A promise: you have
never read a book on the Constitution that is this clear, enlightening, or truth telling, for none like it has ever appeared since it was first past. This isn't just a primer for people who have never read Constitutional history. It is a spectacularly new take on the document, its origins, its meaning, and the way it has been shredded and reassembled in the course of American history for the purpose of serving state elites.
It provides information you simply cannot find elsewhere. Author Kevin R.C. Gutzman shows that the defiance of the document dates back to the first year's after its passage.
Thomas Woods writes: "Although I was revisiting much familiar ground as I read this book, even I was shocked at how dishonest the federal courts have been over the years. And Gutzman just eviscerates all of it, slashing and burning everything in sight, and holding up the ludicrous series of fictions that pass for 'constitutional law' to hilarious derision.Gutzman isn’t supposed to do any of this, of course, since the continuation of the racket depends on popular ignorance."
A striking fact is that this author hasn't previously published in the public arena. His scholarly articles have only appeared in high-level academic journals such as The Journal of the Early Republic and The William and Mary Quarterly. But here he uses all knowledge to reach out to everyone in an effort to help us understand our own history.
"To be blunt," writes Gutzman, "the original federal system's three main attributes – republicanism, federalism, and limited government – have given way to a system in which virtually all matters of any import are governed ultimately by federal policymakers. Worse, when someone thinks to put the matter in the form of a legal question, it is apt to be decided by an unelected, life-tenured federal judge, purportedly – but rarely actually – on the basis of the federal Constitution. All of which constitutes nothing less than betrayal of the American Revolution."
As Professor Gutzman shows, constitutional law is supposed to apply the Constitution’s plain meaning to prevent judges, presidents, and congresses from overstepping their authority. If we want to return to the founding fathers' vision of the Republic, if we want the Constitution enforced in the way it was explained to the people at the time of its ratification, then we have to overcome the "received wisdom" about what constitutional law is.
In the weeks after it was published, this book became a New York Times bestseller, which is surely the worst nightmare of the Federal Judiciary as well as nationalist on the left and right. Neither the socialist nor the neoconservative reading of the Constitution survives his masterful analytics.
Gutzman has succeed in reclaiming the Constitution on behalf of the party of liberty. Read it and be astonished.
272 page softcover