A failed war does not end when the drones stop flying. It creates a new danger: A government that refuses to admit defeat and a president who, having failed abroad, seeks muscular victories elsewhere. The war against Iran is a case study in the limits of military...
There is a point in the decline of republics when the problem is no longer that government breaks its own laws. Governments will always behave unlawfully. The deeper problem comes when the constitutional machinery designed to prevent those acts stops functioning —...
When a government agency comes to an internet service provider demanding information about Americans because of what they have said on social media, the provider should discard the demand, close the door or hang up the phone. The government is not entitled to rummage...
"The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness... They conferred against the Government the right to be let alone — most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men."...
The war in Iran is unlawful and unconstitutional, but in post-World War II America, it is normal. Here is the backstory. When President Donald Trump decided to begin bombing Iran last June, he did not state a coherent or lawful reason for doing so. His director of...
One of the defining failures of modern American government has been the steady erosion of Congress's constitutional authority over war. The Constitution grants Congress — not the president — the power to declare war. Congress decides to go to war. The president wages...
Since its inception, the government of the United States has inexorably exceeded its powers under the Constitution. All three branches have been complicit in a consistent pattern of constitutional indifference. Congress has regulated in areas of governance nowhere...
The Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, embraces two value sets. The first is natural rights, and the second is limited government. After 250 years, neither value has survived, and the opposite of each currently prevails in America. Thomas Jefferson drafted...
When President Donald Trump appointed an obviously unqualified friend, a home builder executive, to be acting director of national intelligence, he inadvertently triggered attention to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The director of national...
Some of the recent legal challenges to the use of surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security upon Americans have resulted in the revelation of truly terrifying behavior by the government, in direct defiance of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. We now...
