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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Taking Care With Text: "The Laws" Of The Take Care Clause Do Not Include The Constitution, And There Is No Autonomous Presidential Power Of Constitutional Interpretation, George Mader
Faculty Scholarship
“Departmentalism” posits that each branch of the federal government has an independent power of constitutional interpretation—all branches share the power and need not defer to one another in the exercise of their interpretive powers. As regards the Executive Branch, the textual basis for this interpretive autonomy is that the Take Care Clause requires the President to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and the Supremacy Clause includes the Constitution in “the supreme Law of the Land.” Therefore, the President is to execute the Constitution as a law. Or so the common argument goes. The presidential oath to “execute …
Tragic Irony Of American Federalism: National Sovereignty Versus State Sovereignty In Slavery And In Freedom, The Federalism In The 21st Century: Historical Perspectives, Robert J. Kaczorowski
Tragic Irony Of American Federalism: National Sovereignty Versus State Sovereignty In Slavery And In Freedom, The Federalism In The 21st Century: Historical Perspectives, Robert J. Kaczorowski
Faculty Scholarship
A plurality on the Supreme Court seeks to establish a state-sovereignty based theory of federalism that imposes sharp limitations on Congress's legislative powers. Using history as authority, they admonish a return to the constitutional "first principles" of the Founders. These "first principles," in their view, attribute all governmental authority to "the consent of the people of each individual state, not the consent of the undifferentiated people of the Nation as a whole." Because the people of each state are the source of all governmental power, they maintain, "where the Constitution is silent about the exercise of a particular power-that is, …