David O. Stewart

The Supreme Court recently ruled that it’s okay for states to require voters to show official identification papers before they are allowed to vote. The case, Crawford v. Marion County…

After a few years in the Writing Game, people start to send you books as they come out, which is mostly good. Sometimes, though, the pile begins to overwhelm. I…

The American Constitution Society posted some excerpts from my appearance with them a week or so ago. Next time I’ll sit up straighter. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMkDuNJt01I

So, I was reading the memoir of Benjamin Perry at the Library of Congress today. Who? He was the first post-Civil War governor of South Carolina, appointed by President Andrew…

I just finished Joseph Ellis’ His Excellency, George Washington, a book I had dipped in and out of for research purposes without reading cover to cover. It is a worthy…

On Sunday, I caught the interview with Justice Antonin Scalia on Sixty Minutes. I was particularly bemused by the Justice’s discussion of whether torture — say, of the detainees at…

In my current project on the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, I am now in the phase of chopping out those parts of the story that — though entertaining to…

The quote comes from Dylan Thomas, from “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” in Under Milkwood. The subject comes up with the death…

It’s more than two weeks late, but I do want to offer belated 216th birthday greetings to Thaddeus Stevens of Lancaster, PA. He plays a pivotal role in the book…

The major parties use a somewhat bemusing array of electoral mechanisms to choose their presidential candidates: winner-take-all primaries, caucuses, “open primaries” (any voter can vote in any party primary), “closed…