Constitutional history -- United States; United States -- Politics and government; United States. Constitution. 18th Amendment
Even Ashurst seems to have known that it was remarkable, unique in
history, for the Fifth Article to name two different makers of future
Articles. It is amazing that the imperative reason for this naming
of two makers, distinct and different in their ability to make,
never suggested itself to any of the renowned lawyers of 1920, even
though they knew the dual nature, _national_ and _federal_, of our
Constitution. It is amazing when we realize that the Supreme Court, in
1819, had stated, as an obvious thing, that, when the First Article
(granting power to interfere with the freedom of men) was proposed,
the legal “necessity of referring it to the people, and of deriving
its powers _directly from them_, was felt and acknowledged by all.” It
is amazing when the same Supreme Court in 1907 had authoritatively
repeated that statement: “The powers the people have given to the
general government are named in the Constitution, and all not there
named, either expressly or by implication, are reserved to the people
and can be exercised only by them or upon further grant from them.”
However, we average Americans, still pursuing the history of America
to learn when we again became “subjects,” will later herein consider
the litigation about the Eighteenth Amendment. So far as the Senate
is concerned, we leave it on December 18, 1917, the day on which it
finally proposed that legislative governments make the Eighteenth
Amendment, whose Second Section was exactly of the same nature as the
First Article, namely, an Article of the kind which the Philadelphia
Convention of 1787 had known never could be made by legislative
governments in America. In that Senate, as in the House, the public
record discloses no American who did not ignore the most important
factor in the Tenth Amendment and the Fifth Article, no American
who knew the legal necessity of deriving, directly from the people
themselves, every power to interfere with the individual freedom of the
people.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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