OPINION:
There is a lot to chew on in Andrew Napolitano’s Oct. 22 op-ed, “Our failed Constitution,” but I will focus on two: President Lincoln’s war powers and the Federal Reserve system.
Citing the Supreme Court’s decision in Ex parte Milligan (1866), Judge Napolitano says that Lincoln arrested and killed civilians in defiance of law. Mr. Napolitano claims that the Milligan case limited the president’s power to arrest civilians. He is wrong.
The Milligan decision dealt with the power to prosecute civilians, not the power to arrest them. There is a big difference. Lincoln never issued an order to kill civilians.
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Mr. Napolitano also lodges a broadside attack on the federal Reserve Act and all its works and ways, suggesting that the entire system is unconstitutional. The Constitution says that Congress may “coin money [and] regulate the value thereof.” Congress is not equipped to administer and supervise the monetary system, so it enacted the Federal Reserve Act to discharge the congressional power to regulate the creation and value of money.
In the landmark case of McCulloch v. Maryland, Chief Justice John Marshall authored a Supreme Court opinion holding that Congress could use the Second Bank of the United States to implement its powers. The system created by the Federal Reserve Act performs the same function.
JIM DUEHOLM
Washington
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