A Test of Executive Power
Starting in the late 1880s with the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), Congress established “independent agencies” outside the executive branch. By one count, there are about 40 such agencies in...
View ArticleConstitutional Disorder
American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again by Yuval Levin • Basic Books • 2024 • 352 pages • $32 No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United...
View ArticleSupreme Paradoxes
The Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made by Cliff Sloan • PublicAffairs • 2023 • 512 pages • $32.50 The years of World War II represent the most paradoxical era in the history of...
View ArticleRemember the Whole Constitution
The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America by Michael Waldman • 2023 • Simon & Schuster • 400 pages • $30 “Every day the [Supreme] Court’s power grab pushes us closer to a crisis, a...
View ArticleHow the Supreme Court Is Attacking Democracy
The Supreme Court is leading the conservative assault on federal administrative agencies—an important, if often hidden, aspect of the American government—in plain sight. Within the last 12 months...
View ArticleThe Post-Dobbs Abortion Fight
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that explicitly stated that no constitutional right to abortion exists in...
View ArticleA Woman’s Place Is in the Courtroom
Lady Justice by Dahlia Lithwick • Penguin • 2022 • 368 pages • $29 The law is the quintessential masculine field, made by men and wielded by them down through the centuries to serve and preserve their...
View ArticleSaving Democracy—Realistically
For more than a decade, American democracy has been in a steep decline. We have known for a long time that our democracy has become more polarized and dysfunctional since the slash and burn politics of...
View ArticleReforming the Electoral Count Act
To protect America’s democracy, members of Congress should dust off their copies of Homer’s Odyssey and re-read the part about the song of the sirens. On Circe’s advice, Odysseus ordered his sailors to...
View ArticleLife After (?) Roe
With Mississippi’s abortion ban being heard in front of the Supreme Court this term, something many expect to end in a tragic outcome for Roe v. Wade, Democracy decided to bring together some of the...
View ArticleWinning Without the Courts
For two decades, the principle of political equality and the conservative Supreme Court majority have been locked in a struggle over the foundational rules of American democracy. And the principle of...
View ArticleThe Issue Is Pluralism
As the Republican majority in the Senate plows forward with President Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, conservative media commentators talk nonstop about Democrats and...
View ArticleFiring the Inspectors General
President Trump has fired more inspectors general than any President. Several of the fired inspectors general have led investigations that were way too close to the President. These include most...
View ArticleCorrupting the Judiciary
Efforts to hijack the judiciary for political ends are hardly new. We have seen them throughout American history, and especially since the 1980s—though always restrained by a deeply held appreciation...
View ArticleSaving the Supreme Court
Two fundamental flaws in the Constitution’s appointment system must be fixed. First, there is no regularized system for Supreme Court appointments. Because presidents can appoint new justices only when...
View ArticleLet’s Think About Court-Packing
Just two years ago, this would have been an extraordinarily radical essay. Its premise is that court-packing—increasing the number of seats on the Supreme Court to change its ideological makeup—is, in...
View ArticleWhat the Kavanaugh Debacle Has Revealed
First things first: Good on Benjamin Wittes for admitting publicly that he misjudged Brett Kavanaugh. Every time a writer is willing to say “I was wrong,” the genre of opinionated political writing...
View ArticleThe Right Against the Law
Five years ago, North Carolina’s Republican-dominated legislature declared war on the state’s judiciary. The courts, federal as well as state, had overturned a stream of measures passed by lawmakers...
View ArticleScalia Was Wrong On Gun History, But That’s Not The Point
Here’s an intriguing item from The Washington Post: using text-search methods made possible by what we now call “Big Data,” a linguistics scholar claims to have demonstrated that Justice Scalia was...
View ArticleLabor’s Janus-Faced Juncture
The name of the Supreme Court case that now poses an existential threat to organized labor seems fitting: Janus v. AFSCME. In ancient Rome, Janus was the god of passages and doorways, endings, and...
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