CRB: Restoring the Constitution

It must be Spring, because the Spring issue of the Claremont Review of Books (subscribe here for the absurdly low price of $19.95) has just been published and is available online to subscribers. It is an incredibly rich issue.

The CRB is the flagship publication of our friends at the Claremont Institute. The mission of the institute — “to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life” — could not be more timely or needful.

As has become traditional, our friends at the CRB have let me pick three pieces from the new issue to preview here for our readers. I have picked three to give some sense of the breadth and depth on offer in the issue. We lead off with an essay on the restoration of constitutional government in these United States by the University of Virginia’s estimable Professor James Ceaser.

Within the conservative movement, there is widespread consensus that we have abandoned the Constitution — John Marini makes the case in the companion essay to Professor Ceaser’s — and that restoring it would remedy many or all of the problems in our politics. Calls for a return to the Constitution are common, but practical advice about how to return it to the forefront of our national discussion are few and far between.

Professor Ceaser argues that, though the increasingly frequent calls to bring back the Constitution are heartening, they are no substitute for hard analysis. He gets the ball rolling in his essay “Restoring the Constitution.” In the essay he charts a course back to our founding principles that all conservatives should read and consider. Please check it out.

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