Commentary As you may know, the primary “constitutional” justification for our out-of-control administrative state is a grossly bloated version of the Constitution’s Commerce Power. In a case pending before the Supreme Court, apologists for centralized authority want the justices to expand that power even more. I have just researched and written a scholarly article (pdf)…

Self-governing citizens in a free republic need to know the structure of their government and the content of its principal laws. For Americans, that requires a basic knowledge of the U.S. Constitution. Ideally, we should acquire this information in school, so as adults we need only burnish it from time to time. However, modern Americans…

One way that some writers try to discredit the U.S. Constitution is to assert that the document’s original meaning discriminated against women. Thus, a 2011 Time Magazine cover story claimed that “the [Constitution’s] framers … gave us the idea … that women were not allowed to vote.” An Oct. 13, 2020, article in The Hill…

When arguing that the Constitution stems from, and continues to reflect, “systemic racism,” critics point to Article I, Section 2, Clause 3—the “three-fifths compromise.”  They do so even though the three-fifths compromise was amended out of the document more than 150 years ago. By way of illustration, a 2011 Time magazine cover story asserted, “The…

This essay addresses one of the most persistent criticisms of the Constitution: that it was adopted to protect, or least accommodate, slavery. As explained below, that criticism is historically false. The Critics’ Deceptive Statistic The critics point out that perhaps 25 of the Constitution’s 55 framers (drafters) were slaveholders. But this statistic is deceptive. One…