Jack Tawil proposed a daring solution to balance campaign finance reform against the constitutional right to free speech: disconnect campaign contributions from sordid influence.
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The Future of the Christian Right
Like a cold front, you could feel the defeat coming; and you did not need Dan Rather or George Gallup to prepare you. You knew it in your bones as you listened to the sound bites on the evening news: Clinton saying nothing and saying it well; Dole saying nothing and saying it poorly. It...
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Living the Jacobin Dream
In 1793, the Jacobins, surfing the wave of Parisian mob violence, intimidated their less resolute colleagues into eliminating both the principle of monarchy and the existence of its politically superfluous incarnation, Louis XVI. Not content with killing a living king and pronouncing a death sentence in absentia on all the princes of the blood who...
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Tariffs and Delusions
Lenin may or may not have said that the capitalists would sell him the rope by which he would hang them, but the proverb is assigned to him for good reason. Any revolutionary who dreams of destroying the free-enterprise system can count on a valuable ally within the system itself, in the form of the...
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A Client State Pushes Eighty
The U.S. occupation and reconstruction of Japan began nearly 80 years ago and is considered by many to be an unqualified success. But Japan's national character was hollowed out in the process; what remains is a shell of a country still obedient to its conquerors.
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Naked in the Public Square
The recent battle over the removal of a 5,280-pound monument to the Ten Commandments placed in the lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court by Chief Justice Roy Moore has deep religious and civil roots stemming from the Protestant Reformation and provides an excellent historical study of religion, law, and public policy in America. Two recent...
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Look to the Altar, Not the Throne
The Supreme Court granted injunctive relief to houses of worship previously closed under New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s restrictions on public gatherings. Justice Neil Gorsuch chided the governor for his “color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues and mosques.” This is a tremendous step toward the restoration of order...
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Life and Death in a House Divided
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...
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Why Is Japan Dying?
It’s Jan. 22, 2016, the 43rd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade abortion decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that has killed more than 60 million babies here. But this year, let’s turn to Japan. Fortune magazine ran an article titled, “Why Japan’s Economic Troubles Should Worry the U.S.” It warned that the world’s third...
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Parochial Formalism
Justice Hugo Black remains something of an anomaly in the history of the Supreme Court. A textualist who was contemptuous of the arbitrary mysticism of substantive due process, he nevertheless advocated the most extreme position on the issue of incorporating the Bill of Rights against the states through the 14th Amendment, a revolutionary doctrine that...
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Keeping Up the Fight Against Tyranny
My article “The New Resistance Is Rising” appeared on Intellectual Takeout on Dec. 1, 2020. Since then, we’ve seen even more evidence of fraud in November’s presidential contest, the Supreme Court and other lower courts have refused to look at the evidence of this fraud, and the left will likely take control of our federal government. Should Joe...
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Wimin’s Work
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...
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The Fear of the Original
The demands of life are endlessly self-contradictory. It is a supreme compliment in intellectual life, for example, to be called original; but it can be alarming to discover something—so alarming that people have been known to turn tail and run when they do. To take a philosophical instance: Leibniz, as Bertrand Russell tells in his...
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Courage in the Face of Tyranny
A Man For All Seasons is a film for our time. In this classic period drama, Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield), a brilliant writer and intellectual and former Lord Chancellor of England, refuses to approve Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, rejects his decision to break with Rome, and recognize the king as the Supreme Head...
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‘War Between the States’
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...
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Liberty, Justice, and Abortion For All
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...
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On Thomas Szasz
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...
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Stealth Candidates
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...
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Guns Incorporated?
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...
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Dreams of My Daughters
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...
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Franklin Pierce and the Fight for the Old Union
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...
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Sex and Marriage in San Francisco
The California Supreme, in a recent decision striking down the state’s ban on same-sex “marriage,” has issued a declaration of independence from the human race. Progressives have inevitably hailed this latest break-through, comparing it to the legalization of inter-racial marriage, but the same progressives just as inevitably will hail the inevitable legalization of cross-species marriage...
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Fueling Culture Wars
“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...
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Off the Hook
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...
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SCOTUS hateus
There are some real stunners in today’s convoluted ruling from the Supremes regarding Arizona v. United States. Here are some of my favorites: “As a general rule, it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain in the United States.” “Federal governance is extensive and complex.” “Removal is a civil matter, . . . ” . ....
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The Royal Prerogative
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...
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Where Trump’s and Bibi’s Interests Clash
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,...
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The Beauty of Holiness: Building for Eternity—December 2005
PERSPECTIVE The Beauty of Holinessby Thomas Fleming Fixing our gaze. VIEWS The Romantic Reactionby Joseph PearceTranscending the divide. The Loving Lookby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.A cure for the epicure. Conservatism as Medicineby Claude PolinNature versus the state of nature. Pugin and the Gothic Dreamby James PatrickTheology in the architecture. NEWS Did the Supreme Court Destroy Property...
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Joe Biden, the New Brezhnev
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...
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DUE PROCESS: FROM JOE FRIDAY TO JACK BAUER—May 2008
PERSPECTIVEBeastie Boysby Thomas Fleming VIEWSFederales, Gringo Styleby Roger D. McGrathThe exponential growth of federal police. Do We Want a Federal Police Force?by William J. QuirkThe Supreme Court and Congress versus the people. Jack Bauer, Agent of Anarcho-Tyranny, U.S.A.by R. Cort KirkwoodAmerica’s most wanted. NEWSThe Surge “Success”by Ted Galen CarpenterTriumph of hope over experience. REVIEWSTowers of...
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Kim Jong-il, the Leader from Hell
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...
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The Importance of Being Mean
The three pillars of liberal morality are engagement, compassion, and inclusiveness; its corresponding demons apathy, hatred, and exclusiveness. The shorthand word for the three cardinal virtues is niceness; for the three supreme vices, meanness. Nice is a word familiar among middle-middle class Americans, who have been liberalized whether they know it or not: the sort...
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What has Happened to Masculinity in 21st Century?
On Saturday morning, September 22, I switched on Fox News and there witnessed a gaggle of five garrulous women, all talking at the same time, all vacuous and empty headed, and all saying basically nothing—a so-called “panel” discussing the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the last-minute and largely-unfounded accusations hurled...
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Who Wants This War with Iran?
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...
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Is Iran Taking the China Road?
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...
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The Dirty Fact About College Admissions
Pitting the state of Texas against four students who had been denied admission to the University of Texas School of Law because of their skin color, the recent Hopwood v. Texas case could spell doom for racial preferences in public education if affirmed by the Supreme Court. The Sth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose...
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Why Some of Us Can’t Dine in Peace
The recent harassment of Supreme Court Justices is a continuation of years of abuse and violence against conservative public figures in both public and private spaces. Some of us can't even dine in peace.
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MONKEYS IN THE CLASSROOM: September 2006
PERSPECTIVE Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off by Thomas Fleming The right to an opinion. VIEWS Educated at Home by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem. The pleasure that comes with struggle. The Supreme Court, Globalization, and the Teaching of Religion by Tom Landess Shaping society. Education to the ...
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Re: Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame
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...
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Two Centuries of Resolve
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...
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Doll Studies
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]...
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Hillary vs. The Donald
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...
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Sex and Marriage in San Francisco
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. ...
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Justice for Tommy
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...
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Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Bush
Thank God for Republican presidents who appoint strict constructionists to the U.S. Supreme Court. Otherwise, the Court today might have upheld ObamaCare.
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Boogaloo Down Broadway: The Charade of Liberal Change
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...
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Happiness in Chernobyl
The lives of the babushkas in Chernobyl are evidence that God exists everywhere, and that while destruction can often reign supreme, creation, however small, affirms our propensity for the good.
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Is a New US Mideast War Inevitable?
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.”...
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Christmas, That Winter Festival
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...
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Our Constitution and Theirs
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...