It’s not easy being a drama critic for the New York Times because you have so much heavy ideological baggage to carry with you every time you go to the theater. You can’t just take in a play and try…
Our national life found its sure basis on a conversation. The Constitution captured the favor and the assent of the American People whose voice it invokes through an extended conversation carried on in the newspapers of the day and yet…
We are approaching another “Presidents’ Day,” which will be celebrated this year on February 21. This federal holiday has evolved from a celebration of George Washington’s birthday (February 22) to an amorphous celebration of all of our nation’s presidents. But…
You, your estates, your posterities lie all at the stake … if your professed enemies are admitted to witness against you; if every word, intention, and circumstance of yours be alleged as treasonable, not because of a statute, but a…
On Tuesday, 45 senators stood up to declare the impeachment proceedings against someone not holding office to be unconstitutional. No reasonable person can imagine that anyone who believes that the whole proceeding is illegitimate will ever vote to convict someone…
How do you defend something when its original justification no longer exists? Arguments for the Electoral College suffer from this problem. That problem lurked beneath the Supreme Court’s decision Monday in Chiafalo v. Washington. By a 9-0 vote, the Court…
Rules, rules, rules — and don’t we hate ’em? They restrict some of our most personal notions, retard our experiential growth, run contrary to modern suppositions as to our human rights. Modern culture reflects and magnifies the I’ll-do-what-I-want spirit that…
In The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton devotes many consecutive articles to addressing the faults of the Articles of Confederation. Occasionally writing together with Madison, he makes the case that the new Constitution would remedy those defects. That the government established by…
March was an important month for George Washington. He resisted the opportunity to become a military dictator in March. And he rode away from America’s presidency in March. A man of action rather than ideas, the Virginia planter turned continental…