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Are We Near a Constitutional Turning Point?

by Gerard N. Magliocca

When Americans think about constitutional law, they almost always focus on the Supreme Court. And with the recent appointments of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, many observers believe that the Court is about to embark on a new conservative era. More powerful forces at work outside of the Court, however, suggest that a different constitutional change may be at hand – the dissolution of the coalition built by Ronald Reagan and its replacement by a new political orde

In Praise of the Study of Folly

by Bryan Caplan

DEMOCRACIES have a lot of apparently counterproductive policies. Economists emphasize the folly of protection and price controls. Experts in other fields have their own bones to pick. How are these policies possible? There are three basic responses. Response 1: Defend the accused policies on their merits. Response 2: Argue that politicians and special interests have subverted democracy. Response 3: Explain how policies can be both popular and counterproductive.

Why We Can't Let Them Tamper with Habeas Corpus

by Staughton Lynd

“Habeas corpus”: it sounds like Latin (which it is), complicated, and user-unfriendly. An exotic form of the verb “to have” – the second person singular of the present subjunctive, according to my dictionary – and something about a “body,” apparently. But hardly anything to get excited about.In reality the ancient judicial writ known as “habeas corpus” is the most elemental, existentially relevant pleading in Anglo-American le

American Corporate Power: Like So Many Other Things, It’s in the Founding

by Andrew M. Schocket

School loans.  Health insurance.  Homeland security. Online music. Energy. Transportation. Bankruptcy. For better and for worse, these and many other subjects of public policy are greatly affected by the actions and interests of large corporations.  Corporations play such an important role in economic and political affairs not by happenstance or by slow evolution, but because that’s exactly what the founders of America’s first corporations intended.  And corporate

We Should Remember that the Buffalo Still Roam

by Michael Punke

There's an undercurrent of despair and even hopelessness in recent reports about global warming -- a drift that carries a real risk of paralysis, the sense that it's too late to do anything. But while our landscape is scarred by centuries of environmental abuse, there are also monumental environmental victories, and therefore hope.   One such hopeful victory is found in the story of the buffalo. In 1902, only 23 buffalo remained alive in the American wild -- the hounded remna

Why the Great Plains Are Dying

by Steven Conn

Much of the western United States has been experiencing a severe drought for nearly a decade, and the future only looks drier. One of the conclusions of the new United Nations study on global climate change is that wet places on the planet will probably get wetter and dry places, like much of the American West, will become even more parched. John Wesley Powell is rolling over in his grave. Powell isn't a household name any more, but in the era after the Civil War he was among the m

Should We Feel Helpless to Effect Change?

by Nancy C. Unger

Andrew J. Bacevich, Boston University professor and frequent critic of the war in Iraq, has startled his many readers by saying that "the will of the people" has no meaningful role in American politics.   Following the death of Andrew Bacevich, Jr., in that war on Mother's Day, Professor Bacevich claims that while his son did his best to serve the country, his own books, articles, and op-ed pieces accomplished no

Thomas Jefferson, Still the Democratic Party's Hero?

by Susan Dunn

Should Thomas Jefferson remain the icon of the Democratic Party? For almost two hundred years, Democrats have celebrated the Virginian, hailing him as the party's polestar. But with all that we have learned about Jefferson, is it time for Democrats to jettison him and look elsewhere for inspiration? Jefferson's high-point as Democratic hero came in the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt adopted him as the symbol of his administration. FDR might reasonably have celebrated Alexander Hamilton

Should Bush and Cheney Face Impeachment?

by Peter Charles Hoffer

Should the House of Representatives impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney? My own preferences to one side (where they belong) the answer is no. But the explanation of the short answer requires a little more detail. While it would be tempting indeed to hoist the Republican Party by its own petard, the immediate precedent--the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton–is not apposite. That episode was a naked abuse of congressional power, by a willf

Uncovering Aimee Semple McPherson's Demons in 21st Century Evangelicalism

by Matthew Avery Sutton

No modern day celebrity preacher claims to follow in the footsteps of jazz-age evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Who would? She vanished in 1926 and returned a month later claiming to have been kidnapped while rumors abounded that she had actually been vacationing with a lover. She was a two-time divorcee who became the inspiration for Sinclair Lewis’s over-sexed fraudulent faith healer Sister Sharon Falconer. She performed vaudeville on Broadway, ran with Hollywood’s rich and fa

The Trouble with Dynasties

by Pamela W. Laird

Why doesn’t George W. Bush fire Attorney General Alberto Gonzales? Like Donald Rumsfeld before him and, more recently, Paul Wolfowitz, Gonzales is causing President Bush political embarrassment and costing him political support. The President’s supporters praise his personal loyalty to subordinates. His critics charge him with arrogance and unwillingness to admit error. But both sides, while recognizing Bush’s loss of political capital, fail to recognize his protection of so

Mental Health is Everyone’s Business: Historical Reflections on the Virginia Tech Shootings

by Heather Munro Prescott

A man's college days, collectively, are usually his happiest. Most of mine were not happy. --Clifford Whittingham Beers, A Mind That Found Itself (1908)Clifford Whittingham Beers’s words came to mind as I followed the news coverage of Cho Seung-Hui’s shooting rampage at Virginia Tech last week. 

What's New in the Abortion Debate in the Wake of the Supreme Court Decision

by Daniel Gordon

"Today's decision is alarming," wrote Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissenting opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart -- the recent case in which the Supreme Court endorsed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. This is an understatement. The Carhart case is a revolution. An "alarming" decision would leave time for the pro-choice side to react, but Carhart has already transformed how the Supreme Court frames the abortion issue. The importan

Did Cho Seung-Hui Have the "Herostratos Syndrome"?

by William Marina

I doubt that many people have ever heard of Herostratos, a Greek who lived almost 2,400 hundred years ago, but I would suggest that the similarities of Cho’s murderous rampage at Virginia Tech and Herostratos’ actions are striking. 

Imus and History

by Rick Shenkman

Imus is already last week's news, though his face adorns the cover of Newsweek. But there remain a few angles that unfortunately have not been addressed. First, is the curious attitude of his apologists to history. In their rush to defend Imus from attacks that he's a racist they frequently omit his pattern of racism. Though they concede that he frequently "came up to the line" and perhaps on occasion "crossed it"--for some reason the vocabulary of the Old We

Why Giuliani Had to Backpedal About His Wife's Role as First Lady

by Scott Kaufman

When Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani told Barbara Walters on the show “20/20” on March 29 that he would be open to his wife, Judith, attending cabinet meetings, it was an expression of how he viewed his relationship with her. “If she wanted to sit in on cabinet meetings,” stated Giuliani, “that would be something I would be very, very comfortable with.” To many Americans, however, the presence of the first lady – an unelected, unappoi

Time to Ask and Tell!

by Steve Estes

"To you who answered the call of your country and served in its Armed Forces," Pres. Truman wrote to Lt. Robert Ricks in 1945, "I extend the heartfelt thanks of a grateful nation." Ricks, a young Army Air Force navigator who had survived several months in Dachau as a prisoner of war, had certainly earned the nation's gratitude. The note from Truman was mailed to millions of American GIs at the end of World War II. Hundreds of thousands of them, like Ricks, were gay.

Bush and the Case of Executive Privilege

by Mark J. Rozell

President Bush and Congress appear headed toward a clash over whether White House aides can be forced to testify before a legislative committee. If pushed hard by the Democrats, it appears that Bush will claim executive privilege and revive a national debate over a constitutional principle most commonly associated with Watergate and the Lewinsky scandal. Why would the president want to do that?

Why Reconstruction Explains Our Politics Today

by Heather Cox Richardson

A week after the 2004 presidential election, a friend sent me a map of America with the red and blue states superimposed over the Confederate and Union states of the Civil War years. The Republican red states fit almost perfectly over the southern states that supported the Confederacy and the western plains that were territories during the 1860s, and the Democratic blue states fit closely over the states that had supported the Union. 

It's Gay Rights, Not Gay Genes, That Matter

by Nancy C. Unger

The "gay sheep" research on rams from the U.S. Sheep Experiment Station in Idaho set off a firestorm of controversy. In an effort to understand what causes homosexuality in rams (which inhibits breeding), scientists sought to produce artificially same-sex preference behavior in male sheep. If they could figure out how to make sheep gay, perhaps they could figure out how to make them straight. Their efforts failed, but the strong suggestion that sexual preference is biolog