What a difference a week can make. Saturday, Sept. 26, was among the best days of the Trump presidency, or so some of us thought watching the president introduce in the Rose Garden his sterling candidate for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. The academic and professional credentials of Amy Coney Barrett, 48,...
The University of Michigan is now the scene of the most important battle over affirmative action since the Bakke case at Stanford, settled so inconclusively some 25 years ago by the Supreme Court. There is absolutely no question that Ann Arbor’s undergraduate and admissions policies are based on a principle of racial preference that, in...
Following the Supreme Court's overturning of higher education affirmative action, there have been a rapid succession of righteous pushbacks against the academic commissars who collectively comprise America's DEI regime.
“The consent of all nations is the law of nature.” —Cicero On the Law of Nations is a powerful brief in favor of what the United States Supreme Court in 1900 declared to be “the customs and usages of the civilized world.” (In Paquete Habana, the highest court declared international law to be “part of...
Before the first Trump-Biden debate, moderator Chris Wallace listed the six subjects that would be covered: The Trump and Biden records, the Supreme Court, COVID-19, the economy, race, and violence in our cities, and the integrity of the election. According to a recent Gallup survey, Wallace’s topics tracked the public’s concerns—the top seven of which...
President Barack Obama surprised even battle-hardened pro-life Americans with his official remarks on the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that has, since 1973, littered garbage dumps across America with the corpses of 50 million babies, 32 percent of them African-American. In a White House press ...
I enjoyed Samuel Francis’s lucid analysis of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education (“Forty Years After,” May 1994), but I take exception to his argument that “the only feasible moral defense of the Brown decision today is not that it replaced force with freedom, but that it replaced one kind of...
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Kelo v. City of New London, a chill wind blew across the rural South. The Court upheld the decision of the city fathers of New London, Connecticut, to grant a private development corporation the right to condemn a middle-income residential neighborhood, evict the property owners,...
Since there are no pressing global issues that cannot wait until next week, I’ll devote my column to a book I’ve just finished reading. Its title, Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans (Penguin, 2017), and the reputation of its author—retired admiral James George Stavridis, who ended his career as NATO Supreme...
The Supreme Court’s recent Casey decision on abortion is a memorable example of sociological balderdash. The joint decision began, “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt,” to which Justice Scalia fired back in his dissent, “Liberty finds no refuge in this jurisprudence of confusion.” Scalia’s observation becomes painfully clear when one reads the...
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review McDonald v. City of Chicago, a case that presents the watershed issue of whether the individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, established in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller, applies to states. Most Court observers agree that it appears very likely that the...
If Franklin Pierce is remembered at all today it is as an inept, do-nothing President whose only accomplishment was to sign the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Historians generally cite this bill, along with the 1857 Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case, as evidence of the aggressive designs of the South to extend slavery...
The Supreme Court’s recent decision to review a Missouri abortion case has raised the spirits of the pro-life movement. In his appeal, Missouri’s attorney general asked the Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade, the landmark civil rights decision that made pregnant women and their physicians sole arbiters over who is born and who is not...
The case called Planned Parenthood v. Casey was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992. At the time there was some thought that it might be the vehicle for overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that made abortion a constitutional right. But Casey only made things worse: it reaffirmed Roe, and added an...
The women’s movement is in considerable disarray. While most self-described feminists are concerned mainly with job prospects, equal pay, and abortion rights, the radical wing of the movement is busy advocating everything from witchcraft to lesbianism. This was never more apparent than at NOW’s recent convention. While most delegates were content with denouncing the Supreme...
Supreme Court arguments on Monday suggest the Court will rule 6-3 or 5-4 that municipalities can ban sleeping on public property. The ruling will affect the entire nation.
Our Endangered Children: Growing Up in a Changing World by Vance Packard; Little, Brown; Boston. Who Will Take the Children? A New Custody Option for Divorcing Mothers—and Fathers by Susan Meyers and Joan Lakin; Bobbs-Merrill; Indianapolis. Secular liberalism is the supreme doctrine of the sovereign self. As such, its failures are particularly obvious at the...
When does a political deal become a bribe? At the 1952 Republican National Convention, California’s favorite son, Gov. Earl Warren, released his delegation reportedly in return for Ike’s promise that he would give Warren the first open seat on the Supreme Court. In September 1953, Chief Justice Fred Vinson dropped dead of a heart attack....
Last June, the Supreme Court decided that the ObamaCare individual mandate passed constitutional muster under Congress’s taxing power. It left undecided a host of other issues that are now being litigated in the lower courts. Under the HHS mandate that followed ObamaCare, employers with 50 or more full-time employees must offer health-insurance coverage for sterilization...
I have no desire to defend President George H.W. Bush or his execrable appointment of David Souter to the Supreme Court, but I was confused by the chronology of the Turnock v. Ragsdale case laid out by Scott P. Richert in the February issue (“Robert Bork, R.I.P.,” Cultural Revolutions). In December 1989, when that case...
On New Jersey In your January issue, you published an article (“Our Platonic Guardians“) on “Justice” Wilentz of the New Jersey Supreme Court by a Hamilton Township attorney named Gregory J. Sullivan. As a lifelong resident of the Garden State, I can only reaffirm what he has written. And add: what this state needs is...
Officer Laurence Powell is off the hook, at least for now. Dealing a severe blow to the civil rights establishment and federal police power, the Supreme Court has overruled the Ninth Circuit Court’s motion to stiffen the sentence handed down in the federal trial of Powell and Stacey Koon, who were found guilty of violating...
“Discrimination” is one of today’s buzzwords, and laws and regulations prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation are fueling some of the sharpest skirmishes within America’s culture wars. A New Jersey Supreme Court ruling against the Boy Scouts’ ban on homosexual Scout leaders has gained the most publicity of late. But a public feud between one...
Christine Blasey Ford, the accuser in the infamous 2018 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has written an unrepentant and incoherent book while showing no remorse for the ordeal she caused others and the nation.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London has disclosed one of America’s dirtiest secrets: In this country founded, so we are told repeatedly, on the liberal trinity of rights to life, liberty, and property, our claims to property are as tenuous as the liberty of Christian parents with children in public...
On Monday, President Donald Trump designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, the first time the United States has designated part of another nation’s government as such a threat. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council responded by declaring U.S. Central Command a terrorist group. With 5,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and 2,000 in Syria,...
Another of those alarming clashes between solid democratic values has arisen, as the Supreme Court has agreed to rehear arguments relating to Citizens United v.Federal Election Committee. In the weeks before the 2008 Democratic primaries, Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit group and creator of an uncomplimentary documentary called Hillary: The Movie, had wished to broadcast...
When the Supreme Court declared Christmas a secular occasion, to be celebrated for its lowest-common-denominator cultural value in the public schools, I expected serious Christians to protest. Here a powerful public body officially secularized what for the history of Christianity has represented a most sacred moment. But so deeply have the forces of secularization, organized...
Leonid Ilych Brezhnev presided over the irreversible decline of the USSR during his 18 years in power, initially as Secretary-General of the Soviet Communist Party and later also as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. He was two years younger than Joseph Biden is today when he died in 1982, but – just...
She’s more likely than not to win confirmation to the Supreme Court. Thus, the really big question about Elena Kagan is blunter: How and when does the United States as a whole get out from under the sway of an alien enterprise such as her university, Harvard? That the Kagan nomination positions one more Harvard...
Kim Jong-il, the North Korean “Dear Leader” (as well as Secretary-General of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Chairman of the National Defense Commission, Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, etc, etc.) is dead at 69. The news that the diminutive leader of the most unpleasant despotism in the world is no longer going to regale us with his...
Are you enjoying your New American Century? You may as well enjoy it. It is all you are getting instead of your “peace dividend.” Justice Ginsberg has recently invoked the laws of some foreign states in justification of her Supreme Court decisions. The Founding Fathers and subsequent generations would have found this impeachable and treasonous. ...
Speaking on state TV of the prospect of a war in the Gulf, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei seemed to dismiss the idea. “There won’t be any war. . . . We don’t seek a war, and (the Americans) don’t either. They know it’s not in their interests.” The ayatollah’s analysis—a war is in neither...
Is the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, a RINO—a revolutionary in name only? So they must be muttering around the barracks of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps today. For while American hawks are saying we gave away the store to Tehran, consider what ayatollah agreed to. Last week, he gave...
Tom, I’m pretty optimistic about the lawsuit filed by Notre Dame and 42 other Catholic organizations. Filing essentially the same case in multiple federal district courts increases the possibility of getting the right result out of at least one, and getting mixed results will kick this issue up to the Supreme Court. So it seems likely...
This year is the bicentennial of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, the foremost formulations of the compact theory of the United States Constitution. By 1798, the Republicans faced an 11-year losing streak. Federalism had reigned supreme in American politics from the end of the Revolution. Even before the institution of the government of...
In 1954, the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that the state-sponsored segregation of children in public schools was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, and thus unconstitutional. The Court reasoned that segregation “generates a feeling of inferiority . . . that may affect their [black children’s]...
Thank God for Republican presidents who appoint strict constructionists to the U.S. Supreme Court. Otherwise, the Court today might have upheld ObamaCare.
In a Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump race—which, the Beltway keening aside, seems the probable outcome of the primaries—what are the odds the GOP can take the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court? If Republicans can unite, not bad, not bad at all. Undeniably, Democrats open with a strong hand. There is that famed...
The California Supreme Court, in striking down the state’s ban on same-sex “marriage,” has issued a declaration of independence from the human race. Progressives have inevitably compared it to the legalization of interracial marriage, but the same progressives just as inevitably will hail the legalization of cross-species marriage as the next giant step for mankind. ...
Harvard’s Cass Sunstein recently complained that conservatives’ slippery-slope arguments about the left’s latest push to codify and enforce radical equality are intellectually “lazy.” Sunstein and his followers give the example of conservative opposition to gay marriage, which often includes the observation that “the Supreme Court shouldn’t force states to recognize same-sex marriages because, if it...
Here it is 2008, and everything else is old news. The provisional and absentee ballots, recounts, scores, and statistics of 2000-2007 are all in the history books, along with Afghan and Iraqi elections and constitutions, insurgencies, hurricanes, disgraced mayors and governors, and Supreme Court, lobbying, earmark, wiretapping, and energy and cartoon ruckuses. Since Barack Obama...
In October 1950, as U.S. forces were reeling from hordes of Chinese troops who had intervened massively in the Korean War, a 5,000-man Turkish brigade arrived to halt an onslaught by six Chinese divisions. Said supreme commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur: “The Turks are the hero of heroes. There is no impossibility for the Turkish Brigade.”...
We here at Chronicles are Constitutional Fundamentalists. We swear allegiance to the Constitution of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, and not the Constitution of Warren, Brennan, and Souter. We do not believe that the Constitution is a “living document” that must be altered by successive Supreme Court justices to keep pace with the times. The Constitution...
Last October I journeyed to Moscow by invitation for a conference on conversion from military to civilian production. Upon arrival, my colleague, Professor Constantine Danopoulos of the political science department at San Jose State University, and I were informed that the meeting had been shifted to December to coincide with the Congress of the Supreme...
Judge John Roberts can rest assured that his Supreme Court confirmation will go very smoothly, judging from the weak 11th-hour attacks the left is mounting against him in the media. A “shocking” discovery about his record appeared in an August 26 report in the Washington Post that took issue with a phrase Roberts used while...
President Barack Obama surprised even battle-hardened pro-life Americans with his official remarks on the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that has, since 1973, littered garbage dumps across America with the corpses of 50 million babies, 32 percent of them African-American. In a White House press release praising the landmark case...
A couple of times in my writings for Chronicles I’ve mentioned “functionally atheist government schools.” That’s what they’ve been since the early 1960s, when several U.S. Supreme Court edicts effectively banned any mention of religion, or anything approaching religion, from public schools. I remember sitting in my 6th grade class at Elliott Elementary School in...
In 1984, Richard John Neuhaus, then still a Lutheran pastor, published The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. The book was, as they say, an “immediate sensation,” in no small part because Neuhaus’s central claim—that religious voices were being forced out of political debate by the federal courts’ mistaken emphasis on the separation...
The U.S. black population has been disproportionately devastated by the practice of abortion, yet many black leaders have been cajoled into dutifully mouthing the abortion politics of their white leftist overlords.