With President Trump’s return to Twitter warfare in leveling unsubstantiated charges that his predecessor ordered the wire-tapping of his offices, what little hope existed for a return to some semblance of normality in the White House has now been extinguished. After six weeks of the most dysfunctional presidency in American history, the verdict in the… Read More
Mad scientists of democracy
In a 1932 opinion, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis coined the phrase “laboratories of democracy” to describe the role of state governments in providing test platforms for new laws that could, if successful, be adopted at the federal level. Grounded in the Tenth Amendment’s stipulation that “all powers not delegated to the United States, nor prohibited… Read More
Channeling Sam Wainwright
Something about the Supreme Court’s recent decision affirming the Affordable Care Act brings to mind Frank Capra’s movie classic,”It’s a Wonderful Life.” For the sake of newly-arrived space aliens who may not have seen it, the movie stars Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, whose many friends include an old buddy, Sam Wainwright. Sam is the… Read More
The Error of Exceptionalism
Say one thing for Newt Gingrich, he has a way with buzz-words. During the run-up to the 2012 election the former-Speaker-turned-political-gadfly published a book on the subject of American Exceptionalism, and ever since then the expression has become a catchphrase among conservatives. In addition to Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum made it an integral part… Read More
The Tea Party’s misbegotten history
History has been described as a endless argument, and, given the interpretive nature of the subject, it could hardly be otherwise. Our understanding of the past is too important to the deliberations of the present to allow any one version of it to go entirely unchallenged. This is not to say, however, that the story… Read More