Who Killed the Constitution?
by Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Kevin R.C. Gutzman
Crown Forum, 272 pages, $25.95

Maybe you didn’t know the Constitution was dead; hence, this timely announcement from these two authors: “It died a long time ago.” And they are unsparing of those who killed it—on the left, on the right, and everywhere in between. Congress, the courts, and the presidency have put it to rest. Woods and Gutzman—a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and an associate professor of American history at Western Connecticut State University, respectively—should know. Individually, they wrote The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (Woods) and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution (Gutzman). In this book they examine what they call the “dirty dozen,” twelve major instances where the federal government has crossed constitutional lines without restraint. So, of what good is the Constitution now? Not much, except as “a useful bludgeon to employ against government power grabs.” What’s to be done? Again, not much, but “by calling attention to what the Constitution really says, we can alert people to just how consistently and dramatically their fundamental law has been betrayed.”

—Russell E. Saltzman