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James Madison opposed Nullification because he knew that the reasons he had pushed for Congress to be given power to regulate trade with foreign countries included his desire that Congress should be able to protect select domestic industries. In other words, although he believed that the tariff laws were unduly interventionist, he insisted they were constitutional. For a full account of Madison’s thinking about these questions, from the 1770s to his death in 1836, please consult my JAMES MADISON AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA.

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Let me add that although elections to the House of Burgesses were always relatively democratic, from that body’s founding in 1619, no one who had been an indentured servant and no one whose ancestor had been an indentured servant was elected to the Burgesses in the 17th century. The way up from indentured servitude was difficult.

In fact, the Virginia Company lamented in Virginia’s earliest days that so many recruits to live in its colony returned to England as soon as they could. Life proved harsher than expected.

Besides that, Prof. McClanahan in his answer may inadvertently have given the impression that land awaited indentured servants at the end of their servitude. This is false, at least in regard to Virginia. There, the law required that they be given seed, farm implements, and a new suit of sex-appropriate clothes at the end of their servitude, but it seems that most never became landowners.

By the time of the Revolution, there were people in the Virginia political elite who descended from indentured servants, notably the eminent Edmund Pendleton, who was an uncle of John Taylor of Caroline and distant cousin of James Madison.

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Yes, it certainly is worth reading. Dr. Hummel, an anarchist economics professor, makes the obvious point that while the Civil War’s chief result was the liberation of four million people, its other main effect was the subjugation of American citizens to the formerly federal government. Bracing throughout.

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Here’s my review of the best book on the subject: http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr/subpages/reviews/Labbe-Lurie104.htm

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The case you want is Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990). In that case, the Supreme Court said that although states may accommodate religious practices and beliefs, they do not have to do so. The First Amendment’s requirement is that they not target those beliefs/practices, but they do not have to accommodate them. A neutral law neutrally applied may have a disparate impact on religious groups, but that is permissible.

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Gillman, THE CONSTITUTION BESIEGED, is the place to start for the pre-New Deal Supreme Court.

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What the Court said in Citizens United is that when the First Amendment bans Congress from restricting the freedoms of speech and the press, it bans Congress from limiting people’s campaign expenditures. This, it seems to me, is perfectly obvious: if I have freedom to print what I want, I have freedom to pay others to print what I want. They are the same thing.

Socialists want to undo Citizens United because they dislike freedom of the press. Period. In pushing McCain-Feingold, John McCain said that his goal was to insulate politicians from critical advertising too proximate to an election. In other words, his law was as nakedly unconstitutional as it could have been. It is hard for me to understand what people think they are going to gain by abetting politicians who want to be immune to criticism.

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Very , very soon, JohnD. Stand by.

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You’ve made a little mistake: it’s in Article I, the congressional portion of the Constitution, not Article II, “the section of the Constitution dealing with the [p]resident and his powers.” Why would it be in Article II, indeed, when the right to the writ of habeas corpus is a limitation on presidential powers? We wouldn’t expect the president to be the one who could waive it.

Of course Congress’s suspending it in 1863 doesn’t vitiate objections to Lincoln’s behavior in 1861.

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Soon. Stand by.

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The Korean War was a folly from beginning to end. The reason North Korea thought itself free to invade South Korea was that the American secretary of state, Dean Acheson, publicly put Korea outside the sphere of America’s interests. Truman changed the American policy only after the attack.

On the other hand, the fact that the USSR’s economic system was absurd doesn’t answer the question whether it was an existential threat to the USA. After all, one could have made a similar argument in Tibet c. 1950: “China’s economic system is absurd, so we have nothing to fear.” What good would that do him now?

I might add that the economic system of the United States is absurd as well.

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Congressmen from several other states mentioned the idea that the New England states (what they called “the eastern states”) tended to cooperate in Congress. Some of them decided to oppose this tendency. Although Virginia and Massachusetts provided most of the radical delegates to the First Continental Congress, I’m not aware of anyone saying what you suspect.

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The idea that I may not be familiar with this boilerplate law-school “history” truly is absurd. To the contrary, I’ve written a best-selling book arguing against it from beginning to end, largely on the basis of my numerous peer-reviewed articles in the top history journals.

“The professor” tells us that the Supreme Court “is a representative institution in that it attempts to do what is right for the nation as a whole,” and for that we have only the word of the judges and of their aiders and abettors in academia, the legal profession, and the media. I suppose that the Chinese premier or the president of Syria would describe himself in the same way: that he is representative in that he attempts to do what is right for the nation as a whole. As in the case of the Supreme Court’s legislation, the policies conferred upon the people by the Chinese and Syrian leaders are not susceptible to popular revision, let alone rejection. Their sad subjects simply have to take their word for it.

“The professor” tells us that, “The Constitution was designed to establish a republic, not a democracy, and its savior is the fact that the Court can do what is best for the nation as opposed to what is best for its electoral interest.” Since he had deigned to instruct me on the “design” of the Constitution, let me note that the role his syllabus and his comments here ascribe to the Court was not envisioned by anyone involved in approving the Constitution’s design; in fact, the only people who hinted that it might have anything akin to its current role were a few ANTIfederalists in New York. If any politician had said in the ratification process, “Federal judges will be better than elected officials because elections cloud people’s judgment,” as “the professor” does here, he would have been hooted down.

Since he is obviously unfamiliar with my best-selling constitutional history, not to mention with the best-selling book in the same field that Tom Woods and I co-authored, I suspect that “the professor” is also blissfully unaware of my account in JAMES MADISON AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA (JMMA) of Madison’s response to MCCULLOCH V. MARYLAND (1824). If the people had known the Constitution was going to be read that way, he said, they would never have ratified it. Both in JMMA and in my contribution to A COMPANION TO JAMES MADISON AND JAMES MONROE, I demonstrate that this is no doubt true.

Another way of putting it is that the system “the professor” advocates is completely unlike, in many ways contrary to, the one the people were sold in the ratification process. “The professor” likely doesn’t know this, as legal training in this area doesn’t extend far beyond reading a few old judicial opinions and a few excerpts from THE FEDERALIST. That’s why I like to say that once I graduated from a top-ten law school, I entered UVA’s PhD program to get an education.

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I am aware of this issue, which will be remedied.

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The states’ right of secession was based on the states’ role in establishing the federal union. Whether a state would allow secession by more local groups — as of course had happened in the cases of Maine, Kentucky, North Carolina, etc. — was not a question of federal constitutionalism.

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