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Search Results for: presidential power

Hand of a person casting a vote into the ballot box during elections

There’s No Easy Fix to Our Broken Presidential Nominating System

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For the foreseeable future, there will be no institutional barrier to demagoguery, viciousness, or incompetence to be found within the nominating processes. The only barrier will be the voters themselves.
flag, sun, trees

The Future of Conservatism: Community, the Common Good, and State Power

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The future of conservatism lies in building a program on political, policy, cultural, social, and educational foundations that can rebuild America from the ground up. Anything short of that will merely prolong our agony.
I Voted Sticker

A Christian Case for Not Voting for Either Presidential Candidate in 2020

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The duty of Christians is to be the soul—even more specifically, the conscience—of our civilization. The options this November, and the trajectories they promise, are not acceptable, and in choosing between them we risk forsaking our calling by soiling our witness.

Presidential Self-Pardons, the Framers at Philadelphia, and the Work of Originalism

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As the late Justice Scalia was fond of pointing out, the views of individual lawmakers in the midst of debate are not themselves the law we must interpret. Neither are the votes taken in a deliberative body rightly viewed as votes on anyone’s interpretation of the text under discussion. The text that they passed, not what they said about what they passed, is the law.

Commander in Chief: War, Foreign Affairs, and the Constitutional Power to Impeach a President

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The framers deliberately designed a strong presidency with the power to wage war with energy, secrecy, and dispatch. Impeachment, in turn, was designed to be a formidable congressional check on the formidable powers of the president—power counteracting power, ambition checking ambition.

The Constitutional Position and Powers of the Presidency: Executing Laws and Interpreting the Constitution

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The framers deliberately gave the president independence, unity, and vast powers. This is only a problem if the office is badly filled.

The Constitutional Power of the Electoral College

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The framers of the Constitution designed the elector system to balance the need for the people to have a voice and the desire to have a refined, informed body actually choose the president in order to avoid the election of a demagogue or charlatan.

Presidential Elections, Party Establishments, and Demagogues

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The American Founders created a careful system to prevent the election of the power-hungry. Progressive-led changes to the electoral process in the twentieth century, however, make it all too easy for ambitious demagogues to seize control—as first Obama did, and now Trump is doing to far worse ends.

The Constitutional Powers of War and Peace

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228 years ago today, the Framers at the Constitutional Convention decided the power to declare war would be reserved to Congress, and the power to conduct war and make peace would be reserved to the president. Presidents and congresses have not always followed the Constitution in matters of war, but that doesn’t mean the Constitution has changed.

First Principles for American Foreign and Security Policy: A Presidential Debate Primer

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As Americans consider foreign policy and national security issues during a presidential campaign, a refresher on our nation’s first principles provides guidance for assessing current problems and contending views. The first of a two-part series.

The Unprecedented, Extraordinary, Anti-democratic, Activist Power of Judicial Review

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President Obama’s recent quips about “judicial activism” do not amount to arguments. They are shallow sloganeering.

Global Warming, Evolution, and Presidential Politics: The Long Shadow of Galileo

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Judging from the media’s response to Rick Perry’s Galileo reference in the Reagan debate, our discourse is still governed by the modern view that science and religion can only clash.

A New Kind of Presidential Debate

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Monday's Presidential Forum broke new ground.

Empower Parents: Restore the Constitution by Returning Educational Policy to the States

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Presidential candidates in the 2012 election must be prepared to protect the interests of parents and children nationwide by rolling back the progressive education agenda and returning to the states their constitutional power to make decisions about education.
Nietzsche

The Bookshelf: On Bad Good Books

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The bad good (or great) books must be read and taught in just the same way as the good great books. The teacher must be a wrestling coach, instilling in his students a readiness to grapple equally with every kind of argument, accepting nothing on which they have not tested their own grip.
Books

Isolation Bookshelf: Great Cases in Constitutional Law

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Chief Justice John Roberts complained five years ago, in the Obergefell marriage case, of some of his colleagues’ “extravagant conception of judicial supremacy.” To understand how such a conception has come to grip the judicial mind, studies of some of the Supreme Court’s most notable cases make for instructive reading.

Elevating Our Politics by Going to the Source: Carson Holloway’s Recovery of a Nobler Debate

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A groundbreaking study of America’s first great political debate under our Constitution provides indispensable political education and guidance for our polarized and confused politics today.

President Obama’s Dishonest and Unconstitutional De-Authorization

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President Obama’s “authorization” request is designed to curtail existing legal authority to wage war on ISIL and to handcuff future presidents in the exercise of their constitutional authority as commander in chief.

Declaration of War: Ten Years Later

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Under the Constitution, the Constitution prevails over international law. The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), signed into law ten years ago this week, prescribed no time limitation or geographical limitation. It was, potentially, a world war of unlimited duration. And yet, our involvement in Libya is unconstitutional.

The Debt Ceiling and the Constitution

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The attempts by both the right and the left to politicize our Constitution must be firmly rejected for the sake of our nation’s health and prosperity.
President George Washington home at Mount Vernon in Virginia, USA

Reclaiming Museums’ Civic Duty

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Museums assume, both for the country and the individual, a special trust of preservation and civic encouragement. That encouragement need not involve glossing over the failings of our past. We distort our history both when we whitewash it and when we overemphasize our shortcomings.
Closeup of the document of Juneteenth National Independence Day Act. Juneteenth is a holiday celebrating the emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States.

The Making of Juneteenth

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The principal irony of Juneteenth is that slavery was still a legal institution in the United States on June 19, 1865—if not in Texas because of the Emancipation Proclamation, then certainly in Kentucky and Delaware, where slavery would not be blotted out until the ratification of the thirteenth amendment. This would not, however, be the only irony in the history of American emancipation, and certainly not the last.

Do We Have an Obligation to Address Injustices Abroad?

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The state ought to be oriented toward justice but with a preferential option for its own citizens. It is unethical to employ state resources, the common property of the citizens, without carefully considering how doing so affects them. Foreign policy is neither charity nor a means to spread justice in the world.
Silhouette of soldier in combat helmet and ammunition saluting on background of sunset sky. Army special forces fighter

The Military Depends on Virtues that Are Fading

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An explanation for the military’s recruitment challenges goes deeper than trends in the labor market. Ultimately, the civic honor on which voluntary service depends has quietly been eroding for some time, and is being replaced by an ethos of individual self-fulfillment.
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