President Bush is fond of reminding Americans of his devotion to
the rule of law. On May 3, 2002, he told an audience that he
“always” lectures foreign leaders “about the need for there to
be rule of law … and our country is a shining example of that.”
Unfortunately, the current U.S. “rule of law” is a parody of
what the Founding Fathers understood by that term. Early
Americans venerated the law and saw it as the key to
safeguarding their freedom. Thomas Paine wrote in 1776 that “in
America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King
is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there
ought to be no other.” In 1780, the Massachusetts Bill of Rights
stated as its goal the establishment of a “government of laws
and not of men.” John Phillip Reid, in his unrecognized classic
1986 study, noted, “It is sometimes assumed by legal scholars
that law was command during the era of the American Revolution,
but that is an error. To a remarkable extent law even in the
eighteenth century was still