Balkinization  

Friday, June 09, 2023

A Confession of Error

Richard Primus

In 2018, in a law-review article titled "The Essential Characteristic:" Enumerated Powers and the Bank of the United States, I wrote that in Congress's 1791 debate over creating the Bank, New Jersey Representative Elias Boudinot read the Constitution's Preamble as a grant of powers, such that Congress was authorized to charter the Bank if doing so would advance the ends of government mentioned in the Preamble, even if nothing in the Constitution's subsequent Articles specifically authorized it to do so.  (See 117 Michigan Law Review 415, 463.)  This week I am re-reading the relevant original sources, and I have concluded that I misread Boudinot's argument.  I now think that he did not make the argument about the Preamble that I attributed to him in 2018.

I still believe that the more general argument I was making in my 2018 article is correct.  That argument was that several members of Congress argued that Congress's power to charter the Bank did not depend on any specific enumerated power--that is, that Congress could at least sometimes legislate on bases other than that of textually specified grants of power, and that chartering the Bank was one of those times.  That argument did not rest on my claim about Boudinot's reading of the Preamble alone, and it remains the case that members of Congress did make non-enumerated-power arguments for the Bank, including arguments from the Preamble.  But I should not have included this argument that I attributed to Boudinot among the evidence.  That was error.  





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