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Presidency: What the 25th Amendment Overlooks

by Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar

For a couple of hours in late June, Vice President Dick Cheney became the Acting President of the United States, as George W. Bush underwent anesthesia for a scheduled medical procedure. The smooth handoff of presidential power from Bush to Cheney and back to Bush occurred pursuant to the Constitution's Twenty-fifth Amendment, which provides a detailed framework regulating various sorts of presidential disability. But this Amendment did not become part of the Constitution until 19

Civil Liberties: J. Edgar Ashcroft?

by Marjorie Cohn

On May 30, 2002, the same day America mourned the victims of the September 11 attack and the conclusion of the Ground Zero cleanup, Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller III unveiled sweeping new surveillance powers for the FBI. In order to cover up its own incompetence in failing to properly analyze the data it already had before September 11, the FBI has now been given wide latitude to more effectively spy on law-abiding citizens. Under what New Yor

Column: Global Warming ... The Story of the President Who Saw a Great Problem and Did Nothing About it

by P.M. Carpenter

What public-policy historians would have done without the sorry events of the late 1920s as a guide is hard to imagine. Those final years of the 20th-century's third decade have acted ever since as an instructive benchmark by which contemporary official attitudes could be evaluated with benefit of focused hindsight. What was it that the nation's highest authorities did to avert an economic implosion--credible signs of which had been posted along financial highways for ye

Column: Did You Know the Founding Fathers Approved of the Death Tax?

by P.M. Carpenter

Assuming that your life is made considerably sadder by the thought of Enron's former CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, losing out on (another) tax cut of $55 million, last week's Senate rejection of the estate tax's permanent repeal must have made your day dismal indeed. Assuming, on the other hand, that the Senate's burdening of Jeff's heirs concerns you not one whit, then congratulations, you heartless blackguard. Its vote, for the time being, belied the oft-heard and exceedingly simplist

Column: Is President Bush Asking to Be Treated Differently than Others?

by P.M. Carpenter

"Until the attack took place, I think it's fair to say that no one envisioned [al Qaeda operatives using planes as missiles] as a possibility." Thus spoke White House mouthpiece Ari Fleischer, subtly pleading that"fairness" be a prime motive in evaluating the Bush administration's lack of action in response to official warnings that Osama bin Laden's deranged playmates might soon hijack American passenger planes.. No doubt the plea was heartfelt. If I had to explain why my preside

Column: Team Bush's Blinders

by P.M. Carpenter

Last week a New York Times headline announced, "Bush Team Campaigning for Opposition to Mugabe's Rule." That would be Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president and mastermind of national implosion and international turmoil. The article spelled out all the sensible reasons why the Bush administration stands stiffly opposed to Mugabe's maladministration. Said one senior official, "Zimbabwe once was to many people a model of democracy and economic success," but its

How Should We Feel About John Brown Now?

by David E. Shi

The terrorists who crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon were convinced they were messengers from God engaged in a holy war. Such fanaticism is not unique to Islam. Virtually all religions have spawned violent zealots willing to die-and kill-for their beliefs. John Brown, for example, believed that God had appointed him"a special agent of death" to"break the jaws of the wicked" and eliminate the"wicked curse of slavery." Born in Connecticut in 1800 and raised on the Ohio

Was Robert Kennedy an Early Casualty in the Terrorism War?

by Edward Schmitt

While the Bush administration has drawn parallels between the Kennedy Justice Department's pursuit of organized crime and its own handling of the war on terrorism, sadly, the more apt historical invocation of Robert Kennedy pertains to the apparent motives surrounding his murder. If Kennedy was not the victim of a worldwide conspiracy by an evil mastermind, his assassin, Palestinian-American Sirhan Sirhan, was driven by some of the same hatreds and fears that led to the attacks last Se

The Future is Now: But Did It Come Too Late?

by Keith Miller

To coin a phrase, derived from my boyhood days on a family farm near Bucyrus, Ohio, I am going to"unload the wagon down to the bed" in this essay. So far as most, if not the vast majority of historians, are concerned, in terms of their published works, including textbooks, one would never realize that the various sciences, along with fossil fuels for energy, as amplified by technologies, have made the modern world, dating let us say (for the sake of argument) from the Industrial Revol

Domestic Scapegoats

by Timothy M. Roberts

Following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, scholars, politicians and journalists have reported and condemned acts of revenge against Arab people living in the United States. To emphasize the injustice of such vigilantism, these voices refer to the infamous forced relocation during World War II of some 120,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese resident aliens. Looking back on the Japanese internment allows us to see what is unique about the threat to our nat

Civil Rights: Attorneys General Who Cry Wolf

by Beverly Gage

In our current predicament, it seems hard to go wrong urging Americans to watch for suspicious men, New Jersey postmarks and other signs that American security is sliding from bad to worse. Newscasters spin doomsday scenarios. So do public officials.But should Attorney General John Ashcroft be engaged in such an enterprise? Specifically, should he be issuing the vague warnings -- of something terrible that might happen sometime somewhere someplace -- that caused such anxiety ov

Priests and Pedophilia

by Vern L. Bullough

The conviction of the defrocked priest John Geoghan for child molestation is only the most recent development in the Catholic Church’s problem with pedophilia. It is a problem that the Church has long tried to suppress while desperately searching for solutions. Unfortunately such information could only be suppressed because a compliant press was unwilling, at least until recently, to publicize the problem. This despite the fact that the Catholic Church in the United States h

Column: Caught in a Lie?

by Thomas Spencer

So it all becomes a bit more clear today. For months, I have wondered why Bush's administration was so tight-lipped about pre-9/11 events. In fact, on January 29th Mr. Bush even requested in a message to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle that congressional investigations into the causes of the 9/11 attacks be limited because it would endanger intelligence gathering and imperil national security. Many thought this was a sign that Bush's administration had much mor

Column: Legislation to Die For

by P.M. Carpenter

Let's face it. America's right turn has become an embarrassment--repeated exercises in political disgracefulness which only the ideologically obtuse or congenitally hypocritical could defend with any semblance of a straight face or personal honor. Such exercises have abounded in the last seventeen months, of course, but one need look no further than the present juxtaposition of right-wing policies on federal taxes and human welfare to get a genuine feel for the disgrace that is pos

The Third Deadliest Terrorist Attack on U.S. Soil--And What We Can Learn from It

by Alex Boulton

September 11 was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The second deadliest was Oklahoma City. The third? It was Nat Turner's Rebellion, which took place in Southhampton, Virginia. There are striking parallels between 9-11 and Nat Turner, both of which may have equally dramatic, long-term, and unforeseen consequences. The Southampton attack of 1831, began around two o’clock on the morning of August 22nd, when Nat Turner started an insurrection

Economics: Enron's Collapse Follows a Familiar Pattern

by Andrew M. Schocket

The crash of Texas-based energy trading corporation Enron is so spectacular that many observers have called it the worst corporate collapse ever. But it's not the first time that corporate political influence and politicians' fanatical opposition to regulation have caused economic ruin.Nearly identical actions on the part of corporate insiders and sympathetic deregulators resulted in even bigger debacles--including the first such failure in U.S., history, in the 1830s, and the

September 11th Changed Everything?

by Dr. Glenn Melancon

Reporters, politicians and people on the street tell us ad nauseam that"September 11th changed everything." Did it? The tragic and horrific acts of murder committed that day call for extraordinary responses and patience. Does American security require, however, the country to assume that"innocent until proven guilty" is a Pollyanna notion. American security forces need the freedom to act and to act quickly to prevent"another September 11th," but does this freedom include torture an

The Christian Left's Vision (Remember Woody Guthrie?)

by Ron Briley

Since the election of 2004, the mainstream media have emphasized the role of the religious right in providing the margin of victory for President Bush. In exchange for its political support, conservative Christians expect the Bush administration to advance especially the selection of judges to their liking, meaning judges who oppose gay marriage and abortion. With this focus upon social issues, the religious right makes common cause with conservative Republicans whose economic programs do li

What Does John Roberts's Harvard History Thesis Tell Us About Him?

by Christine DeLucia

When Supreme Court nominee John Roberts wrote his senior history thesis at Harvard in 1976, he revisited the Edwardian Liberal revival of early twentieth-century British politics. His “Old and New Liberalism: The British Liberal Party’s Approach to the Social Problem, 1906-1914,” submitted "in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Hon

Why History May be a Bad Guide to What's Happening this Week at the AFL-CIO Convention

by Jefferson Cowie

Seventy years ago this October, the American Federation of Labor met in Atlantic City to resolve two years of brewing "discord, dissension, division, and disunion," in the words of historian Irving Bernstein. The tension was palpable at the Chelsea Hotel in 1935, where the forces demanding a massive push to organize basic industry—steel, auto, rubber, electrical—squared off with the lords of craft unionism who sought to defend craft skill, status, and skin privilege th