Barb the Evil Genius’s comment is quite timely considering that I’ve just finished the second book written by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, The Constitution in Exile: How the Federal Government has Seized Power by Rewriting the Supreme Law of the Land.
Judge Napolitano does a good job going through major cases where the rights of the government keep expanding, dividing the time line before and after 1937. Before FDR and the New Deal, the Supreme Court was a pretty reliable (but not perfectly so) check on the powers of the other two branches, but after 1937, the Supreme Court did not challenge any expansion of what the government could do to its people until 1995, the beginning of the Rehnquist Court.
The author provides clear summaries of what each case did, only quoting opinions when necessary. He explains Natural Law and shows that man-made laws either are adhering to or are violence against the Natural Law.
The first power grab was by the Supreme Court itself, in deciding that it needed to institute judicial review. The decision of the constitutionality of the Federal Bank was the beginning of the allowance for Congress to provide for services not specifically enumerated in the Constitution. Most abuses have come from the change in meaning of the “necessary and proper” clause and the “interstate commerce clause”. Originally Congress could pass laws which were necessary and proper to perform the 18 enumerated powers, but “necessary and proper” came to mean anything that was necessary and proper. The “interstate commerce clause” originally meant laws that provided for regular transaction of business across state lines, but recently the federal government used the new definition of that clause in justifying raiding a home that grew its own marijuana for its own consumption.
Napolitano has no love for Abraham Lincoln, who suspended the right to habeas corpus and forbade states to secede from the Union, nor does the author have any mercy for the USA PATRIOT act and PATRIOT II. Federal agents can now write their own “sneak and peek” search warrants, break into your home, take your checkbook, and not tell you for six months, in seemingly obvious disagreement with the Fourth Amendment. We thought regulating our toilets was bad. 
The author suggests certain remedies to reclaim the rights via constitutional convention that we once had in 1791:
- Change “We the People” to “We the States”, to make it more historically accurate
- Article VIII should reword its Commerce Clause to mean to keep commerce regular
- Amendment 10 should be reworded so that so that the federal government only has the 18 enumerated powers and no more
- Repeal the 16th Amendment, the Income Tax
- Repeal the 17th Amendment, to make the Senate more responsible to individual states rather than to people (that’s what the House is for)
- Ensure that states can leave the Union, leaving behind the protection of the Union but also its abuse of powers
Some of these remedies seem rather serious, but Napolitano makes his case for them quite well.
One would expect a criticism like this to be hot-headed, but the judge remains pretty even-keeled. He has his opinions, but he saves his heat for the ideas rather than the people. There are places I wanted to highlight for future reference. I found this a useful book I may not want to sell back to Half Price Books just yet, and I recommend this to Barb the Evil Genius, Kobra, and anyone else who wonder how we got here.
iggyantiochus on 
Dan
I’ll have to check it out, although the cynic in me says that there will always be those grasping for power. I bet this is the motto of more than one person involved in government.