My acknowledgment here of those who fortified this work is necessarily inadequate. Many friends and colleagues have helped me solidify the arguments advanced in this book. Some displayed great patience and tolerance as it dominated my work and influenced theirs, some challenged its conclusions and compelled me to strengthen my arguments, and some participated in its actual construction.
The thesis of this work was originally suggested to me by my ideological colleague, Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. Lew’s leadership of the Mises Institute has produced some of the finest scholarship on liberty in the United States today, and I was thrilled to take his idea and see where the research would lead us. For the germ of an idea, and for unwavering friendship and support, I am in Lew’s debt.
My executive assistant at the Fox News Channel, Mary Kate Cribbin, and my personal producer at Fox, Michael Daniels, himself a talented lawyer, patiently and happily tolerated the endless diversions and schedule changes caused by my efforts to write this book. I am deeply grateful to them.
My team of tireless researchers labored very long and often tedious hours as we examined the law and verified the facts in the hundreds of constitutional episodes discussed in this book. Alexander Yarbrough, Ryan Merola, and Alfred Falzone, III were the able law students who worked as a team headed by my chief researcher, Randal John Meyer. Under Randal’s superb work ethic and able leadership of his fellow students, they all continued to keep me very busy with mountains of finely distilled research to review.
My colleagues at Fox, with whom I share professional goals and aspirations, have always been a source of strength at providing the sounding boards needed to anticipate the reaction of many of my controversial views. Executive Vice President Bill Shine, Vice President and General Counsel Dianne Brandi, Vice President Suzanne Scott, my former Executive Producer at Fox and now a CNBC superstar producer Gary Schreier, Charles Gasparino who is the best investigative journalist in our business, and my other dear on-air colleagues, David Asman, Bret Baier, Bill Hemmer, Elizabeth MacDonald, Geraldo Rivera, Shepard Smith, Chris Stirewalt, Stewart Varney, and Juan Williams have all directly or indirectly encouraged this work.
Among my most effective cheerleaders is my editor at Thomas Nelson, and now HarperCollins, Kristen Parrish. This is my ninth book to be filtered through Kristen’s gentle but firm hands. She is the incarnation of patience.
My new colleagues at Brooklyn Law School have given me the intellectual sustenance and professional platform to address this undertaking and its companion work teaching constitutional jurisprudence to very bright law students. At some point I discussed much of this work with my respected academic colleagues in constitutional theory, Professors William Araiza, Joel Gora, Susan Herman, and Nelson Tebbe. None of these great scholars agree with all my views, yet all of them continue to encourage all my work.
My happy teaching at Brooklyn would never have come about but for the rejuvenation of my college friendship with the now legal powerhouse who is Brooklyn’s new Dean, Nicholas Allard. Nick channeled much of his boundless energy in support of my intellectual passion—examining the behavior of the government for bright future lawyers through the prisms of the Natural Law and the Constitution. His friendship and support and our new professional collaboration have been a gift.
I am indebted to Sen. Rand Paul, who took the time to read an early draft of this book and to make serious constructive criticisms. He is a champion of personal liberty who is currently the U.S. Senate’s greatest defender of the Constitution. I am personally honored and deeply grateful that he has written the foreword to this work.
Of course, my work would have been known to only a few without the now nearly seventeen-year platform that my boss at the Fox News Channel, Roger Ailes, has given me. Roger is a giant and a genius and a man of endless generosity and understanding, whose faith in me has changed my life for the good, beyond my wildest dreams; and those life changes made this book—like its predecessors—possible. Quite simply, I love Roger; even when he takes me to the Fox News woodshed.
Yet, my happy dreams turned dark last year when Jim Sheil, my alter ego to whose memory this book is dedicated, died suddenly on March 19th 2013, as we were working on this book. Jim and I shared much of our lives with each other. Among that which we shared was a love of the printed word. Yet our philosophies and politics were like oil and water. He once joked that editing my books made him feel as though he were Hillary Clinton editing the works of Ron Paul. Jim’s brilliance made all my work better, his fairness made me anticipate challenges, and his faith in me made me a better person. His life cut short devastated me, but gave me an editor and an advocate in Heaven. May the angels deliver him into Paradise, if they haven’t done so already.