The Authentic Constitution - An Originalist View of America's Legacy

Art Palumbo discusses the origin and purpose of America's great foundational document and explores the founding principles of the American republic. He details and clarifies its provisions for the proper powers of Congress, monetary policy and taxation, the government's role in regulating commerce, in war, and in foreign policy, the right to bear arms, immigration and other hot-button issues in a way that cuts through many of the misconceptions that confuse citizens and leave them confounded.

The book strictly supports "originalism," which is the idea that the Constitution should be understood in accordance with the meanings advanced by those who wrote and ratified it. However, it also takes account of how far we have gone off course and recognizes that the changes required to get us back on track again cannot be made all at once.

In 2008, Alan Keyes, a Republican presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000, described the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States in the following way: "The doctrine of unalienable rights is to the Constitution what the laws of physics are to architecture or engineering. Those laws are not repeated in every plan or architect's drawing, but they are assumed and must be respected or the results will be defective and dangerous." It is clear that the founding principles of the Declaration are intimately connected with the Constitution and it would be unwise to ignore them or the bond that the two documents share.

The style of the book is scholarly, but not overly so. It is well documented and contains illustrations and tables. In several cases, documents are transcribed from the originals. The approach is generally as follows: First, an explanation of the original meaning of a particular section of the Constitution is provided. Second, the consequences of not following it are revealed. Third, a solution is offered to get the country back on course, always with a focus on returning to our founding principles and the Constitution.

The Authentic Constitution (1) Provides detailed evidence to support the contention that the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Amendments were not properly ratified; (2) It unreservedly supports the view that the judiciary is not the sole arbiter of the Constitution and that only the parties to the case are ever bound by a court s decision; (3) It supports the view that the Bill of Rights is applicable only to the federal government and that each state has its own enumeration of rights that is applicable to each state; (4) It maintains that complete control over immigration was never constitutionally transferred from the states to the federal government and that this transfer could only have been accomplished properly by a constitutional amendment; and (5) It supports the view that although the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, ... [cannot] be infringed (Second Amendment), it equally supports the notion that each state must maintain an active militia, composed of the armed citizenry of the state (the well regulated Militia of the Second Amendment), as the Constitution requires.

'In questions of power then let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution' - - Thomas Jefferson

Arthur E. Palumbo, Jr., holds a Masters degree from Vermont College of Norwich University. He has studied and written on wide-ranging subjects such as the origins of religions, philosophy, spirituality, health, history, and government. His first book published by Algora was The Dead Sea Scrolls, followed in 2009 by The Authentic Constitution . He lives in Massachusetts.

Mr. Palumbo has studied the Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian beginnings for more than twenty-five years. Several of his articles have appeared in the scholarly journals The Qumran Chronicle and Folia Orientalia.

At the same time, he has been fascinated with the American Founders, the US Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence, and he has read everything he could find on these subjects. Much of what he learned stood in contrast to the vague notions about our nation's foundations that most Americans now hold, and this book is based on his desire to make the real information more readily available.