The only apt comparisons to the Biden-Harris law-and-policy agenda are the New Deal and the Great Society. But how does the political and popular mandate for the current administration's agenda compare to those of these past programs? President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris purport both to rule expansively and permanently alter the country [...]
According to the Constitution, due process, and everyday legal practice, Donald Trump did not receive a fair trial in the Senate. And beyond that: What did the impeachment trial look like? According to the Supreme Court, “Justice must satisfy the appearance of justice” (Offut v. United States). So, what’s next for the courts under Democratic [...]
The political agenda laid out by Joe Biden’s website together with the 2020 Democratic Platform is lengthy, comprehensive, detailed, and unprecedented. No such agenda has ever been written down by one of the major political parties in American history. It is, in fact, not only socialism but the effective elimination of our already-much-diminished federalist system. [...]
In passing its resolution impeaching President Donald Trump just seven days before he leaves office, the House of Representatives has embarked on a new American legal, constitutional, political, and historical journey. An End Without a Means In its political haste to impeach President Trump, the House Democratic majority (along with ten Republicans) decided that an [...]
Rod Dreher's "Live Not by Lies" is based on the testimonies of dissidents in Eastern Europe and Russia as to how they survived the hard totalitarianism of communism. Mr. Dreher attempts to apply their lessons to what he claims is our growing American soft totalitarianism. Live Not By Lies, by Rod Dreher (Sentinel, 2020, 256 [...]
The reality is that no person and no private institution can escape the ceaseless initiatives by legal activists, judicial activists, cities, states, and, depending upon the Administration, the federal government to re-standardize American public as well as private life, and search out and cancel dissenters. In recent years, including this presidential year, cases in the [...]
Can the residents of Seattle whose property and businesses were destroyed, vandalized, or shut down in June, when the city for three weeks allowed and approved of the “autonomous zone,” now sue the city? Two such lawsuits have in fact already been filed in federal court; and in one of them, seventeen different persons and [...]
The police body-camera video confirms what the autopsy reports show: Derek Chauvin and his fellow officers had to subdue a large man resisting arrest, whose system was overwhelmed by the kind of drugs that routinely cause violence, and who died of a heart attack, not choking or strangulation. Along with the tens of billions of [...]
The very idea that students will suffer any significant loss of educational attainment by losing two months of twelve-plus years of school—less than two percent—is nonsense. Such an argument that every minute of school attendance is irreplaceable can only be made by someone who never attended American elementary and secondary schools. A frequently worried-about consequence [...]
The Catholic order of nuns, the Little Sisters of the Poor, are apparently not little enough or poor enough to avoid governmental coercion and interference with their works of charity. For almost a decade now, they have been involved in court cases resisting governmental attempts, first federal and now state, to require them to incorporate [...]
The contemporary frequency of parents, especially mothers, killing their children—not only newborn babies but toddlers too—is a new phenomenon. Does this have something to do with the relentless loosening of abortion laws in America since Roe v. Wade? We live in an era where we pretend that we do not know when life begins, but [...]
Rod Dreher’s book, “The Benedict Option,” has gone on to become an international cultural event. Yet, today, it is not clear whether the book has had any influence on Church institutions and leadership. Has the Benedict Option then been a failure? Should other “options” be considered? Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option, a New York [...]
This summer saw the resolutions of two high-profile civil lawsuits involving accusations of defamation and libel against two pillars of the media-academic complex. In the suit against hyper-liberal Oberlin College, Ohio state jurors rendered a judgment against their neighbor, the college. In the other case, a lawsuit against The Washington Post, the federal district-court judge [...]
Presidents of both parties, and houses of Congress controlled by both parties, have for decades tolerated and thus implicitly encouraged and provided an incentive for illegal immigration. What has been sacrificed along the way is the rule of law. Will the federal judiciary not only change central provisions of American immigration statutory law pertaining to [...]