Suchergebnisse

Accepting the Clausewitz thesis that "war is only an extension of policy," we are free to say that the politicians have created chaos in these latter days in a rather wholesale way. But that is another story. The World Revolution is not my topic, but the comparatively limited revolution which we have been witnessing in our own country the last few years in consequence of the New Deal and more recently of the war. How has this revolution affected conceptions of governmental power in the United States; how is it to be evaluated in terms of American Constitutional Law? For Constitutional Law has always been the most distinctive feature of the American system of government, the result of a unique infusion of politics with jurisprudence, of current opinion with established principles. Today this remarkable product of American political genius appears to be undergoing a fundamental revision—even to be in process of dissolution.

The chief lesson of the war to date for constitutional interpretation is that the Constitution is an easily dispensable factor of our war effort—perhaps one might say an "expendable" factor. That the Constitution is not needed as a source of national power for war purposes has been stated by the Court itself. Speaking in 1936 for himself and brethren in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, Justice Sutherland said: "The investment of the Federal government with the powers of external sovereignty did not depend upon the affirmative grants of the Constitution. The powers to declare and wage war [my italics], to conclude peace, to make treaties, to maintain diplomatic relations with other sovereignties, if they had never been mentioned in the Constitution, would have been vested in the Federal government as necessary concomitants of nationality" (299 U.S. 304, 318).