Review: Calvin H. Johnson, Righteous Anger at the Wicked States: The Meaning of the Founders’ Constitution

Kurt X. Metzmeier, University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law

Abstract

After nearly two centuries of scholarship, it is perhaps impossible to forward a new idea about the motivations behind the founding of the U.S. Constitution, but University of Texas law professor Calvin H. Johnson has brought a new emotion to the debate: “righteous anger.” This review examines his general thesis is that the Constitution was the result of a moral reaction to the inadequate funding of the national defense by the Continental Congress and the need for a strong central government with the power to tax. As the proponents of the “New Federalism” on the Supreme Court continue to read an “original” Constitution they imagine was written to limit the federal power, it is valuable to look again at some of the founders who were mad as hell about the states’ abdication of their duty to protect the commonweal and were not going to take it anymore.