Presidents Rank Sodas! – YouTube
A friend and colleague of mine just sent me a NY Times article by Robert Reich in which the latter contends that the Republicans are acting “unconstitutionally” by refusing hearings to any of Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees. I replied—admittedly, a bit too abruptly—that the Democrats feign concern about abiding by the Constitution only when it suits their purposes.
I stand by this position. But I know that the same can be said for Republicans.
Brion McClanahan’s latest book underscores in spades this bipartisan disregard of the Constitution. His 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America and Four Who Tried to Save Her (Regnery: 2016) is a tailor-made book for the lover of American political history. Moreover, though a piece of scholarship of the first order, it is, refreshingly, written in prose that is accessible to any remotely curious reader.
Another welcoming feature of McClanahan’s analysis is its indisputably non-partisan tone. Unlike Robert Reich, McClanahan’s repulsion from unconstitutional governance is not selectively determined by ideological prejudice and political gain. It is principled. That this is so becomes obvious as soon as one begins thumbing one’s way through 9 Presidents.
McClanahan notes that the concerns of the anti-Federalists began to materialize as early on as George Washington’s tenure in office.
While “Washington’s first administration was a model for the constitutional exercise of
the presidential powers,” his second administration was not. For starters, though he was constitutionally required to seek the “advice and consent” of Congress when it came to issues of war and treaties.
In 1793, in the wake of the bloody French Revolution, Washington acted unilaterally
by essentially breaking America’s treaty with France by issuing his “Proclamation of Neutrality.” James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were among those who viewed this move as the stuff of, not presidents of Constitutional Republics, but monarchs.
It Didn’t Start with Barack Obama
America is well on her way to becoming a banana republic. With presidents signing patently unconstitutional legislation, refusing to enforce laws they don’t like, and even making appointments without the advice and consent of the Senate, it’s clear that the federal Republic our Constitution established is hanging by a thread. And yet the chances that a president who has flouted our founding document and the very rule of law will be impeached are slim to none.
Americans seem to have resigned themselves to the exact form of government that the framers and ratifiers of our Constitution feared most: the tyranny of an elected monarch. The executive branch of the U.S. federal government has grown so far beyond the bounds set for it in our
Constitution that Americans can no longer claim to govern ourselves. We only get the chance to pick the man who will spend four years legislating unilaterally with his pen, waging undeclared wars, and usurping still more powers that the people and the states never delegated to the federal government in the first place.
But how did we get here?
Step by unconstitutional step, as historian Brion McClanahan reveals in Nine Presidents Who Screwed Up America—And Four Who Tried to Save Her. McClanahan’s ranking of the presidents is surprising—because he judges them on the only true standard: whether or not they kept their oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
In Praise of 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America and 4 Who Saved Her
“Every once in a while, American historians will be polled regarding the men they consider the greatest presidents. Without fail, they choose those people most dedicated to the expansion of government. In this outstanding book, Brion McClanahan blasts these historians to smithereens, and reveals the true history of the dangerous men who are known as our great presidents. It’s about time someone did!”
–Tom Woods, author of Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century and The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History. “This book
is both a fascinating read by a master historian and a necessary guide for any voter.”
–Kevin R. C. Gutzman, author of James Madison and the Making of America
and The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Constitution
“Congratulations to Brion McClanahan. As a true American historian, he tells the truth about the rogues’ gallery of US presidents, who have stolen our freedoms, and killed millions in the process. And what great prose!”
–Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., founding chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
“Mr. McClanahan has a hit on his hands, or should. He lays out a case, in plain English, how each of nine presidents “Screwed up” our country. It is a fascinating and factual accounting of presidential usurpation of power…This book is entertaining and educational – a feat which is all too difficult to achieve. I must say, I am smarter for reading it.”
–Brent Smith, The Daily Caller
“Brion McClanahan presents a masterful and superbly-scholarly discussion of how
nine presidents, beginning with George Washington himself, effectively destroyed
the constitutional government.”
–Thomas DiLorenzo, LewRockwell.com
Part I The Nine Who Screwed Up America.
1 Andrew Jackson and the Antecedents of the Imperial Presidency 3.
2 Abraham Lincoln 25. 3 Theodore Roosevelt 35. 4 Woodrow Wilson 55.
5 Franklin D. Roosevelt 75. 6 Harry S. Truman 99. 7 Lyndon B. Johnson 119.
8 Richard Nixon 9 Barack Obama …
A friend and colleague of mine just sent me a NY Times article by Robert Reich in which the latter contends that the Republicans are acting “unconstitutionally” by refusing hearings to any of Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees. I replied—admittedly, a bit too abruptly—that the Democrats feign concern about abiding by the Constitution only when it suits their purposes.
I stand by this position. But I know that the same can be said for Republicans.
Brion McClanahan’s latest book underscores in spades this bipartisan disregard of the Constitution. His 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America and Four Who Tried to Save
Her (Regnery: 2016) is a tailor-made book for the lover of American political history. Moreover, though a piece of scholarship of the first order, it is, refreshingly, written in prose that is accessible to any remotely curious reader.
Another welcoming feature of McClanahan’s analysis is its indisputably non-partisan tone. Unlike Robert Reich, McClanahan’s repulsion from unconstitutional governance is not selectively determined by ideological prejudice and political gain. It is principled. That this is so becomes obvious as soon as one begins thumbing one’s way through 9 Presidents.
McClanahan notes that the concerns of the anti-Federalists began to materialize as early on as George Washington’s tenure in office. While “Washington’s first administration was a model for the constitutional exercise of the presidential powers,” his second administration was not.
For starters, though he was constitutionally required to seek the “advice and consent” of Congress when it came to issues of war and treaties, in 1793, in the wake of the bloody French Revolution, Washington acted unilaterally by essentially breaking America’s treaty with France by issuing his “Proclamation of Neutrality.” James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were among those who viewed this move as the stuff of, not presidents of Constitutional Republics, but monarchs.
Washington also crushed the so-called “Whiskey Rebellion,”
a move that was unconstitutional on multiple grounds.
Yet Washington is not among the cast of characters that McClanahan charges with having “screwed up America,” of having grossly, routinely undermined the Constitution. This ignominious distinction the author endows upon such worthies as Andrew Jackson; Abraham Lincoln; Theodore Roosevelt; Woodrow Wilson; Franklin D. Roosevelt; Harry Truman; Lyndon Johnson; Richard Nixon; and Barack Obama.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that McClanahan treats this list as exhaustive. Like Washington, there are several presidents—George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush are three notable examples—who don’t have chapters reserved for them, but whose flagrant abuses of the Constitution the author meticulously documents.
McClanahan knows that by including Lincoln in his list of presidents who “screwed up America,” he will shock the contemporary sensibilities of many readers. Yet he also makes a compelling case that any such list that omitted “Honest Abe” would be downright dishonest, for Lincoln, “more than any president who came before him, created the blueprint for the modern presidency.”
If ever there was a “fundamentally transformative” president, it was Lincoln, the man who presided over the transformation of the American political system from “a federal republic to a consolidated nation.”
Through a chain of the most cogent reasoning, McClanahan reveals how and why the Southern states that formed the Confederacy were indeed justified, constitutionally speaking, in seceding from the Union. Lincoln, thus, acted unconstitutionally in treating secession as a “rebellion.” Yet even conceding, for argument’s sake, that Lincoln was right about this matter, he was, from the standpoint of the Constitution, terribly wrong in how he proceeded to address it.
“Lincoln,” McClanahan explains, “violated the Constitution and his oath by unilaterally calling up the ‘militia’ to subdue ‘combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or by the powers vested in the marshals by law.” The problem, here, is that the Constitution authorizes Congress—not the Executive branch—to do such things.
However, McClanahan remarks,
“these violations of the Constitution were only the beginning.” The 16th president, he continues, “presided over the most oppressive and lawless general government in American history to that point, one that has only been surpassed by the imperial presidencies of the twentieth century.” Lincoln’s “unilateral suspension of habeas corpus was ruled unconstitutional by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney”—and yet “Lincoln ignored the ruling [.]” His administration “arrested over ten thousand Northern Americans for their opposition to the war, mostly newspaper editors and politically well-connected citizens” (emphases original) [.]
There are many more violations of the Constitution of which Lincoln was guilty, but space constraints preclude enumeration of them here. “Progressive” Republican President Teddy Roosevelt, given “his belief that…the Constitution was an outdated piece of parchment subject to elastic interpretation and the will of the executive,” was the first of the 20th century imperial presidents. Even some of his fellow Republicans in Congress objected to his blatant subversion of the Constitution in executing his “Square Deal” agenda.
While Roosevelt was the first of the last century’s imperial presidents, he was far from
the last. Woodrow Wilson, who “lamented that the founding generation did not have the foresight to call for a closer link between the executive and legislative branches” and who, to remedy this alleged weakness, regarded the Constitution as “organic,” “was a…pioneer in unconstitutional executive authority.”
Then, of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt ratcheted things up considerably by ramming his “New Deal” “through Congress with a personal zeal unmatched by anyone who had held the office before him.” Yet FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, “had become the most progressive president in American history” by the time his nearly eight years in office had come to a close.
The four presidents who tried to “save” America by exercising admirable, if imperfect, constitutional constraints are Thomas Jefferson, John Tyler, Grover Cleveland, and Calvin Coolidge. Not unsurprisingly, though, and with the exception of that of Jefferson’s, the presidencies of these last three are ordinarily regarded by historians as either unremarkable or even failed. This, however, reveals more about the extent to which these same historians subscribe to the model of the imperial—to repeat, the unconstitutional—presidency than it speaks to these forgotten presidents themselves.
By the measure of the Constitution-as-ratified, Tyler, Cleveland, and Coolidge join Jefferson as among the best presidents in American history.
Brion McClanahan’s Nine Presidents Who Screwed Up America and the Four Who Tried to Save Her is must reading for everyone who is more interested in preserving the Constitution than in preserving their respective parties.
During this heated election season, it is also timelier than ever.
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He can’t control himself’: Trump put on notice judges may be forced to jail him.
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‘He can’t control himself ‘: Trump put on notice judges may be forced to jail him
Story by Tom Boggioni •15h
During an appearance on MSNBC, former Watergate attorney Jill Wine-Banks warned Donald Trump he could end up in pre-trial detention if he doesn’t tone down his rhetoric about his criminal indictments.
In a segment with host Ayman Mohyeldin on the former president’s attacks on prosecutors, including Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and special counsel Jack Smith, Wine-Banks suggested sanctioning Trump financially would be ineffective since he would just pay the fines with his supporter’s donations. As the expert explained, Trump is putting the judges in a tough spot if they decide to jail the former president, but that he may leave them no choice.
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According to Wine-Banks, Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s Washington D.C. federal trial, is “up to the task” of handling the former president’s attacks.
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“I think that she can handle it, but she is in a very difficult position because putting him in custody has to be a last resort,” she explained. “He may push her to do that, but he will see it as a political advantage, and so she has to be careful not to give him that advantage. But there is a limit to what she can do to enforce his compliance with what her reasonable requirements for his release are.”
“She can penalize him with a monetary fine but his supporters are paying his legal bills already so it doesn’t hurt him and he doesn’t care about them and their money,” she added. “And so I don’t know how much benefit in terms of his compliance it would be to fine him if he doesn’t obey the fine. She said she would move the trial date up but she can only move it up so far without denying him due process and the adequate time to prepare, and he knows that and she knows that.”
“So there’s a very limited amount of things that she can do other than incarceration, and I think that that may have to be if he — you know [political consultant] Stuart Stevens is right: he can’t control himself,” she elaborated. “And so if he goes way beyond the bounds and is clear in his threats and provoking his supporters to create violence in response to these threats, I think that he will have to be shut up by being incarcerated, and we have an example of Eugene Debs who ran for president from jail and so it is possible that he can continue his campaign from jail.”
Watch below or at the link.
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