Federalism
There’s certainly room for derision against the attitude that Abigail Thernstrom highlights here: In 1996, [current Attorney General Eric] Holder told the Washington Post that he always carried a favorite quotation in his wallet. A black man’s “race defines him more particularly than anything else,” it ran. Said Holder: “I am not the tall U.S.…
My monthly column in the current Rhode Island Catholic reviews the Commerce Clause, government spending, and the Fourteenth Amendment as contributors to trends that are transforming Christmas into a private affair: The underlying assumption that an atheist should feel as at home as an orthodox Roman Catholic in any corner of the nation is at…
The Tenth Amendment, for those who need reminding, reads as follows: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people It’s conceivable that a partial explanation for the states’ permitting the erosion of this protection may…
NewsBuster’s Noel Sheppard points to the results of a Pew Research survey released Thursday. For the first time in a Pew Research survey, nearly as many people believe it is more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns (45%) than to control gun ownership (49%). As recently as a year ago, 58%…
One doesn’t have to follow the same-sex marriage debate for long to recognize a strain of human tendencies with which I became familiar as an ideological minority in the college classroom. As I duked it out with the professor, most of the students would rush to take his or her side (silence from others being…
Stung by heavy termination fees (arising out of some sort of fixed asset sale/lease back arrangement that sounds suspiciously similar to what has been proposed to solve Rhode Island’s public pension problem) resulting from the collapse of AIG, mass transit authorities around the country have asked Uncle Sam for help with the resulting operating shortfalls.…
Many Rhode Islanders have been surprised to learn, as reported by Amanda Milkovits in the Projo, that “prostitution isn’t illegal in Rhode Island as long as it occurs indoors”. The issue was brought to light by a Federal law-enforcement multi-state raid against a thriving network of spa-brothels that included at least one site in Providence.…
I don’t think that there have been many posts on gun issues hereabouts, but Michael Barone–commenting on David Kopel’s analysis of the spread of concealed carry laws–remarks that the spread of such laws is a good sign for federalism. Nebraska recently became the 40th state to approve a concealed carry (“shall-issue“) law. According to Barone:…
D. W. MacKenzie wrote in the October 2002 issue of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, the monthly publication of the Foundation for Economic Education, about the coercive role of government: I am government… Coercion is both my vocation and my avocation; it is in my very nature to compel others to do that which they…
Senator Lincoln Chafee has decided to join California Sen. Diane Feinstein in calling for the abolishment of the Electoral College. “Under the current system, the only states that get any candidate visits are the battleground states,” said Chafee. “As a Rhode Islander . . . I’d like to see the presidential candidates make an investment…