The only way to tyrantproof the presidency is not to elect tyrants to the presidency.
Political as well as religious cults can be distinguished from legitimate organizations by their use of doublethink. Though political cults espouse extremist ideologies, not extremist theologies, operationally they are virtually identical to religious cults, and they also go to great lengths to control the vocabularies of their members.
The difference between a cult and a religion, of course, lies in extremity.
One effect of Roe was to mobilize a permanent constituency for criminalizing abortion - a constituency that has driven much of the southern realignment toward conservatism.
A generation of women has grown up thinking of reproductive freedom as a constitutional right, and the Court should not casually take away rights that it has determined the Constitution guarantees.
The core constituency that Republicans must satisfy in high court nominations is the party's social conservative base, which fundamentally cares about issues, not diversity, and has accepted white men who practice the judging it admires.
You cannot denude the presidency of the substance and power of its office. It can't be done.
If you believe, as I do, that the scope and range of presidential authority is great, that puts a lot of weight on the civic virtue and decency of the individual who holds the office.
When it comes to letting kids out into dark alleys, we understand that they have things to steal. We need to understand that in online life, too.
We should never again have an attorney general capable of saying virtually nothing as the law of major intelligence programs and the integrity of his department's work in overseeing these programs are assailed over a protracted period of time.
The search for the Torah codes is rooted in the unfathomable theological premise that the Torah - itself a set of five books of limited length - contains literally all truth.
Stability in law - particularly constitutional law - is critically important; the Supreme Court would do well to remember that.
Although environmental groups sometimes raise issues in the confirmation process, environmental protection is not central to the fear-mongering of the liberal interest groups that oppose conservative judges. But the threat to basic environmental protections from conservative jurisprudence is broad-based and severe.
President Obama's decision not to go to Congress for help in establishing reasonable standards for the continued detention of Guantanamo detainees is a failure of leadership in the project of putting American law on a sound basis for a long-term confrontation with terrorism. It is bad for the country, for national security, and for civil liberties.
To get a FISA warrant to spy on a suspected spy, the feds go before a super-secret court located in a sealed room in the Department of Justice. With no defense lawyers present, they need only show probable cause that the target is an 'agent of a foreign power' engaged in intelligence gathering against the United States.
June 10, 2002, the day John Ashcroft announced the arrest of Jose Padilla, marked a low point in Ashcroft's career as Attorney General.
If the 'enemy combatant' cases of Padilla and Hamdi present a clash between liberty and security, each side champions one while giving short shrift to the other.
How exactly the obstruction-of-justice statutes interact with the president's broad powers to supervise the executive branch under Article II of the Constitution is a genuinely difficult question.
There is no doubt in my mind that Article II limits to a considerable degree the application of the obstruction statutes to the president when he is acting in his capacity as chief law-enforcement officer of the country.
I don't doubt that there are many presidential acts that would constitute obstructions of justice if anyone but the president engaged in them but which constitute legitimate exercises of presidential power when the president engages in them.
