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  • House Report No. 22 Summarizing 14th & 15th Amendments
The Federalist Blog
The Federalist Blog
Where Federalism is kept honest!
  • immigration

    Feds Argue Pre-Eminent Authority over Immigration

    ByP.A. Madison July 12, 2010September 28, 2011
    9 Comments

    One of the core arguments advanced by the Justice Department in a lawsuit against Arizona’s immigration law is that under “our constitutional system, the federal government has pre-eminent authority to regulate immigration matters.” The government further states this “authority derives from the United States Constitution …” Here is the problem with this: There is zero evidence the States had ever surrendered their authority over internal State immigration matters to the federal government. The Constitution’s enumerated powers say nothing about immigration. What power…

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  • commerce clause | General Welfare

    Fight Obamacare with Truth, not Lawsuits (for now)

    ByP.A. Madison April 10, 2010
    2 Comments

    If you think fighting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a matter solely devoted to filing lawsuits you are deeply mistaken. The reason lawsuits will have little effect is because the entire judicial system is a house of cards built upon a foundation of fiction and lies the court is willing to jealousy defend even if they must continue with deceit. Justices on the court are no longer concerned with defined limited powers or original meaning behind enumerated powers anymore…

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  • constitution | General Welfare

    President Monroe’s Response to Obamacare

    ByP.A. Madison March 23, 2010
    5 Comments

    Excerpts from President Monroe’s Special Message on Internal Improvements, May 4, 1822: If, then, the right to raise and appropriate the public money is not restricted to the expenditures under the other specific grants, according to a strict construction of their powers respectively, is there no limitation to it? Have Congress a right to raise and appropriate the public money to any and to every purpose, according to their will and pleasure? They certainly have not. The government of the United States…

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  • 14th amendment | constitution | incorporation

    Was ACORN the Victim of a Bill of Attainder?

    ByP.A. Madison March 9, 2010
    1 Comment

    This may be old news by now, but I wanted to add a few remarks regarding the Association of Community Organizations (ACORN) argument that a House resolution amounted to a “bill of attainder” that resulted in a cut off federal grant money to the group. Judge Nina Gershon agreed, writing, “They [ACORN] have been singled out by Congress for punishment that directly and immediately affects their ability to continue to obtain federal funding, in the absence of any judicial, or even administrative,…

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  • 14th amendment | 1st amendment | incorporation

    What the Court & Everyone Misses in Citizens United v. FEC

    ByP.A. Madison February 12, 2010May 31, 2012
    4 Comments

    The Supreme Court recently held in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission that corporations had a First Amendment right to spend money to support or oppose political candidates. The Court struck down federal laws regulating independent political advertising by for-profit and non-profit corporations before an election even as they reaffirmed rules about disclosure and disclosures for ads and against direct corporate giving to candidates. The court assumed if a corporation could not engage in political speech then neither could major media outlets…

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  • 14th amendment | incorporation

    Alan Gura’s brief in McDonald v. City of Chicago

    ByP.A. Madison January 27, 2010July 21, 2011
    7 Comments

    Like many pro constitutional gun ownership activists, Alan Gura’s brief for the petitioners in McDonald v. City of Chicago attempts to cast doubt on Slaughterhouse precedent that says the Fourteenth Amendment was not intended “as a protection to the citizen of a State against the legislative power of his own State.” He wants to convince the court that their privileges or immunities doctrine is profoundly erroneous. However, did Slaughterhouse really get it wrong? The written evidence strongly suggests that in fact Slaughterhouse…

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  • eminent domain

    Feds think they have Eminent Domain Powers within States

    ByP.A. Madison May 8, 2009
    5 Comments

    The AP reports that the federal government will begin taking land from seven property owners so that a Flight 93 memorial can be built in time for the 10th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks. “We always prefer to get that land from a willing seller. And sometimes you can just not come to an agreement on certain things,” said National Parks Service spokesperson Phil Sheridan. One major problem: The Federal Government has no authority to condemn private property within a State…

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  • gay rights

    Gay Marriage: Iowa Supreme Court Wrong on the Law

    ByP.A. Madison April 4, 2009September 28, 2011
    21 Comments

    Reading through the unanimous, 69-page decision of the Iowa Supreme Court striking down the state’s 10-year-old ban on same-sex marriage, reads more as an advocacy for same-sex marriage than constitutional fact finding. While I do not have much time to Blog on this case now, I will quickly point out deliberate and obvious factual errors the court used to invalidate Iowa’s same-sex ban. The court declares the “primary constitutional principle at the heart of this case is the doctrine of equal protection.”…

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  • 14th amendment | equal protection | gay rights

    Historical Meaning Behind ‘Equal Protection of the Laws’

    ByP.A. Madison February 6, 2009January 8, 2024
    14 Comments

    Equal Protection of the Laws simply means all persons shall be tried and punished equally before courts of law as it did under Common Law. The clause has no application outside of criminal law which explains why the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments were needed. Justice Scalia speaking of the Fourteenth Amendments Equal Protection Clause (EPC) to students at UC Hastings College of the Law in September 2010 remarked, “nobody thought it was directed against sex discrimination.” Scalia could have added nobody thought…

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  • citizenship

    Defining Natural-Born Citizen

    ByP.A. Madison November 18, 2008August 25, 2013
    420 Comments

    “The common law of England is not the common law of these States.” –George Mason What might the phrase “natural-born citizen” of the United States imply under the U.S. Constitution? The phrase has always been obscure due to the lack of any single authoritative source to confer in order to understand the condition of citizenship the phrase recognizes. Learning what the phrase might have meant following the Declaration of Independence, and the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, requires detective work. As with…

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  • House Report No. 22 Summarizing 14th & 15th Amendments