If you are to make claims like this, at least make arguments. This isn't twitter.

Caro is extremely comprehensive and will write small mini-books on the history of every significant institution or person LBJ ever touched. That means that The Master of the Senate begins in like 1810 and gives a complete history of the Senate up until LBJ is elected into the body.

I would be interested in someone analyzing when the constitution would permit a private citizen to take up arms against a sitting government (if any such circumstance exists).

To my knowledge, the interpretation which comes closest is Insurrectionist theory which interprets the right to bear arms as including the right of citizens to use them to defend against an oppressive government. There are apparently more explicit statements of this right in the preambles to some first-state constitutions, as well as the declaration of independence.

It should not be surprising that nobody has yet won on such a case in court though, and practically speaking you don't have this right ^[1] .

My understanding has been that even if you are arrested unlawfully by a police officer, you can't use proportional force (as you would if you were assaulted by a non-police-officer), since the perspective of the government is that it is the judiciary's right to determine whether an arrest is or isn't lawful, not the citizen's.

1. Except implicitly the founders themselves, who of course supported the right to revolution. Or at least supported that right for themselves. But originalism has never been a popular (or coherent) constitutional philosophy. ↩︎

Yeah I meant "most" where the others we're comparing are the 9 justices and one Marshal at most.

But I would eagerly read a post describing how this change came about and what downstream factors it impacted.

I cannot recommend more strongly the first three chapters of Robert Caro's Master of the Senate on this subject. It gives a full political history of the senate, and essentially its fall from grace, starting as the most powerful single component of the US government, hailed the world over for being the most competent and thoughtful political organization on the planet, to its ineptitude becoming the butt of jokes on TV and barely being considered during the signing of routine treaties.

Yeah, I remember in high school civics I could not understand in what sense the tripartite system of government we have constituted a "balance of powers", when the only branch of government with any meaningful amount of guns was the executive, ruled by a singular president ^[1] .

Until very recently it felt like a miracle anything worked at all, and my impression is that it worked so well in the past because congress had much much more day-to-day decision making power and was much more plugged into the information sources, then the "seniority system" was instantiated, congress became senile, and FDR got unprecedented control over the war-time economy, and took the opportunity to transfer many decision making roles and bodies from congress to the executive.

When congress is made up of the old and senile, and relies on the president to be their eyes, ears, hands, and brain, it just makes more and more sense to delegate broader and broader powers to the executive, who has the better qualified staff, more information, and a quicker reaction time.

The courts have never been all that powerful, except when they had the implicit backing of the president or congress. When they haven't clearly had that, my impression is they have made sure not to command the executive to take any meaningful actions.

1. My teacher's response to these questions & my confusion over their responses was kick me out of the classroom into the hallway. I gained quite a positive reputation among students and teachers after that! ↩︎

Could you point to your source for the claim about the Marshall's Service falling under the Judicial Branch of the government? My understanding is that his belongs to the DoJ so would fall under the Executive Branch.

I believe this is a minor mistake, see my other comment.

These guns come in the form of the U.S. Marshalls who are under the direct control of the judicial branch.

You got the (admittedly extremely confusing) names wrong here. The US Marshalls are under the executive branch and report to the Attorney General, however the Marshal of the United States Supreme Court is a single person under the direct command of the supreme court and heads the Supreme Court of the United States Police Department, who are actually the people with most of the guns here.

This seems like its caused some confusion with some commenters here.

what if the banking system refused to honor them given the S.C and Congress's rulings?

This is one reason why the independence of the FED is important. The US has a very centralized banking system which is technically governed by the executive branch.

I have heard this claim before, but have never been given a reason to believe it. Why do you believe the military is under the spell of "listen to the constitution" and not "listen to orders"? The latter seems a far more prevalent sentiment given the practical fact that often if you don't listen to orders, you and your friends will often wind up dead.