Constitution
June 23, 2022 — John Hinderaker
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court decided Carson v. Makin on a 6-3 vote, with the liberal bloc dissenting. The case related to a program in Maine, whereby the state will pay for specified educational alternatives for parents who live in districts where there is no secondary school. Public and private schools are eligible as long as they are accredited and meet other requirements, except that only “nonsectarian” schools can participate.
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April 18, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Florida federal district judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle has ruled that the travel mask mandate is illegal. Axios has a brief story here along with a link to the decision as posted online here. I have barely had time to review the story and won’t comment on the merits of the decision until I can read it. I can only say that the mandate is obnoxious and absurd regardless of the
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March 22, 2022 — Steven Hayward
It goes without saying that leftists have perfected the art of situational ethics. The basic operating rule for the left is: “‘Democracy’ means getting what we want; if any institution doesn’t give us what we want, that institution must be destroyed,” though they will always call it “reform.” Consider the cliche of the last few years that “democracy is in peril,” and then let this Washington Post headline settle in
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March 22, 2022 — Steven Hayward
The confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are off to a predictable start, with Sen. Ted Cruz mentioning the forgotten late 18th-century Justice Bushrod Washington, who was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 24 hours, provoking a spasm from the left, which may have been Cruz’s intent. Gillian Brockwell, a staff writer for the Washington Post‘s “history blog,” found this all too much to take: Ted Cruz told Ketanji
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March 16, 2022 — John Hinderaker
In a number of cases across the country, academics who have been fired or otherwise penalized for failing to go along with the “woke” fad have successfully sought legal redress. It is remarkable how little understanding the academics who run our colleges and universities have, apparently, of the basics of constitutional law. They generally seem to think that they have free rein to impose wokeism on all those within their
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February 6, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
Adrian Vermeule is a law professor at Harvard and a leading proponent of Common Good (or National) Conservatism. He has written an op-ed for the New York Times called “The Supreme Court is on the wrong path.” I’m not sure what path the Supreme Court is on (we’ll probably have a better idea by the end of June). Therefore, I neither agree nor disagree with proposition set forth in the
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January 17, 2022 — Steven Hayward
The media consults “experts.” And then get the story completely wrong. There’s a deeper story at work right now, and it is simply this: all the action on constitutional interpretation now is on the right—the reverse of circumstances of the Warren Court era in the 1960s, when elaborate new liberal theories beloved of the “living Constitutionalists” were spinning forth from law schools every day. Today’s reversal is not merely because
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December 17, 2021 — Steven Hayward
One reason the left hates the American Constitution, and wishes to replace it, is that its embedded principles along with much of its explicit text is foursquare against the two main purposes of the left: class struggle and race struggle. Never mind the drive to abolish the electoral college, or the Senate, or admit new states to increase the odds of Democratic election victories. Just take in how the left
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November 17, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The new (Fall) issue of the Claremont Review of Books is now online and in the mail. I just received the galley on Monday and am in the process of picking out essays and reviews to feature on Power Line, as usual. To kick things off, I have the exchange published in the issue under the rubric of The Disputed Question. The question is the soundness of John Eastman’s memo(s)
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November 6, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers is in the news. He tested positive for covid and will miss tomorrow’s game. The purported scandal is that Rodgers implied in a press conference some time ago that he had been vaccinated. (He said “immunized.”) Now Rodgers is caught up in the general hysteria over vaccination, leading him to describe himself as a victim of the “woke mob” that is trying to “put a
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October 10, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Philip Hamburger holds an endowed chair at Columbia Law School and is author, most recently, of Purchasing Submission: Conditions, Power, and Freedom, just published by Harvard University Press. I was a fanatic admirer of Professor Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (2014), which I reviewed for National Review in “A new old regime.” I thought it was the most important book I had read in a long time and still do.
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October 8, 2021 — Steven Hayward
As I survey the current scene, I’m inclined to take the long view, which goes all the way back to Watergate. One of the ignored subtexts of Watergate is that a part of the fury behind the drive to get Nixon is that Nixon had made clear after his 1972 landslide his determination to challenge directly the power of the permanent bureaucracy, and thereby the power base of the Democratic
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August 26, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The Supreme Court today blocked the Biden administration’s lawless moratorium on evictions. You can read the opinion and dissent here. Even if one believes that the moratorium constitutes good public policy, it seems beyond dispute that the executive branch lacks the power to mandate it. As the majority of Justices said in their unsigned opinion, “If a federally imposed eviction moratorium is to continue, Congress must specifically authorize it.” Biden
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August 3, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports that Joe Biden, bowing to pressure from the left, will extend the moratorium on evictions, after all. Initially, Biden had refused to do so because, as he acknowledged, he quite plainly lacks that authority. But now, he has decided to violate the law — indeed, the Constitution — and extend the moratorium. The Post states: The Biden administration has repeatedly insisted that it lacked the legal
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June 17, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Forget Friday Night Lights. How about Feddie Night Fights—Federalist Society style? Two weeks from now, on Wednesday June 30 at 8 pm eastern time, I’ll be refereeing a Federalist Society student division online webinar on the issue of whether the Declaration of Independence should inform judicial interpretation of the Constitution. This is a live issue on the right, and I’ve written an outline of the two sides of this issue,
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May 28, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Most Americans naively believe that the 14th Amendment precludes our governments from discriminating on the basis of race. Sadly, that isn’t how the courts see it. Nevertheless, race discrimination is at least sometimes illegal, as a panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held yesterday. The case relates to Joe Biden’s Restaurant Revitalization Fund, the terms of which are discriminatory. Hans Bader has the story: On Thursday, a federal
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April 23, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Democrats seem intent on using the events of January 6 as a sort of Reichstag fire on which they can predicate a one-party state. They have H.R. 1. to federalize election law and facilitate fraudulent voting. They seek to pack the Supreme Court. And they propose turning the District of Columbia into a state. The D.C. statehood gambit has been around for a long time, but it answers to the
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