The History Book Club discussion

This is the thread for the discussion of FEDERALIST. NO 26.

This paper is titled IDEA OF RESTRAINING THE LEGISLATIVE AUTHORITY IN REGARD TO THE COMMON DEFENSE CONSIDERED


This paper was written by Alexander Hamilton.

by Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton, in the Federalist, shoots down Trump’s ‘emergency’
by Quin Hillyer
February 18, 2019 05:59 PM

President Trump’s assertion of supposed emergency powers to appropriate military money for a border wall runs directly afoul of the spirit and intended design of the Constitution.

This is important. Others like David French have convincingly and eloquently argued that Trump’s re-appropriation of taxpayer dollars runs afoul of specific provisions within the interplay between existing statutes and the Constitution. They are absolutely correct, but I'm making a different point.

Sometimes, political actors can get so caught up in legal technicalities, so insistent on parsing statutory exceptions, that they miss the importance of long-recognized, bedrock concepts of how our constitutional system is supposed to work. This is surely the case right now with Trump and his defenders.

The larger question to ask isn’t whether the president can find a way to “get away with it,” so to speak, but rather whether his actions are within the intended scope of presidential powers bequeathed to us by founders who were rightly skeptical of king-like authority. In this situation, the words of even the most monarchy-friendly of the founders, Alexander Hamilton, are worth considering.

In various parts of the Federalist Papers, Hamilton repeatedly returned to the importance of one particular restriction on the use of military funds, namely the requirement that, concerning the power to “raise and support armies,… no appropriation of money to that use should be for a longer term than two years.”

Hamilton most clearly explained why this is important in Federalist 26 (with Hamilton’s original emphasis):

Remainder of article:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/op...

Source: The Washington Examiner