constitution

  • Original Meaning: Cruel and Unusual Punishments

    ByP.A. Madison
    3 Comments

    Summary: The prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments is a check against extralegal tribunals or discretionary acts of judges in imposing illegal and cruel punishments that are unknown to established law as practiced under the infamous court of Star Chamber. I thought it was about time to address the well-established ancient understanding of the Eighth Amendments provision for “cruel and unusual punishments” since it is obvious current jurisprudence has no fundamental clue to its constitutional purpose. Most judges today probably will be…

  • Was the United States Founded on Christian Religion?

    ByP.A. Madison
    5 Comments

    I’m often asked if the United States as a nation was founded upon Christianity and the answer is clearly no because religion was not an object of concern delegated to national government by the member States who formed it. National government was formed with very few and limited objects such as war, uniform bankruptcy laws, foreign commerce, etc. All other imaginable concerns dealing with everyday domestic affairs of the people remained with the people themselves within their individual and independent States. A…

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

    ByP.A. Madison
    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…

  • Defining Natural-Born Citizen

    ByP.A. Madison
    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…

  • Q: Did Marshall and Bingham Share the same Constitutional Philosophy?

    ByP.A. Madison

    A reader would like to know what ideological differences there might had been between two influential individuals of constitutional law: Chief Justice John Marshall and John A. Bingham. While John Bingham spoke cordially of C.J. Marshall, the two sat at opposite poles of each other. Here is a quick illustration of their differences: Mr. Bingham was a self-proclaimed “state rights” man; Marshall on the other hand was a Nationalist to the left of George Washington. Mr. Bingham viewed the Alien and Sedition…

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    Supreme Fraud: Plyler v. Doe

    ByP.A. Madison
    11 Comments

    I do not think there is any other single Supreme Court case in which I am asked to comment on more than the case of Plyler v. Doe – especially now with more press attention being devoted to school overcrowding and the costs associated with teaching non-bona fide resident children belonging to citizens of other nations. I have not devoted any lengthy commentary on this case for the simple reason the four dissenting justices (O’Conner, Burger, Rehnquist and White) thoroughly highlighted the…

  • Revisiting the Fifteenth Amendment

    ByP.A. Madison
    5 Comments

    Summary: The Fifteenth Amendments sole purpose was to remove “white” from former rebel State statutes so black citizens could have equal footing as whites in voter qualification laws. This had no effect on stringent State voter laws that could easily disqualify most blacks on conditions other than race because there was no likelihood such an amendment would be ratified by more than 3 States. Today when one speaks of the Fifteenth Amendment they usually do under the belief the Amendment provides an…

  • The US Constitution Only Delegates the Power Over Immigration or Asylum to the States

    ByP.A. Madison
    50 Comments

    Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall on behalf of herself and several other county attorneys and sheriffs, recently said a Arizona proposed immigration provision is an unconstitutional intrusion by the state into immigration policies, which are solely the purview of the Federal Government. This struck me kind of odd because in order to come under the purview of the Federal Government the authority must be found delegated or, incidental to a delegated power granted to Congress under the US Constitution. There is a…