Asa Hutchinson Quotes
As we approached our work, my colleagues and I looked to the U.S. Constitution for guidance. It states, 'No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.' No person, no exceptions.
Hutchinson, Asa. "Opening Presentation of the House Managers." Congressional Record, U.S. Government Printing Office, 14 Jan. 1999.
The call for individual liberty and the right of personal property by clergy is surprising to many. This Cahier was the consensus of the Clergy of Blois in 1789. There were cahiers of several provinces of France—some by the clergy, some by the nobles. What is fascinating is the emergence of many of the pre-Revolutionary French concepts. The example of the American revolution and its principles was known throughout the educated classes of France.
The people who raise the issue do not claim that property rights are not human rights. They do analyze different rights to priorities. For example, most people would view the right to life as more important than the right to travel. Unfortunately rights sometimes come into conflict. What Rand calls the “dichotomy” is the prioritizing of property fights as lower than some other rights such as the right to life. Those people would argue that a businessman should not have a facility that is a public hazard and interfere with his property rights to protect the lives of the public who might encounter the hazard.
He was considered Massachusetts’ greatest Colonial orator.
Jefferson and some of the other Founding Fathers saw the American experiment as having implications for the whole world. To Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence was not just for Americans but ideally for all mankind.
Hayward claimed that Wilson was the first American President who ever criticized the American Constitution. Many do not agree as Madison and Jefferson in part, along with most other Americans, found the Constitution so wanting that it was ratified only on condition of the passage of the Bill of Rights. Jackson, was distressed by the limitations on the President and many others had their objections, but Wilson, before he became a politician was a prominent academic political scientist and wrote voluminously and had an intellectual following so his criticism was not considered so “political” as others.
Note the use of the phrase “against the government.” One of the unique aspects of the American Constitution and The Bill of Rights is that the government is considered a potential and even probable infringer on the liberties of the people. It is almost as though the government was the potential enemy. Modern libertarians state this very explicitly and it is ever present in the views of both the right and left wings of American politics. Most centrists recoil at the thought that some citizens see the government as the enemy, but even in America there have been times where the government has infringed on the rights of citizens only to have the courts or future administrations and Congresses correct the error.
See {587703} for a similar statement by a Supreme Court Justice.
This is probably the first known use of the Bill of Rights phrase in the English language. For the earliest American use, see Edward Rutledge.
William Asa Hutchinson II (/ˈeɪsə/, AY-sə) is an American politician serving as the 46th and current Governor of Arkansas since 2015. A member of the Republican Party, he previously was the U.S. Attorney for the Fort Smith-based Western District of Arkansas (1982–1985), U.S. Representative for Arkansas's 3rd congressional district (1997–2001), Administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (2001–2003) and the first Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security at the United States Department of Homeland Security (2003–2005).
