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For much of its history, the interpretation of the United States Constitution presupposed judges seeking the meaning of the text and the original intentions behind that text, a process that was deemed by Chief Justice John Marshall to be 'the most sacred rule of interpretation'. Since the end of the nineteenth century, a radically new understanding has developed in which the moral intuition of the judges is allowed to supplant the Constitution's original meaning as the foundation of interpretation. The Founders' Constitution of fixed and permanent meaning has been replaced by the idea of a 'living' or evolving constitution. Gary L. McDowell refutes this new understanding, recovering the theoretical grounds of the original Constitution as understood by those who framed and ratified it. It was, he argues, the intention of the Founders that the judiciary must be bound by the original meaning of the Constitution when interpreting it

U.S. attorney general. Born in Oakland, Calif., Meese received a B.A. from Yale (1953) and an LL.B. from the University of California, Berkeley (1956). After working at the Piedmont, Calif., Recreation Department, he became deputy district attorney in Alameda county, Calif., in 1959. In 1967, he joined the staff of Governor Ronald Reagan as legal affairs secretary, holding this post until 1969, when he became Reagan's executive assistant and chief of staff. He also served as the chairman of the Governor's Emergency Operations council during the urban and campus disorders of the 1960s and early 1970s.

The most recent effort of the Supreme Court of the United States to define the judicially created constitutional right to privacy has demonstrated once again why that contrived right poses such a pronounced threat to constitutional self-government. In writing for the majority in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) to overrule a case of only seventeen years' standing that allowed the states to prohibit homosexual sodomy, Justice Anthony Kennedy insisted that the idea of liberty in the Constitution's due process clauses is not limited to protecting individuals form "unwarranted governmental intrusions into a dwelling or other private places" but has "transcendent dimensions" of a more moral sort. The essence of the Constitution for Justice Kennedy and his ilk is that it falls to "persons in every generation [to] invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom." Put more simply, there is nothing permanent in the constitution, no fundamental, unalterable principles; its meaning comes only from the changing moral views of successive generations of justices.

On October 23, 1987, the United States Senate committed what many considered then-and what many still consider today-to be an unforgivable political and constitutional sin. Wielding its power to advise and consent on nominations to the Supreme Court of the United States, the upper house voted 58-42 not to confirm Judge Robert H. Bork. The vote, which was the largest margin of defeat in history for a nominee to the Supreme Court, concluded one of the most tumultuous political battles in the history of the republic, a battle that would transform the process of judicial selection for years to come.

Since roughly the beginning of the Reagan administration the left wing of the Democratic senatorial cohort has enjoyed remarkable success in disparaging Republican nominees to the federal judiciary as mere "conservatives". Its argument has been that those nominees would decide cases on everything from abortion to economic regulation on the basis of their "conservative" policy preferences. Sadly, as a general rule, the conservatives have allowed the Democrats to get away with this distortion.

When Raoul Berger turned ninety a little over a decade ago, he was presented with a book of letters from friends and admisrers. Those sending their good wishes were among America's most distinguished jurists, public officials and scholars, including Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, former Attorney General Edwin Meese III and Professor Philip B. Kurland. The collection was introduced by a letter from former President Ronald Reagan.

At least since John Cowell's Interpreter was adjudged by the Committee on Grievances of the House of Commons in 1610 to be "very unadvised, and undiscreet, tending to the disreputation of the honour and power of the common laws" have law dictionaries been objects of occasional controversy. Yet legal dictionaries, as well as dictionaries more generally, have remained a constant resource in American law for those seeking to give meaning to the words of both statutes and constitutional provisions. They have appeared in the pages of the reports since the beginning of the republic; a majority of the justices of the Supreme Court, at one time or another, have turned to them; they have not been simply the refuge of the lesser sorts who have ascended the highest bench, but have been relied upon by those justices generally held in greatest esteem; and their use has never been the preserve of any particular methodology or jurisprudential view.

Such serious charges by so many distinguished historians demand a careful consideration of what the Founders meant by "high Crimes and Misdemeanors": Were they only indictable crimes or did they include what one of the Framers called "political crimes and misdemeanors?" Were they offenses that a President would commit only in "the exercise of executive power" or did they also include a President's malfeasance committed in his private capacity? Were they subject to a reasonably fixed meaning or were they to be determined simply by the exercise of the "awful discretion" of those in Congress called upon to impeach and to try impeachments? If it is true that this new theory of impeachment will indeed "leave the Presidency permanently disfigured and diminished [and] at the mercy as never before of the caprices of any Congress," then a return to the proper understanding of the Founders' intentions will avert nothing less than a constitutional catastrophe.

IF THERE IS A BIBLE THAT INFORMS AND GUIDES AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT, IT IS THE FEDERALIST. THESE ESSAYS, WRITTEN TO "SELL" THE PROPOSED CONSTITUTION TO DELEGATES TO THE NEW YORK STATE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, SPEAK BOTH TO THE MOMENT AND TO ALL TIME, MAKING THEM AS THIS ARTICLE SUGGESTS AT ONCE AN INSPIRING AND A PUZZLING WORK--ONE THAT HAS BEEN VARIOUSLY ANALYZED AND EXPLAINED. THE AUTHOR HERE EXPLORES THOMAS HOBBES'S INFLUENCE ON THE AMERICAN FOUNDERS, ARGUING THAT THEY SHARED HIS VIEW OF THE PROBLEM OF POLITICS AND ULTIMATELY ACCEPTED HIS SOLUTION, ALBEIT IN MODIFIED FORM.