There is an old joke that goes something like this: How do you find a needle in a haystack? Why, you burn down the haystack. The joke is unfortunately reminiscent of the infamous Viet Nam explanation that ?We had to burn the village down in order to save it.? In the wake of 9/11, the concern of every American has to be that we root out terrorists without burning down the constitutional village. And so far, the omens are not good.
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Category Archives: Constitution
The Past Illuminates the Present
We live in dangerous times. But we are hardly the first to do so. The questions that engage us (or that should engage us) have been the subject of books and essays by great minds for centuries. Too few of us are familiar with those works.
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Remember the Bill of Rights?
There I was, in a rocking chair at the nursing home, where one of my grandsons had come to visit me. The discussion turned nostalgic, as we discussed those years, long past, when I had taught college students about the Bill of Rights.
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Assault on Judges
The nation’s founders realized that judges wouldn’t always be right, but they nevertheless insisted that they be independent. In the system they created, majority rule stops where the Bill of Rights begins. If judges weren’t shielded from the political passions of the day, the founders knew the Bill of Rights would quickly become the "Set of Suggestions."
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Circles
Libertarians insist that the political spectrum is not a straight line, with "right-wingers" on one end and "left-wingers" on the other. Instead, it is a circle, where extremists on opposite poles touch?and share a desire to impose their particular brands of political correctness on the rest of us. Extremists may disagree on ideology, but they share a real fondness for authoritarianism.
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