Word: hamilton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...HUNDRED years ago, when the Constitution was drafted and presented to the people for ratification, a bill of rights was conspicuously missing. Its absence was no mere oversight; Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, among others, believed that the liberty and rights of the people might just be safer without one. The collected wisdom has had it that they were wrong--that the initial lack of a bill of rights was the Founder's one big mistake. Yet no one has done more to challenge this position and vindicate Madison and Hamilton than Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork...
...construing the Bill of Rights so strictly, however, Bork does a disservice to the very Founding Fathers he purports to honor, reading the Bill of Rights precisely as they feared future generations might. Seen in light of Madison's and Hamilton's original worries over the effects of a bill of rights upon liberty and justice, Bork's neutral principles emerge as no principles...
...RIGHTS the people possess, Madison and Hamilton felt, were so numerous that it would be impossible to avoid omitting many in a bill of rights. Worse still, the government and the courts might very well consider the rights specifically enumerated as the only ones the people possessed. Sound familiar...
...bill of rights, then, would simply grant rights to the people which they already possessed. It would "contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted," Hamilton wrote, harping on the irony of the situation. Unfortunately, such double protection might do more harm than good, as Hamilton pointed out in The Federalist #84. "Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?" he wrote. Such a declaration could only afford overzealous rulers "a colorable pretext to claim more [powers] than were granted...
...lost in it, because Grooms sticks to the things everyone has heard of -- the cow that started the Chicago fire, Little Egypt gyrating, Cyrus McCormick looming dourly over his agricultural-machine factory, or (in a crypt below the graveyard of New York's Trinity Church) the skeletons of Alexander Hamilton in his wig and Robert Fulton with his steam engine. Ruckus America is all one big pop-up book, done in an impressively resourceful, oompahing parade of stylistic parodies: corn-pone cubism, red- neck deco. The way buildings splay and their ground cants toward the viewer comes straight...