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None comes to mind, but that is not to say that it didn’t occur.

You’re welcome.

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I published an article in The Journal of Libertarian Studies in 2002 arguing that Calhoun’s posture concerning federal power–which had been assertive, though not Hamiltonian–turned on a dime in response to the outcome of the presidential election of 1824. I’ll add that whether Randolph had laid the groundwork is an interesting question; certainly he began to sound more like Randolph, although Randolph rejected Calhoun’s doctrine of Nullification, insisting that a state could secede but not nullify, when the time came. Take a look. (Note: Tom Woods edited that issue.)

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Liberty Fund has a cheap edition of the Pacificus-Helvidius Debates. There, Hamilton and Madison agree that this right of the president isn’t anything more than ceremonial.

In general, Congress has the right to hear from anyone it wants. It can subpoena anyone it wants. It isn’t for the Executive Branch to have any role in such matters. In fact, more than one president has testified before Congress.

The bottom line is that the invitation to give the speech in itself didn’t violate any provision of the Constitution.

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Engineering and economics are generally the least left-wing majors on any college campus. Even math has its Marxists (yes, it’s true), but statics, dynamics, fluids, etc., brook no buffoonery, and economics departments tend to have the second-most non-liberals of the lot.

I agree with Tom 100%. An MIT degree is a wonderful credential to have for life, and he should get one if he can. A newly minted engineering degree will pay off those loans shortly; a guy in his 20s can vow upon graduation to pay them off within a decade and continue living close to the bone as he did in college.

I’ve been giving my daughter this same talk recently. She’s looking at engineering too, and Dad was highly impressed by a joint visit to Columbia. No one ever said, “I wish I didn’t have an MIT degree,” or, “I wish I hadn’t earned my bachelor’s at Columbia.” Again: it’s not just a degree, it’s a ticket to the national elite in a way that Michigan and Berkeley just aren’t. Esteemed professors move from Michigan to MIT, not the other way around.

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What the Court held was that they could not be citizens of the United States, and thus that they could not sue in federal court under federal courts’ diversity-of-citizenship jurisdiction. The Court didn’t hold that they couldn’t be “American” citizens, as that wasn’t the issue in the suit; several states continued to recognize particular blacks as state citizens after the decision.

I don’t like the term “African-American” in relation to slaves, because slavery denied them American-ness. Thomas Jefferson referred to slaves as “a captive nation,” and that’s how the law treated them. This was changed by the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment.

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I think there’s something to the fact that Jews as a group, unlike say Slavs, Armenians, Chinese, or Cambodians, are very literary and prominent in world intellectual life–in publishing, in academia, in journalism, and in cinema. This is in no way a negative commentary on Jews. Historians deal all the time with the fact that the only past people whose thoughts we know, for the most part, are those who could write, etc. So, ancient and medieval history tends to be about kings, generals, bishops, theologians, et al. There will never be a Chinese Anne Frank, and that’s not because Mao’s mass murders weren’t more numerous than Hitler’s.

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I recommend Van Tien Dung’s memoir _Our Great Spring Victory_ for a North Vietnamese view of the final conquest of South Vietnam.

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Southern Democrats did, yes. Johnson as senator at first joined them, then helped push through symbolic civil rights legislation.

As early as 1866, President Andrew Johnson–a southern Democrat–vetoed the first such bill on constitutional grounds. Again, I think he was right in his constitutional claim; in fact, his veto message sounded like Thomas Jefferson.

For my claim that it was the VRA, not the CRA, that ultimately resolved this issue–and thus that segregation could have been ended perfectly constitutionally, and without elevating federal judges to the position of American censors (in the Roman sense), see Klarman’s _From Jim Crow to Civil Rights_.

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In 1789, Congress sent twelve proposed amendments to the states for their ratification. Ten of those were ratified, in 1791 (the first ten amendments), one was ratified in 1992 (the 27th Amendment), and one was never ratified.

As the states received these proposals, they came with Congress’s preamble explaining their purpose. Tom Woods and I reproduce the preamble in the Appendix to Who Killed the Constitution: http://kevingutzman.com/books/whokilledtheconstitution.html, and what it comes to is that the proposed amendments are being sent to the states for the purpose of further clarifying the limits on federal power.

Not to empower federal courts to strike down new types of state laws–to provide further clarification on the limits of federal power.

This was an uncontroversial position in the first generations under the US Constitution. Even Federalists accepted it, as is shown by the fact that Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Barron v. Baltimore (1833) holding that the Bill of Rights applied only to the states was the opinion of a unanimous court.

Only five decades after the 14th Amendment was declared ratified did the Supreme Court start this “incorporation” stuff, and it wasn’t until very recently that they got around to saying the Due Process Clause made the 2nd Amendment enforceable against the states. Berger destroyed this claim, first in his classic _Government by Judiciary…._ (get the 2nd edition, which has wonderful new material), then in his follow-up _The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights_.

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Separation of church and state, as I’ve written in a couple of Orthodox publications, is the best that can be done in the USA. Beyond that, one might start by reading Eusebius’s history of the Church.

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I could wish there were an Austrian account of Stolypin’s reforms, and indeed of Russian economic history from Napoleon’s retreat to the present. Alas, no such luck.

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Washington was completely inexperienced in command at that level at the war’s beginning, and it showed on Long Island and on Manhattan. He did however eventually decide upon precisely the right grand strategy for American victory. Besides that, he steadfastly insisted that Congress, not he, had final authority in the American system, both when some of his officers and when the British pushed him in the other direction. He ultimately resigned his commission. These three facts combine to make him not only a good military commander, but the greatest man in American history.

I agree about Franklin, though we mustn’t ignore John Jay’s pivotal role in concluding the Treaty of Paris.

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I would note that the USA got into trouble when it failed to maintain the practicality of its general approach–as when Kennedy said it would meet any foe, bear any burden, etc., and when Truman discarded Acheson’s policy of leaving South Korea outside the perimeter the US must defend.

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Eisenhower, unlike his Democratic predecessor and successor, appointed pro-Civil Rights judges to federal judgeships whenever he had the chance. He also sent the 101st Airborne to intervene in Little Rock in 1957.

However, not only did he do the latter grudgingly, but he privately mused that Brown had been wrongly decided. As you’ve seen, I believe Brown wrongly decided as well, although I think the 1965 VRA was perfectly constitutional and ought to have been adopted and enforced far, far sooner.

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This of course happens all the time, as presently in connection with both the marijuana laws and the immigration laws.

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