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“American Carnage:” President Trump’s Inaugural Address
The phrase “American carnage,” until now, would have evoked for me the Civil War, the great contest between the North and the South that led to the deaths of more than 750,000 Americans, Northerners and Southerners, blacks and whites. Near the end of the war, Abraham Lincoln, by then aged almost beyond recognition by the……
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President Trump and the Unwritten Constitution
If there’s one thing the election of Donald Trump has shown, it’s the strength of our formal political institutions. Do you disagree? Consider that in many states at many times in history, a democratically elected person so manifestly unfit for office would not have been allowed to take office. Yet there is no real risk……
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Russian Hacking: Trump’s Plan B
President-elect Donald Trump has now had a classified briefing from the Director of National Intelligence and the directors of the FBI, CIA, and NSA on the Russian hacking issue, and we have had the chance to read the unclassified version of the report. What can we conclude?
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Trump, Israel, and the Security Council: Fiasco
The fiasco of the Security Council’s resolution on Israeli settlements in the West Bank was a fitting end to 2016. It featured lots of what’s wrong with the world today. Here is my take.
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There Is No Salvation In The Electoral College
In my post on the electoral college a few weeks ago, I gave a little bit of the historical background, including a reference to Federalist 68, in which Alexander Hamilton described the college as, more or less, a group of wise men who could be relied on to exercise sound judgment and ensure that no……