8 The Core Legislative Powers of Taxing and Lawmaking

This chapter reviews modern American conceptions of the separation of powers and much of the architecture of the administrative state that grew out of history long before the framers gathered in Philadelphia. It analyzes the essential idea that the fundamental rights of life, liberty, and property could not be disturbed except by the consent of the people, meaning the passage of laws by representatives of the people. It also explores the exclusively legislative character of the power to tax and the power to make law binding on persons within the realm as the foundation stone of all separation-of-powers law. The chapter recounts the beginnings of constitutional government that arose when Parliament won control over the powers to tax, spend, and borrow. It details the process of the constitutional government that began with Magna Carta and was completed by the end of the seventeenth century, a full hundred years before the Constitutional Convention.