How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America

Depressingly Accurate Facts about the U.S. Constiution Today

The title doesn't say enough about the book or its contents. The book is only one-quarter Andrew Hamilton; there is another quarter that addresses John Marshall and another quarter addressing Joseph Story, both, Supreme Court judges and; and the last quarter addresses Hugo Black, yet another Supreme Court Judge as well. The title might have been how the Secretary of the Treasury and Three Supreme Court Judges Screwed Over America.

In brief, the Supreme Court judges, according to the facts in the book, followed Andrew Hamilton’s desire to expand the nature of the central government, at the expense of the original intent of the U.S Constitution, first using the idea of "implied powers," even though the role of the government the Constitution strictly defined with limited or circumscribed powers.

John Marshall, for instance, used Hamilton's notion of "implied powers" to include the metaphysical and unsubstantiated notion that "we the people" were citizens of a national union and that states were not the sovereign powers the U.S. Constitution said they were and which states declared themselves sovereign before the King of England well before they sent delegates to the convention for the creation of a U.S. Constitution.

By the Sixties, Hugo Black put the "nail in in the coffin" of the original intent behind the U.S. Constitution, claiming that the Constitution was a "living" document and that the words found in the document have different meanings as American culture moves through the centuries. He made it impossible for the states to assert any scintilla of sovereignty over their own state laws, declaring that the federal government and the Supreme Court solely owned that decisive role in determining whether a law was constitutional or not - through "implied powers," that Andrew Hamilton had conjured up back in the late 1770s.

Though several patriots and esteemed men of thought fought against the unconstitutional expansion of federal "powers," men like St. George Tucker, Abel Upshur, and John Taylor of Caroline, all of whom wrote incisive tomes defending the originalist intent position in interpreting the U.S. Constitution, too many power-hungry bureaucrats, thirsty for wealth and control, senators with ties to the banking industry, for example, ignored these patriots' ideas and writings, backing up the very men who chose to undermine what the Founding Fathers wanted and intended for Americans.

I found the story the author tells of the devolution of the U.S. Constitution and of states' rights dramatic if depressing, but often in a very abstract manner since the issues about what the U.S. Constitution meant and means today were and are themselves abstract. While men indeed battled with one another over the Constitution, they waged their war with words, with ideas, and often with lies and misrepresentations.

I found Chapter 12, "Hugo Black and Incorporation," the penultimate chapter, the most difficult and complex reading experience of all the chapters. The author condensed a lot of subtleties and ideas about contract law, constitutional law, and amendments into these pages, and I think the subject matter deserved either a longer chapter or another chapter. I'm not sure I understood enough of the signal issues Hugo Black was attempting to foist on the American people, with notions of "civil rights" and the Bill of Rights "against" the states in contradistinction to constitutional rights. I am not quite certain that the author himself had a complete grasp of all the ramifications he was attempting to explain or display for his readers.