As Benjamin Franklin was leaving the Constitutional Convention, he was asked, “What have you given us?” He answered: “A Republic, if you can keep it.” That probably happened, but even if it didn’t, the exchange captures two fundamental truths about…
In his fine book Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide (2017), Harvard Law School Professor Cass R. Sunstein, a prominent Democrat who served in the Obama White House, stresses a key point about impeachment: grounds for impeachment should be neutral in the sense…
The most frequently quoted one-liner about impeachment is Gerald Ford’s: “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers [it] to be at a given moment in history.” Former President Ford was a honorable man who…
My Yale Law School colleague Bruce Ackerman has proposed a theory of constitutional change that he calls “constitutional moments.” The idea was spelled out in a series of lectures, later published in the Yale Law Journal and in Ackerman’s multi-volume history…
The pundits in the left-wing press have uniformly agreed with President Trump’s decision to call off the retaliatory strike on Iran, so they have instead criticized his supposedly making the decision at the last moment when the planes were already…
I saw a bumper sticker the other day that made me laugh: “Make American Smart Again. Impeach Trump.” Let’s see now: he is a billionaire (although there is a debate about just how many billions). He paid very little or…
One of the tragedies caused by the decline of education over the last century has been the demise of rhetoric, the art and science of constructing an argument. Learning the logical structure of fallacies and sophisms is an important tool…
Many commentators in the liberal press are gloating that Donald Trump walked out of the Hanoi summit with North Korea leader Kim Jong Un empty-handed. Typical is Josh Rogin of the Washington Postwho proclaimed the summit a “win” for Kim…
The other day all the major new outlets were covering a story about Elizabeth Warren saying on the campaign trail in Iowa that Donald Trump “might not even be a free person” but rather in jail at the time of the…