As Jeffrey Rosen of the National Constitution Center reminds us, the founding fathers anticipated “a demagogic challenge to the rule of law.” Here is a taste of his piece at The Wall Street Journal: The allegations in the indictment of Donald...
Federalist Papers
Is Trump’s Authority “Total” When It Comes to Reopening the Economy?
Short answer: No. Although he would obviously like it to be. The Washington Post talked to some constitutional scholars. Here is a taste of Meagan Flynn’s and Allyson Chiu’s piece: When President Trump was asked during Monday’s news briefing what authority...
Welcome to the United States Senate, the “World Great Deliberate Body”
1788: As the select assemblies for choosing the President, as well as the State legislatures who appoint the senators, will in general be composed of the most enlightened and respectable citizens, there is reason to presume that their attention and their...
What They Knew and When They Knew It
Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina and Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia sat next to each other during the Donald Trump Senate impeachment trial. Burr is currently using this sketch as his Twitter profile picture. New profile pic. pic.twitter.com/mvArg4RNar —...
Would the Founders Have Recognized GOP Arguments Against Trump’s Removal?
As we enter the 2020 election season I have been trying to do more writing for local and regional outlets here in Pennsylvania. This morning I have an op-ed on the impeachment trial at LNP/Lancaster On-Line (formerly Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era). ...
American History Finds Its Way Into the Impeachment Report
Read it the entire impeachment report here. A taste (in bold): The Framers of the Constitution well understood that an individual could one day occupy the Office of the President who would place his personal or political interests above those...
Today’s Quote from the Federalist Papers
From Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 75: However proper or safe it may be in governments where the executive magistrate is an hereditary monarch, to commit to him the entire power of making treaties, it would be utterly unsafe and improper...
Federalist 65
Context To the People of the State of New York: THE remaining powers which the plan of the convention allots to the Senate, in a distinct capacity, are comprised in their participation with the executive in the appointment to offices,...
George Will: The GOP is “a party of slow-learning careerists” who have tethered their “careers to a downward-spiraling scofflaw”
I am glad that conservative columnist George Will is coming to Messiah College on October 31, 2019. In yesterday’s column, Will rips into the Republican Party and its “canine loyalty” to Donald Trump. Here is a taste: In Federalist 51, James...
Federalist #69 and the Mueller Report
Danielle Allen of Harvard University makes the connection in a piece at The Washington Post. Here is a taste: The Mueller report has finally brought us face-to-face with the need to address the “delicate and important circumstance of personal responsibility” in the...
Joanne Freeman on Federalist No. 76 and the Whitaker Lawsuit
A group of Senate Democrats–Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Mazie K. Hirono (D-Hawaii)–has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration. The suit challenges the constitutionality of the appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general. The suit invokes...
Quotes of the Day
Federalist 57: The aim of every political Constitution is or ought to be first to obtain for rulers, men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society, and in the next place,...
No, Stephen Miller. That's Not How it Works.
This post is pretty basic, but it needs to be said. In this day and age there are a lot of “basic” things that need to be said about how our government works, how republics are maintained, and how a...
Virtual Office Hours: U.S. History Survey Edition–Episode 15
“The Constitution and Federalist Paper 10” [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WogA-ILLQik]...
The Most Important Document in American History Is…
George Marshall’s Marshall Plan Speech. Followed by The Federalist Papers and the Fourteenth Amendment. This is according to the 800 people who voted at the History News Network. (The Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights were excluded from...
Environmental Conservatism?
I have always wondered why more conservatives weren’t environmentalists or conservationists. Don’t conservatives like to conserve things? With this in mind, I found Peter Blair’s review of Roger Scruton‘s recent book How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case...