal government was grabbing unlimited power for itself, the state legislatures would then turn around and ratify some horrible, centralizing measure that had been proposed by the convention. So myself, I am sanguine about that. And of course what this worry also ignores is, what people who make this argument ignore is that we are going to have Pelosi’s Constitution anyway. We have it right now. [Audio glitch] will do to us whatever it wants and will legislate [glitch] they like. So the idea that there’s going to be some horrible eventuality that Pelosi and Company will get what they want as the result of a process in which we try to amend the Constitution to limit their power, that assumes that they don’t get what they want anyway. Right now they get exactly what they like.

Mike: True.

Kevin: So I don’t know how it could possibly be that having this kind of a convention could make things worse. And just to give you an indication of the extent to which the current constitutional culture in the United States has given centralizers like Pelosi and Obama, that is, people who want the federal government to have authority over everything you do, every minute of your life, how they have gotten what they want through a “we’ll never amend the Constitution to correct what the Congress is doing” attitude among conservatives, let me read for you a little bit of the appendix to Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose.”

Mike: Okay.

Kevin: Milton Friedman was the leading advocate of liberty in American economics in the 20th Century. Now, I myself am not at root a Monitorist. I mean, people who are expert in economics know that he was also the leader of what was called the Monitorist school of economics. And I think he was mistaken at root about that. But the bottom line is Milton Friedman was a very prominent libertarian in the 20th Century, somebody who stood for freedom.

Mike: Right.

Kevin: And he had a bestselling book, coauthored with his wife Rose in I think 1978, called “Free to Choose.” It was a number one bestseller for months and months. And in the appendix to that book, Friedman reprinted the Socialist Party platform of 1928. And the reason why he reprinted the Socialist Party platform of 1928 was to show us that by 1978 we were living with the Socialist Party platform of 1928. That is, every single element of it has been adopted. So plank one in the Socialist Party platform of 1928, “Nationalization of our natural resources, beginning with the coal mines and water sites, particularly of Boulder Dam and Muscle Shoals.” And then in parentheses he says “Boulder Dam, renamed Hoover Dam, and Muscle Shoals are now both federal projects.”

Number two, “A publicly owned giant power system under which the federal government shall cooperate with the states and municipalities in the distribution of electrical energy to the people at cost.” And in parentheses he says, “We’ve made a regional start on this with the Tennessee Valley Authority.” There’s actually more to it now than there was in 1978.

But anyway, number three, “National ownership in democratic management of railroads and other means of transportation and communication.” Parentheses, “Railroad passenger service is completely nationalized through Amtrak. Some freight service is nationalized through Conrail. The FCC controls communications by telephone, telegraph, radio, and television.” And of course what Friedman didn’t know in 1978 was that now the federal government feels free to wiretap millions, literally millions of Americans, without ever identifying them, without ever getting a warrant from any kind of a judge. It’s even more problematic than it was when Friedman wrote this.

Mike: Right.

Kevin: Number four, Socialist Party platform of 1928, “An adequate national program for flood control, flood relief, reforestation, irrigation, and reclamation.” Well, Friedman in parentheses says, “Government expenditures for these purposes are currently in the many billions of dollars.” And of course they’re far greater now than they were when he wrote that. I mean, I could go through the rest of this platform from the Socialist Party of 1928. But my point is, for those of you who think the Constitutional Convention idea is dangerous because we’ll lose the republic that the founding fathers bequeathed us, wake up. We already...

Mike: We lost it.

Kevin: We don’t have the constitutional republic the founding fathers bequeathed us. We are living with 20th-century socialists’ idea of what a central government ought to look like.

Mike: Well, and Dr. Kevin Gutzman with us. It’s our first crack at this. It’s called “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About a Constitutional Convention but Were Afraid to Ask.” I might add a coda to number four, Doc. And that is, that since I live in a flood zone here in Southeast Louisiana, the only place I can buy flood insurance from is from NFIP, National Flood Insurance Program.

Kevin: Right.

Mike: Which has been taken over by the – it’s administered by the federal government. Now, your agent can broker it, but it is backed up by the full faith and credit of Uncle Sucker. Just so you know. So you can count number four in the Socialist Party Platform of 1928 as having been completed, absolutely completely. And just ask anyone in Florida how they get homeowners insurance if they live in Jupiter, Florida or below, and they’re probably going to give you a similar answer.

Kevin: Well, my point, and as I said, I could go on with the...

Mike: Right, I know you could.

Kevin: ...rest of the planks of this. But I omitted the planks about what became Social Security and Medicare and all this kind of stuff. So the bottom line is people commonly object to the idea of a Constitutional Convention by saying, oh, lord, the socialists will get control of the government. Well, you know, have you looked at the Democratic and Republican parties lately? And how do you think they behave? The idea that the federal Constitution is doing what it’s supposed to do, that it’s performing its only function, which is to limit the power of people in federal office, is absurd. You’d have to have been asleep. That you’re going to lose that by having an attempt to rein in the federal government – now, I think that if there were a federal Constitutional Convention, what they should take up should be the way the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause has been interpreted, the way the Commerce Clause has been interpreted, and the notion that the powers of Congress listed in Article I, Section 8 are exhaustive.

So there’s no reason why, if we had a Constitutional Convention, we couldn’t have three amendments saying the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is only procedural. It includes no grants of substantive rights. That the Commerce Clause is only about trade between the states. It has nothing to do with matters that are entirely internal to the states. And of course that’s the way it was intended in the first place, but federal judges and the Congress have completely remade it so that the other day, when Pelosi was asked where do you get authority to tell people who their doctor will be, she laughed because it assumed, you know, the question had underlining it the idea that there was something illegitimate about the way federal officials have been behaving since 1937. Well, of course, as you and I know, there is something illegitimate about the way that federal officials have been behaving since 1937. And the only way to slap some sense into them is to have a Constitutional Convention. That’s it. There’s no other mechanism.

Dr. Kevin Gutzman: When you want to become an attorney, you get a law degree from an accredited law school. And then you take a bar exam. Before you take the bar exam, you take a bar review class, several weeks of cramming to learn everything about being a lawyer that you didn’t learn in law school.

Mike: Right.

Kevin: And when I took the bar review class, getting ready to take the Texas bar exam, I took it from one of the popular national companies that give this kind of a class in states all over the country. When we got to the part of the bar review course in which the instructor was preparing us for the multistate multiple choice section, that is, for the section of the Texas bar exam that was multiple choice and that is given, not only in Texas, but in various other states in the country. She told us, if one of the options you’re given is the Tenth Amendment, you know that that is always wrong. You never choose the option Tenth Amendment on the bar exam because that is always incorrect. In other words, by the time I was taking the bar review class in 1990, everybody knew that Tenth Amendment is never enforced. It is never respected. The principle that the Congress has only the powers that are enumerated in the Constitution is completely absent from, quote/unquote, “constitutional law” these days. So, you know, there’s that.

Mike: This is how we...

Kevin: And then the other possibility, besides calling on the Tenth Amendment to limit the powers of Congress, is nullification. And there are people now who are talking about nullification, which is the idea that the state governments would stand up to the federal government and prevent them from doing something. We’ve seen that tried in American history. You know, the federal government has the weapons, has the army. It’s absurd. There’s no way that nullification is going to work

Mike: So nullification is not going to work. You can’t have...

Kevin: No.

Mike: ...a citizen-led – what Kevin’s question was, could the citizens call the Convention, and you answered no. It has to be called by the legislature.

Kevin: That’s right.

Mike: So then to clarify here – and “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Constitutional Convention but Were Afraid to Ask” with our special guest Dr. Kevin Gutzman here. What is needed is – and I believe there’s only two states left that need to call; right?

Kevin: I don’t know what the current number is.

Mike: There’s 34.

Kevin: I’ve read varying accounts of that.

Mike: Okay. Well, we can get an inventory on that, is to get to 38 states, three quarters of them necessary or needed to call the convention. And then the next question is, before I get back to your phone calls at 1-866-95-PATRIOT, my question, here’s the one that I have. So the state legislatures will then, I would assume, much as Madison and Hamilton were able to convince the various state legislatures and assemblies in 1787 to send delegations, they would then appoint delegations to go meet in a central place, say it’s Kansas City or wherever, and they would hold this convention. Is that how – that’s how you would envision the pragmatic, actual workings of it would take place; correct?

Kevin: Yes. It’s just a carbon copy of the process that yielded the Philadelphia Convention that wrote the Constitution in the first place.

Mike: Okay. So we may need to have a failure, then. We may need to go to Mount Vernon and lose. We may have to go meet in Annapolis in a bar and not accomplish anything other than commit that, okay, we’ve got to go back and redouble our efforts because they tried twice. Well, Maryland and Virginia tried to meet. And then Madison and Hamilton tried to conspire to get it together in Annapolis, and of course they were successful. But unlike Madison and Hamilton, though, let’s set the record straight, too. We learned this in “The Fame of Our Fathers” and learned this in Dr. Guzman’s books and in my movie, “The Spirit of ’76.” The advertised purpose for that convention, Dr. Gutzman, was amending the Articles of Confederation; right?
Kevin: Right.

Mike: And we wound up with an entirely new plan of government. Which we’re not seeking here.

Kevin: Again, the bottom line is, well, of course, in a sense we are seeking an entirely new plan of government. It depends how you want to look at it. If you want to say we like the original frame of the federal government, and we’d like to see it actually implemented, or if you want to say we’d like to have a different government from the one we actually live under, we’d like one that looks more like the one the founders gave us. So I guess you could say it’s new, or you could say it isn’t, whichever way you want to look at it. But, yes, it’s true that in the first place, people like Madison and Hamilton wanted to strengthen the central government. And we’ve had three major episodes in American history when the central government was drastically strengthened. One was when they ratified the federal Constitution. One was at the time of the Civil War and immediately after. And then the third one was the so-called Revolution of 1937, which was really the culmination of things that had been going on for 15 years before that.

So we live today under not the Constitution of 1788, but the Constitution of 1937. And we’ve seen where that’s taken us. We have an absolutely unbridgeable gap between the federal government’s revenue and its obligations. And the gap is growing as people in federal office see that every incentive for them leads to more spending, more borrowing, permanent enserfment of our descendents. I think that’s why this is the first time we need a formal effort drastically to reduce the power of the central government.

Mike: I concur. Curt is in Ohio with a great question, next up here on “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Calling a Constitutional Convention but Were Afraid to Ask.” The time has come, my friends. Curt, how are you?

Curt: Good, sir. How are you?

Mike: Fantastic. What’s your question?

Curt: My question, I think we already answered. Originally my question was, once the convention is convened, I’ve heard rumors that the entire document is at risk at that point, where anything could be amended by the convention. Is that correct?
Kevin: No, the convention can’t amend anything. This is a very important point.

Mike: Okay.

Kevin: The convention would be called to make proposals. But if there were going to be any actual amendment adopted, it would have to be adopted through ratification by the states. So it would take 38 states then to amend. That’s why this idea, this scare idea that people are floating out there, that there’d be a coup d’état, and we’d end up all singing the Marseilles, or May 1st would be our new national holiday because we’d all be wearing red all the time, this is just inaccurate. A convention cannot actually change the Constitution. It can make proposals. So if they came out of the convention with a proposal, you know, let’s get rid of the Congress and have a military government, bang, you’re stuck, that’s not what could happen. All it could do would be make recommendations to the states for their ratification. And again, I think that a Constitutional Convention that grew out of a movement to reassert state governments’ Tenth Amendment rights is highly unlikely then to say we want, you know, Nancy Pelosi to be our queen. That’s just not going to happen.

Mike: Right. And I get this question a lot, too. “You don’t know what you’re – this is dangerous.” But as you pointed out, and I think this needs to be part of the recap that we’re going to post online on our website, you can hopefully help us get it linked up on some other popular sites, that – and this is something that I’d never heard before. But that document that you cited that was in Friedman’s, the appendix to Friedman’s book, how much more evidence or how much more destruction, ignorance, and outright – what’s the word when you violate your oath? I mean, I get calls all the time, Kevin, from “Are they committing treason when they violate their oath, and they do this to the Constitution, and they do that?” And I always say, well, no, they’re not really conspiring with the enemy. They’re not making war with the enemy against us here. But yes, they are violating their oath. And apparently there is no penalty, and Bill Clinton can attest to this, for perjury anymore.

Kevin: Well, he paid a $90,000 fine and was disbarred for five years. So I guess that was some kind of penalty, although of course it was not nearly so stiff a penalty as you or I might have paid if we had been found to have done exactly the same thing as he did. Let me read you a little bit more of this Socialist Party platform of 1928 from the back of Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose.” Plank nine, “A system of health and accident insurance and old-age pensions, as well as unemployment insurance.” So people who say, wow, we’re going to have socialism if we have a Constitutional Convention, plank nine is what they’re voting on in Congress right now. This is what they think they’re empowered to do by the current federal Constitution. In other words, they completely ignore the limitation on the powers of the central government that were supposed to have been created by the Constitution. And they are writing into law the Socialist Party platform of 1928.

Mike: Amazing.

Kevin: The whole thing is going to be what we live with. So people who say, oh, no, we can’t have a Constitutional Convention because it’ll mean the death of our beloved Constitution, signed by Washington and Franklin and Adams and, I mean, and Hamilton and Madison, you’re wrong. That frame of government is long gone. And what we’re talking about here is the question, is there any way to bring it back? Is there any way actually to have a limited decentralized government in which most decision making is done by elected state legislators? And I’m saying the only mechanism that the Constitution provides is the Constitutional Convention. There’s no other way effectively to limit the powers of Congress.


Want to learn more about Dr Kevin R.C. Gutzman(He received his BA, MPAff, and JD from the University of Texas and my MA and PhD in American History from the University of Virginia) and the real facts of the constitution from a real Constitutional Scholar?

I would suggest you read a couple of his books in the matter:
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution...
Who Killed the Constitution?: The Federal Government vs. American Liberty from World War I to Barack Obama...
Virginia's American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776-1840...

Its always refreshing to have a debate and actually have facts to back up your arguement....

I have to thank my good friends Mike and Kevin for this keen insight to the constitution