Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness The phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence. These words express the hopes of all people. The author of the Declaration of Independence recognized that these rights, so much a part of the basic nature of people, cannot be [...]
Congressional Power to Declare War While the U.S. Congress has issued Declarations of War in five wars over the past two hundred thirty six years, U.S. Presidents and the U.S Congress have authorized hundreds military operations and even “wars” without such Declarations of War by the U.S. Congress. What does the Constitution actually say? Article [...]
The Powers of the President In the past couple of hundred years, the power exercised by the President has been in the news and has been controversial. For example in March of 2010, President Obama signed a presidential executive order a few hours before the health care bill was voted on in the House of [...]
Importance of Supreme Court Justices What’s at stake with a new Supreme Court Justice? What does it mean? What is going to happen? How does any of this affect me? To answer the question of what’s at stake, let’s take a long-ago historical example of how a changed Supreme Court changed the lives of all [...]
Webster's 1828 Dictionary In discussing the Declaration of Independence and Constitution with my publisher after considerable study of both documents, we both thought “Maybe we’re missing something. Maybe we’re not really getting the original intent of our Founding Fathers.” My publisher suggested looking in Webster’s 1828 dictionary to see what we could find. The current [...]
What happened to the Tenth Amendment? The Tenth Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. The Tenth Amendment is the one that says the powers not given to the U.S. federal government by [...]
