Federalism
Right now, public education is such an expensive catastrophe that top-down imposition of standards and reasonable organizational principles is an attractive option. But there’s a very dark side to the impulse, hints of which can be found here: Governors and education leaders on Wednesday proposed sweeping new school standards that could lead to students across…
In my December column for the Rhode Island Catholic, I included federal spending among the mechanisms whereby we’re losing local — and therefore overall — control of the shape of our government. Neil Downing points out just such a deal with the Devil with respect to unemployment insurance: Rhode Island has a chance to obtain…
There’s certainly room for derision against the attitude that Abigail Thernstrom highlights here: In 1996, [current Attorney General Eric] Holder told the Washington Post that he always carried a favorite quotation in his wallet. A black man’s “race defines him more particularly than anything else,” it ran. Said Holder: “I am not the tall U.S.…
My monthly column in the current Rhode Island Catholic reviews the Commerce Clause, government spending, and the Fourteenth Amendment as contributors to trends that are transforming Christmas into a private affair: The underlying assumption that an atheist should feel as at home as an orthodox Roman Catholic in any corner of the nation is at…
The Tenth Amendment, for those who need reminding, reads as follows: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people It’s conceivable that a partial explanation for the states’ permitting the erosion of this protection may…
NewsBuster’s Noel Sheppard points to the results of a Pew Research survey released Thursday. For the first time in a Pew Research survey, nearly as many people believe it is more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns (45%) than to control gun ownership (49%). As recently as a year ago, 58%…
One doesn’t have to follow the same-sex marriage debate for long to recognize a strain of human tendencies with which I became familiar as an ideological minority in the college classroom. As I duked it out with the professor, most of the students would rush to take his or her side (silence from others being…
Stung by heavy termination fees (arising out of some sort of fixed asset sale/lease back arrangement that sounds suspiciously similar to what has been proposed to solve Rhode Island’s public pension problem) resulting from the collapse of AIG, mass transit authorities around the country have asked Uncle Sam for help with the resulting operating shortfalls.…
Many Rhode Islanders have been surprised to learn, as reported by Amanda Milkovits in the Projo, that “prostitution isn’t illegal in Rhode Island as long as it occurs indoors”. The issue was brought to light by a Federal law-enforcement multi-state raid against a thriving network of spa-brothels that included at least one site in Providence.…
I don’t think that there have been many posts on gun issues hereabouts, but Michael Barone–commenting on David Kopel’s analysis of the spread of concealed carry laws–remarks that the spread of such laws is a good sign for federalism. Nebraska recently became the 40th state to approve a concealed carry (“shall-issue“) law. According to Barone:…
