by Mike Gray 

[T]he natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. — Thomas Jefferson 

John Eidsmoe and Ben DuPré on WND believe “great” presidents—as well as “great” leaders throughout history—aren’t the ones school children are told to admire: 

We suggest that the truly great men of history are those who have defended and preserved individual liberty by resisting the increase and centralization of government power [and] the truly great presidents in American history have been those who have defended constitutional liberty against this tendency of the federal government to usurp power. 

You may not have heard of all these people—Judas Maccabeus, Cato and Cicero, Hermann the Liberator, Archbishop Stephen Langton of Canterbury, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, and the 17th-century Puritans—but, using Eidsmoe and DuPré’s criteria, they were great leaders. 

Among the American presidents who showed respect for the Constitution: 

In 1854 President Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill for federal aid to help the mentally ill, declaring, “I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity. (To approve the measure) would be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.” 

President James Madison, as another example, apparently felt charity, while laudable, begins at home—and is not the proper business of American government: 

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. 

The full article is here.