Teaching Constitutional studies, poli sci, political theory, US history topics in Virginia. Own views & comments, these don't reflect my institutional affiliations. Husband / cat person / Madisonian / Lincolnite / Trekkie / strategy gamer / metalhead.
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I think Klein is right on here. A shutdown will probably be the right thing to do, but need to do it right and even if we do it's not a strong guarantee that it'll do what we want to public attitudes and information about the current situation. But it's the only good way to play our national cards.
For so long, things we'd considered rote platitudes were so universal they could be taken for granted as the framework within which we have normal policy debates. To affirm American principles, the Declaration and Constitution and Liberty and Democracy and Rule of Law, *is* the policy debate now.
It's been a long time since I waded through this stuff, but isn't part of the point of Straussian defenses of classical liberalism that it is better to have regimes which let philosophical debate and expression flourish freely such that we DON'T have to resort to coded esoteric readings of thinkers?
Religiosity+attitudes about religiosity in the late 18th+early 19th century ("the Founding Era") were complicated! We'd been through a Great Awakening but also a kind of re-exclusion by 1776, and endemic communal wars, recession ain't great for churches, but both sides used religious legitimation.
There are interesting things to do with applying and analyzing Machiavelli still left to do sure but "was he a republican" and "did he have to do weird things with his texts to Not Get Tortured" are both thoroughly answered questions+I am not sure why we're relitigating them in the year 2025.
What on earth are the theoretical stakes here? Machiavelli was a) a general defender of republics b) not even remotely committed to arguments about universal natural rights c) thoroughly enmeshed in his own political context in ways that complicate reading his texts. Like...what are we arguing abt?
I’m a little better inclined towards the early republic version because it was an anti-elitist gesture towards the small-r republican nature of the new nation. This administration has instead built a costly elite club for its biggest fans and lickspittles…far worse!
Yale Law School never beating the “they don’t teach law at Yale” allegations
One of my darker thoughts is that since the advent of paramilitary police units in the late 1980s, and then 'counterterror' embrace of a military affect, aesthetic, and equipment philosophy among law enforcement, we've eroded the sacrality, clarity of this principle in popular cultural imagination.
Man, correct though it seemed at the time, that the temporary Democratic majority in the first half of Biden's term chose to spend time + energy on fixing the electoral college's janky mechanisms which made room for Jan 6 rather than reforming vague emergency powers has real bad downstream impacts.
I don't get excite for new video games ahead of time very often because I'm not a terribly committed gamer, but the release of Surviving Mars remastered will give me an opportunity to revisit a prettier, debugged version of a favorite and I'm pretty stoked for that.
Look I know the “no more forever wars” stuff by the MAGA world was always a bit disingenuous but this letter is just…breathtaking in its open ended claim to legitimate use of military force overseas (?) nearly anytime, anywhere, forever.
Jesus. A single Arleigh Burke carries something like eight times the missile power of that ship, and so much more besides (like functional antimissile defenses, for example). And there are THREE of those (plus an older but bigger Ticonderoga) currently being ominous off of Venezuela's coast.
Just haphazardly checked and the entire air to air combat force of the official actual Venezuelan air force, much less cartel paramilitaries, appears to be twenty SU-30s in a very poor maintenance and flyability state. So yeah, just ridiculous to imagine drug cartel interdiction needs F-35s.
Right, that's what I mean. A headline saying "10 F-35 fighters and 8 destroyers" doesn't convey to the average citizen the awe-inspiring overkill-for-the-Caribbean number and variety of munitions those small numbers of seemingly 'little' delivery platforms actually signify.
I also worry that people don't grasp what a 'destroyer' is. In the popular imagination / mind's eye for most folks isn't it like, the smallest ship or like a little escort vessel because that is the popular media depiction of it? "8 destroyers" sounds a lot less important than it rly is as a result.
Thanks for taking the time to answer so thoughtfully. I rly like the distinction between 'this is what they calculated a court might be satisfied with' and 'this is an actual attempt at honest legal grounding for an action.' You and I agree we're in a crisis, I was just curious about some nuances!
It's an interesting constitutional ? how much motives matter here. If they bothered to construct a framework of legitimation (Schedule F) does it matter that they only bothered to do so because they did not think they could get away with doing otherwise? Or does it matter merely that they did so?
This is also somewhat difficult to follow because the administration is inconsistent. sometimes they try to give a (pretextual) statutory or constitutional basis for their moves, like w Schedule F, but other times they don't seem to even bother (like with the Venezuela boat strike).
every time a student asks me about 'the 1900s' my hair turns about 2% more gray
grim but probably true. especially Barrett after her experience marginally breaking with conservative orthodoxy and getting roughed up by their talk-o-sphere pretty badly will be reluctant to step out and critique the administration.
my semi-serious take is that Barret and other conservatives on the Supreme Court won't think it's a crisis until the President does something directly to the Supreme Court, ie it's not a constitutional crisis until it's at MY doorstep, who cares what the executive is doing to the other institutions.
But that said your broader statement - that finding and condemning injustice in the systems we benefit from is hard for anyone to do - is an exceptionally good one. 'many such cases,' as the internet would say.
Absolutely! I was thinking about a diff't group -those who seemed energetic, ambitious, smart when I knew them in our mutual youth, and who are now p. downtrodden, but can't rouse an ounce of energy for their aid or defense from others in our cohort who succeeded b/c of this particular mental habit.
This wasn't even really a subtweet of the American right (it can be read that way reasonably). It was more a melancholic reflection a rule of US psychology more broadly, as I see so many people calcify into seeing existing hierarchies as 'just' while they age, only partly due to their place in 'em.
It's always seemed odd that many ppl are more entrenched in the idea that material or professional prosperity + success are earned as they age. If anything, as I watch the lives of people I've known unfold, the clearer the randomness of cruel fate and the iron protections of privilege are clarified.
I mean I do not want to suggest that the German constitution doesn't have problems of governance and application. It certainly does. But comparative government is certainly something most Americans could use a little more background in, even if it's not as specific as comparative constitutional law.
like dogs chasing thrown bones
Everyone wants the German constitution, no one except the Germans gets it. Head of state and government separate? Check. Strong federalism? Check. Structured judicial review? Check. Multilayered representational mechanisms? Boy howdy check. Prioritization and relationally organized rights? Check.
God, there are many depressing things abt American political life right now, but one that gets to me most painfully is the horrors of our information environment. We've never had a pristine one (Anti-Masons! Yellow Journalists!) but the acid eating away at everyone's worldview seems so much worse.
All to often and at its worst, that can sometimes be true. As a teacher, I do my level best to mitigate that and make it as untrue as possible within the limits of my job expectations.
I'm convinced that's part of why I liked FALL GUY so much (yes, I know it's sorta franchise-ish cause it had a long-ago incarnation). It was a pretty good movie on its own rights, but the fact that it was an action-comedy without capes and universe building to weigh it down was just so nice.
It's also an exceptionally valuable course for mature high schoolers because faith communities and leaders are often very open and welcoming. The course often allows kids to visit temples, synagogues, mosques, churches in the community and meet or hear from many different members of the clergy.
For many years, my school (gifted magnet high school) offered a World Religions course and it was one of out most popular, beloved by students, and had powerful outcomes for awareness and engagement in global diversity. Alas, the mad rush to replace everything with AP tests slowly ate it away.
Just a note: “religious education” is not the same thing as religious indoctrination, and we would actually be a lot better off with more of the former in our schools.
I understand why Oren Cass, as part of his long crusade to fit his policy agenda into the seams of Trumpian personalism and MAGA directed revenge schemes, writes stuff like this. But I have to wonder whether even he really thinks it is any more than wishcasting, putting lipstick on the pig, etc.
If I could rewrite the AP Comp Gov country set from scratch I'd use Canada, Germany, China, Korea, Nigeria, Mexico. Six countries is probably enough/too many, but I'd love to add a thoroughly illiberal competitive authoritarian state in there too, like maybe Turkey or Thailand or Egypt.
Oh yeah certainly. But one of the many things that shows the hollowness of this test is the fact that they decided an mcq like this was an appropriate way to ask about this particular topic. Sigh. Poor OK teachers.
Sure, none of the answers are particularly accurate....but isn't that just because the EP is such a complex little piece of policymaking that it is pretty difficult to encompass in a multiple choice question of any kind? Defining with good precision + accuracy exactly what the EP did is a paragraph.
I increasingly think that the military FAFO factors would be so chaotically distributed that the defining element would be China's capacity to deny any kind of viable large scale electricity generation capacity to Taiwan over the course of 5-9 months of pitched blockade/hopeful invasion conflict.
I'm not a true military knower, just a dabbler, but every time I ponder this situation mind boggles. So many unknowables! Could early-strike munitions hold down sortie capacity at US runways in the region? How does Taiwans paper readiness match real readiness? How would anti-missile defenses scale?
To be clear neither of these makes much of a difference on the law and moral calculus front but which one is true does present a starkly different picture of what set of calculations and motives are predominating when it comes to authorizing this kind of strike in the administration.
Putting the horrifying nature of this at arm's length to think for a minute, I wonder if it's more likely that the relevant order-giving authorities in the admin knew it was a migrant boat and were motivated by that fact, or whether they were misinformed that it was drugs and motivatedtby that.
I'm not much for meta-narratives about global politics, but the fact that China provides technological and export-subsidy finance support Russia needs while North Korea pledges manpower and munitions for the axis of autocracy's united proxy war in Ukraine seems....hard to avoid as a meta-narrative?
The partisan lines have really hardened and even the lean-R identifiers will come home to Sears in the next couple of months. I would love it for Spanberger to stomp to a margin of 10+ points, but the negative polarization is just too strong even among Rs who may think Sears is not a good candidate.
meanwhile you cannot stream a TV show or YouTube or go into a bar with a TV in Virginia without being bombarded by this laser-guided focused message bomb of a 30s ad screaming "I know everything is too expensive and you hate it, I'll be very mature and responsible and try to help":
I have to introduce students to Youngstown and the whole constitutional framework surrounding executive orders and their constitutional bounds (or lack thereof) but homework time limits mean I couldn't assign any pre-class work. The suffering is so, so, so real.
This is increasingly one of my biggest problems with Amar, for all that there are many many things I like about his writing. He just won't clearly call out a Yale graduate, even the most awful one, because his institutional loyalty is so powerful.
We often focus only on teachers when discussing educational resource distribution, but many schools are severely understaffed with office support and other professionals like nurses, cafeteria, facilities, transit workers too, and those we have are paid even more poorly than teachers.
I miss seeing him at We The People events, seminars at Montpelier, and especially his voice on the radio! I hope he’s doing well. A true constitutional educator from what I knew of him.
I am not sure the Fay caning case is a good parallel to the recent boat sinking, largely because Fay had proper due process in Singapore. Peoples reaction does point to a larger lesson though, you’re right about that.
I agree with your general point here - that people’s hunger for what they see as righteous retribution agst wrongdoers will often overwhelm their judgement, esp when judgement is trying to invoke complex airy things like international norms of treatment. However! 1/2
Oh man, you are so right. An edit button, my kingdom for an edit button!
Thing is their ignorance isn't even material to their policy positions. If they rly wanted to construct arguments about exclusion, contemporary history and sociology about political culture and acculturation ideas could help em, even if I'd disagree w their uses. But no! They just go herrenvolk.
this is not even remotely new historiography! Peasants to Frenchman came out in the late 1970s! It will never cease to gall me how much people who make claims about the historical roots of national identity and nationhood make almost no effort to engage with the actual history of the concept.
I cannot tell you how glad I am someone caught that because I spent way too long asking myself if I should even use that turn of phrase
I think a permanently ruined my culinary tastes by living in China in the 2000s in my 20s, when every major city was beginning to offer its own regional cuisines as well as other regions, everything was artificially cheap, and true standardization/e-commerce hadn't quite taken over yet.
there is a way in which this is even an explicit repudiation of the constitution itself, created not to pass some european idea of "nationhood" down to posterity, but to pass *republican self-government* down to posterity.
Scalia and Kennedy represent two v different ways a 'lich Jaffa' who lived to the 2010s might've taken conclusions about natural law, natural freedom, natural order, licentious freedom v ordered liberty etc. I like to imagine (maybe wrongly) that some of them would've gone in the Kennedy direction.
Even laying that aside, I re-read Machiavellian Moment by Pocock last year and it really struck me that though that whole school has ben pidgeonholed as the forefathers of today's MAGA right, I think that's hard to sustain in a rigorous ideological way. The context of the 1960s-1980s was just difft!
He (and a lot of other people of the era, arguably even Strauss himself) are pretty impossible to map honestly and coherently into the current moment in a way that lines up with either MAGA or the current Dem-Left coalition ideologically. Someone like maybe Kristol or maybe Luttig comes closest?
I’ve been thinking about this and it’s like four degrees of difference from us just pulling a Lusitania. 1) Germany never claimed US was a terrorist regime 2) scale/numbers 3) drugs aren’t arms to an opponent in a declared war 4) no published warnings of changes in use of force policy in Venezuela.
My favorite podcast was a radio show from the Appalachian School of Law and James Madison's Montpelier called 'Your Weekly Constitutional,' and I don't think it can ever be revived. A perfect mix of the scholarly, timely, silly, and personality-of-the-host uniqueness that makes a good show.
Yep! I sometimes thing the outsized role that Wood and Bailyn have com to play the anti-1619-Project people's worldview is pretty similar. Those were good books in service to complex historiographic conversations already ongoing, their drafting into the culture war uniform is an uncomfortable fit.
Albion's Seed was a good and very interesting work of cultural history, not a polemic aiming to justify or even speak to contemporary political and cultural discourse in some kind of normative way. I hate when really good history books get tarred like this.
Very good thread on this extremely complicated situation by a real expert, with other real experts in the comments, too. Great read to grasp the legal outlines before these troubles begin.
Worth asking what we'd do to another nation that blew up a boatload of our citizens booking along in international waters. Even if our citizens were committing a crime like drug smuggling into that other country, blowing our lawbreaking citizens up with missiles would be correctly be seen as bad.
I hope so, but I kinda worry that 'MAGA Project' and its most vocal advocates (and the base voters themselves) have become self-reinforcing enough that the administration and its Congressional enablers would be able to hold together and govern according to their lights (yikes!) for a couple years.
I think that’s true! But I worry that the mysterious charisma juice is what lets Trump get elected, and Vance won’t need that part for the next three years.
Kinda fascinating that Trump got up there and gave short remarks amounting to "Colorado votes for Democrats and votes by mail and my buddies are from Alabama so fuck Colorado I moved it there." and eight other people's job was saying "no no this was merely a legitimate military eval siting process!"
I'm not that cynical about this group, partly because I've gone out of this way to make sure the reading isn't over-assigned and is achievable (so the desire to turn to AI isn't prompted by frustrationg/time crunch, at least). I'm sure they're using it some, but not to totally replace the reading.
Had my Political Philosophy 101 kiddos reading the sections of Book V of The Republic where Socrates is all-in on equal opportunity for men and women (sort of)....but also communal marriage and the abolition of parenthood. Cannot wait to hear what they make of it tomorrow.
There's a lot of category confusion w people not thinking critically here. "Wouldn't publicly shitpost memes all day, skitter around like broken-wheeled bike" or "be better at Formally President-ing" can get wrongly conflated with "would be better all-around" or "less bad for liberal democracy."
both the professional centrists and professional leftists over-estimate the effect size of ideological positioning relative to other factors influencing vote margin in any given year
I tend towards Definition 1 more than Definition 2. It is the CONFLICT which is proxy in my view, not the REGIMES. A proxy or puppet regime has no autonomy from foreign control of its policy, but in this case only the military conflict, not the govt itself, is dependent on foreign resources.
Had a movie night to watch Thunderbolts, which is one of the many Marvel properties I hadn't seen recently. It was fine? At least interesting, which is more than I can say for a lot of superhero stuff. Plenty of problems with it, of course, but I'm all for improvements and depression-is-the-villain.
Obama stabilized and did his best in the existing order, but I'm increasingly fond of Skowronek's model of Presidential political organizing principles. Obama was a pre-emptive or affiliated President in the Reagan era of politics as it was falling apart. We have yet (I hope) to get a reconstructor.
Yes, it’s quite frustrating and tricky to figure out how to shift that attitude. Only the Canadian left has done it, and them only two a limited and fragile extent. Canadian style immigration reform is a tough pill for us to swallow here in the us for all kinds of reasons, too, independently!
You know, Myrkur as an experimental artist who has a foot in heavy/black metal sounds is often great, but it is odd that my favorite album of hers is Folksange, which wanders farthest from those roots and puts her voice and highly produced strongs/trad instruments in the fore.
To give an example of this: my county has a population of about 350k & a GDP approaching 40m. Endless land, business development deals. There are like....one? three? journalists who make its governance part of their beat and I admire them, but its hard for them to do deep complex influence stories!
And unfortunately for us, the workhouse model still has more influence than it should in the way we structure our post-conviction penal system and the way it disposes of and conceives of inmate time and 'improvement' value.
One thing I legit lose sleep about is how much important state & local stuff is un-noticed right now in the midst of journalistic implosion and total nationalization of social media spaces. NYT's recent piece on Chinese influence in local elections is a good example that's hard to mirror elsewhere.
Even the idea of punishment as improvement of the punished isn't that new - some of my favorite Benjamin Rush diatribes are ones where he's demanding that the new American states adopt less inhumane systems which transform the punished into better citizens in the name of republicanism.
Quite fair! I didn't mean that as a gotcha question, I think it's a genuinely good and thoughtful theory of the role of the executive and was curious to explore it a little.
What about when the executive is authorized by the Constitution itself to take coercive or effective action, as with Lincoln marshalling the army before Congress could assemble or Bush grounding commercial traffic and ordering emergency shootdowns in the hours after the first 9/11 attacks?
@kangaroopete.bsky.social it is Mariner to a T!
Elsewhere too - I like the Civil Rights cases speech (teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the...) too, it hits on the proper role for the Court and respect for it (or lack thereof) In a popular constitutional regime.
It's also really fascinating because it performs a kind of positive revision on the founding generation, giving them and their document credit for demanding a level of applied, radical universal egalitarianism and positive intent that was quite far from their historical mental world.
Have any of you been to the navy/nautical museum stuff in Philadelphia? Trying to decide if it's worth shelling out some money and effort to take a group of students (HS seniors doing a US constitutional history elective) on a field trip since I'll have some unexpected extra time.
The diversity, complexity, and depth of those successive rings of evidence and sources of argument that belong in the Constitutional universe is what makes studying constitutional politics and constitutional law so addictive and interesting.
The thing is, those materials are anything but sparse! When the text doesn't provide a direct & clear answer, there are a dozen successive rings of increasingly distant-from-the-text constitutional concepts/bodies of evidence which can be used to determine potential range of right and wrong answers.
yeah, in addition to what I said above it is also the case that city planners, teachers, service/works employees are underpaid more than it is that police are overpaid, for the most part.
That's quite true and I wouldn't argue w it. But it doesn't contradict the arg. that if we're going to reform local+municipal police forces, better and different training, cultural practices, and recruitment will be needed (along with re-defining mission elements), and all those things are expensive
It’s a pretty hard concept to get one’s brain around that there can be a range of reasonable partly-or-mostly-right answers as well as a simultaneous and often larger universe of definitely-wrong answers to even a single question of constitutional or legal construction/interpretation/application.
Been reading Kathleen Goonan's Queen City Jazz and it's definitely one of the weirder, less approachable sci-fi novels I've read in a long time. That's not to say it is bad - it is quite good! But really demonstrates the weirdness of the genre that in the 1990s such a book was shelved w space opera.
sorry to return to this thread late but of all the alien-invasion media of the 2000s and 2010s, I think my favorite remains Colony despite its early cancellation and bumpy episode-to-episode quality. Really reflects critically on occupation, military/insurgent themes, dilemmas of collaboration, etc.
I think it depends on what the population you're selling to is. For a lot of less politically activated discourse-soaked general-election voter types, "police should be improved because they're an important part of our civil life, its expensive, they aren't always great right now" is very salable!
Largely because a lot of those solutions involve expanding and further professionalizing police forces, which in turn involves paying them more and dedicating more time to taking policing expertise seriously....which runs against the rhetorical grain of many activist's approach to police reform.
I mean, sort of. But Chinese prefects also combined a lot of the aspects of local city councilor, judge, mediation lawyer, and beat cop in ways that confuse our modern sense of what a professional police force is really optimized for.
I've gotten pretty used to an early-bed, early-rise schedule over the summer to run at/before sunrise....but today I have to do an airport pickup for a late night arriving flight and I'm already dreading being up so much later than I'm accustomed. Sigh.