"McCullough v. Maryland (1819) Has Congress power to incorporate a Bank?... The bill for incorporating the bank of the United States did not steal upon an unsuspecting legislature, and pass unobserved. Its principle was completely understood, and was opposed with equal zeal and ability. After being resisted, first in the fair and open field of debate, and afterwards in the executive cabinet, with as much persevering talent as any measure has ever experienced and being supported by arguments which convinced minds as pure and as intelligent as this country can boast, it became law. The original act was permitted to expire, but a short experience of the embarrassments to which the refusal to revive it exposed the government, convinced those who were most prejudiced against the measure of its ‘necessity’ and induced the passage of the present law…. … In considering this question, then, we must never forget that it is a CONSTITUTION we are expounding….…. The power of creating a corporation, though appertaining to sovereignty, is not, like the power of making war, … a substantive and independent power, which cannot be implied as incidental to other powers, or used as a means of executing them…… Revising the legal status of corporations. Amend the U.S. Constitution to clarify that a corporation is not a person and does not have all the legal rights of a person. Also, any corporation that clearly and persistently violates laws should be routinely relieved of its corporate charter by the state that granted it. All this is necessary to make clear that a corporation is given its incorporation to be a servant of the people, not an underhanded dictator of the whole society. Fining and or jailing the officers of a corporation that violates the law, rather than fining the corporation itself. The power of creating a corporation is never used for its own sake, but for the purpose of effecting something else… ….. The word ‘necessary’ is considered as controlling the whole sentence, and as limiting the right to pass laws for the execution of granted powers, to such as are indispensable, and without which the power would be nugatory. … Is it true that this is the sense in which the word ‘necessary’ is always used? Does it always import an absolute physical necessity, so strong that one thing, to which another may be termed necessary, cannot exist without that other? We think it does not. …. This great principle is, that the constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof are supreme; that they cannot control the constitution and laws of the respective states, and cannot be controlled by them. From this, which may be almost termed an axiom, other propositions are decided as corollaries, on the truth or error of which, and on their applications to this case, the cause has been supposed to depend. These are, 1st. that a power to create implies a power to preserve. 3d. That where this repugnancy exists, that authority which is supreme must control, not yield to that over which it is supreme… …. This opinion does not deprive the states of any resources which they originally possessed…. [Chief Justice Marshall, McCullough v. Maryland (1819): The national government is supreme within its sphere of authority and has a wide choice of means to implement its constitutional powers.]"
Posted on: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 23:22:13 +0000
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