Morgenthau at the University of Chicago where he earned both an M.A. and a Ph. D. in political science. He received his J.D. degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Buffa was a criminal defense attorney for 10 years and his seven Joseph Antonelli novels strive to reflect, from his own experience, what a courtroom lawyer does, the way he (or she) thinks, and the way he feels about what he does.
In Buffa's new novel, Immunity, the President of the United States has ordered the murder of his political opponents—and the Constitution seems powerless to stop him.
Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series covers the Lost History of the American Constitution. It begins:
In February of 1941, J.P. Lippincott Co. published a limited edition of the five volumes of Elliot’s Debates, originally published under the sanction of Congress in 1830. This limited edition of 750 sets, entitled “The Debates of the several State Conventions on the adoption of the Federal Constitution, as recommended by the General Convention at Philadelphia, in 1787,” has never been republished. It is out of print, unavailable; the ratification debates have vanished from memory, no longer part of our history. Had they been available, had they been there for lawyers and judges, congressmen and senators, and every day citizens to read and study, we would have known, among other things, that the future Chief Justice, John Marshall, thought it a matter almost too obvious for comment that, unlike a British King, an American President could never have immunity for crimes or misconduct while he was in office, and that James Madison, who, more than anyone else, designed the American Constitution, insisted that a President couldVisit D.W. Buffa's website.be removed from office, not after conviction in an impeachment trial, but the moment he was suspected of an impeachable offense.
The Constitutional Convention finished its work in September of 1787. Ratification, it was agreed, required the approval of nine of the thirteen states. When the Virginia Ratifying Convention met on June 2, 1788, eight states had already ratified. If Virginia ratified, America had a Constitution; if Virginia failed to ratify, the Union was almost certain to dissolve. There were 168 delegates to the convention, and, while each of them had a vote, most were content to listen. That, as it turned out, took some effort of its own. Patrick Henry’s first speech, given in opposition to ratification, was close to nine thousand words. The “public mind,” he insisted, “as well as my own, is extremely uneasy at the proposed change of government.” Governor John Randolph replied in a speech nearly as long. Unlike Henry, Randolph had been a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, but, like Henry, he had opposed it.
“I refused to sign, and if the same were to return, I would still refuse; but as I think that those eight states which have adopted the Constitution will not recede, I am a friend of the Union.” If Virginia were now to reject the Constitution, it would produce disunion, and union, lost now, was lost forever. Without a union of the states, there would instead of peace be “licentiousness, insecurity, and oppression.”
Henry rejected this out of hand. The danger was not from the failure of union; the danger was from...[read on]
Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind; History of Rome; Before The Deluge; Herodotus's Histories; The Education of Henry Adams; Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand; The Golden Bowl; The Life of George Washington; Tacitus and the dangers of history; the Lost History of the American Constitution.
--Marshal Zeringue