The American Founders made sure the president could never suspend Congress

The signing of the U.S. Constitution.
Architect of the Capitol

Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire

The British monarch has the right to determine when Parliament is in session – or, more to the point, when it is not.

Breaking with longstanding tradition, and possibly with the United Kingdom’s unwritten constitution, new Prime Minister Boris Johnson asked Queen Elizabeth II to suspend, or “prorogue,” the national legislature for five weeks starting on Sept. 9, or shortly after. She agreed.

Freed from having to take pesky questions in the House of Commons, Johnson claims he will be able to concentrate on getting a better deal for Britain as it prepares to leave the European Union on Oct. 31. Many British lawmakers, including some in Johnson’s own party, are furious and fighting back. But if the ploy succeeds, it will be one of the longest parliamentary suspensions since the British last cut off their monarch’s head.

Given the similarities between the U.S. and U.K. political systems and the personal parallels – and affection – between Johnson and U.S. President Donald Trump, Americans might wonder whether the president has a similar power to suspend Congress.

The answer is a very clear no – thanks to the forethought, and strong historical knowledge, of the country’s Founders.

Johnson and Trump have similarities but differences too.
Erin Schaff, The New York Times, Pool

Breaking up, but still learning by example

On July 4, 1776, Congress severed all ties to Britain. The Declaration of Independence included a repudiation of George III, though Americans had initially admired him when he assumed the throne in 1760. They also rejected the monarchical form of government that King George embodied.

Initially admired: George III.
Allan Ramsay/Wikimedia Commons

Compared to other kingdoms in Europe, which were ruled by overbearing monarchs and aristocrats, the British monarchy was not that bad. In fact, the institution contained a number of features that Americans quite liked. One was the system of representative government. King George and his ministers could only enact laws, including laws that taxed the British people, with the consent of Parliament. The House of Commons, the legislature’s lower chamber, was an elective body, chosen in the 18th century by property-owning men – and occasionally property-owning women – in England, Scotland and Wales. Although Britain wasn’t a democracy, it wasn’t an absolute monarchy, and definitely not a dictatorship.

From the earliest days of English settlement, Americans held the legislative part of the British monarchy in high regard. They modeled their own colonial assemblies as far as possible on Parliament, especially the House of Commons. Each colony had a governor and a council, but the most important branch was the representative assembly. Only colonial assemblies could levy taxes, and all other laws required their approval as well.

After independence, the colonies became states. Americans, wrote David Ramsay of South Carolina in 1789, were now a “free people who collectively” had the right to rule themselves. If they were to have government based on “the consent of the governed,” as the Declaration proclaimed, they still needed legislatures, which needed to be as strong as possible. Parliament remained an example worth following.

Rejecting royalty

What Americans did not want was another king. The Founders admitted that even though the British monarchy had failed the colonists, it worked pretty well for the British, with the king’s ministers consulting Parliament on most matters of importance. But they knew that the “constitution” that required them to do so was an unwritten one based primarily in tradition, not legal statutes and documents.

A detail of a portrait of King Charles I, while his head was still attached.
Sir Anthony Van Dyck/Wikimedia Commons

They also knew that just over a century before, a different king, Charles I, had not been so accommodating. In 1629, when Parliament refused his request for taxes, Charles dissolved the legislature and governed as a personal monarch – not for five weeks, but for 11 years.

That didn’t go well for Parliament, the British people or the king. The civil war that ensued ended with Charles’ execution in 1649 on a balcony overlooking what is today Trafalgar Square. The crowd’s gasp as the axe severed his neck was a sound no one ever forgot. The kings and queens who followed him were mindful of it too. When Charles’s son, James II, suspended Parliament again, the British sent him packing, and gave the crown to William and Mary.

The lesson, however, was largely a matter of custom. During the 18th century, the king’s ministers knew how to get along with Parliament, but the law did not require them to. British monarchs still had enormous powers, and Parliament usually did what they wanted. Although it was Parliament, not George III, that sparked the American Revolution by taxing the colonists without their consent, Americans placed most of the blame on the king’s ministers, and on the king himself.

Protecting the legislature

When Americans started debating what sort of government they wanted for the United States, they knew they needed an executive with some of the vigor that they associated with a monarchy. What they had in mind, however, was different from the British crown. The monarch, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the “Federalist” essays, was a “perpetual magistrate,” who had powers that were limited only by whatever rules he or she chose to observe.

The newly created role of U.S. president, by contrast, had clearly defined powers under the Constitution, as did Congress. Crucially, the power to summon or dismiss Congress belonged to the House of Representatives and the Senate, which together decided when to convene and when to adjourn. The position of president, in other words, was intentionally designed without the authority to reproduce the 11-year tyranny of King Charles – or the five-week suspension of Queen Elizabeth II and her current prime minister.

Eliga Gould, Professor of History, University of New Hampshire

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Five types of gun laws the Founding Fathers loved

Were muskets in 1777 better regulated than assault rifles in 2017?
Jana Shea/Shutterstock.com

Saul Cornell, Fordham University

The Second Amendment is one of the most frequently cited provisions in the American Constitution, but also one of the most poorly understood.

The 27 words that constitute the Second Amendment seem to baffle modern Americans on both the left and right.

Ironically, those on both ends of our contemporary political spectrum cast the Second Amendment as a barrier to robust gun regulation. Gun rights supporters – mostly, but not exclusively, on the right – seem to believe that the Second Amendment prohibits many forms of gun regulation. On the left, frustration with the lack of progress on modern gun control leads to periodic calls for the amendment’s repeal.

Both of these beliefs ignore an irrefutable historical truth. The framers and adopters of the Second Amendment were generally ardent supporters of the idea of well-regulated liberty. Without strong governments and effective laws, they believed, liberty inevitably degenerated into licentiousness and eventually anarchy. Diligent students of history, particularly Roman history, the Federalists who wrote the Constitution realized that tyranny more often resulted from anarchy, not strong government.

I have been researching and writing about the history of gun regulation and the Second Amendment for the past two decades. When I began this research, most people assumed that regulation was a relatively recent phenomenon, something associated with the rise of big government in the modern era. Actually, while the founding generation certainly esteemed the idea of an armed population, they were also ardent supporters of gun regulations.

Consider these five categories of gun laws that the Founders endorsed.

#1: Registration

Today American gun rights advocates typically oppose any form of registration – even though such schemes are common in every other industrial democracy – and typically argue that registration violates the Second Amendment. This claim is also hard to square with the history of the nation’s founding. All of the colonies – apart from Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania, the one colony in which religious pacifists blocked the creation of a militia – enrolled local citizens, white men between the ages of 16-60 in state-regulated militias. The colonies and then the newly independent states kept track of these privately owned weapons required for militia service. Men could be fined if they reported to a muster without a well-maintained weapon in working condition.

#2: Public carry

The modern gun rights movement has aggressively pursued the goal of expanding the right to carry firearms in public.

The American colonies inherited a variety of restrictions that evolved under English Common Law. In 18th-century England, armed travel was limited to a few well-defined occasions such as assisting justices of the peace and constables. Members of the upper classes also had a limited exception to travel with arms. Concealable weapons such as handguns were subject to even more stringent restrictions. The city of London banned public carry of these weapons entirely.

The American Revolution did not sweep away English common law. In fact, most colonies adopted common law as it had been interpreted in the colonies prior to independence, including the ban on traveling armed in populated areas. Thus, there was no general right of armed travel when the Second Amendment was adopted, and certainly no right to travel with concealed weapons. Such a right first emerged in the United States in the slave South decades after the Second Amendment was adopted. The market revolution of the early 19th century made cheap and reliable hand guns readily available. Southern murder rates soared as a result.

In other parts of the nation, the traditional English restrictions on traveling armed persisted with one important change. American law recognized an exception to this prohibition for individuals who had a good cause to fear an imminent threat. Nonetheless, by the end of the century, prohibiting public carry was the legal norm, not the exception.

#3: Stand-your-ground laws

Under traditional English common law, one had a duty to retreat, not stand your ground. Deadly force was justified only if no other alternative was possible. One had to retreat, until retreat was no longer possible, before killing an aggressor.

The use of deadly force was justified only in the home, where retreat was not required under the so-called castle doctrine, or the idea that “a man’s home is his castle.” The emergence of a more aggressive view of the right of self-defense in public, standing your ground, emerged slowly in the decades after the Civil War.

#4: Safe storage laws

Although some gun rights advocates attempt to demonize government power, it is important to recognize that one of the most important rights citizens enjoy is the freedom to elect representatives who can enact laws to promote health and public safety. This is the foundation for the idea of ordered liberty. The regulation of gun powder and firearms arises from an exercise of this basic liberty.

In 1786, Boston acted on this legal principle, prohibiting the storage of a loaded firearm in any domestic dwelling in the city. Guns had to be kept unloaded, a practice that made sense since the black powder used in firearms in this period was corrosive. Loaded guns also posed a particular hazard in cases of fire because they might discharge and injure innocent bystanders and those fighting fires.

#5: Loyalty oaths

One of the most common claims one hears in the modern Second Amendment debate is the assertion that the Founders included this provision in the Constitution to make possible a right of revolution. But this claim, too, rests on a serious misunderstanding of the role the right to bear arms played in American constitutional theory.

In fact, the Founders engaged in large-scale disarmament of the civilian population during the American Revolution. The right to bear arms was conditional on swearing a loyalty oath to the government. Individuals who refused to swear such an oath were disarmed.

The notion that the Second Amendment was understood to protect a right to take up arms against the government is absurd. Indeed, the Constitution itself defines such an act as treason.

Gun regulation and gun ownership have always existed side by side in American history. The Second Amendment poses no obstacle to enacting sensible gun laws. The failure to do so is not the Constitution’s fault; it is ours.

Saul Cornell, Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History, Fordham University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.