Opinion

Why McCulloch v. Maryland—Now 200 Years Old—Is Not a ‘Big Government’ Manifesto

11/13/2019|Updated: 11/15/2019

Commentary

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in McCulloch v. Maryland. In that case, Chief Justice John Marshall upheld Congress’s power to charter a national bank—a distant forerunner of the modern Federal Reserve System.

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Rob Natelson

Author

Robert G. Natelson, a former constitutional law professor who is senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence at the Independence Institute in Denver, authored “The Original Constitution” (4th ed., 2025). He is a contributor to The Heritage Foundation’s “Heritage Guide to the Constitution.” He also researched and wrote the scholarly article “Virgil and the Constitution,” whose publication is pending in Regent University Law Review.

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