U.S. Constitution

In a Friday post on the website of The Washington Monthly, not of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Martin Longman discussed President Trump in strikingly medical terms. “The reason Trump has become so vulnerable so quickly is because he’s treating Washington like the pathogen when he’s the infectious agent,” declared Longman. “A better politician might be able to take over the host…

On Friday’s CBS Evening News, anchor Scott Pelley strayed into punditry as he observed that “the common denominator of Mr. Trump’s woes is the Constitution” and not the media because they didn’t cause the departure of Mike Flynn, halt his immigration executive order, or have Andy Pudzer withdraw as the Labor Secretary nominee.

The Hamilton electors, whatever their number, are being cheered on by Hamilton bloggers, one of whom is Esquire’s Pierce. In a Saturday post, Pierce argued that in the country the Founding Fathers envisioned, the Electoral College would vote down a Donald Trump presidency. Pierce wrote, “Let us assume for a moment that our constitutional institutions are as strong and functional as they are…

After nearly eight years of competing theories, the essence of the Tea Party has been determined, says Jonathan Chait. In a Wednesday post, Chait claimed that Donald Trump’s election as president verifies liberals’ explanation of what the movement stood for. The right, wrote Chait, was wrong to argue that the Tea Party was all about “timeless principles of conservative movement thought” such as “…

In a Tuesday post, Esquire blogger Pierce complained that Ronald Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric discouraged many from voting, thereby benefiting Republicans, but Donald Trump’s anti-government rhetoric encouraged many to vote, thereby benefiting Republicans. Pierce noted that Reagan, in his first inaugural address, declared “that government was not a solution to the problem, that government…

What would the Founders think of presumptive President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral vote victory, earned in the face of a popular vote loss? Hint: It’s not what many media commentators would have you believe. We can find a small clue to the Founders’ feelings in something Benjamin Franklin said as he left the Constitutional Convention. As delegates departed from the old Pennsylvania State House…

When it comes to Supreme Court justices and their views of the Constitution, on the one hand there’s Clarence Thomas, and on the other there’s everyone else in the 227-year history of the Court, suggested CNN and New Yorker legal analyst Toobin in a Tuesday piece. Toobin called Thomas, who just marked a quarter-century as a SCOTUS justice, “not a conservative but, rather, a radical” who’s driven…

If Hillary Clinton takes Joel Dodge’s advice, one of Washington’s kings of unintentional comedy might be in the spotlight for a while longer. Dodge, a lawyer who also writes for The Week, thinks Clinton should choose current vice president Joe Biden as her running mate. Biden, contended Dodge, “is virtually risk-free and carries more upside…[He] is universally known, vetted, and unquestionably…

Omar Mateen claimed at various times to be aligned with terrorist groups including ISIS, Hezbollah, and the al-Nusra Front. Tim Dickinson does not consider any of those bloodthirsty outfits “the greatest threat to our homeland security today.” That description, Dickinson argues, best fits the National Rifle Association. “The NRA's unhinged gun advocacy,” he wrote in a Wednesday article, “has…

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has contempt for both Donald Trump (“his appeal operates…at a sub-intellectual level”) and those who’ve voted for him (“the Republican Party turns out to be filled with idiots”). Still, suggested Chait in a Thursday post, Trump and his supporters have unwittingly clarified something important: the Tea Party movement is not and never was truly conservative,…

Scatology has typically been out of bounds in mainstream-media political commentary. (Not in all political commentary, of course. For example, actor John Cusack once called former actor Ronald Reagan “a criminal who used the Constitution as toilet paper.”) Nonetheless, Michael Tomasky went there in a Wednesday column trashing Senate Republicans for refusing to consider any Supreme Court…

CNN and New Yorker pundit Jeffrey Toobin considers Antonin Scalia “a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor.” The late SCOTUS justice, asserted Toobin in the New Yorker, “lived within the sealed bubble of contemporary conservative thought” and “devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy…

New TBS host Samantha Bee returned for round two of her show Monday night and after a litany of vile remarks in the inaugural edition, she used the opening segment of this one to savage late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and especially Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as she likened him to an “obstructionist ass” who’s desecrating Scalia and the Constitution by stating he wouldn’t…

The antics of the former major-league baseball player Manny Ramirez were frequently described as “just Manny being Manny.” Yglesias suggests that Hillary Clinton’s ill-advised use of a private email server was just Hillary being Hillary, and that that’s a good thing. In a Tuesday article, Yglesias wrote that “from her adventures in cattle trading to chairing a policymaking committee in her…