“Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.” —T.B. Macaulay Consensus on the benign motives of our Founding Fathers and the nature of the Constitution that had persisted through the 19th century began to crack at the beginning of the 20th under assaults from the Progressives. It has disintegrated at an accelerating rate since, so...
“If a woman of her own accord drops that which is in her, they shall crucify her and not bury her.” —The Assyrian Code, c. 2000 B.C. Ancient history is worth keeping in mind when confronting the claims of the pro- and anti-abortion and euthanasia camps, since both tend to couch their arguments in terms...
If Trump loses outright on the immunity issue, he will have himself to blame. He had the opportunity to nominate three Thomas/Alito-esque stalwarts. He whiffed.
Written documents should be interpreted with an eye toward discerning the intent of the author. When the Constitution of the United States is the text under consideration, the relevant intentions are those of the men who drafted and ratified the document. This proposition reflects a long-established canon of construction: common-law judges as far back as...
People call me up and say they want to beat me to a pulp. I am, they tell me, a lowlife muckraker, and obviously a racist to boot. Some of my closest friends express doubts about my sanity. An apparently well-subscribed website appears to be devoted to my downfall and calls for my books to...
Almost alone among the peoples of the world, the United States has largely been spared—at least until recently—the bitter conflicts that plague countries whose citizens do not share a common language. Since the early 17th century, immigrants from diverse backgrounds have settled here. In the past, it was understood that in exchange for enjoying opportunities...
By now any reasonable prosecutor—or so-called prosecutor—would have conceded defeat and dropped the lawfare madness.
While violent criminals are given a pass to victimize and reoffend, the everyday American finds himself under the heel of an increasingly invasive and oppressive state.
The case of James Younger and his forced gender transition may be a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and is an example of how woke rule in America is characterized by systemic mental disorder.
In Washington, D.C., access and influence go hand-in-hand; they are the stock and trade of the lobbyist, the lawyer, and the political advisor. They are, as well, the biggest “skill” current officeholders and staff members can take with them when they leave the government. —from Pat Choate, “Puppets for Nippon,” May...
“The compact which exists between the North and the South,” proclaimed William Lloyd Garrison in an abolitionist declaration of 1843, “is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” When the Southern states concluded that they were no longer bound by what their enemies regarded as a compact with the devil. Garrison and his...
On February 22, the South Dakota Senate, by a vote of 23-12, approved legislation banning nearly all abortions in the state. On February 24, the vote in the South Dakota House of Representatives was 50-18 (H.B. 1215). Twelve days later, Gov. Mike Rounds signed the measure into law. President Bush criticized the law as too...
Yes, Virginia, there is a religious war going on. It is for the soul of America. And traditional Christianity is besieged. In a January visit to the Vatican, American bishops were warned by Benedict XVI that “radical secularism” posed “grave threats” to their Catholic faith. Your religious freedom is being circumscribed, said the pope....
The basic concerns of this book go well beyond detailing how the original goals of the civil rights movement have been shamelessly perverted by the courts and bureaucracy. The authors show in some detail how the courts and bureaucracy acting in tandem have endorsed quotas and set asides, policies that now make race and sex...
“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” —Ecclesiastes 9:10 The Gilded Age still exerts a strange pull on the American imagination. It was a time of larger-than-life people and larger-than-life business entities. It featured conspicuous consumption—including palatial mansions, yachts, international travel, and international scandal—that seems almost to exceed anything we have...
Nearly half a year into the new administration in Washington, it remains too early to tell how many of President Trump’s unquestioned pratfalls and errors in judgment, most of them resulting from emotional indiscipline, stubbornness, and political inexperience as well as the necessary thicker skin experience would have given him, are attributable to the President...
Back in December of 2020, then President-elect Biden said that he would not make vaccines against COVID-19 mandatory, nor did he think they should be mandatory. Given the new vaccine mandate by the White House, set to affect nearly 100 million Americans by some estimates, one reasonably conclude that Biden misled the people. However, Biden’s...
American soldiers stumble upon a secret dungeon and discover dozens of emaciated prisoners—173 of them, to be precise—who had simply vanished from the face of the Earth over the previous weeks and months. Horrified GIs walk wide-eyed through the stinking chamber of horrors whose inmates grasp with difficulty that their ordeal is over. Most of...
Overall, the pro-life cause must be less concerned with short-term tactical disagreements and more concerned with unanimity as to the long-term goal.
An American television viewer will witness more violence in a single evening than an Athenian would have seen during a lifetime of theatergoing. Acts of violence were virtually prohibited in Greek drama, and Aristotle goes so far as to argue against the use of “mere spectacle” to produce the desired catharsis of pity and fear:...
While violent criminals are given a pass to victimize and reoffend, the everyday American finds himself under the heel of an increasingly invasive and oppressive state.
Things are pretty dismal all over the country, but some places are worse than others. Usually, published rankings of American states are compiled by liberals who value such things as high-school and college graduation rates, personal income, internet speed, and the availability of abortion clinics. That’s why Massachusetts and Minnesota commonly come out on top. ...
For John Roberts, it is Palm Sunday. Out of relief and gratitude for his having saved Obamacare, he is being compared to John Marshall and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Liberal commentators are burbling that his act of statesmanship has shown us the way to the sunny uplands of a new consensus. If only Republicans will...
Yes, the Irish caved in and reversed their vote against the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty. Gutless? Of course. But I’ve spent too many years in Dublin and Cork to be surprised. The Irish did the same thing when they voted no to an earlier treaty in June 2001. The next year they gave in to...
As the Midterm Apocalypse was sliced and diced on the Day After, pundits noted the “Kavanaugh Effect,” whereby Senate Democrats who joined in the smear-and-delay campaign against then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh lost their bids for reelection in states that had supported President Trump in 2016. On the other hand, Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia, moistened...
Amistad Produced by Steven Spielberg, Debbie Allen, and Colin Wilson Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by David Franzoni Released by Dreamworks If Amistad is not yet a household word like E.T. or Jurassic Park, it may soon be with the power of Steven Spielberg behind it. Amistad is really two movies. One, about the 19th-century...
The term limit issue has been sweeping the country. Since 1990, voters in 15 states have used the petition and referendum process to impose term limits on their state legislators. Earlier this year [1994] in Illinois, term limit supporters filed 437,088 petition signatures from almost every county calling for a statewide referendum on term limits. ...
This remarkable editorial by Chronicles’ longest-serving editor offered one of the first and best analyses of America’s immigration problem.
“Much law, but little justice.” —Thomas Fuller With five votes around here you can do anything,” Justice William Brennan told his law clerks, thus summarizing the quintessence of Brennanism. That constitutional law is not something derived from the text, structure, and history of the various provisions of the Constitution but rather a creation of the...
Years ago, a Christian evangelist friend of mine complained about doing the Lord’s work in the South. Everyone is a Christian there, he lamented, whether or not they really are one. His point was well taken. It is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is a problem not just for Christian evangelists...
This remarkable editorial by Chronicles’ longest-serving editor offered one of the first and best analyses of America’s immigration problem.
In the early 1980’s, the Reagan Justice Department announced a far-reaching “war” to free the United States from illicit drug use. There was skepticism at the time that government actions could cause such a fundamental change in entrenched public attitudes and behaviors, and there were different views about the means by which such a war...
The America First Committee emerged nationwide in the summer of 1940 from the initial efforts of Gerald Ford, Potter Stewart, and other Yale Law School students, seconded by law professor Edwin Borchard. It evolved amid the American political cataclysm following Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide election to a second term in November 1936. The mandate to institute...
When the people’s fundamental law is ignored by the legislature, the remedy is typically to elect new representatives to set things right. If the people’s fundamental law is transgressed by the courts, the correction is often not so easy. Many judges are appointed for life and never have to face the electorate. Others are appointed...
Sen. Rick Santorum is the latest Republican political leader to walk down Trent Lott’s trail of tears. Why do Republicans continue to make these gaffes? Most politicians, after all, have spent their entire lives since elementary school telling people what they want to hear, and they ought to realize that the power they hold in...
Judge Danny Boggs of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is, for believers in the rule of law, a hero. Judge Boggs, in an extraordinary dissenting opinion published in May, revealed profound problems with the majority of his court’s approach to law in an affirmative-action case and pointed out that his chief...
“Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God.” —Psalms LXXXVII This rich and complex book is on one level the summing up of a controversy over a properly Christian, specifically Catholic, view of politics which has pitted the author, a theologian, against certain “neoconservative” thinkers, notably Richard Neuhaus, Michael...
Putting together the Court’s two most notable recent decisions, the Arizona immigration decision and the Obamacare decision, leads to this unsettling conclusion: there is virtually nothing the states can do on their own, and there is virtually nothing the federal government cannot do. If that is what the Founders intended, I’m a unicorn. We also now have...
Prosecutors pick the person or target and then go searching for the crime. Trump supporters are the latest most glaring example of this inversion of justice, which if often called "lawfare."
According to an article in the New York Times on September 10, “In 2005, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents—nearly 96,000—than in any year in the previous two decades.” Moreover, many of these are not simply Muslims who had been here on guest visas but now have been granted permanent...
The whole truth about Lincoln’s war to prevent 11 American states from forming a federation of their own cannot be understood unless it is seen as an extension of a brutal process of centralization that had been going on in Europe since the 13th century. Medieval Christian civilization contributed to political philosophy by introducing a...
“When family pride ceases to act, individual selfishness comes into play.” —Tocqueville “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I’ve always thought that Tolstoy underestimated the variety of happy families, but his dictum definitely holds true from at least one point of view, that of family law. While...
“ . . . redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” —Ephesians 5:15 “Go day, come day. Lord, send Sunday.” My paternal grandmother could be counted on to say these words at least once per week. Whether burdened with some mundane task or confronted with the evidence of human frailty, the prospect of the...
“Another Crisis like this one and the West will be wiped out,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel on June 1. “Once we have overcome this Crisis, the question will be how can we return to a path of virtue as far as public debts are concerned.” Of course, the first question is whether the West...
Native American resistance, resilience, and perseverance remain prevalent. The limits of Native American sovereignty remain mysterious.
Former President Donald Trump questions the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. For half the country, this makes him a “sore loser” who promotes “conspiracy theories” and pushes “The Big Lie.” But when President Joe Biden in his recent press conference preemptively questions the legitimacy of the 2022 midterm elections, nine months before they even...
Right before our eyes, we’ve witnessed a profound change in the way that American society treats the institution of marriage. Forget about the law—state or federal. This is a cultural shift, and we need to be aware of the way that the shift occurred. We can forget about the law, because one way or another,...
Anyone paying attention knows the American government is broken. Whether we understand the Constitution or not, we know intuitively that something isn’t right. We may grouse generally—“Government spends too much money,” or “Government should be doing X”—but it’s hard even to begin explaining why the system isn’t working. There are several major trends that explain...
As if we needed more proof of the threat to national sovereignty, there comes John Gardner’s latest “James Bond novel,” SeaFire. Gone is Ian Fleming’s wonderful cast of characters. The drab but lovable Q has been replaced by a woman nicknamed Q’ute; the admiral M has been replaced by a committee of bureaucrats; a primping...
Like it or not, gay marriage is here to stay. The Supreme Court ruling matters little. That was the case well before oral arguments were heard, and not for legal reasons. Yes, the fact that some states had already recognized it played a part, but the real reason gay marriage is now a permanent part...