For those of us who can remember when our politics was more civil, when Republicans and Democrats actually seemed to respect each other and could trade control over the presidency without wild claims of illegitimacy being hurled at the incumbent, the recent behavior of Democrats is puzzling. How can one explain the now obviously transparent
Should our 232-year-old United States Constitution still be binding? For the last few years, progressives increasingly have begun to answer with an emphatic “No!” The most visible such criticism of our fundamental law is the attack on the Electoral College, which provides for indirect election of the president by electors who, if the truth be
How did the Constitution’s framers envision the presidency? Would Donald Trump be their worst nightmare, or just what they had in mind? We know something about what kind of person their ideal president was because of who was chosen to be our first. More or less the same folks who framed the Constitution
The difficulties President Trump faces in carrying out his agenda are massive and were underscored again by the last case decided this term by the United States Supreme Court. That case, Department of Commerce v. New York, presented a challenge to the Trump Administration’s plan to add a question about citizenship status to
One of the great characteristics of Americans is their candor. Among the reasons we declared independence from what we believed to be the excesses of a corrupt British monarchy and aristocracy was our contempt for pretense, deference, and pomposity. We believed, instead, in simple virtue and simple values such as truth, decency, honesty,
The indispensable Victor Davis Hanson recently noted, “Real coups against democracies rarely are pulled off by jack-booted thugs in sunglasses or fanatical mobs storming the presidential palace. More often, they are the insidious work of supercilious bureaucrats, bought intellectuals, toady journalists, and political activists who falsely project that their target might at some
One of the oldest and greatest guides to understanding American politics is captured in the sage advice: “follow the money.” As America is the richest nation on the globe, there is a lot to be followed. The federal leviathan is awash in trillions of dollars in cash. Countless lawyers, lobbyists, and public officials,
It is one of the puzzles of history that Republicans once sought to impeach Bill Clinton. Predictably, they failed to convict him in the Senate with the requisite two-thirds vote, and then Republicans lost the midterm elections that followed, all while President Clinton’s popularity increased dramatically. Even if the Republican effort to remove
On the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor are the famous lines from poet Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me . . .” The United States
