Was the 14th Amendment a new Constitution?

One hundred and fifty years ago this month, the Senate put the president on trial. Nobody emerged with his reputation enhanced.

Did Robert E. Lee commit treason?

Statesmanship, like its popular cousin leadership, is an elusive quality to identify, if only because it varies from the context of one political order to another. In monarchies and dictatorships, the lines of a society are drawn horizontally, with classes of elites, the military, and bureaucrats…

Every four years we elect a president. And every four years someone emits a squeak of protest that the method we use for electing presidents under the Constitution—the Electoral College—is unfair, undemocratic, antiquated, or unpopular and should therefore be eliminated. Most of the time, this is…

Americans love revolutions. Our national identity began with a revolution, and a revolutionary war that lasted for eight years; and we cheer on other people’s revolutions, as though we find satisfaction in multiplying our own. “I hold that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing & as…