Constitution

Charlie White, the GOP, and the Rule of Law

After the Republicans in the Statehouse passed House Bill 1242, changing the election law in order to avoid the consequences of having run an ineligible candidate, my husband shook his head. “It’s enough to make you ashamed of ever having been a Republican.” This from a man who worked for the GOP for over fifty [...]

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I Don’t Like This Law So It Must Be Unconstitutional

Yesterday, I spoke to a high school government class, filled with bright high school seniors who have thus far escaped any meaningful encounter with the U.S. Constitution.It came as a surprise to most of them, for example, that the Bill of Rights applies only against government. So we talked a good deal about the limits [...]

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Stop the Presses! ACLU Supports Christian Athletes

One of the great myths promulgated by the Christian Right is that the ACLU is “anti-religion” and “anti-Christian.” Those bent on demonizing the organization conveniently overlook the many cases in which the ACLU represents the rights of religious folks. When I was Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, it used to irritate me that we got [...]

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Restoring Civic Literacy

The following text is a speech I recently gave to the Indianapolis Chapter of the League of Women Voters about the abysmal state of historical/constitutional knowledge in America. ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— When I was asked to speak, my “assignment”—or at least my intention—was to discuss one of my recent books, “Distrust, American Style.” In that book, I [...]

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Framing the Framework

Eliot Spitzer may be defective in sexual morality (not to mention taste), but he made a very important point in a recent speech reported by ACS–the American Constitution Society. As the ACS blog put it: Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, during a keynote speech at an ACS event examining corporations’ influence on the federal [...]

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