In 2008, Barack Obama promised hope and change. “Yes We Can,” he and his supporters shouted. Now we learn that “we” meant government. The American people, apparently, aren’t capable of anything. “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that,” President Obama said last week in Roanoke, Virginia. “Somebody else made …
Every Fourth of July, Americans celebrate with fireworks and barbeques and John Philip Sousa. Then we return to our regularly scheduled lives. But this Independence Day is different. Last week, the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, an unprecedented expansion of government’s power into one-sixth of the economy and a tremendous loss …
The Supreme Court on Thursday introduced lawmakers to a new Obamacare. The justices held that Congress does not have the power under the Commerce Clause to force you to buy health insurance, even though that’s what lawmakers and the President thought they were doing when they passed the law. Instead, …
Once, Obamacare’s defenders were certain the Supreme Court would uphold the individual mandate requiring every citizen to purchase health insurance. Then came the oral argument. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli was unable to articulate a limiting principle to Congress’s powers. That set off a scramble to find historical precedent for the …
How would you rewrite the Constitution? The Daily Show writer Kevin Bleyer did that for his latest book Me the People, and he invited readers of Slate to do likewise. Several proposals are straight out of an Occupy Wall Street drum circle: the money-is-not-speech amendment, the corporations-are-not-people amendment. Other proposals …
The Constitution is for sale. No, really. Christie’s in New York will auction off George Washington’s 223-year-old copy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights next week. The pages are largely unmarked, except for a few of Washington’s notes about the presidency. That’s appropriate, considering that Article II was drafted with …
In his latest book, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, Jonah Goldberg argues that liberals hide their ideology behind tired aphorisms such as “violence never solved anything” or the Constitution is a “living document.” Unlike liberals, conservatives admit to having an ideology (although we …
It’s commencement time again: rows of folding chairs, the polyester cap and gown, a dozen of your closest relatives listening intently for your name, and of course the big name speaker. Georgetown’s School of Public Policy has Kathleen Sebelius, Columbia Law has umm, uhhh, Solicitor General Don Verilli, and Barnard …
