Defending the Founders
May 15, 2013 — Scott Johnson
It may be too optimistic to wonder if commencement speech to the graduating students of Ohio State University (White House video here) might not have represented the high tide of Obamaism. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I wonder if it might not be (bumpily, with the implementation of Obamacare before us) downhill from here: Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as
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April 9, 2013 — Scott Johnson
In one of his routines on the justice system dating back to the early 1970′s, comedian Richard Pryor commented sarcastically (in language rated XXX): “You go down there looking for justice, that’s what you find: Just us.” Pryor was referring to the racial composition of the players involved in the administration of justice. Times have changed substantially in that respect, but reading Ben Shapiro’s account of President Obama’s gun control
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March 29, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Over at NRO’s Corner, my daughter Eliana has an interesting preview of coming attractions in the Senate: Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee — the Senate’s rabble-rousing GOP triumvirate – seek nothing less than to fundamentally transform the debate over gun control. As has been reported, they will likely filibuster when Harry Reid brings his gun-control legislation up for a vote. In doing so, according to sources, they hope
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March 3, 2013 — Scott Johnson
James Wagner has found himself in a familiar position and he has dealt with it in the familiar fashion. Speaking as the president of Emory University, he praised one of the constitutional compromises with slavery. Writing in the university’s alumni magazine, Wagner cited the provision counting slaves as three-fifths of the population that determined congressional representation (and electoral votes in presidential elections) as a compromise that should inspire today’s gridlocked
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February 22, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Today is the anniversary of the birth of George Washington. Of all the great men of the revolutionary era to whom we owe our freedom, Washington’s greatness was the rarest and the most needed. At this remove in time, it is also the hardest to comprehend. Take, for example, Washington’s contribution to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Washington’s mere presence lent the undertaking and its handiwork the legitimacy that resulted
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February 12, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Today is of course the anniversary of the birth of America’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln. As a politician and as president, Lincoln was a profound student of the Constitution and constitutional history. Perhaps most important, Lincoln was America’s indispensable teacher of the moral ground of political freedom at the exact moment when the country was on the threshold of abandoning what he called its “ancient faith” that all men are
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February 9, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Introduced by Senator Jeff Sessions, Dr. Benjamin Carson spoke on Thursday this week at the National Prayer Breakfast to an audience that included President and Mrs. Obama up on the dais. Dr. Carson is a pediatric neurosurgeon who has lived a life of incredible accomplishment defying seemingly impossible odds. Watching the video, however, I couldn’t help but wonder if Dr. Carson might not have a greater contribution to make outside
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February 3, 2013 — Steven Hayward
By now most everyone has seen or heard about Ben Shaprio’s magnificent smackdown of the egregious Piers Morgan on CNN a few weeks back (posted below). If people didn’t know of Ben before then, they enjoyed a star-in-the-making moment. But even a natural talent usually has some important help along the way, and in Ben’s case, it was the Claremont Institute’s Publius Fellows program. Ben was among the 2006 class
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January 23, 2013 — Scott Johnson
I think it would be a serious mistake to ignore or fail to attend closely to President Obama’s second inaugural address. It speaks to his ambition, his assault on the founding principles, and his attempt to realign the electorate on a misreading or misinterpretation or misrepresentation of the meaning of the founding principles. Attention must be paid. See, e.g., Yuval Levin’s “Obama’s second inaugural.” As R.J. Pestritto has demonstrated, the
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November 19, 2012 — Steven Hayward
In the post-election “Now What?” edition of National Review just out today, I have an article suggesting that the durable features of the Constitution, however attenuated by a century of “progressivism,” should caution us from overdoing our pessimism. The whole article is behind a subscriber firewall, but here’s the lede: Conservatives are natural pessimists, based on a realism about fallible human nature that fuels our opposition to the coercive utopianism
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October 11, 2012 — Steven Hayward
While we await the Ryan-Biden smackdown tonight, a few notes from the bookpile. Harry Jaffa has a new collection just out: Crisis of the Strauss Divided: Essays on Leo Strauss and Straussianism, East and West (Rowman & Littlefield). It contains several essays written at the height of some of the disputes about Strauss in the 1980s, and some earlier material, such as Jaffa’s essay on the occasion of Strauss’s death
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August 6, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Our friends at the Heritage Foundation have launched a new educational initiative, Makers of American Political Thought, featuring short essays on key figures and ideas in American politics. (There will be an essay in this series from me a ways down the road, about a certain modern president.) The first essay in the series came out last week—Hillsdale’s R.J. Pestritto on Woodrow Wilson: Godfather of Liberalism. Pestritto is the author
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July 4, 2012 — Scott Johnson
President Calvin Coolidge celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1926, with a speech providing a magisterial review of the history and thought underlying the Declaration. His speech on the occasion deserves to be read and studied in its entirety. The following paragraph, however, is particularly relevant to the challenge that confronts us in the variants of the progressive dogma that pass themselves off today
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June 14, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has long been a supporter of the First Amendment rights of citizens in the face of what goes under the name of campaign finance reform. He knows what he is talking about and he has been a stalwart on the subject. Tomorrow he will be giving a major address at the American Enterprise Institute on “Growing Threats to the First Amendment” at 11:15 a.m. (Eastern).
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June 5, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Well, since we cover the fairer sex here (by the way, John, where is your review of the recently concluded Miss USA pageant?), equity demands that we cover the beefcake beat, too. And appearing right now on Bloomberg/Business Week is an article making the case that Alexander Hamilton was more than just a canny banker and political thinker. He was a chick magnet, too. There’s even a FaceBook group called
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May 22, 2012 — Scott Johnson
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
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May 7, 2012 — Steven Hayward
One of my most contentious contentions is that if you want to learn about the Constitution, taking constitutional law at a law school is the last place you should do it. But undergraduate political science and history curricula are hardly better. Among other things, as Peter Berkowitz observes today in the Wall Street Journal, American higher education neglects what I call the “Owners Manual” of the Constitution—the Federalist Papers: Most
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