In November we called your attention to Noah Feldman’s argument about Lincoln and the Constitution in his new book The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery and the Refounding of America. In that book, the Harvard Law professor argues that Lincoln violated...
Constitution
Did Abraham Lincoln break the Constitution?
Harvard law professor Noah Feldman believes that he did, and it had little to do with his support of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment. Here is a taste of his recent piece at The New York Times: In April...
Josh Hawley’s “Love America Act.” Let’s break it down
Last week we published a post on Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s op-ed in The New York Post condemning critical race theory and promoting his personal view of what young Americans should learn in history class. His views are encapsulated in...
How do Christian nationalists deal with the Establishment Clause?
Recently, a scholar in another discipline asked me how Christian nationalists who study the American past “ignore, navigate around, or distort the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.” I address this in Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A...
Newseum’s First Amendment monument will move to Philadephia’s Constitution Center
Here is Stephen Salisbury at The Philadelphia Inquirer: The Newseum, an interactive museum in Washington, D.C., devoted to journalism, is gone, succumbing to financial woes. It closed at the end of 2019. But while the building on Pennsylvania Avenue has...
Michelle Bachmann: This week revealed the “greatest attack” on the “foundations” of America that “we have ever seen in 400 years”
Michelle Bachmann, the new dean of Regent University’s school of government, visited MAGA evangelical Jim Garlow’s “election integrity” prayer meeting this week. You can watch it here. (It was posted on Eric Metaxas’s Rumble page). Bachmann warns the pro-Trump evangelical...
Mitch McConnell clarifies his vote to acquit Trump in a *Wall Street Journal* op-ed.
Mitch McConnell is a weasel. He is also a very crafty politician. In his mind, moral conviction always takes a back seat to his quest for political power. This was on display Saturday when he voted to acquit Donald Trump...
The names of the GOP senators who voted against the constitutionality of the second Trump impeachment trial
Today the Senate debated the constitutionality of the second Trump impeachment trial. (Is it constitutional to convict a former president in an impeachment trial?) The Senate voted to move forward with the trial by a vote of 56-44. Six Republicans...
Evangelical law professor and former federal judge Michael McConnell argues that the Senate can try Trump because he was impeached while still in office
Michael McConnell teaches law at Stanford. In 2002, George W. Bush nominated him to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Senate approved his nomination unanimously. Bush also had him on his short list for a Supreme Court nomination....
What should we make of Trump’s 1776 Commission Report? Part 3
Read previous installments in this series here. It is now difficult to find the 1776 Commission Report, but I managed to locate a copy in the Internet Archive. The authors begin with the Articles of Confederation. The report teaches a...
Did American exceptionalism survive Trump?
Bloomsburg writer Mihir Sharma says that Americans shouldn’t get so uptight about apparent threats to their democracy. Maybe sometimes we need an international voice to help us keep things in perspective. Here is a taste of Sharma’s piece, “World shouldn’t...
Free speech! Free speech! The court evangelicals process the events of the last week.
It’s been a very ugly week in America. By this time next week, Donald Trump may be the only United States president to have been impeached twice. We are getting more and more disturbing images and videos from Wednesday’s invasion...
Should we wait until January 20?
Here are the facts. A group of pro-Trump rioters invaded the seat of the United States government yesterday in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump, the sitting United States President, refused to condemn the rioters. He...
Let’s set the record straight on what Mike Pence can and cannot do at tomorrow’s certification of the Electoral College results
Donald Trump seems to believe that Mike Pence can overturn the votes of the Electoral College tomorrow when Congress certifies the results. Here is Trump last night in Georgia: And earlier today: CNN is reporting that Trump and Pence had...
George Will: Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, et al. “are the Constitution’s most dangerous domestic enemies”
Yesterday conservative columnist George Will blasted the GOP senators who will object to the vote of the Electoral College on January 6 (tomorrow). My favorite line from the piece: “Hawley–has there ever been such a high ratio of ambition to...
What is the Electoral College and how does it work?
Today the Electoral College will elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. How does this all work? CNN has a nice overview. Read it here. The New York Times also has a piece on what to expect today. And here is...
Were the framers of the Constitution “originalists”?
As a historian, I want my students to understand, as best as possible, the meaning of the constitution in its 18th-century context. This requires them to know something about a world that is long gone. We like to say, with...
What Matthew 4 REALLY says about Christians and power
Recently an evangelical pastor who was a college of classmate of mine wrote to me praising Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Amy Coney Barrett as Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement on the Supreme Court. He seemed very excited about the nomination...
The court evangelicals get another chance to execute their political playbook
For many American evangelicals, Christian witness in the political sphere comes down to overturning Roe v. Wade. This is why the court evangelicals are so gleeful about Trump getting another Supreme Court nomination. This is also why they say virtually...
Donald Trump now believes that the president is “constitutionally obligated” to appoint a Supreme Court justice
Trump says he is “constitutionally obligated” to nominate someone to serve on the Supreme Court: Trump is correct. He is constitutional obligated to nominate someone to serve on the Supreme Court. So was Barack Obama in 2016. Watch: And here...