Free Republic

Last night, a friend sent me a draft of the Pledge to America that the House Republicans will be releasing today. It rewards study. Back in early August, I wrote a lengthy post entitled John Boehner’s Testing Time, arguing in some detail that we live in a critical time in which the ordinary rules of politics do not apply. In ordinary circumstances, we are condemned to a politics focused largely on patronage – in which political struggle revolves around finding the means to satisfy party constituents. In such circumstances, the dynamic I described in Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift pertains. Federal...

Congressman Mike Pence spoke at Hillsdale College Monday night at the invitation of the Young Republicans. I attended the dinner held in his honor before the talk, briefly chatted with him, and listened with care and interest to his talk – which had as its subject “the Presidency and the Constitution.” Pence, who has represented Indiana’s ninth district in Congress since 2001, attended Hanover College not far from Madison, Indiana – where my grandfather once owned a dry goods store. There, I knew, he had studied with my friend G. M. Curtis. On that ground alone, I figured that he...

..."The presidency is the most visible thread that runs through the tapestry of the American government. More often than not, for good or for ill, it sets the tone for the other branches and spurs the expectations of the people. Its powers are vast and consequential, its requirements -- from the outset and by definition -- impossible for mortals to fulfill without humility and insistent attention to its purpose as set forth in the Constitution of the United States."....

President and Mrs. Arnn, Mr. John Cervini, Mr. David Bobb, Elliot Gaiser, College Republicans and each and every one of the faculty and students of Hillsdale College here today.… As I am sure you know, honor is what allows us to do what is right despite the cost. Even greater honor is required to do what is right in the face of superior power. And the greatest honor is to stand strong even if it means standing alone. The long fight of Hillsdale College, standing alone -- then and now for the proposition that all men are created equal, then...

Representative Mike Pence of Indiana's 6th District will give a public lecture on Monday, September 20, at Hillsdale College titled "The Presidency and the Constitution." The lecture will take place in Phillips Auditorium at 8:00 p.m. If you are interested in attending, please contact Patty Corboy at (517) 607-2569 or pcorboy@hillsdale.edu.

Not many Americans know it, but today is Constitution Day. Well, technically, by force of 2004’s Public Law 108-447, it is “Constitution Day and Citizenship Day”—but never mind the fine print. Two hundred twenty-three years ago, on September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, after nearly four months of intense deliberation, 39 delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution, sending it to the states for ratification. The ensuing state contests were hard fought, but the Federalists, who were in favor of the Constitution, prevailed, the Constitution was adopted, and the work of the Convention was vindicated. Before “social studies” replaced civics...

Today marks Constitution Day. On 17 September 1787, in Philadelphia, the Framers of the American Constitution added their signatures to the document they had produced, and soon thereafter it was dispatched to the Continental Congress for consideration by the states. On this day, it is appropriate that we, their heirs, reconsider their handiwork and ask whether ours is still a constitutional government. In their deliberations, the Framers confronted one great question, and it was largely on this question that the debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists during the ratification period turned. Can one establish an enduring republic on an...

This year marks the centennial of the Mann “White Slave Act,” when Congress made it a federal offence to transport a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes.” Though the act is still on the books (as former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer can tell you), and has been made gender-neutral, it is usually seen as a relic of nineteenth-century moralism. In fact, no act did more to overturn the nineteenth-century constitutional order. The Mann Act was boldly challenged the idea that the Constitution limited Congress’ power the ends enumerated in Article One, section eight. It established an all-purpose federal...

Bad metaphors bring bad policies. During the Great Depression Americans were told that “the pump” had to be “primed.” Despite twelve years of pump-priming, F. D. R. did not bring America out of the Depression. Bipartisan tax cuts targeted against Truman’s “Fair Deal” did. Roosevelt had also used the metaphor of “war,” but that analogy was brought to perfection in L. B. J.’s “war on poverty.” The image is problematic. Marines going into a battle, for example, want to know, as they are locking and loading, who the “bad guys” are, that is, whom to shoot. Who were the bad...

In the days of Lincoln, the risks to the Constitution and the chance to save it went hand in hand. The same is true today. On the one hand, we have accumulated a debt, in a time of relative peace and unprecedented prosperity, that rivals the debt incurred to win the largest war in history. That war eventually came to an end, but our deficits have no foreseeable terminus. Despite this, we pass a new entitlement to health care in a midnight vote, no one having the chance to read the bill. It is unreadable anyway. A high official has...

ATTENTION: You may register and view all of the Constitution Day Colloquium events during their live broadcasts. If you are unable to view any event during its live broadcast, you may access an archived version within several hours of the event's conclusion. Please click here for instructions on how to view the live and archived webcasts. Hillsdale College Constitution Day Celebration First Annual Hillsdale College Constitution Day ColloquiumSeptember 16 – 17, 2010A live webcast sponsored by the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and CitizenshipDownload the agenda | Download Speaker Bios Register for the Hillsdale College Constitution Day...

My Ricochet time is limited this week as I attend to my Trustee duties on behalf of Michigan’s Hillsdale College. I’m proud to be the Vice-Chairman of the Board, and we’re celebrating the opening of the Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington this week. If you think most colleges and universities offer courses on the Constitution, think again. Even a long-time shop teacher can use the fingers on one hand to count those that do. There’s a delicious irony to this college’s presence in the Capital, because Hillsdale is nearly unique in its refusal to accept any...

On television, on radio, in books, and in a widely viewed speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year, Glenn Beck has pronounced "progressivism" as the "disease" that afflicts America. His progressive opponents, meanwhile, seem obsessed with attacking him for this obsession—the Center for American Progress has even launched a series of papers to "set the record straight." This battle reveals a deeper dispute about American history. Mr. Beck and others—such as Jonah Goldberg in his 2008 book, "Liberal Fascism"—tie today's progressives (the new word for liberals) to the progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century....

The Hillsdale College Constitution Day Celebration Webcast, is a two-day program that commemorates the September 17, 1787, signing of the Constitution, and celebrates the enduring principles of that document. We welcome your participation in this exciting event. Your constitutional questions are important to us, and during the event we encourage you to submit questions to the panelists, debaters, and speakers via an email address that will be provided on this Web site's log-on page. In preparation for the Constitution Day Celebration, we invite you to visit the online Hillsdale College Constitution Reader at www.thekirbycenter.org, a collection of 100 primary source...

“Republics they say are ungrateful. . . . The people that create or build to make victory possible . . . are war profiteers to be subjected to suspicion, to be investigated, to be harassed.” Thus spoke Andrew Higgins, the inventor of the Higgins boats that were so essential to the U. S. D-Day landings in WWII. Eisenhower called Higgins “the man who won the war for us.” But when the war was won, Higgins was socked with an IRS investigation and then was largely forgotten. I grew up in Nebraska, where Higgins was born and raised, but I never...

One of the benefits of studying history is that we can see what worked and what didn’t work in the past. That helps us put the present in perspective. My larger point is that many ideas that are fashionable today will be discarded and in the dumpster thirty years from now. In fact, my task as a teacher is often to explain to students how it is possible that so many people in a given generation could have believed something that today is obviously so silly. Let’s look at some examples.

Sleeping With The Enemy Malcolm A. Kline, July 14, 2010 A large chunk of the blame for the ever-deteriorating state of education goes to some of academia’s favorite targets. “Republicans have been asleep on the schools,” author and activist David Horowitz claimed at a July 9, 2010 breakfast on Capitol Hill sponsored by Hillsdale College. “We don’t have a conservative educational reform movement.” Horowitz authored the Academic Bill of Rights and founded Students for Academic Freedom. “Curricula in virtually every liberal arts college are dedicated precisely to social change,” Horowitz writes in his recent pamphlet Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution:...

Massive federal spending. Presidents Roosevelt and Obama responded similarly to the crises. They talked about balancing the federal budget, but instead resorted to massive spending. Earlier presidents, like Cleveland and Harding, cut spending when the nation was threatened with economic hardship. Hoover was the transition president, running deficits with record spending on public works, the first federal welfare program, and the first large-scale federal farm program. The results were budget deficits and 25 percent unemployment.

President Obama has often remarked that the Great Recession (2008–10) is the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. It’s interesting to study the many parallels between the Great Recession and the Great Depression.

Something ominous is happening within the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama will soon have to start paying attention. For weeks now, James Carville has been railing against the Obama administration’s handling of the oil spill in the Gulf. On Tuesday, Ed Rendell, Governor of Pennsylvania, added further fuel to the flames by issuing a warning. If Obama did not start pulling troops out of Afghanistan in July, 2011 as promised, he predicted that there would be a political insurrection within the party and that the President might face a primary challenge. It is in no way surprising that the Republicans...