First Monday in October – Three Days Late

 

They’re back and, as usual, the return to active duty of the United States Supreme Court reminds me of the first paragraphs of Dickens’ Bleak House.

“. . . Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth . . .Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, amoung green aits and meadows; fog down the river . . . The raw afternoon is the rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition with which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth.”

Just change the month and the name of the court and you get a feel for the sense of dread that begins each year at this time as the United States Supreme Court gets ready to do the corporations’ business.

But, first up, this year is the First Amendment and even the Roberts Court is hesitant to mess with that. And, as common with First Amendment cases, the speech at issue was odious. The little, tiny, Phelps “church” of Topeka, Kansas, the members of which appear to consist of exactly one extended family, arranged for seven of the family to protest at the funeral of a Marine killed in Iraq. He was killed, according to these alleged Christians, because the United States is soft on homosexuality.

If that makes no sense to you, you are sane.

Anyway, the father of the dead Marine, Albert Snyder,  sued the Phelps family church for intentional infliction of emotional distress, a tort that requires outrageous conduct. The “church” members had picketed his son’s funeral carrying obnoxious signs and later posted on their website an “epic” which accused the Snyders of raising their son “for the devil.” Keep in mind that their son was not homosexual, but because we’re soft on gays in this country, the Snyders were in league with the Devil when they raised their son and that’s why he got killed.  Then there were the signs: “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” “You’re Going to Hell,” and “God Hates Fags”.

To call such ideas stupid is to give them a dignity to which they are not entitled. The news media have competed , trying to find an appropriate word: “odious”, “contemptibile”, “disgusting”, are a few I’ve read, but stupid fits better.

The Father won at trial but a federal appellate court took his jury verdict away from him, determining that the First Amendment protected the speech of the church members. For reasons that mystified most observers, the Supreme Court accepted the case and heard oral argument this week.

The oral argument was a sorry affair, primarily due to the inexperienced advocates for both sides. One perceptive observer said it reminded him of the 1945 World Series when both teams were so depleted by WWII that sportswriter Warren Brown said, “I don’t think either one of them can win it.” Worse, the daughter of the church’s founder and patriarch argued for the church. It’s never a good idea for a lawyer that close to a case to handle it. If your spouse is a brain surgeon and you have a brain tumor, it’s probably best for her not to do the surgery. So too with lawyers.

Look for the Court to affirm the “church’s” victory. Nothing in the First Amendment’s free speech clause exempts from its coverage political speech at a funeral.

Nor does it outlaw stupid speech.

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The link above is to the blog of Garrett Epps. If you have time to regularly read only one blog about legal affairs, read his; skip mine.

The Supreme Court’s Campaign Finance Decision

After making us wait for months, the Supreme Court did exactly what almost all observers predicted, ruling in a 5-4 split decision that corporations can spend as much money as they want in political campaigns. Not surprisingly, the opinion got a lot of news coverage, and, more surprising, a visible reaction from Justice Alito when President Obama lambasted the opinion during the State of the Union speech. (Frank Rich of the New York Times referred to Alito’s “delicate sensibilities.”)

2010 State of the Union Message

Speculating about what the Court does behind its closed doors is like metaphysical conjecture: Nobody knows for sure.

But, like metaphysical speculation, it can be fun to guess. For instance, why did the Chief Justice, Justice Thomas, and Justice Scalia feel a need to write separately, adding pages and pages to Justice Kennedy’s already long majority opinion? The answer almost certainly lies in their knowledge that the majority opinion is a breathtaking exercise in judicial activism. These are the justices who falsely proclaim their judicial modesty, but in this case go far out of their way to decide the constitutional issue on the broadest basis possible.

To summarize, they wrote, “We had to decide this case as broadly as possible because we had to.” And, yes, that is a tautology. On the merits, the majority said, “Money is speech, corporations are people; therefore, corporate money gets First Amendment protection.”  Seriously. That is the Readers’ Digest version of the holding. (I don’t know why they don’t put me on the Court. I don’t use nearly as many words to get to a result. “Omit needless words,” said Professor Strunk.)

Justice O'Connor

And the only member of the majority who chose not to write, Justice Alito, was the one visibly offended when the President took the Court to task for upending American political campaigns. In the realm of fascinating speculation must go, “What does Sandra Day O’Connor think of her replacement (Alito) and does she regret resigning from the Court?” I’m guessing the answers are, “not much” and “yes.”

Less speculation is required about the dissent. As the senior member of the dissenting minority, Justice Stevens assigned the writing of the dissent to himself. He probably will retire at the end of this Term and the dissent may be the last opinion on a major issue that Stevens writes. Moreover, he clearly has the better legal argument, so knows that his opinion will one day — when good political sense again commands a majority of the Court — be the law of the land. Dissenting opinions are often written for the future, the author assuming that his view will prevail eventually.

Justice Stevens was more persuasive than Justice Kennedy for another reason: None of the dissenters felt a need to write separately. In that regard, Stevens is better than Chief Justice Roberts at keeping his troops in line.

Being Chief Justice is like herding cats. Unless you are a Border Collie, there is little hope. We haven’t really had a Chief Justice since Earl Warren who was much good at it. In fact, the Chief Justice gave us a clue about the frustrations of the job recently. During an oral argument this month, Solicitor General Elena Kagan inadvertently called Justice Scalia, “Mr. Chief Justice.” She immediately caught the mistake and said to Scalia, “I didn’t mean to promote you.” The Chief Justice jumped in, “I’m glad someone thinks of it as a promotion.”  I imagine he’s having a hard time with his brethren.

He needs some Border Collies.

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For a thoughtful, serious analysis of the President’s words about the opinion and Justice Alito’s response, look at this from SCOTUSblog.  Here is the opinion itself, all 183 pages of it.

Footnotes in American History – Corporations are Just Like You and Me, only with More Money

This continues our series of footnotes in American history, footnotes we imagine will appear one day in the future when the definitive history of our time is written. Based on this week’s opinion of the United States Supreme Court in the campaign finance case, this footnote will appear in the Oxford-Kindle History of America series.   The case turned out exactly as the cats and I predicted back in September, a 5-4 win for corporations.

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Ftnt. 43

The Supreme Court, in 2010, announced its 5-4 decision in the case of Citizens United. The Court held, in that case, that corporations had exactly the same free speech rights as real people.

Because corporations, like regular people, had First Amendment rights to run for political office and become judges, corporations soon dispensed with the subterfuge of buying judges and politicians and began running for office themselves. That is what comes of anthropomorphizing corporations. Due to the trillions of dollars available to the largest corporations, real humans could not compete and corporations, exercising their god-given First Amendment rights, took over America’s entire government. By the end of the Obama Administration in 2016, hardly any real people were left in government and the presidential election that year pitted the Bank of America against Exxon-Mobil. The election was close and eventually came down to a few disputed votes in Florida. The Supreme Court was called upon to choose the new president. Here, from ancient archives, is a copy of the news story that ran in the New York Times ( a defunct “newspaper” corporation. Historians are unsure what  “newspapers” were, but they seem to have been “paper” based.)

The New President

Dateline  2010 – Washington D.C.

Supreme Court Chief Justice NBC announced the decision of the Supreme Court today in the contested presidential election between Bank of America and Exxon-Mobil. The Bank of America wins and will become the Nation’s 45th president. Speaking on behalf of the president-elect, Simon Toady – corporate spokesman for the Bank of America — said that the bank was delighted with the result and looked forward to four years of record-breaking profits. “Our shareholders are going to see their stocks go through the roof! And the bonuses!” he announced happily. Toady said the new president would immediately introduce legislation requiring all Americans to deposit all their money in the Bank of America. He also announced that all Americans would be required to carry credit cards issued by the Bank of America and that their credit card fees would be raised to pay for the inauguration.

Simon Legree, spokesman for Exxon-Mobil, said, “We congratulate the Bank of America on its win. But what goes around, comes around and corporations live forever. We’ll get our chance at the presidency and, when we do, look for the price of gasoline to go through the ceiling. We take care of our shareholders!”

The 2016 Loser

The Supreme Court’s decision relied heavily on its earlier case of Bush v. Gore, the first time in the Nation’s history that the Supreme Court elected a president. That case was decided in the olden times of 2000, before the Court realized that corporations had exactly the same First Amendment rights as regular persons, which meant that corporations could run for office and become judges. Chief Justice NBC wrote the Court’s opinion and was joined by Justices Microsoft, Verizon, Goldman-Sachs, Wal-Mart, Toyota, China First, and Scalia (the last remaining human on the Court). Justice AFL-CIO dissented but, as the majority opinion noted, “Nobody pays any attention to unions anymore.”

In a related matter, the Chief Justice announced that Justice AFL-CIO would shortly leave the Court. “We had a higher bid from Blue-Cross for that seat,” said the Chief Justice.

In other political news of the day, House speaker Nancy Pelosi announced her retirement. She will be replaced by JP Morgan Chase Corporation which announced that it would fiercely oppose the new president’s attempt to “steal all our deposits.” Political analysts doubted that the new Speaker’s efforts would amount to much since Bank of America’s stocks went up 500% on the announcement of the Supreme Court’s decision. Spokesman Toady said, “The stock market will decide what is best for America, not ordinary citizens or some backwater corporation like JP Morgan Chase.”

Analysts said the election results ensured that Americans would, once again, be deprived of health care reform.

Return from Big Ditch

Returning to the work-a-day world from the Grand Canyon is like reading a Dan Brown novel after watching Hamlet.

But, here I am, so I had better make the best of it.

I had intended to regale you with an analysis of the “dog-fighting” case argued last week in the Supreme Court but Dahlia Lithwick of Slate beat me to it and did it better than I could. Read it here and enjoy laughing.  Not much suspense in how that case is going to turn out.

And, from the satiric Onion, comes this photo along with the headline that the Supreme Court has been ordered to remove the tip jars from its bench.  And the humorous faux news that Justice Sotomayor did not escape jury duty.

And the real news that the Supreme Court was not interested in the glass dildo case.  Really.

Freedom of Speech, Corporations, and Cats – Part II

Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor

Well, I was wrong and am happy to admit it.  For the first time — at least as far as I know — a justice of the United States Supreme Court publicly admitted  that treating corporations like people was an invention of courts and may have been a mistake.  In what was only her second question from the Supreme Court bench, Justice Sotomayor said,

Because what you are suggesting is that the courts who created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons, and there could be an argument made that that was the Court’s error to start with, not Austin or McConnell, but the fact that the Court imbued a creature of State law with human characteristics.

She was talking to Theodore Olson who was arguing on behalf of one such corporation, which claims to be entitled to exactly the same constitutional right to free speech that you and I have.

And, although they didn’t go as far as Justice Sotomayor, both Justices Stevens and Ginsburg questioned Olson about why corporations should get the same First Amendment treatment as real people. Justice Ginsburg began,

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Mr. Olson, are you taking the position that there is no difference in the First Amendment rights of an individual? A corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights. So is there any distinction that Congress could draw between corporations and natural human beings for purposes of campaign finance?

That question occurs at page 4 of the transcript of the oral argument.  By page 7, Olson still had not answered the question and Justice Stevens weighed in,

JUSTICE STEVENS: Mr. Olson — Mr. Olson, would you answer Justice Ginsburg’s question yes or no? Can the — leaving aside foreign investors, can the -can — does the First Amendment permit any distinction between corporate speakers and individual speakers?

The Justices with Various Supernumeraries

Theodore Olson, you should know, is a fine lawyer and one who appears before the Supreme Court regularly.  He is a former Solicitor General of the United States.  He knows how to answer questions for which there are answers.  Instead, he continued to dodge and weave.  Here is the rest of the exchange:

MR. OLSON: I am not — I’m not aware of a case that just –
JUSTICE STEVENS: I am not asking you that. I meant in your view does it permit that distinction?
MR. OLSON: My view is based upon the decisions of this Court and my view would be that unless there is a compelling governmental interest and a narrowly –
JUSTICE STEVENS: But if there is a compelling government — can there be any case in which there is a different treatment of corporations and individuals in your judgment?
MR. OLSON: I would not rule that out, Justice Stevens. I mean, there may be. I can’t imagine all of the infinite varieties of potential problems that might exist, but — but we would eventually come back to the narrow tailoring problem anyway.

Olson never answered the question.

Not that it matters much.  The activists on the Court (Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alitio) will combine with Justice Kennedy to rule that corporations are entitled to the same First Amendment rights that you are.  The fact that you lack the money to buy yourself a congressmen while Fortune 500 companies don’t, will matter not a whit to them.  By a decision of 5-4 the Court is going to rule that no limit can be placed on the ability of a corporation to donate money to political candidates.  That will remain the law until a different Court rules that money and speech are not the same.

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You can read the transcript of the argument here or you can listen to it here.

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UPDATE

Being a humble, modest person I hardly ever note when some august, prestigious publication takes note of some humble, modest observation I have made.  However, when the Wall Street Journal – days after my post on the subject – also notes Justice Sotomayor’s question and ponders its long term consequences, I am gratified.  If the Wall Street Journal is worried,  there is hope.

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ANOTHER UPDATE

We’re on a roll here at the Golden State. Now Steven Colbert is on the train with us.

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Still Another Update

The Court ruled exactly as predicted in this post. Here is the blog post about the ruling.

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Somehow or the other, my copyright notice appears on the photographs above.  That is wrong.  They are the official photographs of the Supreme Court and no one would ever allow me into the Supreme Court building with a camera!

Freedom of Speech, Corporations, and Cats

No. 5 is the useless cat clavicle - Adapted from: An Atlas of Cat Anatomy. Field - Taylor

The law moves — sometimes forward, often sideways, and frequently backwards — by means of written court decisions.  Theoretically, each decision is based on earlier decisions that supposedly control the result.  Lawyers refer to this as “relying on precedent” and, when counseling clients, use it to predict what will happen if a particular client takes a particular course of action.  Litigating lawyers search for earlier cases that will provide a rule of decision for their current case.  Judges look for precedent either to help them decide a particular case or to justify their decision after they’ve made it.

Thus the common law trudges along.  Justice Holmes once remarked that the process is much like the clavicle bone in cats:

Precedents survive like the clavicle in the cat, long after the use they once served is at an end, and the reason for them has been forgotten, the result of following them must often be failure and confusion. . . .

So it is with the pleasant little fiction that a corporation is a person.  The law, for more than a century now, requires that corporations be treated as though they are persons.  If you ever sit on a jury in a case involving a corporation versus a real person, the judge will command you to treat the corporation just exactly as you would as if it were a living, breathing person.

This is nonsense, of course. Corporations don’t breathe, they don’t eat, they don’t love, they don’t cry, and they don’t die.  They live forever and many of them will make more money today than you will make in the rest of your life. Why these financial behemoths with more money and power than most governments should get the same treatment from the law as you may seem a mystery.  (Actually, they get better treatment than you do.  They hire the best lawyers, the best accountants, and the best politicians.  They can fire you any time at all, even though you have spent a lifetime serving them.  They don’t even need a reason to lay off thousands of hard-working people at a time.  And when they do, their stock value usually goes up. We have a death penalty for real people who run seriously afoul of the law, but when did you ever hear of a court passing a death sentence on a corporation?)

The reason for this legal fiction lies in the shadows of the industrial revolution and the Supreme Court’s 19th Century infatuation with railroads.  In what was probably his worst mistake as president, Abraham Lincoln — a railroad lawyer himself — appointed Stephen J. Field to the Supreme Court.  Field, before he went senile, several years before he left the Court, was a powerful, persuasive advocate for the railroads and other industrial corporations.  Field — or maybe it was some other justice, no one knows for sure — ran across an obscure law review article by an obscure and incompetent law professor which cited several old cases from England for the proposition that corporations must be treated as natural persons. But the law professor was wrong.  Those old cases held nothing of the sort; the law professor made it all up.

But that was good enough for Field and the majority of the United States Supreme Court and it remains good enough today. Corporations are people, just like you and me.

Which is why the arguments scheduled for tomorrow in the Supreme Court, in the case ostensibly about the anti-Hillary Clinton campaign movie, are going to be very interesting.  A corporation, formed for no other reason, is going to argue that it should be treated just like real people when it comes to giving money to politicians for their campaigns.  They will say that, if natural people have a constitutional right to free speech, which includes giving money to politicians with whom you agree, they ought to get to do it too.  They will ask the Supreme Court to overturn two precedents which say otherwise and at least four of the judicial activists on the Court (Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts) are likely to agree.

You can listen to the arguments as soon as they conclude.  We’ll return to this issue after the arguments.

But no one, not a one lawyer nor one Justice, will so much as hint that the very idea of treating corporations just like people is silly.

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Read Part II of this post here.

The Yoo Memos

There is nothing unusual about a sycophant telling the boss or the teacher exactly what he thinks the boss or the teacher wants to hear.  We’ve all known them, at school or at work or at a function attended by some luminary or celebrity.  Too weak in their own selves, they curry favor with those they regard, rightly or wrongly, as authority figures.

We’ve been reminded recently of this fact of life with the release of some of the post 9/11 legal memoranda written by John Yoo, late of the Justice Department and now a law professor at UC Berkeley.  Yoo was one author of the memos to President Bush — and, more to the point, probably Vice-president Cheney — in which Professor Yoo said that the President of the United States can suspend provisions of the Constitution of the United States or any statute if the country is at war.  This is the same John Yoo who wrote a lengthy memorandum concluding — basically — that the United States doesn’t torture because nothing the United States does is torture.

Because the Nation has a strong Constitution, you can read the Yoo memos here, but only if you have a strong constitution.  I don’t recommend them for anyone in frail health or with a low “outrage quotient.”

Yoo doesn’t agree.

After reading the memos, this lawyer could not decide which was more astonishing, the absurdity of the conclusions or the incompetence of the lawyering.

Reading the Yoo memos you come away with an abiding conviction that he understands neither our Republic of ordered liberties nor this from the poet Wendell Berry:

You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
They will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
“I am not ashamed.” A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will begin
his evening flight from the hilltop.

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For a competent law professor’s view of the memos, here is Brian Tamanaha.

Strangely, the conservative law professors’ blog has had little to say other than Professor Orin Kerr speculating about what we still don’t know about other memos of the time.

Nor have the conservative law professors yet given us their take on this, based on a report from the International Red Cross, which seems to remove any remaining doubt that the United States of America tortured several people, probably on the orders of senior officials and with the “legal” blessing of Justice Department lawyers.

Navajo Nation v. The U.S. Forest Service — Update

As we noted the last time we blogged ( here and here) about this important religious freedom case, in which a majority of the judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held that defiling the San Francisco Peaks of Arizona wouldn’t cause any harm to the people who believe the Peaks are sacred, we noted that the Native American tribes involved in the case have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case. (No one has the automatic right to take a case to the Supreme Court and the Court hears only about 2% of the cases that it is asked to hear.)

Since we last blogged. several religious organizations have joined in asking the Supreme Court to take the case. Their “Friends of the Court” briefs make for interesting reading. One grouping of Native American tribes take the time to list just a few of the mountains around the world considered sacred by non-Native Americans.

The response to the requests for the Court to take the case, from the Forest Service and from the owners of the ski area, was first due February 9, 2009 but has now been extended by the Court twice and is now due on April 9th. It is not a stretch to imagine that the Forest Service, with a new boss in the form of President Obama, is reviewing its position in the case. The Forest Service could reverse itself, ask the Court to take the case and overrule its victory in the 9th Circuit. That would leave only the owners of the ski area asking the Supreme Court to let the lower court’s decision stand.

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UPDATE: The Supreme Court granted yet another extension to the government and the ski slope operators to respond to the Tribes’ Petition for Certorari, now due May 8 2009.

Religion in American Law and Politics, Part IV

I’ve been taken to task for beginning this series about Religion in American law and politics without first disclosing the true rule of law about religion laid down by the First Amendment. After some thought I decided two things: first, I should disclose, as succinctly as possible, that rule; and, second I should do it in as few words as possible. That led me to Walter Dellinger’s marvelous “Five Minute Constitutional Law” course. Here, in its entirety, is Professor Dellinger’s statement of the Religion Rule:

Establishment of religion is really simple: government prayer, bad; private prayer, good. (The only hard cases come when a citizen uses government property or public funds for religious purposes, and the facts make it difficult to tell whether it’s the government or the private citizen actually making the religious choice.)

There you have it. But please, stay tuned for all the other great stuff that is coming. Abraham Lincoln is next and we’ll eventually get all the way up to this year’s Supreme Court term which begins next Monday. We’ll end with a discussion about whether the United States is a “Christian Nation” or not.

Religion and American Law and Politics, Part III

We ended the last post in this series with Thomas Jefferson suggesting to James Madison that they should devoutly pray for Patrick Henry’s death.  This tongue-in-cheek comment by Jefferson reflected his and Madison’s frustration with Henry’s attempts to tax for religious education and to enshrine a particular religion as the state religion of Virginia.  They did not want a State religion in America. 

Which brings us to the Founding Fathers.  What were their religious views?  As we progress through this survey please remember two things: first, this is a lowly blog, not a detailed treatise on American history; Second, the Founding Fathers were practical politicians.  As practical politicians they were not above using religion and public professions of religion in order to achieve and exercise power.  Many presidents and other political leaders, knowing that most of the population either is or professes to be religious, use that knowledge for practical ends.  President Kennedy frequently attended church during his presidency; yet when one of his sisters – who presumably knew him well – was introduced to an author who proposed to write a book about Kennedy’s religious beliefs, she remarked, “That will be a very short book.

About half of the Founding Fathers were nominally Episcopalian or Anglican.  Most of the rest were Protestants of one kind or another. But all were children of the Enlightenment which enshrined reason over all else. Jefferson, Franklin and Madison were Deists who believed in a single God operating in the world through providence.  They accepted Jesus as a great moral teacher but did not believe he was the Son of God.  In that sense, they were not even nominally Christians.  With only months left to live Franklin wrote a letter in which he said that he doubted the divinity of Jesus but added, “. . .though it is a question I do not dogmatize on, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.”

Jefferson was more explicit, once spending several evenings in the White House scissoring out of his copy of the New Testament everything he found to be supernatural.  Of the Holy Trinity he wrote, “Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them, and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity.  It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves priests of Jesus.”

George Washington was a practical man as well.  He wrote, “And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.”  That was an idea that all the Founders seem to have held; that religion is necessary to instruct the populace in morality and to hold together a functioning society.  None were above using public religious ideas to advance their causes even if their personal beliefs were less religious.  One scholar of whom we will hear more has concluded that Washington “appears to have thought religion a useful tool in leading his troops and later, his nation.” [Jon Meacham in American Gospel, p-77.]

Nor is it beyond reason to suspect that Jefferson was also using religion as a tool when he wrote in the Declaration of Independence that the new nation was going to assume among the powers of the earth, “. . .the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them. . . .”  Jefferson – and Franklin and John Adams who reviewed and made changes to Jefferson’s draft – may have had a different idea of God than many of his contemporaries and most Americans since have thought.  One of the “Founding Fathers” of the Enlightenment which so heavily influenced all the Founding Fathers of the United States was Baruch de Spinoza.  Spinoza, a pantheist, held that Nature and God are one and the same.  No white flowing bearded God existed for Spinoza; there was only Nature.  So when Jefferson wrote about the laws of Nature and Nature’s God he may have been going as far as he dared in espousing his own personal religious belief which was far closer to Spinoza’s philosophy than anyone noticed.  Evocations of God are a common thread throughout our political history and Jefferson and the other founders were not above such practical politics.

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About the two paintings.  The first is the committee of five, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Livingston, and Sherman presenting the draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress painted by John Trumbull.  The second painting, by Howard Chandler Christy, is a representation of the signing of the Constitution.  Seated in the center of the portrait are Hamilton, Franklin and Madison.  Washington, well you don’t me to tell you which one is Washington.