Tag: supreme court
The Death of a Justice and the Hope of Magnanimous Statesmanship
We do not need reminding of how bitter, partisan, and polarized American politics is today. In order to have a community, people need to hold some things in common. America in 2020 is increasingly a nation of people who share a geography while holding wildly differing values.
Truth on the Losing Side
Justice Scalia’s dissents in the two same-sex “marriage” cases are worth reading. The first opinion addresses the idea of judicial supremacy within the federal...
Firm Identities and Loose Borders
Hillsdale, Michigan. A drive back from New England to the upper mid-West on Tuesday gave me ample time to hear the journalistic accounts of...
Interstate Commerce and Arizona Wine
The federal courts' extraordinarily broad interpretation of the Constitution's interstate commerce clause has long posed a problem for localists -- which is to say,...
Helpless?
With three children raised and fledged, we managed to avoid their seductive pox and the kids are actually grateful for it. All three of them are engaged in creative professions. Pushing buttons makes for better button pushers but an imagination comes from a combination of independent thinking and a life lived as much outside as inside.
Waking Up, Smelling the Constitutional Coffee
Wichita, KS
Dahlia Lithwick and Ezra Klein are a couple of my favorite pundits in the whole blogosphere. Lithwick is snarky, and Klein is wonky,...
Why I Hope Westboro Baptist Church, the ACLU, and Dahlia Lithwick...
Free speech is a good thing. Respecting the value of the whole community is a better one.
Few v. Many: The Topsy-Turvy World of Judicial Demographics
There are many reasons to wonder about the wisdom of confirming Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court. What strikes me most about her nomination is the typically phony way Washington and the mainstream media are packaging the event.
When Lawyers Catch the French Disease
Devon, PA. No observer of American culture grasped its implicit contents better than did Alexis de Tocqueville, and no one since has better grasped...
Iowa… Place of the Drowsy Ones
OWEN TOWNSHIP, WINNEBAGO COUNTY, ILLINOIS: According to one legend, the word Iowa means "Place of the Drowsy Ones" in some extinct Indian tongue. This...