Sublime

Power, Lord Acton said, corrupts. Not always. What power always does is reveal.

The same day that Hamilton wrote to Washington to defend his conduct, Jefferson at Monticello did likewise. In an unusually long and heated letter, Jefferson charged that Hamilton had duped him into supporting his schemes and had trespassed on State Department matters by meeting with French and British ministers. He admitted hiring Freneau but made

Even while Congress was still debating the tariff bill, Wilson had summoned it into a second joint session, at which he called for the creation of a system of regional banks controlled by a Federal Reserve Board (its seven members would be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate) that would end Wall Street’s control of

In many ways, the amendments to the authority acts had given him, in his fields of operation, more power than he would have possessed as chief executive of state or city.

When the Senate moved too slowly for Roosevelt’s taste in ratifying a treaty with Santo Domingo to forestall European intervention, Roosevelt, as he himself described it, “put the agreement into effect, and I continued its execution for two years before the Senate acted; and I would have continued it until the end of my term, if necessary, without

Rounding out the group were Thomas Nelson, Jr., son of the late Virginia governor, and Washington’s young nephew Robert Lewis, who had escorted his aunt Martha to New York. Among members of Congress, James Madison stood in a class by himself in his advisory capacity to Washington. When he ran for Congress, Madison had consulted Washington about how

He did this by activating three still amorphous clauses—the necessary-and-proper clause, the general-welfare clause, and the commerce clause—making them the basis for government activism in economics.

In any case, it is especially misleading to suggest that common law provided clear guidelines for settling novel issues in the United States. When the Sherman antitrust legislation was passed in 1890, everyone agreed that it incorporated the common law, but it took twenty years of split U.S. Supreme Court decisions, usually registered in strikingly