:: Weekly Dosage ::: "Now you know something that 99.999% of Americans do not know, and probably a higher percentage of lawyers. The “dollar” is a silver coin containing three hundred and seventy-one and one-quarter grains of silver—and it cannot be changed by constitutional amendment, by definition, any more than the term “year” can. And yet, as I mentioned before, if you ask the average person what a dollar is, he’ll probably hold this thing up. [holding up a Federal Reserve Note] Is there something wrong here? Do we see some kind of cognitive dissonance when we have a problem with this? I should hope so.
The second area in which the misuse of monetary powers and the disregard for monetary disabilities has corrupted the Constitution, as I said before, is the overextension of powers. I won’t go into these in great detail. If you look at the “Necessary and Proper” clause, which has been wildly expanded to give fantastic powers to Congress, what is the foundational case for that expansion? It’s usually cited to be McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819. What was that case about? It was about the Bank of the United States . It was a money case.
If we go to the doctrine of “Emergency Powers,” which is having a great uplift today, for obvious reasons, what was the foundational case that put that doctrine on the constitutional map? It was Knoxvs. Lee, the legal tender cases brought after the Civil War. If we go to the doctrine of “Aggregate Powers,” the doctrine that says, “You can take a little here and a little there and kind of sum them all up, so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” again we go back to the Knox case, a monetary case.
What’s very interesting is to read a dissenting opinion by Justice Steph"
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