Books
April 5, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (2014) constitutes a pioneering work of intellectual restoration. Provoked by recent developments in administrative law, I have returned to it this week. Just in time for this concluding post, I heard from Professor Hamburger last night. He wrote: Dear Scott, Thank you so much for your kind discussion of my book! Alas, there is still a long way to go in clearing up the
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April 4, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Philip Hamburger is the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the author of Is Administrative Law Unlawful? I thought I would follow up “The case against administrative law” with the interview I conducted with Professor Hamburger back in 2014, after I had reviewed Is Administrative Law Unlawful? for National Review. It may be slightly dated. However, as the song goes, “the fundamental things apply.”
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April 3, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Every day the news brings word of edicts handed down from on high by rulers whose names we have never heard of or voted for. I mean the heads of the various administrative agencies that control every corner of our lives. Administrative law is not an inherently interesting subject. You may not be interested in administrative law, but administrative law is interested in you. William F. Buckley, Jr. used to
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April 2, 2024 — Scott Johnson
President Biden revived one of the Democrat/left’s greatest hits in his shoutfest that passed for a State of the Union address last month: And now it’s my goal to cut the federal deficit $3 trillion more by making big corporations and the very wealthy finally pay their fair share. Look, I’m a capitalist. If you want to make a million bucks – great! Just pay your fair share in taxes.
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March 30, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Coleman Hughes was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of MI’s City Journal. MI has compiled his City Journal publications online here. He is the author of the book The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, published last month by Penguin Random House. Hughes was invited to talk about the subject of his book on The View this week. I have posted the video
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March 29, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll proudly celebrates her Power Line anniversary and announces the publication of Over My Limit – Ammo Grrrll’s Tenth Year of Shooting Fish In A Barrel. She writes: The NSFW but hilarious comic Ron White has the famous wonderful line (at least 30 years old, so I feel comfortable quoting it) about being unable to avoid further trouble when arrested: “I had the right to remain silent, but I
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March 15, 2024 — Scott Johnson
I ask readers to forgive me for repeating this personal note from last year. It is meant to pay tribute to my high school, my high school teachers — Latin teachers Lyman Hawbaker (who also taught ancient history) and Dave Sims in particular — and to my classmates. In the course of our high school years we were required to study Latin and dip our toes into Caesars’s Gallic Wars,
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March 9, 2024 — Scott Johnson
The current issue of the Claremont Review of Books carries the informative review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk by Helen Andrews. The Andrews review is relatively brief and extremely interesting. I want to single out the penultimate paragraph: Conservatives ought to support Musk because he will need all the help he can get. The deep state has him in its crosshairs and will not stop until he is
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February 15, 2024 — Scott Johnson
On his current visit to Moscow Tucker Carlson is repeating the old phenomenon of political pilgrimage. Paul Hollander devoted an entire book to it 40 years ago — Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (1981). (The original subtitle of the book was Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba.) Hollander’s book was a powerful antidote to the phenomenon, but it did not
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February 15, 2024 — Scott Johnson
New York Post columnist Miranda Devine literally wrote the book on The Laptop From Hell. Subtitle: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide. Whenever she updates the continuing saga of Hunter Biden, attention must be paid. Today the reader’s attention is rewarded with low comedy: Hunter has been making all of his 16 lawyers in cases across the country go through this charade of
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February 13, 2024 — Scott Johnson
I recorded Shane off TCM and watched it for about the tenth time last night. The film was directed by George Stevens with a script by A.B. Guthrie, Jr. Alan Ladd plays Shane, the gunfighter with a mysterious past who is looking for a new life in Wyoming circa 1889. A variety of currents and undercurrents run through the film. Some of them conflict. Indians have been cleared from the
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February 12, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
Black History Month is “ridiculous,” Morgan Freeman contends, because “black history is American history.” Black History Month also tends to ignore certain works that merit attention year round. Consider, for example, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany, by Hans Massaquoi, son of a Liberian father and German mother. “In their many bloody clashes for dominance in Germany,” wrote Massaquoi, “the Nazis and Commies were virtually indistinguishable. Both
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February 9, 2024 — Scott Johnson
In the last of the five stories that make up his third volume of stories about fictional alter ego Henry Bech, John Updike recounts the incredulous response to Bech’s receipt of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature. In Updike’s telling, the New York Daily News runs a story with the headline “BECH? WHODAT???” That doesn’t quite apply to former Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon Chase, but we should know him
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January 22, 2024 — Scott Johnson
This past Saturday I met Aaron MacLean, host of the School of War podcast. Aaron is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Before that, he worked on Capitol Hill as senior foreign policy advisor and legislative director to Senator Tom Cotton and served on active duty as a U.S. Marine for seven years, deploying to Afghanistan as an infantry officer in 2009–2010. Following his time in
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January 12, 2024 — Scott Johnson
The New York Times has published its Edward Jay Epstein obituary by Sam Roberts. It runs as “Edward Jay Epstein, Author and Stubborn Skeptic, Dies at 88.” The Times obit draws freely on Assume Nothing: Encounters With Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe, the autobiographical memoir Ed published last year at age 87. Ed was a New York character and the Times obit isn’t bad. Indeed, it
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January 11, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Last week I declared Edward Jay Esptein’s Assume Nothing: Encounters With Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe my book of the year. I followed up with Ed by email, asking him how he was doing and telling him I wanted to visit him in New York. Ed responded that he was “just recovering from [his] first bout of covid” and asked how I was doing. I am
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January 7, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Henry Wallace! I have long thought that Roosevelt’s replacement of Wallace with Truman on the Democratic ticket in 1944 provided irrefutable proof that God looks out for the United States. Wallace was a fool who would have altered the course of history very much for the worse if he had succeeded Roosevelt to the presidency in 1945 instead of Truman. Among other evidence of Wallace’s foolishness, one thinks of Wallace’s
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