Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy – judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes – because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences.
In 1976, Jimmy Carter – peanut farmer; carried his own suitcase, imagine that – somewhat tapped America’s durable but shallow reservoir of populism. By 1980, ordinariness in high office had lost its allure.
If those who wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment had imagined laws restricting immigration – and had anticipated huge waves of illegal immigration – is it reasonable to presume they would have wanted to provide the reward of citizenship to the children of the violators of those laws? Surely not.
Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration – which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better – has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated.
Arizona’s law makes what is already a federal offense – being in the country illegally – a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona’s right to assert concurrent jurisdiction.
Since the emergence of the Republican Party, only two Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, have been followed by Democrats, and both FDR and JFK died in office, so their successors ran as incumbents.
The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of america is justice and securing the blessings of liberty.
The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny “arf” – the sound of a lap dog.
The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.
When liberals advocate a value-added tax, conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it – after the 16th Amendment is repealed.
The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bidding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so in 1956 Congress entitled women to collect benefits at 62, extending the entitlement to men in 1961.
The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.
The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction – that ‘Europe’ has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.
The average American expends more time becoming informed about choosing a car than choosing a candidate. But, then, the consequences of the former choice are immediate and discernible.
Baseball’s best teams lose about sixty-five times a season. It is not a game you can play with your teeth clenched.
It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.
The almost erotic pleasure of spending money that others have earned and saved is one reason people put up with the tiresome aspects of political life.
We are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within.
The English language is not always the President’s friend.
The First Amendment is not a blanket freedom-of-information act. The constitutional newsgathering freedom means the media can go where the public can, but enjoys no superior right of access.