Federalism
In recent years, a strange emphasis has been emerging on America’s political Left on the notion of treason. The accusation flies not only against hated political personages, but also retroactively in ways it didn’t used to be applied, like the Confederacy. It isn’t difficult to see where this is going: According to this person, the…
John DePetro and Justin Katz review the political news of the day in Rhode Island.
Two lines of debate in the battle of Left versus Right cross frequently. One is the question of whether history has an inexorable pull toward which it progresses, making it possible for there to be a “right side” of history that one can predict beforehand for a given issue. The other is whether one’s side…
From Matthew Continetti’s review of The Founders’ Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and What We Risk by Losing It, by Larry P. Arnn: An observer of contemporary American politics would assume that we have rights to just about everything—not only to those freedoms mentioned specifically in the Declaration,…
The aggressive and heated response to Jessica Ahlquist, upon her success in leveraging the power of the federal government to impose her religious preferences on her community’s public high school, is ignorant, unproductive, and completely at odds with the message of the prayer banner that the federal judge ordered removed and the broader faith espoused…
In the Federal debt-ceiling deal passed yesterday, as an alternative in phase II to a specific program cuts projected to cut spending by 1.2 trillion dollars, the debt-ceiling can be raised by 1.5 trillion dollars if Congress sends a balanced budget amendment to the US Constitution to the states for ratification. This raises the question…
Governor Chafee isn’t giving many clues as to the decisions that he’s making as he builds his budget proposal, but some statements that he has been willing to make are telling with regard to his approach, to say the least: Chafee did describe some specific priorities. He supports proposed federal legislation that would help the…
In an essay that is, unfortunately, behind a subscription firewall, Ramesh Ponnuru takes a mildly contrarian position on federalism: Yet this may not be an auspicious time for a campaign to empower the states, since their own mismanagement has been in the headlines for several years. California and Illinois are the most familiar basket cases,…
Timothy Sandefur’s edifying review of the shift in legal thought on the Supreme Court during the era of President Franklin Roosevelt’s progressive revolution points, among other things, to the way in which political groupings do not draw straight lines across history, such that a conservative or progressive today would have agreed with their supposed forerunners:…
At the Tenth Amendment rally at the Rhode Island statehouse a week ago Saturday, I asked Robert Healey, who has litigated Ninth and Tenth Amendment issues before the courts, about the current legal interpretation of the Tenth Amendment, and whether he believes the goal of Tenth Amendment activists should be to hold the Federal Government…
