With Kavanaugh, the Court Should Tame the Administrative State by John Yoo & James C.Phillips
Editor’s Note: The following is the second in a series of articles in which Mr. Yoo and Mr. Phillips will lay out a course of constitutional restoration, pointing out areas where the Supreme Court has driven the Constitution off its rails and the ways the current Court can put it back on track. The first entry is available here.
Before his confirmation, Kavanaugh had no clear views on privacy, race, or sexuality, the great constitutional holy of holies of the Left. Instead, his real threat to modern liberalism came from his hostility to the progressive vision of technocratic government run by insulated bureaucrats and protected by deferential judges.
It seems that Kamanaugh may be a voice in returning the Administrative State to Constitutional sanity. We'll see...
A Clash of Judicial Visions by John Yoo & James C. Phillips
Editor’s Note: The following is the first in a series of articles in which Mr. Yoo and Mr. Phillips will lay out a course of constitutional restoration, pointing out areas where the Supreme Court has driven the Constitution off its rails and the ways the current Court can put it back on track.
From a constitutional perspective, originalism is clearly superior to the common-law approach of judges who enact their own policy preferences like a legislator. First, originalism is the only legitimate way for a Supreme Court justice to approach the job.
I'm excited about this series of articles by well-respected law professors. They so clearly lays out what is at stake.
Seattle Under Siege by Christopher F. Rufo
The best way to prevent homelessness isn’t to build new apartment complexes or pass new tax levies but to rebuild the family, community, and social bonds that once held communities together. As Richard McAdams, a recovered addict and current outreach worker for the Union Gospel Mission, told me: “There are 6,000 people on the streets in Seattle. I know 3,000 of them by name and know their stories. It’s not a resource issue in this city, it’s a relational issue. The biggest problem is broken relationships.”
Excellent look at the forces arrayed against homelessness and the reasons for their absolute failure.
Harkness Cautions: You Need A Sage On A Stage by Joshua Gibbs
A good teacher is not trying to inspire a lifelong spirit of inquiry. A good teacher is revealing Truth, and helping students to settle finally on the Truth. If a teacher is opening minds, he ought to be closing them on the life of God and morality and virtue, not leaving them endlessly dangling like broken jaws. The good teacher does not merely help students investigate the meaning of virtue, he commands them to be virtuous, explains virtue with clarity, and models virtue for them in his texts and his own life.
I could not love this iconoclast's ideas more. He makes me catch my breath.
At Sixteen, It Is Very Hard To Pray
These rather banal, mundane desires more or less gutted my desire to pray when I was younger. Pray? For what? Prayer was far more ceremonial than anything. Prayer was how church started, how assemblies at school started, how meals started. Prayer was nothing more than a little bell you rang for ten seconds that let everyone know to be quiet. And just like you don’t need practice to ring a little bell, neither do you need practice to pray. It’s whatever comes out of your mouth. You don’t practice it. You don’t prepare for it. You don’t remember what you said ten minutes later.
Once again, Joshua Gibbs nails the modern ethos...
We’re Not on the Brink of Civil War. Here’s Why. by Jay Cost
Here, Hamilton makes a compelling case that if groups of people recognize that they can make money from interacting with one another, they will come together. Their interests will ultimately be “blended and interwoven,” even if they have different religions, regional dialects, or professions.
His argument is that as long as we need each other to have a functioning economy, civil war will not be an option. We'll see...
Is the Aeneid a Celebration of Empire—or a Critique? by Daniel Mendelsohn
[T]he difficulties we have with Aeneas and his epic cease to be difficulties once you think of him not as a hero but as a type we’re all too familiar with: a survivor, a person so fractured by the horrors of the past that he can hold himself together only by an unnatural effort of will, someone who has so little of his history left that the only thing that gets him through the present is a numbed sense of duty to a barely discernible future that can justify every kind of deprivation. It would be hard to think of a more modern figure.
Mendelsohn rethinks the Aeneid to finally see Aeneas as far more modern than we might otherwise think and therefore far more relevant
