On the Road Again
I was up in Cambridge, Massachusetts to give a talk on “Principles of Constitutional Government” to a Harvard political club. (Ok, I’ll spell it out: it was the Harvard Republican Club). It was great fun, with over 100 students and a handful of faculty members in attendance. I made a strong pitch for the seminars of the Institute for Humane Studies, as did my friend and former intern Rich Halvorson, who introduced me.
I briefly described the origins of the Constitution of the United States and then explained the structure of the American constitutional order, viz. a system in which the people enjoy unenumerated rights and the government exercises delegated, enumerated, and therefore limited powers. I had brought copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and walked them through the documents, with emphasis on the precision of the language (“certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness….”; “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States….”; and so on.) Naturally, I had to discuss deviations from that system, and I chose the recent exercise of an unenumerated power by the federal Justice Department (prosecution of a Californian for growing and distributing marijuana to the terminally ill, in accordance with California law) and the violation of an enumerated right by the Justice Department (suspension of the right of the writ of habeus corpus in the cases of Messrs. Padilla and Hamdi, who have been held without charge, without legal counsel, and without judicial review). The audience was receptive, even though both of those violations of the Constitution have been carried out by a Republican administration.
I’m off on Tuesday to Pittsburgh to speak at Pittsburgh University and the Duquesne Club, then off to chair a seminar on children’s rights in La Jolla, California, then, well, all over. (My colleague Julie Cullifer has been working hard to schedule me to speak at UC Berkeley, University of Michigan, University of Chicago, University of South Carolina, and lots of other places. I usually speak at universities in the evenings, and my days are spent speaking before business groups, meeting potential donors, and, of course, traveling.)