An outstanding treatise that situates the Supreme Law of Our Land in its historical and and interpretative context. Like most great histories, this book is a story - the story of our Constitution from its inception to the present time. The central, unifying them of the book is to ground the Constitution within the context of the US Declaration of Independence. The primary thrust of the book can be reduced to a proper understanding of the third sentence of the Declaration. To wit, the reason that we institute governments among men are to secure our unalienable rights. It is not to grant, but to secure these rights, that we have governments, for we posses these rights due to our nature as free human beings, rather than some bequest of positive law.
Building on this premise, Barnett takes us through a history of US Law, Supreme Court rulings, and Constitutional Amendments that describes a long and persistent struggle between what he calls the Democratic and the Republican constitution. Rather than a commentary on our political parties, Barnett details two conflicting views of our Constitution: the Democratic or "majoritarian" constitution views "we the people" as a single identity, and this collective is sovereign. The Republican constitution, in contrast, views "we the people" as a group of individual sovereigns, and the purpose of the Republican constitution is to protect these individual sovereigns from their servants to whom they the sovereigns have delegated "just powers". After chronicling the history to the present day, Barnett provides a set of recommendations for what can be done to "secure the sovereignty of we the people" whose protections have been eroded over these past 200 years.
An informative and eminently readable book, Our Republication Constitution is highly recommended for anybody interested in constitutional or legal history and how our government of once enumerated powers has turned into the administrative-executive behemoth that we see today.
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