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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.”…
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…
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