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You’re welcome.

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You’re welcome.

Note that this discretion doesn’t extend to dispensing with a law altogether, which was regarded by the Revolutionaries as an objectionable practice of the worst British monarchs.

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For the Stamp Act, again, see the Morgans’ The Stamp Act Crisis. For the Tea Act, see Benjamin Carp’s book on the Boston Tea Party. I fear that I don’t know good books specifically on those other two topics.

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I asked Phil Magness of the Institute for Humane Studies, and he gave me this link:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/laurence-hayek-6162259.html

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We might note as well that many southerners in the antebellum period had an exaggerated view of the popularity in the North of various radical notions with which leading abolitionists were associated–among them women’s suffrage, health food, free love, a critical approach to/rejection of the Bible, rejection of the Constitution, etc. In this context, the attack on slavery as immoral, retrograde, a retarding economic influence, and so on looked like just another ingredient in a very unsavory stew of Yankee craziness.

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You’re not going to find Jefferson, Madison, Randolph, et al., calling the Federal Government “national.” They typically called it the “general” government.

This matter is discussed extensively in the lectures. Again: a federal government was created by the parts with certain powers in the center (as in Switzerland, The Netherlands, Australia, or–in theory–the USA), while a national government has component parts for the convenience of the center–as in France since the Revolution.

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I’m Eastern Orthodox, and I lived in Panama for four years: I agree with you about Latin America, Catholicism, and Protestantism. I could say a thing or two about Unitarianism too.

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Each of these questions is the subject of bookshelves of dissertations, scholarly articles, and books.

In a sense, they all require us to engage in alternative history–that is, historical fiction–to come to answers.

As I understand it, Brown v. Board of Education–result of the NAACP LDF’s legal strategy and extremely partisan behavior by numerous federal judges–spurred private activism, which itself ultimately brought segregation to Americans’ TV screens and led to adoption of the decisive VRA of 1965. That’s what ended segregation, not the 1964 CRA.

Each of the three had a role. There’s no way to know what would have happened without any of them. In general, however, it was Congress that ended segregation. Historians today tend to resist this conclusion, because they want to stress black agency–just as they want women to be responsible for women’s suffrage, even though of course it was all-male legislatures that adopted the amendment at the behest of all-male electorates in nearly all the states.

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Both.

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This clause was intended to keep Congress from restricting or banning importation of slaves prior to 1808 under its Article I, Section 8 power over “commerce with foreign Nations.” Republicans of the 1790s argued that despite this intention, which was reiterated in several states (notably Massachusetts and South Carolina) during the ratification debates, it applied to all immigration; by this reading, the Commerce Clause grants Congress power to regulate immigration.

I accept this position.

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Faced with limited resources, no prosecutor can enforce all of the laws with equal vigor. It is in the discretion of each to decide which to emphasize and which not. The president, as the person in whom the Constitution purports to vest all of the Federal Government’s executive authority, has this discretion within the ambit of the Federal Government.

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Be sure you start with Herodotus, because Thucydides distinguishes his approach from that of Herodotus. It will be good to know what he means, and to be able to read his book with what he says about that in mind.

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An executive order is an instruction from the president–in whom the Constitution says all of the executive power of the Federal Government is vested–to his subordinates in the Executive Branch. Their theoretical limit is the border between executing policy and making it–the latter of which would be for the Legislative Branch.

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I’m not sure what part of this you intended as a response to me.

The reason the US Constitution does not include basic philosophical statements is that it was intended as a federal constitution–that is, as a means of establishing a government with a few, delegated powers. Since the government would have only the enumerated powers, there was no need for a philosophical statement. A state–Virginia, for example–might precede its constitution with a philosophical declaration of rights, on which the state constitution would be based, because the state constitution was creating a government whose only limitations were those listed in the declaration. Former Philadelphia Convention delegate James Wilson explained this in his famous Statehouse Speech of October 6, 1787 (19 days after he signed the Constitution):

http://www.constitution.org/afp/jwilson0.htm

Wilson was one of the handful of leading orators in the Philadelphia Convention, and this speech was more widely reprinted and cited than any other Federalist argument during the ratification campaign–certainly more influential at the time than The Federalist Papers. Soon after Wilson gave this speech, President Washington appointed him to be among the first members of the Supreme Court.

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Many people were expropriated during the Revolution. Much of the land was sold, the proceeds used to help defray the cost of the war. Some Patriots, such as Alexander Hamilton, later argued–in court or outside–that these seizures were immoral/unconstitutional and should be reversed; you can find information about that in the Hamilton legal papers.

There is no general study of this question. In general, you have to take it up on a state-by-state, even town-by-town basis.

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