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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

For my last visit (for a while) to this remarkably rich vein of unknown historical fact, I share information about our vice presidents with which you can dazzle, delight, and delectify. Well, dazzle and delight, anyway. Q. How many vice presidents have died in office? Seven! Q. Come one, seven? I can’t name one! If…

This afternoon I gave the first in the Liberty Lecture series at Gunston Hall in Alexandria, George Mason’s former digs, and talked about why the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 did such a poor job with the Presidency. Among the more painful errors they committed was having each presidential elector vote for two…

I don’t read many law reviews any more, but my eye fell on the current issue Yale Law Journal, which I cannot avoid as a former editor. This time, I was glad. There’s a fascinating article by Jenny Martinez, a Stanford law professor, “Antislavery Courts and the Dawn of International Human Rights Law.” http://yalelawjournal.org/117/4/martinez.html The…

Picking a running mate is the most important first decision of the presumptive (McCain) and potential (Clinton and Obama) nominees for president. Though the first three Vice Presidents to ascend to the White House (Tyler, Fillmore, and Johnson) were a rum lot, we might have done worse. Richard Johnson of Tennessee (Van Buren’s number two)…