Protesters at the "Presidents Day Protest to Fight Trump's Fake Crisis," in San Francisco, California on February 18, 2019 (Sheila Fitzgerald / Shutterstock.com).How Unilateral Claims of Presidential Power Energize Polarization
Image: Wael Alreweie / Shutterstock.comPolitical Originalism and the Problem of Power
Image: Charles Brutlag / Shutterstock.comTo Secure the Blessings of Liberty: Sharing Stories of American Civic Purposes
Kent Weakley/Shutterstock.comVoter Turnout and the Prospects for the Republican Party
Alexandru Nika / Shutterstock.comPresidential Rhetoric and the Challenge to American Constitutionalism: A Conversation with Jeffrey Tulis
President Theodore RooseveltElecting Blacks Hasn’t Really Helped: A Conversation with Jason L. Riley
Jason RileyThe writings of Jason L. Riley span politics, economics, education, immigration, and race, among other subjects. The Buffalo-born Riley has worked for the Buffalo News, USA Today, and, for the last 23 years, the Wall Street Journal, becoming one of the leading conservative journalists in the United States. The frequent Fox News commentator is currently working on a biography of Thomas Sowell. Riley’s first book, which was about immigration, was Let Them In (2008). Next came Please Stop Helping Us (2014), examining the history of failed governmental assistance to black Americans. Templeton Press has just published his third book, False…
Burning Down His House
No man enters the presidency prepared for the office, yet few chief magistrates have managed a stage entry as startlingly rife with incompetence and impropriety as Donald Trump. The reason is that the inherent, inertial conservatism of the office disciplines most of its occupants.
Congress in Search of Itself
Christopher DeMuth had an interesting take on the election and its impact on our national institutions. In an essay for the Wall Street Journal, he wrote of the present inability of the political branches of government to function in a manner compatible with a national public good. Analyzing that failure, he pointed to what he believes is “a central purpose of the American scheme of checks and balances,” namely: to draw out the distinctive strengths of the two political branches, executive and the legislature, while containing their distinctive weaknesses. The scheme has not been working well of late. The consequences are…
Responses
Indubitably, our nation’s finances are a mess. America has run deficits 36 of the past 40 years. The national debt is $18 trillion, and it has tripled as a percentage of GDP since 1974. Each February, the President rolls out his budget—a collection of tomes loaded with tables and text attempting to explain the government’s $3.7…
John Marini provides an insightful commentary on Christopher Demuth’s optimistic suggestion that President Trump and the Republican Congress will be able to revive separation of powers and, by so doing, rescue us from an “autopilot government, rife with corruption and seemingly immune to incremental electoral correction” that the administrative state has created. Marini is less…
Americans are worried about the economy and jobs, about national security and safety from terrorism, about securing healthcare, about their children’s education. Lately I haven’t heard too many people talking about the problem of separation of powers. In fact, besides John Marini, Christopher DeMuth, Jonathan Turley, and a few other scholars and policy wonks, I…
I would like to thank Kevin Kosar, Ralph Rossum, and Colleen Sheehan for their thoughtful and generous responses to my essay, “Congress in Search of Itself”. Although there were many areas of agreement, and very few disagreements, each author focused on a different aspect of the problem posed by the contemporary role of Congress, and…
A New President
President Washington's Inauguration in New York City, April 23, 1789.Tomorrow will make it official that Donald J. Trump is the 45th President of the United States of America. His inauguration will likely be full of the Americana that many of us love, one that will provide telling points of patriotism and gratitude without any of the postmodern irony that lurked in Obama’s second inaugural where he said the truths of the Declaration of Independence “may” be self evident, and, without pausing, concluded that we should still be willing to work eagerly on their behalf. Trump’s election tells us that Americans are not rushing to enter the age of post-national and…
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- Next Page »
