Showing posts with label Franklin D. Roosevelt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Franklin D. Roosevelt. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Federal Reserve Act of 1913 -- Your REMEDY under the Common Law

English: Total debt outstanding in the US, by ...
English: Total debt outstanding in the US, by sector. Source: US Federal Reserve, report Z.1/D.3. Used on Kredietcrisis. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)



How to redeem Federal Reserve Notes for Lawful Money.  How many books and articles say that this can not be done?  A great number say it can not be done, yet it's being done by a number of people now.  Of course, your bank is going to give you a hard time because then they can not make money on you as easily as they had before, but why is that your problem?  It's not.  

  Watch this video and it may take you a number of times watching it to get all of the facts here.  It's rather deep and extensive.  But it has some fantastic points.  Using Federal Reserve Notes to pay bills does not discharge the debt you owe.  It only satisfy's the debt, but the debt still remains on you.  If this is new to you, you can do some homework and you will find out how true this really is.

  So you think you own your home or car?  Guess what, you do not.  Look at the paperwork very closely and you will soon learn that you do not own it at all.  You can only own something if you pay for it in lawful currency.  Federal Reserve Notes are only debt instruments, not actual currency.  It's why you pay taxes.  We will keep bringing to you real solutions for the real world.  Not fake solutions that will only turn your stomach and put you deeper in debt.  Become part of the solution for fixing this country, and stop being part of the problem.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Here’s What Inversions Are Costing Us

Seal of the United States Department of the Tr...
Seal of the United States Department of the Treasury (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You don’t get to pick your tax rate. Neither 

should corporations.

That’s why, earlier this week, the Treasury Department took initial steps to prevent U.S. corporations from using a tax maneuver to avoid paying taxes in America. This loophole -- known as an “inversion” -- lets a company avoid taxes by relocating their tax residence overseas while changing very little else about its operations or business.
And it’s costing Americans nearly $20 billion over the next decade -- critical dollars that could grow and expand the middle class.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Undermining The Constitution A HISTORY OF LAWLESS GOVERNMENT (Part 11)

English: The Supreme Court of the United State...
English: The Supreme Court of the United States. Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Thomas James Norton

THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS ACT OF 1935 WAS A VICTORY FOR CAESARISM OVER THE STATES AFTER A CONTINUOUS BATTLE FOR TWO DECADES
The most common disregard by Congress and the President of the Tenth Amendment, forbidding the Nation to usurp powers not granted to it, and especially to stay away from the governmental field of the States, has been in its persistent attempts, under the cloak of the Commerce Clause and of the General Welfare Clause, to invade the police field of the States -- for the protection and care of the health, safety, morals, education, and general well-being of the people -- and take jurisdiction of the liberties and living of men.
The Commerce Clause authorizes Congress "to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States" -- not within the States. The General Welfare Clause is discussed in another section. By NLRA Congress displaced a Union of States by a Nation
After half a century of notable failures and some burrowing successes, that invasion won completely through the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. By that act Con-
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gress usurped police control of all workers in the United States.
Could Hamilton have foreseen that, he would have been dumbfounded.
"I confess," he wrote in No. 17 of The Federalist, "I am at a loss to discover what temptation the persons intrusted with the administration of the General Government could ever feel to divest the States of the authorities of that description" -- legislation "for the individual citizens of America."
Briefly, the act declared an "emergency" to exist because of the "burdening" of commerce and the "obstructing" of it by strikes arising out of labor disputes; and, to keep the "flow" of commerce -- not alone interstate commerce covered by the Commerce Clause, but all commerce -- uninterrupted, it set up a Labor Board to which disputes between workers and employers should be taken for hearing and decision. As there could be no suspension of production by any strike that would not "affect" or "obstruct" both intrastate and interstate commerce at least a little, all workers and employers were thus brought under the Commerce Clause, written respecting interstate commerce only, as its language so plainly shows.
Before that only a small part of the workers of the country were within reach of Congress by virtue of the Commerce Clause -- those employed by railroad companies, telegraph and telephone companies, and aviation companies. The great body of them lived and worked subject to the police power of the States.
Representatives of the States in Congress, by passing the act, disparaged and diminished their commonwealths.


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By a complete about-face Supreme Court sustained Congress
Overriding its own decisions for half a century, on the powers of Congress over interstate commerce, and reversing the Judgments of four Circuit Courts of Appeals of three judges each, the Supreme Court of the United States, in an opinion by Chief Justice Hughes, Justices McReynolds, Van Devanter, Sutherland, and Butler dissenting, upheld (301 U. S. 1) on April 12, 1937, two months after the President proposed to "pack" the Court, and while the proposal was still before Congress, the National Labor Relations Act as a valid exercise of the granted power to Congress to regulate commerce "among the several States." The very title gives the lie to the strained recitations in the Act in a make-believe that it is a regulation of commerce and not a labor law. The promise was in those recitations that the operation of the Act would put an end to strikes and the disorders and losses which had attended them, which was not, of course, a subject of national jurisdiction.
Legislation had numerous precedents
The National Labor Relations Act had been preceded by many acts for the usurpation by Congress and the President of power over concerns of the States. The tyrannies spawned by the Labor Board in applying the National Labor Relations Act were a long time in coming.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt was Governor of New York, he protested in behalf of the States against the dishonest and lawless use of the Commerce Clause by Congress and the President to occupy forbidden ground in the States. Speaking on July 16, 1929, before a conference of governors at New London, Connecticut, he condemned the "stretching" of the Commerce Clause by Con-


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gress to cover cases not embraced by grants of power to it in the Constitution (italics inserted):
Governor Roosevelt declared against such legislation
"Our Nation has been a successful experiment in democratic government because the individual States have waived in only a few instances their sovereign rights. . . .
"But there is a tendency, and to my mind a grievous tendency, on the part of our National Government, to encroach, on one excuse or another, more and more upon State supremacy. The elastic theory of interstate commerce, for instance, has been stretched almost to the breaking point to cover certain regulatory powers desired by Washington. But in many cases this has been due to a failure of the States, themselves, by common agreement, to pass legislation necessary to meet certain conditions."
Importance of commerce in history
The Commerce Clause, for the strict observance of which Governor Roosevelt was rightly solicitous, contains a principle dating back as far as Magna Carta (1215), when King John, faced by armed men, signed an agreement not to interfere in the right of Englishmen to go to and fro in commerce, and abroad and return, except only in an exigency of war.
Englishmen in commerce were "in pursuit of happiness," which the Declaration of Independence later de-


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nominated a right from the Creator, for the protection of which "governments are instituted among men."
The speeches and writings of Edmund Burke in behalf of the American colonists make clear that the restrictions on commerce by the government of England were far more burdensome and intolerable than was "taxation without representation," usually given as the cause of the American Revolution. All products for sale had to go to England -- in English ships. All things that they had to buy they were obliged to buy in England -- for transportation in English ships. Raw material ready for manufacture had to go to England for that purpose. This interference with commerce (only one of many hard regulations) destroyed shipbuilding, which had become of great importance, put an end to manufacture, and cut off commercial communication with other countries.
Constitution designed to make commerce free
It was obstruction by States of this right to engage in commerce that contributed much to the breakdown of the government under the Articles of Confederation. And the third grant of power to Congress in the Constitution which followed (after taxing and borrowing) is "to regulate commerce . . . among the several States."
Congress is authorized to regulate commerce so that it will not be obstructed as it was before -- that is, it is to promote commerce. It is not to obstruct it affirmatively, any more than the early States could rightly do so, by legislation like the Norris-LaGuardia Law, which cripples men in commerce in the maintenance in court of their constitutional rights -- and their inherent rights. It is not to obstruct commerce negatively by failure to guard the


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rights of those engaged in it, as in the toleration of costly and destructive strikes.
Commerce most important activity of man
The history of commerce makes clear that legally it is the most important right of men, not to be trifled with by kings or others in power. Nevertheless, for a third of a century obstructions to commerce have been so nearly continuous as to condemn the Government at Washington for default of duty under the Commerce Clause.
Five years before the National Labor Relations Act of Congress, Governor Roosevelt condemned illicit ideas which he afterwards sanctioned as President. In a radio address in 1930 he again took up States' rights and home rule and said that with "a great number ... of vital problems of Government, such as the conduct of public utilities, of banks, of insurance companies, of agriculture, of education, of social welfare, and of a dozen other important features . . .Washington must not be encouraged to interfere." (Italics inserted.) But Roosevelt, like Supreme Court, did turn-around
With every one of those "features," Congress, taking orders from President Roosevelt, did interfere, to the denial of the liberty of man to engage unhampered by his Government or by his fellows in pursuits which had never before been regarded in the United States as subjects for political meddling. Never before regarded, because no fancy had ever found in the Constitution anything even suggesting the power in Congress to engage in or control such activities.


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Yet, during the first eleven years of the Act, from 1935 to 1945 inclusive, there were 37,383 work stoppages, involving 16,827,305 workers and the loss of wages for 175,896,235 man-days.
N.L.R.B. failed of purpose proclaimed
For the eleven years before the National Labor Relations Act, 1924 to 1934, inclusive, the work stoppages were 11,565, affecting 5,829,339 workers, about one-third of the number involved in stoppages during the 11 years following the Act.[1]
Even more deplorable than those losses to the workers was the brake put on production of food, clothing, housing, and other things required by a people in sore need, who had shown every willingness to do their part in the conduct of the war.
Many of those strikes were attended by the worst disorders, sometimes by bloodshed. Plants were seized by strikers and the owners excluded from them. Picketing was of the most violent sort.
Against those manifestations of lawlessness, which appeared in all parts of the country, the authorities of the States did nothing, or next to nothing. The United States looked on. There was generally a breakdown of law.
1. For the six years from 1940 to 1945, inclusive, covering the whole time of World War II, strikes took place as follows:
In 1940there were 2,508strikes
19414,288 
19422,968 
19433,752 
19444,956 
19454,750 
Total23,222 




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A picture of countrywide performances
What was going on all over the country all during the war is illustrated by this official statement of the Employment Relations Board of the State of Wisconsin, issued on December 27, 1946 (italics added):
"It can no longer be assumed, as it was when the first order of this board was made in May of this year, that the leadership of the organization now on strike intends to be law-abiding citizens.
"Events transpiring since the entry of the order and its enforcement by a judgment of the Circuit Court of Milwaukee County clearly indicate that the leadership of this union entertains no respect for the law, agencies designated to administer it, or the courts, but intends to prevent by any methods, legal or illegal, the use of the company's premises by the company, or the pursuit of work by employees of the company desiring to work."
Previous orders of the Board had been disregarded. As the quotation shows, the strike at the plant of Allis-Chalmers had been on since May preceding. All the powers of unionism had been concentrated on Allis-Chalmers to compel it to establish the closed shop and thereby deny to Americans the liberty to work under conditions of their own choosing.
Was the conduct described in Wisconsin treasonable?
The Constitution defines one of only two acts of "treason against the United States" as "adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort."


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Were not the unceasing strikes which were waged in essential industries from one end of the war to the other of great "aid and comfort" to Germany and Japan?
What did the Department of Justice of the United States do to protect the Government in its war endeavor and the American in his liberty?
Nothing.
Not until the head of the United Mine Workers notified the Secretary of the Interior, who was operating the coal mines under one of the many illegal seizures of property, without compensation, committed by Government during the war, that it would terminate its working agreement at midnight, November 20, 1946, did the United States show mettle befitting such an occasion. This time it had been put on the spot.
Government of great Republic driven to corner
The United States could not say that the duty to act was on the States, or use any other of the evasions which it had employed as encouragement to strikes against private industries. So it had its Department of Justice bring a suit on November 18 for injunction in the United States Court in the District of Columbia, which immediately issued an order restraining the head of the union and the miners from carrying out the notice. Nevertheless, a gradual walkout of miners began on November 18, and by November 20 "a full-blown strike was in progress," the Supreme Court said in sustaining the action of the trial judge in fining for contempt the head of the union $10,000 and the miners as a body $3,500,000. It authorized


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the reduction of the fine imposed on the miners to $700,000 on condition that they permanently obey the order of the court.
Simple case pointed way to managing labor disputes
That shows how nicely those disputes could be handled if Congress and the States (which have really fostered labor troubles) would remit them to the courts, where all other people having disputes are obliged to go. Congress does not interfere in controversies between individuals, or between corporations, or between corporations and individuals, or between States, or between associations of men. Why should it interfere in disputes between employee and employer?
The questions in dispute are justiciable (for the Judiciary) where negotiation or arbitration fails and the next step is the strike, with suspension of production for the needs of the people and the country, and disorder, sabotage, and personal peril. At that point society must assert its paramount interest, as it did in the instance just described, and require the adjudication of the dispute in its courts.
Labor decisions show courts afford remedy
Since the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1928 holding (262 U. S. 522) invalid a statute of Kansas setting up an Industrial Court to hear and decide controversies between employee and employer, including differences over wages, the interest of the public in the continuity of service has become more and more recognized. The National Labor Relations Act of July, 1935,


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brought all of the employees of the country within the Commerce Clause of the Constitution under the pretense that it was necessary to prevent strikes from interrupting the free flow of commerce to the discomfiture and damage of the people. And in 1934 the Supreme Court sustained (291 U. S. 502) a law of New York setting up a Milk Control Board to fix maximum and minimum prices for milk, thus taking away the right of the parties to contract. The welfare of the public and the interest of the Nation have been so grossly disregarded during the last two decades that views on "the liberty of contract," and on "the right to strike" and plunge society into confusion and distress, have undergone change. The act of the legislature of Kansas setting up the Industrial Court would probably be sustained today.[2]
Labor controversy has ceased to be personal to parties
When, for illustration, employment was on a small scale, the law was that an employee assumed the risk of injury by the carelessness of a fellow worker and he was therefore not entitled to damages from the employer. But as employment became stupendous, laws making the employer liable (as an operating cost) for injuries to a worker, whether there was negligence or not, were upheld by the courts as valid exercise of the police power of the States
2. Long after that part of the text was written, the Supreme Court of the United States, in an opinion rendered on January 3, 1949, sustaining a law of North Carolina and a constitutional provision of Nebraska forbidding employers to enter into contracts obligating themselves to exclude persons from employment because they are or are not members of labor unions, examined the case of the Industrial Court of Kansas and said that hours and wages can be fixed by law in the public interest. That fulfills the prophecy of the text.


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in the interest of society. So the controversy between employee and employer is no longer a matter exclusively personal to them.
Congress should get out of labor politics, in which it has too long performed a discreditable as well as an unconstitutional part. Government now conducted with respect to elections
The capers that have been cut at Washington during the last three decades make one wonder whether sight has been entirely lost of the purpose of Government as laid down in the Declaration of Independence, namely, to secure man against his fellows, and more especially against those whom he has chosen for his servants in public office. The activities of administrations have been plainly to favor, in view of the next election, great voting blocs like the labor organizations, the people on the farms (who, subsidized for years, turned the Presidential election in 1948), and the political bosses who "deliver" the votes of many corrupt cities. The platforms of both parties have offered shamelessly to "give every thing to every body" in those classes.
Meanwhile, the people, who set up Government "to secure these rights" which came to them from the Creator, "among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," are stripped of their possessions with a system of ruthlessness rarely exampled in the history of tyranny.
Although the Criminal Code of the United States provides that a fine of $100 and imprisonment for six months, or both, shall be imposed upon anyone who shall "knowingly and wilfully obstruct the passage of the mail," and


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although the opening of mail is severely punished, the Executive Department of the Government took no action respecting the obstructing and opening in 1937 of mail addressed to Americans engaged in their work and surrounded by pickets trying unlawfully to deny to them this liberty.
The nonaction by the Chief Executive, who is enjoined by the Constitution to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," looked to the beholder like sanction of the illegalities.
Washington friendly to the sit-down strike
While the Government at Washington assumed to legislate by the National Labor Relations Act respecting all labor, regardless of whether it might be engaged in interstate commerce (of which only it has jurisdiction), a spokesman for the White House let it be known that sit-down strikes in various parts of the country, by which owners were forcibly dispossessed of their property by their employees, were matters of concern, not to the Nation, but to the States! As before indicated, the debilitated States generally concurred in such strikes.
The Secretary of Labor was reported by the Press to question at first whether the seizure and detention of plants by sit-down workers was illegal!
While employees of a steel manufactory at Canton, Ohio, were working under siege by an army of pickets, airplanes dropped leaflets to discourage the workers, saying, "Our members are well fed and happy. Relief is being arranged for their families. Four departments of the United States Government are fighting for our side."
On March 23, 1947, the Associated Press reported from


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Milwaukee that "the Allis-Chalmers strike, one of the most bloody and turbulent in recent history, ended today when the striking UAW-CIO Local 248 voted to return to work without a contract."
That shows that the workers themselves had tired of the long misleading by their officers.
Communism in strikes in United States
As the chief principle of the tactics of Communism is to provoke disorder and profit by it, the foregoing record, made mostly while the Republic was in the perils of war, compels the question whether Communist influences guided that disgrace to "government under law."
Earl Browder, for years head of the Communist Party in the United States, and twice a candidate for the Presidency of this Nation, reported to the Congress of the International Communist Party in Moscow on July 18, 1935:
"How was our party able to penetrate the masses and emerge from isolation? A great role was played by leaders in the strike movement and in the work of the party among the unemployed. In some of the most important strikes, the San Francisco general strike for one, the Communist Party had a decisive, determining influence."
And the great Government of the United States was not only unable to deport the alien who fomented and led that strike, but it also came around to issuing citizenship papers to him!
In What Is Communism? it is made clear (p. 163) by Browder, a native of the United States, that the plan of Communism is to take away liberty and property by armed force:
"The Revolution is carried out by the great masses of the


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toilers. The Communist Party, as the vanguard of the most conscious toilers, acts as their organizer and guide."
And again (pp. 164, 165):
"In the revolutionary situation the Communist Party . . . wins some of the armed forces to its side, and leads the effective majority of the population to the seizure of State power. . . . Above all, they need the armed forces."
An attempt to destroy an industry
Although not so wide in its reach to people as the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the law of Congress of 1886, forty-nine years before (amended and extended in 1902), taxing oleomargarine ¼¢ a pound, and 10¢ a pound when colored, was fully as bad an invasion of the police field of the States. Agriculturists, a voting power, put the bills through Congress in protection of dairy butter. In addition to the destructive tax on the colored article (while colored butter was not taxed), the heavy license tax on manufacturers, on wholesalers, and on retailers, and the regulations regarding packing, labeling, and permits were obstructive and costly. The manufacturers abandoned coloring and left that to the consumers. Notwithstanding the handicap, oleomargarine grew steadily in favor. It was used in the navies of the world, including our own.
Those laws, attacked as intended to destroy an industry, as an encroachment upon the police field, and as working a deprivation of property without due process of law, were sustained (195 U. S. 27) in 1904 by the Supreme Court of the United States in an opinion by Justice White, with dissent by Chief Justice Fuller and Justices Brown and Peckham.
In 1888 the Supreme Court had upheld (127 U. S. 678)


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a law of Pennsylvania (1885) which forbade the making and selling of anything to be used as butter, or in lieu of it, out of any substance "other than unadulterated milk or cream." Justice Field dissented from the opinion written by Justice Harlan chiefly on the ground that the Court had lost the distinction between regulation and prohibition. To be sure, a State may regulate the manufacture of foods so as to secure purity and prevent fraud. But Pennsylvania had no more right or power to suppress the manufacture of oleomargarine, made and sold without deception, than it had to prevent the making of marmalade. Wide as the police power is, it must be exerted with regard for rationality, liberty, and the right to property.
Of the case arising in Pennsylvania, Judge Dillon, once on the Federal Bench, wrote in Municipal Corporations and also in Law and Jurisprudence in England and America this sound and complete comment:
"The record of the conviction of Powell for selling without any deception a healthful and nutritious article of food makes one's blood tingle."
If the police power of Pennsylvania could not extend that far, how could Congress, without any police power at all, get a seat in the game of politics?
In March, 1950, a discreditable record of 64 years was ended by Congress when it repealed the legislation by a vote of 202 to 106 in the House and 59 to 20 in the Senate.
The unbelievable guilelessness of the American
In all worlds of fabulists and fictionists no state of things is exhibited which is at once so preposterous and so potentially calamitous as that there should be tolerated a party


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against freedom and possessions in a land where the Constitution twice guarantees security to Liberty, Property, and Life!
Why have Senators and Representatives, who have been sent by the people of the States through the years to represent them in the Congress of the Union of States, failed to maintain their States in their constitutional position in that Union? They have made the State a kind of satrapy of the central power.
What Congressmen and Governors have done to sovereign States
The degraded position to which the States have descended in the estimation of our Government was shown by a meeting in 1944 in St. Louis of the governors of 26 States, who deplored the fact that for 11 years not a Governor had been called to the White House for consultation.[3]
When President Truman took office in 1945, the Republican members of Congress proceeded to the White House
3. The bill of particulars drawn by the governors proposed the resumption by the States of their constitutional functions. It condemned the acquisition by the United States of the lands of the States, the usurpation by Washington of unemployment insurance and unemployment services, the derogatory "conditions' fixed by the Federal Government to grants in aid of States for public works, the attempt of the Administration "to undermine and abandon our traditional National Guard," the entry of the United States into competition with insurance companies, the plans to control from the National Capital the field of medicine, the development of water resources without any recognition of the superior rights of the States, and some other acts of total indifference to the existence of local governments, as leaving for ten years "entire regions of our country" without "representation in the Cabinet or administrative agencies of the Federal Government." The crowning insolence was the failure of the President to invite any governor to the White House for an exchange of views.
Of course, the things complained of were brought about by the incompetence or delinquency of members of Congress from the States.


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to tell him that they would help him in all ways consistent with their political beliefs. On leaving the White House, the Republican leader in the Senate said to newsmen that he had not been on the premises since the party in power took office in 1933.
Well, the governors complaining at St. Louis were not heard in protest when the representatives of their States in Congress were originating or supporting bills for weakening their commonwealths and widening the authority of the National Government. And as for the treatment of members of Congress by the White House, they had let go of their constitutional reins.
At the 42nd annual convention of the governors of the States, at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on June 19, 1950, there was a quite general expression of the view that "Federal aid" should be relied upon by the States to carry their projects of flood control, reclamation, irrigation, electric power, and the like.
The presiding governor sought to prevent "stump speeches on the obligation Washington has in the development of the West." But the governor of California thought it "perfectly logical to ask the Federal Government for help in irrigation, reclamation, and power projects: we repay every cent and pay interest on Federal moneys going into such projects."
No one rose to inform him that the Constitution gives no authority to Congress to lend money at interest or otherwise for any purpose. Nor was he reminded that banks, and others having the right to lend, provided the necessary money for all great projects in the building of the United States from the beginning down.
The governor of New Jersey protested the proposal for


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Federal aid. He could not understand how any governor could "go on record for a balanced Federal budget and at the same time have his hand out for millions for reclamation, irrigation, and public power." He said that "New Jersey would have nothing to do with Washington, that it can and does finance its own projects, and at cheaper interest rates than the Federal Government can borrow money."
It is somewhat reassuring that one governor out of 48 had been sufficiently educated to declare for constitutional procedure.
The meeting of governors revealed the great need, not so much for "Federal aid," as for a school for giving constitutional instruction to the executives of the States. Such a school might accept members of Congress. Something must be done toward teaching those in office.
In the days of the horse and buggy
In the autobiography of Senator Hoar it is said that if any group went to the White House and brought back directions on policy, they would be made to regret it. For sixteen years or more the White House has been permitted by Congress to usurp direction of policy.
The States must back-track to where the writers of the Constitution set them -- or where they set themselves, for they made the Constitution.
And the schools must so teach the Constitution that governors of States will know better than to resign their great offices to take inferior seats in Congress.
And the President must be elected by the constitutional method.
When the States have exercised the power which they


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reserved to themselves by section 2 of Article I, to prescribe the qualifications of voters for members of Congress as well as for candidates for local offices, by making a certificate of graduation in the study of the principles of our constitutional system a condition of registering for voting, then we shall have a better situation in Congress and out.
And in the days ahead
And when the States have abolished the straight ticket by restoring or putting into effect the Australian ballot, which was emasculated for the aid of the illiterate followers of political leaders or bosses, then American elections will express the competence of the people for self-government.
And when the States have brought back the constitutional election of the President and put him in his place to stay, and thereby removed the need for Corrupt Practices Acts of Congress, our country will then be again "the land of the free."

The States, which intended when they wrote the Constitution to manage the country largely, should return to that duty.

From the great folks over at Barefoot's World.  

Monday, January 20, 2014

Undermining The Constitution A HISTORY OF LAWLESS GOVERNMENT (Part 2)

Battle of the Hook, 2013
Battle of the Hook, 2013 (Photo credit: Battleofthehook)
By Thomas James Norton
II
LONG-CONTINUED ATTEMPTS BY CONGRESS TO INTIMIDATE THE SUPREME COURT, ACCOMPANIED BY HYPERCRITICAL WRITINGS OF POORLY INFORMED UNIVERSITY MEN AND OTHERS, LED UP TO THE ATTEMPT OF THE PRESIDENT AT COURT PACKING IN 1937
The next notable move in point of time against the constitutional structure of our Government was begun by Congress in the early 1900s.
For three decades before President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to set up a Supreme Court to suit his plans, Congress had been nagging the Judiciary from time to time with bills to "curb" it. Congress seemed to feel that it was an affront to its dignity and learning for the Supreme Court -- when an American challenged a law as invalid because it would deprive him of property "for public use without just compensation," or for the reason that it otherwise disrespected constitutional boundaries set for his protection -- to declare the act unconstitutional.
Lack of scholarship caused congressional attack on Judiciary
Members passing as constitutional scholars introduced bills to forbid that an act of Congress be held unconstitu-
14

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tional unless by a vote of 6 or 7 of the 9 justices, or by all of them. Fortunately, Congress had sound members enough to prevent the enactment of any bill of that kind into law. But the pendency of those bills from time to time and the discussion of them in Congress and in the Press operated to discredit the Judiciary in public estimation.
The proposition that an act of Congress should not be held invalid by (for illustration) a vote of 6 of the 9 justices of the Supreme Court means that the minority should decide the case. Our whole constitutional system operates by majority except in nine specified instances.
Majority decisions of courts constitutional
By the ancient rule of interpretation those specifications for more than a majority exclude in all other instances a higher vote. The Constitution having thus left the majority vote to the Supreme Court, it can be changed, not by Congress, but only by amendment.
"All provisions which require more than the majority of any body to its resolutions," wrote Hamilton in The Federalist, "have a direct tendency to embarrass the operations of the government, and an indirect one to subject the sense of the majority to that of the minority."
When Article III of the Constitution declared that "the judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court," etc., it described the court of that day in England and in America, which decided cases by a vote of the majority; that court became the tribunal of the Constitution.
Men in schools aided in attack on Judiciary
While that exhibition of superficiality was in progress in the Congress, the professors in the universities, and in

16
many schools of law, wrote books in assault of the Supreme Court. Just what the sons and daughters of the supporters of the institutions of learning were exposed to in the way of contagion may be best understood from a few titles of the books which they published in the season of hysteria:
Our Despotic Courts
Is the Supreme Court Too Supreme?
Appeal from the Supreme Court
Impeaching Laws of Congress
Government by Judges
Judicial Censorship of Legislation
Big Business on the Bench
Our Judicial Oligarchy
Judicial Legislation
Aggression of Federal Courts
The Great Usurpation
Those books showed the authors to be destitute of knowledge of constitutional history and principle. For example, The Great Usurpation asserted that the Supreme Court usurped power when it first held a challenged act of Congress invalid for conflict with a provision of the Constitution.
Hamilton made clear the function of constitutional courts
That the Court possessed the power was shown by Hamilton, a member of the Constitutional Convention, in No. 78 of The Federalist, written in 1788 and addressed "to the people of the State of New York," in answer to ob-

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jections raised against the proposed new form of government in the convention having ratification before it:
"The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts. A Constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by the Judges, as a fundamental law. It therefore belongs to them to ascertain its meaning, as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two, that which has the superior obligation and validity ought, of course, to be preferred; or, in other words, the Constitution ought to be preferred to the statute, the intention of the people to the intention of their agents."
Clear thinking and lucid writing, that.
Members of Constitutional Convention explained duty of courts
Before the Constitution took effect, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, speaking in the ratifying convention of his State, explained the function of the courts in constitutional cases to be precisely what was later objected to by the author of The Great Usurpation. Ellsworth had been a member of the Constitutional Convention, and he should be taken as high authority:
"The Constitution defines the extent of the powers of the General Government. If the General Legislature [Congress] should at any time overleap their limits, the Judicial Department is a constitutional check. If the United States go beyond their powers, if they make a law which the Constitution does not authorize, it is void; and the judicial power, the national judges, who, to secure their impartiality, are to be made independent, will declare it to be void.

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"On the other hand, if the States go beyond their limits, if they make a law which is a usurpation upon the Federal [National] Government, the law is void; and upright, independent judges will declare it to be so."
In the Ratifying Convention of Pennsylvania, James Wilson, who had been a delegate to the Convention which wrote the Constitution, who was the ablest lawyer in it and one of the most influential members, and who later became a justice of the Supreme Court, made a similar statement.
Foreign scholars saw importance of constitutional Judiciary
Bryce, Von Holst, and other foreign writers on our Government saw clearly our judicial principle.[1] Von Holst said that the Judiciary is the keystone of the American arch. Enemies of our liberty have been chipping at the keystone for a third of a century.
Moreover, in 1922, the leaders of organized labor, in concert with the critical spirit of Congress, sent a questionnaire to candidates for Congress asking whether they believed that five men on the Supreme Court "who had not been elected by the people, and who cannot be rejected by the people, should be permitted to nullify the will of the people as expressed by their representatives in Con-
1. The Supreme Court of Canada, under the North America Act of the British Parliament of 1867, which followed our Constitution closely, passes on the constitutionality of an act of the Dominion Parliament and upon an act of the legislative body of the Province or State.
So, under the Constitution of Australia (1900), more closely following ours, the High Court, when the question is raised by a litigant, determines whether the law of the Commonwealth or the act of a State (not province in Australia) conforms to the Constitution.

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gress and the Executive in the White House." That was the jargon of the books and current magazines.
Second, would they "work and vote for a constitutional amendment restricting the power of the Supreme Court to nullify acts of Congress?"
Third, would they vote for a clear-cut statute forbidding the issuing of injunctions in industrial (meaning labor) disputes?
Leaders of labor organizations supported attacks on Judiciary
On June 7, 1935, following the decision of the Supreme Court holding unconstitutional the National Industrial Recovery Act of Congress, a dispatch from Washington said that the President of the American Federation of Labor, "in a speech over an NBC network," voiced "organized labor's determination to fight for a constitutional amendment forbidding the Supreme Court to invalidate an act of Congress."
It has just been seen from Hamilton, a great lawyer who was in the Constitutional Convention, and from Oliver Ellsworth and James Wilson, also members of the Convention, that it is the Constitution, not the Court, that "invalidates" (a loose word of the unscholarly schoolmen) an act of Congress. The act is not invalidated by the Court, because it has no validity when not made "in pursuance" of the Constitution. "The Supreme Law of the Land," as defined by Article VI of the Constitution, consists of "this Constitution, and the laws of the United States [Acts of Congress] which shall be made in pursuance thereof," and treaties.

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What makes an Act of Congress unconstitutional?
If Congress does not pursue the lines laid down for it in the Constitution, its legislation is a nullity. The Supreme Court does not "nullify" it, as so many law-school professors and others classed as educators have taught several generations of youth, to the great damage of the mind of the Republic.
On the provision of the Constitution just before quoted, Alexander Hamilton, in No. 83 of The Federalist, made this comment (italics his):
"It will not, I presume, have escaped observation that it expressly confines the supremacy to laws made pursuant to the Constitution."
Did the United States have no Constitution, the Nation would nevertheless possess all the powers essential to its existence -- to raise an army and a navy; to appoint ambassadors; to make treaties; to issue money; to levy taxes, and to take other steps found necessary to its welfare as a Nation among nations.
But when a Constitution is written and adopted, it is for the purpose of preventing those inherent powers from being exercised at large and at will. The powers enumerated in the Constitution must be exerted as it directs.
It was said by the Supreme Court in 1936 (299 U. S. 304) that the United States has inherent powers of sovereignty in foreign relations external to the Constitution; and so it could forbid its citizens to ship arms to South American countries in conflict.
But it was unnecessary for the Court to drag in a dialectical proposition. The Commerce Clause, empowering

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Congress "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations," was authority enough to control the shipment of arms.
"Inherent power" in the President or the Congress over matters with which the States severally cannot deal has always been definitely rejected by the Supreme Court, it declared (298 U. S. 238) as late as 1936. In the foregoing case an opinion by Justice Story (1 Wheaton 304), written 120 years before, was quoted to show that the General Government "can claim no powers which are not granted to it by the Constitution; and the powers actually granted must be such as are expressly given, or given by necessary implication."
The Constitution modifying inherent powers
But when, for illustration, the inherent power to make war was brought under the Constitution and transferred from the King to the Parliament -- or, so to say, given to Congress instead of the Executive -- the intention was to restrict fundamentally international practices. The declaring of war and the raising of forces and money are with the Congress. The command of the forces is with the President. The treaty of peace is with the President and the Senate. The dangerous powers are well divided.
Is it in pursuance of the Constitution for the Government at Washington to refrain for years from proclaiming World War II ended in law when it was ended in fact in 1945? And to continue spending -- carefully restricted by the Constitution to "the common defence and general welfare of the United States," not of any other nation or of the world at large -- on nations which ceased to be our allies in 1945, and on nations which never were our allies?

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Only powers of Congress respecting money
The Constitution gives power to Congress (1) "to coin money" and (2) "to borrow money on the credit of the United States" -- but not to lend money, or to give it away, either at home or abroad. What is expressed in a Constitution is equivalent to a prohibition of what is not expressed. The powers over money mentioned are the only ones that the Constitutional Convention brought in from the world of inherent powers and fixed in the Fundamental Law.
Those specifications reject the theory of unlimited powers exercised by European monarchs in 1787. Not long before that, Louis XIV had kept Europe embroiled in wars by loans or grants of money to belligerent rulers. Did the Constitutional Convention, at least one member of which was born in his reign, intend to give that power to Congress? It did not say so. The power was therefore withheld by the people from their servants.
The United States is now, without authority -- under a denial of authority -- lending or granting money to Europe, and to the rest of the world. Postwar programs, 22 in number, for aiding foreign nations, in addition to the military aid program, have piled on top of the costs (330 billion) of War II $30,757,000,000, according to Senator Byrd of Virginia, speaking in September, 1949.
Thus, the limitations of the Constitution become what Madison gave warning of -- "paper barriers."
What the Supreme Court really does
Nor does the Supreme Court "veto" an act of Congress when, in a case brought by an American claiming that his constitutional protection has been written off by the Legis-

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lative Department, the Court finds the complaint well founded and forbids the enforcement of the act.
This kind of constitutional illiteracy, which is chargeable against the schools, colleges, and universities, and is therefore all pervasive, exhibited itself in the Department of Justice of the United States when, after the failure of the President in 1937 to "pack" the Supreme Court, time was taken by the Attorney General to write a book defending the President's action, The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy.
The attempt to "pack" the Federal Courts
The three major acts of Congress for the "New Deal" of President Franklin D. Roosevelt having been held repugnant to the Constitution by the Supreme Court, the President determined to remake the Judiciary of the Constitution, with special reference to the Supreme Bench.
The purpose was clothed in the suavest language, but the robe had a stiletto under it. One of the leaders of the countrywide organization which was formed to urge Congress to resist the move gave it the name which "stuck" -- a plan to "pack" the Supreme Court of the American people. That word soon became the sole designation of the President's scheme.
The National Industrial Recovery Act, to supervise and control industry, was held (295 U. S. 495) invalid in May, 1935.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act, for the support of agriculture, was held (297 U. S. 1) unconstitutional in January, 1936.
And the Bituminous Coal Act, to supervise that industry

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and favor miners, was held (298 U. S. 238) to be in conflict with the Fundamental Law in May, 1936.
The "plan" kept secret from the people
It was in 1936 that President Roosevelt was elected the second time. But in the campaign of that year there was no whisper of the determination to "pack" the Supreme Court and the lower Federal courts. So, when the plan was revealed on February 5 following the November election, there was an instinctive outburst of protest. For the American senses his constitutional inheritance, even though his expensive schools have taught him next to nothing about it.
On February 5, 1937, the President sent a bland message to Congress, with a bill already drawn, providing that a new justice or judge be appointed by the President when an incumbent had reached the "retirement age" of 70 and failed to retire. A concurrent bill, which took effect on the first of the following month, gave to the justices of the Supreme Court the privilege of retiring at 70 on full pay, a privilege given to judges of the lower Federal courts in 1911. Of course, Congress could not fix a "retirement age," as the Constitution gives tenure "during good behavior."
The mathematics of the packing plan
At the time of the attempt at packing, there were on the Supreme Court 6 justices of the age of 70 or over who seemed content with their situations and their interesting work. To the 9 already sitting, the bill would permit the addition of 6 more. With those 6 and the two or three more known to be favorable to the "New Deal," the President would have a majority of the 15.

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In what public opinion called "a great state paper," the Judicial Committee of the Senate denounced the bill as an "utterly dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle," which "would subjugate the courts to the will of Congress and the President."
"It is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected," reported the Committee to the Senate, "that its parallel never again will be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America."
It had no chance of passage. Democrats as well as Republicans opposed it. But as the "New Deal" has held control for thirteen years since then, every justice of that time save one (who retired) has passed away, and all the justices of the Supreme Court are now appointees of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. The majority of the Court have long been appointees of the "New Deal."
In 1933 President Roosevelt wrote Looking Forward, in which he said of somebody's suggestion for increasing the size of the courts that "such a so-called remedy [for congestion] merely aggravates the disease."
Department of Justice joined against Judiciary
Of course, there is no such thing as the "judicial supremacy" dealt with in the Attorney General's book The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy. It is the supremacy of the Constitution that the courts apply. The conception, expressed by many other book builders, that the Supreme Court has been in a "struggle" to raise itself over the Executive and the Congress would be dishonest were it not for the constitutional illiteracy from which it springs. The only "supremacy" involved is that of the Fundamental Law.

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And when Congress, in taking for public use the property of a canal company, provided that nothing should be allowed to it in compensation for the franchise to collect tolls (without which none of the property would have had value to it), the Supreme Court was not promoting its own "supremacy" when it held the act of Congress void for withholding "just compensation" for property taken for public use." It was simply observing the oaths of the justices and of the members of Congress "to support this Constitution."
Later the President appointed the Attorney General to the Supreme Court.
Law schools blamable for lack of learning on Constitution
Some years ago the American Bar Association made a survey of the law schools in 25 of the leading universities and found that only 8 of them made a knowledge of the Constitution a requisite to a degree. Hence, probably, the silence of the Bar while the alien idea of Communism and the alien idea of Socialism were introduced in government in violation of the Constitution.
Men and women who will be living in later generations through children and grandchildren and their descendants owe it to their blood, if they do not feel that they owe it now to their country, to take this subject of constitutional education to heart and change existing conditions.
And why should the President of the American Federation of Labor want an amendment to the Constitution which would leave Congress with imperial powers? For, notwithstanding the repeated complaints of labor leaders

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and their political lackeys that the Judiciary of the Constitution is prejudiced against labor, a long line of favorable decisions is found in the reports. Both State and Federal courts have upheld laws without number in the interest of workers. Forty years before a man of alien birth sponsored the National Labor Relations Act of Congress for "labor's gains," an act of Michigan was upheld requiring the employer to protect the employee from machinery and other perils.
Courts of Constitution never unfriendly to labor
In 1898 the Supreme Court of the United States (169 U. S. 366) upheld a law of the Territory of Utah limiting the hours in mines and smelters. That was 39 years before President Roosevelt undertook to set up a Supreme Court of his own, which would be partial to the laborers voting for him. Numberless laws limiting the length of the day for men, women, and children have been upheld by the courts through the years.
In 1908 the Supreme Court of the United States held (208 U. S. 412) valid -- not in conflict with the National Constitution -- a law of Oregon limiting the working hours of the day for women.
In 1913 the Supreme Court of the United States sustained (231 U. S. 320) an act of Illinois (which the Supreme Court of that State had upheld) limiting the age of the worker, a measure to protect youth.
In 1917 the Supreme Court of the United States sustained (243 U. S. 332) an act of Congress limiting the hours of railway trainmen.

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In 1937 the minimum wage law of Washington of 1913 for women was sustained (300 U. S. 379) by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Judicial decision completely refuting charges of labor leaders
But the case affording the most striking refutation of the charge of labor leaders and the public officials was decided (281 U. S. 548) in May, 1930, by the Supreme Court of the United States. In disobedience to the often-expressed wishes of labor leaders that labor organizations do not seek redress in the courts of wrongs which they feel that they suffer (probably because that would prevent the leaders from taking the grievances to the White House or before committees of Congress), the Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks brought a suit in the United States District Court asking an injunction to prevent the Texas and New Orleans Railroad Company from intimidating the members of the Brotherhood and coercing them into an association of clerical employees of its own.
The trial court granted an injunction to the workers.
The railway company appealed to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals. That court of three judges sustained the trial court.
The railroad company went to the Supreme Court of the United States and again, and finally, the employees were held in right to an injunction. The employer was permanently enjoined from preventing employees from "freely designating their representatives by collective action" for dealing with the employer, as required by the Railway Labor Act of 1926, seven years before the Roosevelt regime.

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The employer's act of contumacy
Notwithstanding that, the employer recognized its own association of clerical employees in the designation of representatives. In contempt proceedings brought by employees, the District Court of the United States required the defendant and its officers to disestablish its association of clerical employees and to reinstate the Brotherhood as the representative of clerical workers. Further, the employer was required to restore to service and privilege certain employees who had been discharged by it during the controversy.
What would the author of Big Business on the Bench say to that record?
Was not that a better way to try "a labor case" than to rush to Washington and be photographed with the President, and have a "hearing" for weeks or months before a Congressional Committee, with flashlight pictures without end and press conferences in large number? Employees bargained collectively long before NLRA
From the foregoing it appears that "collective bargaining" by employees was secured to them by act of Congress 9 years before the alien National Labor Relations Act.
As a matter of historic fact, the locomotive engineers and firemen made a collective bargaining agreement with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad Company in 1885, or 58 years before the "New Deal" took over the United States for party purposes. During the late '80s and early '90s the Shop Craft Unions were formed on that railroad. The Maintenance of Way employees, the Telegra-

30
phers, the Switchmen and the Clerks were organized at about the same time and dealt with their employer collectively.
Employees generally had collective bargaining
What has been said of the company mentioned is probably true of all the other important railroad companies in the United States.
Moreover, legislation favorable to the worker began about half a century before the National Labor Relations Act, which has been called "labor's Magna Carta." In 1886, the year before the Inter-state Commerce Act was passed, a bill for compulsory arbitration of railway disputes passed both Houses of Congress; but it was vetoed by President Cleveland because it provided fine and imprisonment for failure to obey the award, which was to be binding on both parties, without right to appeal and review. In 1888 a law for voluntary arbitration was enacted.
A look into the history of other large employers would doubtless show the rise of collective bargaining by labor organizations similar to its growth on the railroads.
Rights of workers and employers denied by NLRA
"Labor's gains" during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt were built on the closed shop, a denial of the liberty of man to work at will, and the denial of free speech to the employer, who was prevented from even discussing with his employees a subject raised by them.
Propagandism has been so stiff since 1933 that the multitudes have been led to believe that there never were any "labor's gains" before.

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What this subject of employment needs is to be taken out of Government, in which it has no proper place. In view of the paramount interest of the public, which requires that production, transportation, communication and other essential services do not cease, and in view of the damages suffered by employer and employee from strikes, the legal obligations of one man or party to another present justiciable questions, which should be heard and decided by the courts of justice established by constitutions. There the "leader" will have no chance to parade and unfold his "philosophy" on compulsory membership, on the check-off, on the giving of no report even to the donors of moneys received, and on accounting to nobody for expenditures.
Courts could settle labor controversies nicely
In court the inquiry would be, not into "social science" or any other scrambled subject, nor into the right of any worker to join a union or stay out of it; the inquiry would bear on whether the property can pay what the employees demand and at the same time keep in condition to meet its obligations in service to the public now and in the future, while giving a reasonable return to those who furnish the money for the industry -- in these times $5,000 or more to keep each employee in a place to work at a machine.
Those are the "rights" involved, not the miscalled "right to strike" -- which cannot exist in any plant of any size, because a strike of any magnitude damages the public and individuals, and no person or group has a right to do damage.
"The condition of any particular business and of its owner must also come into question." Pius XII, 1931.

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Of course, a worker may quit employment
The mere right of a worker to leave employment -- if he is not under contract to stay with it -- is not in point. To be sure, he may leave. Many may leave. But when he leaves, not for the sole purpose of severing the relation with the employer, but to do damage to the employer and the public, that may become, when done by many in concert, a conspiracy denounced by law. The Criminal Code of the United States (Title 18, sec. 51) provides:
"If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise and enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same, . . . they shall be fined not more than $5,000 and imprisoned not more than ten years, and shall, moreover, be thereafter ineligible to any office or place of honor, profit or trust created by the Constitution or laws of the United States."
That provision was enacted on March 4, 1909. It looks as though it would be highly useful to the Attorney General in time of a riotous strike.
Concerted quitting to bring the employer to his knees and cause him to pay more whether in justice he should, is contrary to the provision of the Criminal Code quoted. Even a purpose not in itself unlawful cannot be carried out by unlawful or criminal means, wrote Chief Justice Fuller (148 U. S. 197) in 1893.
All the liberties that the American enjoys and prizes, he must use with due respect to the rights and liberties of others. The rights of the employer and the rights of the public to continued production and peace have been disregarded too long.

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Strikes in war were conspiracies
Most of the strikes during World War II were prima facie conspiracies against owners of property, against the interest of the public in unceasing production, against social order, and too often against the safety of persons. As they gave "aid and comfort" to our enemies in war, they fell within the definition of treason in the Constitution.
The National Director of the Bureau of Mines reported to the President in January, 1950, that for ten months of 1949, in comparison with the like time in the preceding year, the shipments of hot air furnaces burning solid fuels dropped 47 per cent. Does that indicate damage to innocent manufacturers from strikes of miners of coal?
It is of common knowledge that for several years the use of oils for fuel has been on the increase, owing in part to convenience in transportation and to easier firing, and perhaps to lower costs. But the figures shown and those following are too abrupt to mark only the long growth of a preference of oils for fuel. They indicate clearly that manufacturers and owners of large office buildings and others are in active construction of defenses against strikes of miners of coal.
During the time mentioned, sales at factory of mechanical coal stokers dropped 60 per cent. Did the conspiracy to stop mining of coal do damage there, and to an interest in no way involved in the dispute?
In 1947 coal produced 50 per cent of the heat content in the total energy used in the United States. In 1948 it produced 46.5 per cent, and in 1949 it fell to (estimated) 38.5 per cent. Other fuels rose in use correspondingly.
In the report of the Bureau of Mines there were other strongly probative facts showing damage to railroads, to

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the traveling and shipping public, and to the economy of the country in general.
Is destruction of property not preventable?
Are the owners of properties in coal to be destroyed in helplessness? Does the "Liberty under Law" which was chiseled on the front of the building of the Supreme Court at Washington mean anything substantial, or is it merely an expression of emotion?
To be sure, labor must organize and bargain collectively through its chosen agents. The notion that an individual worker can go to United States Steel or to General Motors, or to any other great employer, and make a contract of employment to his best advantage is in disregard of practices by the employer which made the union necessary. The union has been highly beneficial to both employer and employee, and it could be more so with better leadership on both sides.
It is a maxim of the law that there is no wrong without a remedy. The trouble has been that the Political Department of Government, instead of the Judicial, has been dealing with the subject. Only the courts can administer remedies for wrongs.
A dispatch from London through the United Press in October, 1949, said that the Government of England was considering the need of a court to adjudicate cases in the field of employment.
The Members of Congress and the members of the legislatures of the States (and many judges) who hasten, whenever the subject comes up, to declare for theright to strike do not look beyond the political aspects of the subject, of which it should have none. And the whole trouble is that

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by politicians the subject has been kept political whereas, because of the widely extended effect of strikes, the irreconcilable disputes are justiciable and are therefore for the courts.
A historic decision in point
When the American Railroad Union, an organization of trainmen, called a strike on several railroads hauling Pullman sleeping cars and announced that it would stop every railroad in the country if necessary, the Attorney General of the United States brought a suit for injunction under the Post Office Clause and the Commerce Clause to restrain the strikers from obstructing commerce and the mails. An injunction was granted and the trial court was upheld (158 U. S. 564) in May, 1895. There was no dissent from the opinion, by Justice Brewer, that "the strong arm of government may brush away all obstructions."
According to that decision, seizures from their owners by the Government of railroads, mines, and other properties in time of strikes (48 by President Roosevelt and 28 by President Truman), instead of protection of the owners and the public in the operation of the properties, were unlawful.[2] Those whose combinations or conspiracies interrupted commerce should have been brought to heel.
2. Even in a time of war, property not in a zone of combat could not be seized for use by government. Where the courts are open in this country, rights of "life, liberty, and property" are adjudicated there. That was held (4 Wallace, 2) in a great case arising out of the Civil War. A citizen of Indiana, not in the military service, was tried (1864) by court-martial and sentenced to death. The accused should have been tried in a civil court, the tribunals of both Nation and State being open, and Indiana not being in the theater of war.
The courts were open to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman to stop strikes instead of seizing property illegally.

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In November, 1946, when the President was put in a corner by a threat from the head of a union that the people would have no coal for the winter, the Department of Justice demonstrated that it is perfectly easy to stop that kind of performance.
Courts can determine fair pay to workers
Since 1906 the Interstate Commerce Commission has prescribed, after hearing both sides, reasonable rates for railroads. State commissions have long heard and decided controversies over rates of gas companies, electric light companies, street-car companies, telephone companies, and others; and their work has come to be fairly satisfactory to all.
The decisions of Federal and State commissions and of courts, in cases of disputes between labor and industry, would be quite satisfactory to the parties, including the public, if the President and the Senate and the governors would earnestly strive to appoint to such positions men of the highest legal learning and experience, instead of "lame ducks" -- men put out of office by the people at the polls -- or other political derelicts. The appointing powers have not been faithful to the public interest in this relation, which is the chief interest.
But no tribunal could do so badly as the mediation boards and other political devices have done in trying "labor" cases and maintaining confusion throughout the country.
Competent men can get justice done
The proposition that the appointment of competent men to judicial and quasi-judicial posts would cure most of our

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flagrant evils was demonstrated in late 1949 and January, 1950, by trials in two United States District Courts, in which the defendants were charged with acts of disloyalty. Judges on the Bench competent to conduct a trial correctly, competent United States Attorneys who knew how to prepare and present evidence, and competent and courageous men and women sitting as jurors, evoked the admiration of the people.
It can be done.
The service of the juries is specially emphasized, because for three or four decades advocates of the abolition of the trial jury have appeared in the schools and the Press insisting that the institution is "outmoded" and causes a "lag" in the administration of justice, to borrow the words of those jargonists.
But it is now clear that the jury never met the needs of social order better than it can meet them today. The jury is still "the country," the field of last resort. In the old pleading of the common law the defendant answered "that he is not guilty as in manner and form it hath been complained against him: And of this he puts himself upon the country." This right to put the decision to the country, to the Ultimate Power, the people, must never be parted with.
History gives us many cases in which "the country" refused to convict when directed to do so by a judge servile to the crown. "The country" in London repeatedly refused to convict, when ordered to do so by the judge, the founder of Pennsylvania of violation of the "law" in the exercise of his religious belief.
It is too bad -- it is perilous -- that we are not taught history. The Constitution was written by historians who

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worked to prevent in America the follies in governments past.
Controversies between employer and employee respecting compensation fair to both parties and the public must be taken out of the White House, out of Congress, and out of politics, and submitted to existing courts or to a special tribunal, which may become expert.
Attack of President on Supreme Court a result
The attempt of the President in 1937 to pack the Supreme Court was not a sudden outburst of alienism. It had been a long time in coming. The spadework, using one of the favorite expressions of the miners and sappers, had been done by many others.
As big a thing as the great American Republic could not have been put on the skids without years of steady work. Beginning with 1933, Socialism (control by government of production, distribution, and exchange), Fascism[3]
3. The meaning of Fascism, a word much used in our country with evidently little understanding, may best be made clear by showing the corporations of government set up by Mussolini in Italy to take over all the activities of men.
The word Fascism indicates nothing respecting the operations of the government. It comes from "fasces," the name of the bundle of rods surrounding an axe and carried by the Roman lictor before the chief magistrate as a symbol of authority. Its being brought in by Mussolini was one more of those puerile attempts mentioned by Bryce to bring back somewhat of the Roman Empire. Mussolini set up 22 corporations. The first was the Corporation for Cereals, made up of designated numbers of employers and workers, and embracing growers, threshers, millers, bakers, commission and co-operative organizations. All the corporations were similarly divided. They were the Corporation for Fruits, Vegetables and Flowers; for Viticulture and Wine; for Sugar-beet and Sugar; for Edible Oil; for Livestock and Fisheries; for Timber; for Textiles; for Metals; for Chemical Trades; for Clothing Trades; for Printing, Publishing, and Paper; for Building Tools and Housing; for Water, Gas, and Electricity; for Mining and Quarrying; for Glassware; for Arts and Professions; for Inland Transportation; for Sea and Air Transportation; for Hotel Industry; for Credit and Insurance; for Entertainments. (cont. on 39)

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(Socialism by corporations), and Communism (confiscation by government of private property through graduated taxes and by abolition of inheritance), all forbidden by the Constitution because in no way authorized, and in many ways condemned by implication, spread with the rapidity of a fire on the prairie.
But the seizure by them, the Socialists, the Fascists and the Communists, of the liberty and property of Americans began before 1933.
3. (cont.) That defines Fascism. It is Socialism carried out by governmental corporations. It is at violence to our Constitution, but it has been coming for some years, and is now pretty well "dug in."

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