ciary which has usurped the legislative power. He further notes the encroachments of federal over state sovereignty, setting up as his causative villains the ideologist Woodrow Wilson and the intensely practical Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. But the enfeeblement of the American constitutional system began long before Mr. Wilson eschewed his professorial prerogatives, in the congressional sanction of the loosest construction to the concepts of the “general welfare” and “interstate commerce.”
The genius of the Founding Fathers was demonstrated in their own time, as the government they had designed adjusted itself to the development of a two-party system they had never conceived and a committee system within the Congress which they had never foreseen. Mr. Burnham’s genius is that, starting from the questionable thesis that congressional power is in serious jeopardy, he has cogently and perceptively outlined the history of American government and noted the areas in which the Legislature can recover its predominance.
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