Product Description

Think it’s just judges who are trampling on the Constitution? Think again.

The fact is that government officials long ago rejected the idea that the Constitution possesses a fixed meaning limiting the U.S. government’s power. Going right to the scenes of the crimes, bestselling authors Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Kevin R. C. Gutzman dissect twelve of the most egregious assaults on the Constitution.

In Who Killed the Constitution? Woods and Gutzman:
• REVEAL the federal government’s “great gold robbery”–the flagrant assault on the Constitution you never heard about in history class
• DESTROY the phony case for presidential war power
• EXPOSE how the federal government has actively discriminated to end . . . discrimination

Who Killed the Constitution? is a rallying cry for Americans outraged by a government run amok and a warning to take heed before we lose the liberties we are truly entitled to.

“If you want to know why the federal government regulates the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the words you speak, read Who Killed the Constitution? . . . When the history of these unfree times is written, Tom Woods’s and Kevin Gutzman’s fearless work will be recognized as the standard against which all others are measured.”
–Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox News senior judicial analyst and bestselling author of The Constitution in Exile

“It’s about time someone shouted out that the emperor has no clothes.”
–Kirkpatrick Sale, director of the Middlebury Institute and author of Human Scale

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17473 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-07
• Released on: 2009-07-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307405760
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
“If you want to know why the federal government regulates the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the words you speak, read Who Killed the Constitution? . . . When the history of these unfree times is written, Tom Woods’s and Kevin Gutzman’s fearless work will be recognized as the standard against which all others are measured.”
–Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox News senior judicial analyst and bestselling author of The Constitution in Exile

“It’s about time someone shouted out that the emperor has no clothes.”
–Kirkpatrick Sale, director of the Middlebury Institute and author of Human Scale

"Woods and Gutzman (two bestselling authors in thePolitically Incorrect Guide series) appeal to both left and right in this constitutionalist jeremiad. Liberals will agree about the unconstitutionality of the draft, warrantless wiretapping and presidential signing statements. Conservatives will agree about the unconstitutionality of school busing, bans on school prayer and Roosevelt's suspension of the gold standard. The common thread is the authors' brief for a federal government strictly limited to the powers explicitly granted by the Constitution. The authors' exegeses of the Constitution and court decisions, heavy on original intent arguments, are lucid and telling, but not always consistently supportive of liberty: their reading of the First Amendment implies that state governments may restrict speech, religion and the press. Their attack on expansive federal power-even federal spending on cancer research-is perhaps too successful; it inadvertently supports scholars like Daniel Lazare who argue that the Constitution is too antiquated, constraining and hard to change to keep up with a modern consensus on civil rights and good governance."
—Publishers Weekly


From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author
THOMAS E. WOODS Jr. is the New York Times bestselling author of 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask, The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History, and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.

KEVIN R. C. GUTZMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Constitution and Virginia’s American Revolution.

Customer Reviews

Where, and when, did government in America go wrong?
There's a reason that our federal constitution is short. It was so the average American could be intimately familiar with it. It was also because the federal government was supposed to be small. As James Madison described in the Federalist No. 45:

"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State."

So what changed? Woods and Gutzman persuasively document a selected array of federal power plays and Supreme Court decisions over the course of the 20th century that radically reshaped the federal government in ways the Framers of the U.S. Constitution never imagined nor intended.

From the unconstitutional persecution against World War I dissenters by the Wilson administration; through Harry Truman's attempted 1952 power grab, the phony case for broad presidential war powers, and the startlingly perverse use of presidential signing statements by the Bush administration to undermine the rule of law; to the tragic consequences of Commerce Clause jurisprudence run amok beginning with the New Deal and continuing to this very day: "Who Killed the Constitution?" serves as an eye-opening guide to how exactly, and how far away, we've managed to stray from the limited-government vision of our forefathers bestowed upon us in the Constitution. Woods and Gutzman cite several Founding Era authorities to prove exactly this.

Hopefully the abuses of the past administration, and the continuation of those abuses by the new one, will awaken Americans to explore their own constitutional heritage and incite them to start demanding their government adhere to the supreme law of the land: the Constitution of the United States.