Starting Points

Another Trump presidency may be right around the corner. Perhaps his primary economic policy point this campaign has been his favorite word: “tariffs.” According to Alan Rappeport, an economic policy reporter for The New York Times, Trump has considered instituting between 10 and 50 percent tariffs on all imported products, a 60 percent tariff on goods from China, and higher targeted tariffs for particular products and industries.

Amongst the general educated public in America, the eminent political theorist Hannah Arendt is probably best known for her concept of “the banality of evil,” which she discusses in her 1963 book about the trial of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. One indicator of just how famous the phrase “banality of evil” became is that Ronald Reagan invoked it in a 1985 speech to the European Parliament.

In his 2008 book The Activist: John Marshall, Marbury v Madison, and the Myth of Judicial Review, Lawrence Goldstone argues persuasively that the Chief Justice was intent on using William Marbury’s suit against the Jefferson Administration to claim for the Court the authority, nowhere specified in Article III of the Constitution, to be the ultimate arbiter on the constitutionality of legislative acts.

April 19 marked the anniversary of the American Revolution – specifically, the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

As Americans prepare to head into one of the most contentious presidential election seasons in recent history, experts are looking 200 years into the past to the heated election between John Q. Adams and Andrew Jackson for insight and answers as to what may lie ahead. Several important questions concerning the similarity of the election and our present political climate are immediately evident. Can the election of 1824, similar in many respects to the upcoming election, repeat itself?

The election of 1856 was the most violent peacetime election in American history. For the first time, a national political party with a legitimate chance to win the presidency campaigned on an anti-slavery platform, putting a fright into Southern politicians, the slave owners they represented, and their Northern sympathizers.

The following is a review of Dennis Hale and Marc Landy, Keeping the Republic: A Defense of American Constitutionalism (University Press of Kansas, 2024). In one of the less-noticed aspects of his State of the Union address, President Biden announced his elimination of the requirement that Federally-backed mortgages be accompanied by title insurance.

Teaching college students today about the significance of the American principles of freedom, equality, and constitutionalism is an uphill battle against the rise of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) at the expense of the humanities and social sciences, the bureaucratization of the classroom with its plethora of non-pedagogical mandates, and — perhaps most difficult of all — the intellectual climate of woke ideology that pervades the classroom.

“. . . I amused myself with reading seriously Plato’s republic. I am wrong however in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to go through a whole dialogue.

“I want . . . salt, and pepper, for the old people.”— Red Cloud Kinship is an Indigenous cultural tradition. It is also a political practice. Indigenous societies and nations withstood colonization for centuries by wielding the political power of kinship. Inter-Tribal kinship alliances prevented the total annihilation of Indigenous peoples during the colonial and early American eras and defeated threats to Tribal national existence in modern times.