End-stage legal academia is the Minnesota Law professor who was doing the “just asking questions about birthright citizenship” bit treating *Bill Ackman* as a source of serious authority on the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment
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"The Congress shall have Power ... to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States" US Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 1.
Right. And what does “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law,” which appears in Article I, mean if not to grant Congress spending power?
Just curious: if Congress doesn’t have the Spending power, then who does? Or is the idea that the US federal government was always intended to be powerless to provide for the well being of the country and the Taxing clause was just to raise money for new powdered wigs and what not?
Surely he means that congressional spending is constitutionally limited to purchases made with 18th century continental currency because the Framers did intend electronic transfers
JFC, it's not an interpretation! That clause *literally* says "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States".
If you argue that "provide" doesn't mean "spend" especially in the context of it *immediately* following Congress's power to tax, then you're just a fucking liar.
It also tries to delete the subordinate clause. The most he can even argue, which he does in a real clear politics piece, is that if the clause is subordinate, then entitlements go away. But, he doesn't really explain why that is. "Entitlements" provide for the general welfare.
The RCP piece is more "firmly" about the inability to spend more than the government takes in. He thinks that a comma in the sentence instead of a semicolon means that the government is limited to a checking account. No issuing debt. US cannot be debtor, only creditor to those who owe taxes.
But I say "firmly" because it's a fucking comma. Originalism is wild. He's also out here defending the immunity decision and the birthright citizenship interpretation because they are "intellectually interesting" and totally don't mesh with his "political priors". Fuck this guy.
It’s not “obviously Constitutional” for Congress to spend money to further some regulatory objective it couldn’t achieve directly? Does that mean any funding of law enforcement is not obviously Constitutional?
Article I, Section 9, Clause 7: No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
But there is. “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law”. I just have to keep posting this to keep my sanity
How many fucking decadeswe been arguing over "A well regulated militia". Endless ink in law reviews, court cases, moot courts, essays, assignments, discussion panels over something so obvious only legal brain could make it mean the exact fucking opposite of what it clearly fucking means.
if we're doing bad con-law takes based on a bad-faith ultra-textualist reading, ok, but we can all play that game. How about "the constitution doesn't say the president is commander in chief of the air force"
Textualism is basically Schrödinger's Jurisprudence, allowing them to assert the government both can & cannot do anything not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, whichever interpretation happens to suit their foregone conclusion of the moment.
The constitution doesn't say you have to be allowed to breathe oxygen, and in fact doesn't *specifically* say you have to be allowed to breathe at all.
"Everything not explicitly banned in the Constitution is allowed to Republicans, and everything not explicitly allowed in the Constitution is banned from Democrats"
This honestly reminds me of when I was a 1L and would read a couple clauses and make these sweeping interpretations and have to be shot down by my professors who were con law professors who probably held the job this guy now has
The job this guy now has is obviously not the job he wants. What he wants is to be the new Turley — someone who repeats idiot talking points like a monkey and gets to go in TV because of it.
Wurman's technically correct, utterly meaningless, and the kind of thing you say at parties if you want everyone to suddenly remember they need to refill their drinks.
Did you know there's technically no clause explicitly stating Congress can turn on the lights to work either?
It’s not technically correct at all. If he said, “the word ‘spending’ isn’t in the spending clause” that’s technically correct. But that’s just saying they wrote a word that means the same as spending and not that exact word.
I don’t even think he’s technically correct, we interpret article I section 8 clause 1 as including a power to provide for the general welfare because it literally says “The Congress shall have the power to … provide for the common defense and general welfare…”
I mean, the argument is the scholarly legal equivalent saying gravity is just Newton's "interpretation" of falling apples.
If he's engaging in pedantry, he should at least note that the General Welfare Clause has been consistently intrp'd (including by drafters) as a substantive power since 1787.
@wheystandard.bsky.social (by the way, i agree with you, he's being deliberately pedantic and asinine here, trying to curry favor with a bunch of fascists and morons, et al.)
And at the same time, “Legal Insurrection” is sifting through scholarships at public universities, suing over anything that isn’t for white men (spoken as a union exec at a sued university)
(To be fair, the only time I was sad about not having a law degree was when considering how satisfying it must be to write “William Jacobson can eat this University’s entire ass”)
Okay, but can the Constitution buy you an endowed professorship as long as you set whatever is left of your credibility aflame (might be generous of me to say he has any credibility left)? 🙃
There were law professors who treated criticism of Wurman’s brain-dead musings as some grave threat to the academic project, meanwhile he’s out here name-dropping the hedge fund dipshit who is so terminally online that he accidentally got his wife outed as a plagiarist
Given what they've shown, I don't think legal professors belong in the "academic project."
They aren't doing objective research! This isn't physics where they're looking at the world and gathering information. They're making normative arguments, aka practicing politics!
Between Ilan Wurman and Daniel Schwarcz, an education from University of Minnesota’s Law school is starting to look dubious. Hiring managers should take note. Maybe cancel OCI’s and recruitment there before this incompetence infects your workplace?
There is no spending clause lol. Show me you don't understand high level concepts without showing me you understand high level concepts. It's a phrase experts use to discuss certain aspects of the written text. What a loser masking as smart person.
Beyond pathetic, just downright sad. As I have told many people many times, Bill Ackman told me almost 25 years ago at the Beverly Hills Hotel that, "We'll be in the South of France." That was his response to the chaos his idea then for worker-less stores or 'disruption' would bring to America.
Increasingly clear that there should be no “law schools” as such, and lawyering should be an apprenticed occupation like it used to be. Learn to practice law by doing it, and cut out the grifting middlemen who spend their days debating the legality of mass murder as a fun intellectual experiment.
Stop lying, Ilan. "The Congress shall have Power [...] to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States[...]; "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law[...]" U.S. Const., art. I. (about the leg. branch).
…And is Ilan implying that federal spending is controlled by the POTUS? Where’s the support in the Constitution for such a proposition? So the federal government is not allowed to spend any money?!?!
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That ignores the appropriations clause below.
Between that and Ilan posting a bunch of dumbass takes in the hopes of getting appointed to the bench, it's been a real banner year for my alma mater.
Tax payers don’t create our national currency when they pay tax
But the fact that so many of you use "light mode" makes me fear for humanity.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 7: No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
Did you know there's technically no clause explicitly stating Congress can turn on the lights to work either?
If he's engaging in pedantry, he should at least note that the General Welfare Clause has been consistently intrp'd (including by drafters) as a substantive power since 1787.
Wurman, who claims he is a law professor, certainly knows this and therefore is a fucking bald-faced in-your-face liar.
He’s right, though; it doesn’t say spending.
They aren't doing objective research! This isn't physics where they're looking at the world and gathering information. They're making normative arguments, aka practicing politics!
“there is no spending clause there’s a taxing clause!” well what he calls it is irrelevant, it vests authority to tax and spend in the Congress