Constitutional Professor Calls to get Schooled on US Constitution

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio & Transcript – Mike in Kentucky, a “Constitutional Professor”, calls in to the show today to get schooled at Mike Church University. Listen to Mr. Church give him the lesson on original intent that he must’ve skipped out on at his “real” university. And remember Mike in Kentucky, that’s a very valuable diploma you have… if you ever run out of toilet paper.  Check out today’s audio and transcript for more…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Mike in Kentucky, you’re next on the Mike Church Show.  Hello.

Caller Mike:  Thank you for having me on.  So here’s the point.  I was listening to Glenn Addison.  It is great to see guys with a good heart wanting to run for the United States Senate.  He is woefully underprepared to talk about the U.S. Constitution, and here’s why.  I teach judicial process and constitutional law.  I understand different views of the Constitution: originalism, literalism, living constitutionalism.  All this goes back to the notion that you’re not going to find the words for each one of the federal departments in the Constitution because it’s not that kind of document.  That would be a civil code.  We live under common law and our founding fathers understood —

Mike:  No, no.  You know what, Mike?  No, no, no.  I don’t know where you learned constitutional law, but you ought to go back and read some James Madison.  Madison was asked this question shortly after the Constitution went into effect, and he explicitly made it clear for anyone that wanted to know that common law was not the underpinning of the U.S. Constitution because it couldn’t be.  There was no way you could possibly write down the vastness of common law and have it apply.  Common law was left where it is.  It is left in the police powers and the courts that are in the states.

The Constitution does not deal with common law.  The Constitution is a plan of government.  It explicitly, by definition, confers, voluntarily, some powers from the states to a general government for them to exercise.  As the ratification statements in Pennsylvania, in North Carolina, in Virginia and in New Hampshire make very, very clear, as soon as the general monster begins to take any power that was not conferred to it, the people have an indubitable and feasible right to reserve those powers for themselves.  I don’t know where they teach constitutional law and common law at the same time as being one in the same, but my understanding, of course that comes from some guy named James Madison, is that the two are very, very separate.{sidebar id=56}

Caller Mike:  Mike, I have read every one of the Federalist Papers.

Mike:  I didn’t read that in the Federalist Papers.  I read that in correspondence.  There is writing on the document outside of the propaganda that is The Federalist.  That’s what it was, a series of newspaper editorials to influence the people in New York to ratify.  Guess what?  It had no effect.  They didn’t want to ratify after reading The Federalist.

Caller Mike:  Mike, you’re being somewhat selective.  If I could just finish my argument.

Mike:  Go ahead, please.

Caller Mike:  As you look at the Constitution itself, the way it’s configured is exactly right.  It’s enumerated powers of the federal government.  The remained is reserved to the state.  That’s an appropriate interpretation.  People that go beyond that simply don’t understand the underpinning of our Constitution.  However, the Constitution itself has language which is broad and intentionally broad.  That language, when married to the Necessary and Proper Clause and the Supremacy Clause —

Mike:  No.  No.

Caller Mike:  Let me finish.

Mike:  No, because you’re poisoning the audience.  No.  If you really want to do tit for tat on the Necessary and Proper and Supremacy Clause, these were actually the points of — this is what Patrick Henry referred to in the ratification convention in Virginia, which lasted for four weeks.  This is what Henry referred to as the “Sweeping Clause.”  He kept referring back to the Sweeping Clause.  James Madison and Edmund Randolph and Mr. Nicholas and Edmund Pendleton and every federalist alive, including John Marshall, stood up and said no, that is not a clause that can be used other than to carry the foregoing powers into use.  That’s all it means.

You are taking the argument that the anti-federalists or republicans made, and you’re giving it life, while the people that advocated on the side of ratification said that was a bunch of BS.  The Supremacy Clause, by the way, Professor, says “in laws made in pursuance thereof.”  It is only supreme inasmuch as a law has been constitutionally made through an enumerated power, and then it is supreme.  Anything else is not supreme and you can’t sit there and claim because something was ubiquitously left out there for interpretation that it is.  Either you have a written constitution and it has certain things you must follow or you don’t.

The reason we’re in the pickle we’re in today is as soon as the damn ink on the document was dry, people began to do what you just did, just selectively say, [mocking] “Yeah, but to bring that into power, of course we have to create this agency and this national bank.  It’ll be okay.”  Yeah, it’ll be okay.  Your explanation, sir, is perfectly reasonable when you’re in the company of people like Laurence Tribe or Eric Foner or other people that love to use the living, breathing and it’s subject to interpretation version of the U.S. Constitution.

The fact of the matter is, the reason it was written down is so that what you just did can’t be done, or to make it more difficult for it to be done.  Men not being the perfect people that we are, mischievousness is in our nature.  What would be called construction to a founding father or a man of the founding generation, that’s what you just engaged in, in construction.  In other words, [mocking] “I want it to mean this because it’s necessary and proper.”  My good friend Professor Kevin Gutzman puts it this way.  I’ll read it to you.

[reading]

It is always hard to educate anyone to believe that there were some instances in which the U.S. Constitution correctly read does not yield the outcome they’d prefer.

[end reading]

End Mike Church Show Transcript