History
The use of the term strict construction in American politics is not new. The term was used regularly by members of the Democratic-Republican Party and Democrats during the antebellum period when they argued that powers of the federal government listed in Article I should be strictly construed. They embraced this approach in the hope that it would ensure that the bulk of governmental power would remain with the states and not be usurped by the federal government via novel interpretations of its powers. Perhaps the best known example of this approach is Jefferson's opinion arguing against the constitutionality of a national bank. Because the vagueness of Article I inevitably lent itself to broad interpretations as well as narrow ones, strict constructionists turned to the somewhat restrained descriptions of the powers of Congress that were offered by advocates of the Constitution during ratification. Thus, politicians who identified themselves as strict constructionists embraced an approach to constitutional interpretation that resembles what we today call originalism.
A broadly accepted, but possibly apocryphal, story has Davy Crockett delivering a speech called "Not Yours To Give", in which he urged the United States Congress to reject an appropriation for a Naval widow on the grounds that Congress had no Constitutional authority to give charity. He was said to have been inspired to this view by Horatio Bunce, a constituent in his district and by accounts given, a strict constructionist.
The term began to be used by conservative and moderate Republican presidents beginning with Richard Nixon in 1968 when he was running for election. His pledge was to appoint judges that interpret the law and reinstate "law and order" to the judiciary. He appointed four judges that seemed to be of that philosophy. One of them, however, developed a liberal philosophy, while another became a moderate. The other two were in the mold of what most think of in terms of strict constructionists. Gerald Ford, when running to serve a full term of his own distanced himself from the issue of appointing judges. Ronald Reagan, however, also promised "Strict Constructionists". All three of his US Supreme Court judges loosely fell into this category. Still one was more of an originalist while the other two were fairly conservative. Every major Republican nominee since Reagan has promised to nominate only strict constructionists for the US Supreme Court and mostly such judges for other federal courts.
Read more about this topic: Strict Constructionism
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)