Fourteen Clear Factual Errors in Richard Stengel’s Essay on the Constitution (And I Am Looking for Your Help)
Posted by Aaron Worthing Jun 29th 2011 at 2:49 pm in Featured Story, Mainstream Media, Time Magazine, corrections/retractions, media bias
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On June 23, 2011, Time magazine published an essay entitled “One Document, Under Siege” (one page version, here) by Richard Stengel. I consider the publication of this article to be nothing less than a scandal. Besides the deep philosophical disagreements I have with Mr. Stengel, the piece simply fails as journalism. As I will demonstrate in this post, there were fourteen objectively verifiable errors in Mr. Stengel’s piece, half of which could have been discovered simply by reading the Constitution itself.
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Here are the fourteen errors, in short:
1. The Constitution does not limit the Federal Government.
2.The Constitution is not law.
3. The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment emancipated the slaves.
4. The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment granted the right to vote to African Americans.
5. The original Constitution declared that black people were to be counted as three-fifths of a person.
6. The original, unamended Constitution prohibited women from voting.
7. The Commerce Clause grants Congress the power to tax individuals based on whether they buy a product or service.
8. Inter arma enim silent leges translates as “in time of war, the Constitution is silent.”
9. The War Powers Act allows the president to unilaterally wage war for sixty days.
10. We have only declared war five times.
11. Alexander Hamilton wanted a king for America.
12. Social Security is a debt within the meaning of Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment.
13. Naturalization depends on your birth.
14. The Obamacare mandate is a tax.
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I’m not a scholar of anything. Well, maybe of the bits of flotsam passing me by that cause me to react. Here are two bits that attract my eye, and now my keyboard.
When I saw the Time magazine article on the web, I read it.
I saw #1 and #5 in the original Time article and wrote the intire article off to “liberal media bias”. That’s why I never buy magazines and rarely buy a paper.
#1 was outrageous. I knew that from Reading Tom Woods’ stuff.
I spotted #5 thanks to Walter Williams eloquent writing about the “three fifths” as how the Dead Old White Guys dealt with balance in representation.
Impressive collaboration by this author to pull together others to refute the Time article.
Shame on Time for producing such drivel. The sad part is that folks have read it and think it’s correct.
Argh!
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