{"id":39564,"date":"2017-07-30T03:00:33","date_gmt":"2017-07-30T07:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=39564"},"modified":"2017-07-29T10:55:26","modified_gmt":"2017-07-29T14:55:26","slug":"the-greenback-cases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/07\/30\/the-greenback-cases\/","title":{"rendered":"The Greenback cases"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Samizdata<\/em>, Paul Marks<\/a> discusses why it is so difficult to prevent governments from expanding their powers far beyond what the constitution may allow:<\/p>\n

… a Constitution is only as good as the enforcement mechanisms to make sure it is obeyed \u2013 and as Luther Martin warned at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, trusting government appointed judges to limit the powers of the very government that appointed them is a fatally flawed idea.<\/p>\n

This is not a recent problem. Even in the 19th century the Supreme Court often ruled that the Federal Government has powers that the Constitution does NOT give it. For example the infamous \u201cSecond Greenback Case\u201d where the Supreme Court, with newly appointed \u201cjustices\u201d (appointed, in part, for this corrupt purpose) overturned the \u201cFirst Greenback Case\u201d where the court had declared, quite correctly, that the Federal Government has no power to print (or have printed) money \u2013 only to \u201ccoin money\u201d (Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution of the United States) and that only gold or silver coin (not paper money) may be \u201clegal tender\u201d in any State (Article One, Section Ten of the Constitution of the United States). Nothing could be plainer than that paper money is unconstitutional \u2013 indeed the very reason the United States Constitution was written in the first place was to prevent the \u201cnot worth a Continental\u201d paper money issued by the Continental Congress to finance its government \u2013 those who support the Articles of Confederation system forget that one of its fundamental flaws was that it allowed the government to print money, as it gave no reliable source of taxation to finance the United States Armed Forces. Without a large scale and professional armed forces there is no point in having a United States of America at all \u2013 and each State might as well go its own way till conquered by European powers in the 18th century or by the People\u2019s Republic of China in the 21st century.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

To return to the Greenback Cases\u2026 \u2013 Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase (the former \u201cslaves lawyer\u201d famous for his anti slavery legal work before the Civil War) de facto<\/em> ruled that the Treasury Secretary during the Civil War had acted unconstitutionally in having money printed, even though the the Treasury Secretary of the time was Salmon P. Chase (himself). It is not necessary to recuse yourself if you intend, de facto<\/em>, to find yourself guilty. However, more \u201cjustices\u201d were added to the court \u2013 and the judgement (and the Constitution) was overturned. The argument being that no more paper money was being printed \u2013 it would gradually go over time, so there was no need to make a fuss\u2026 still less to declare that the \u201cUnited States Dollars\u201d in the pockets of people were just bits of paper with ink on them (not \u201cmoney\u201d).<\/p>\n

In 1935 the Supreme Court de facto<\/em> ruled (by five votes to four) that the Federal Government could steal all monetary gold and void all private and public contracts that had gold (or silver) clauses in the contracts. There was no Constitutional basis for this decision (none whatever \u2013 just \u201clawyer\u2019s cant\u201d) and the Federal Reserve notes declared valid money came from an organisation (the Federal Reserve system created in 1913) that the Congress had no Constitutional power to create. The Supreme Court, led by the Chief Justice, might as well have chanted \u201cDeath to America!\u201d and \u201cHail Satan!\u201d as they announced their judgement \u2013 as some of the dissenting judges pointed out. Thus the unconstitutional Credit Bubble financial system was pushed forward. The doubts of Luther Martin at the Constitutional Convention were vindicated \u2013 government appointed judges sitting without a jury can not be trusted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Samizdata, Paul Marks discusses why it is so difficult to prevent governments from expanding their powers far beyond what the constitution may allow: … a Constitution is only as good as the enforcement mechanisms to make sure it is obeyed \u2013 and as Luther Martin warned at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, trusting government […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,7,9,13],"tags":[715,866,164,563,752],"class_list":["post-39564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-history","category-law","category-usa","tag-constitution","tag-fdr","tag-federalreserve","tag-money","tag-supremecourt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ai8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39564"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39565,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39564\/revisions\/39565"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}