You May Have More Rights Than the President — or the Supreme Court — Thinks
I’m looking forward to a forthcoming article in the Texas Law Review — how’s that for a sentence I never thought I’d write? The title shows a certain insensitivity to the marketplace: “Individual Rights Under State Bills of Rights When the Fourteenth Amendment Was Ratified in 1868: What Rights are Deeply Rooted in American History…
Read MoreFive Best Political Novels
In writing about Henry Adams recently, I was intrigued by a perennial conversation as to what are the best political novels. The project begins with defining what is a political novel. Surely it cannot be limited to fictions about the elctoral process. All human society has political content, and novels have to be embedded in…
Read MoreOriginal Intent, But Only If You Can Figure It Out
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is at it again, peddling his notion that the Constitution must have a fixed meaning as of September 1787. In remarks printed in the Washington Post, Scalia offers the novel thought that but for his fealty to original intent, his judicial decisions would be really conservative. Oh, my. Rather than…
Read MoreElectoral College Mumbo-Jumbo
The electoral college is a barnacle on American democracy. I argued this point in The Summer of 1787, and in a piece in the Los Angeles Times last year. The delegates to the Philadephia Convention liked the electoral college for the reason I don’t: it defeats democracy. They hoped that the electors would be wise…
Read MoreThe Other Adams
Actually, there are a zillion Adamses, many of them interesting, but the one I want to talk about is Henry Adams (1838-1918), great-grandson of the President John Adams, grandson of President John Quincy Adams. This Adams was a total intellectual. He had money so he did not need to work, and mostly didn’t. He was…
Read MoreAdams Mania
Having seen the first three episodes of HBO’s “John Adams” series, I’m mostly delighted with it, though with a few reservations. On the plus side, the production is a muscular one that conveys the risks of life during the Revolution. The army scenes aptly show the miserable conditions endured by the soldiers. It’s good to…
Read MoreSlow Motion Showdown, Part Deux
So the topic is the flaccid congressional response when the White House thumbed its nose at a congressional subpoena for documents about the firing of U.S. Attorneys in 2006. My interest is in episodes when Congress did not limply file a lawsuit to assert its rights, secure in the knowledge that no self-respecting court would…
Read MoreSlow-Motion Showdown
Has Congress forgotten how to stick up for itself? The face-off over the firing of United States Attorneys in 2006 was explosive at first. Was the Bush Administration injecting crude political criteria into law enforcement? High-level officials, including Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, resigned in the blowback. Sensing that the trail of wrongdoing led to the…
Read MoreTom Peters & Me
A few months back, after giving a couple of dozen book talks on The Summer of 1787, I developed a new one on the “Leadership Lessons of the Constitutional Convention.” I figured a new take on the writing of the Constitution would keep my presentations fresh. I also thought business and government groups might appreciate…
Read MoreLawyers, Guns, and Money
Before getting into the Supreme Court’s argument today in District of Columbia v. Heller, the title from the Warren Zevon song prompts this best Zevon quote ever. Shortly before his premature death, he was asked what he would tell those (unlike him) not expecting to die soon. His response: “Enjoy that sandwich.” As for the…
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