Paul Mirengoff is an attorney and conservative commentator best known as a co-founder of the influential blog Power Line. He contributed political and legal commentary to The Weekly Standard between 2005 and 2015, writing on topics ranging from constitutional jurisprudence to political culture and policy debates.
What’s the biggest domestic public policy success of the last two generations? In our view, it’s the plummeting crime rate that began with a changed approach to crime in the Reagan years.
ROBERT WOODSON is the founder and head of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (NCNE). A former civil rights activist and community organizer, he is one of the many 1960s-era liberals who was mugged by reality. In Woodson's case, it was the reality that the civil rights movement had…
IN HIS END-OF-THE-YEAR COLUMN, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne included this message from an irate conservative reader: "Most liberals and some Democrats hate this president and will do anything to bring him down, including siding with terrorists against the president." Noting that the same…
THE DEMOCRATS' 2006 election strategy regarding the war in Iraq has begun to emerge. According to the Washington Post, key Democratic operatives and legislators "are slowly coalescing around a political plan [that] would involve setting a broad time frame for drawing down U.S. troops and blaming…
"SOME OF OUR ELECTED LEADERS have opposed this war all along. I disagreed with them, but I respected their willingness to take a consistent stand. Yet some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past. They are playing politics with this issue and they are sending…
WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH nominated Harriet Miers, conservatives who balked at her lack of conservative credentials were assured by some that they should infer Miers's conservatism from the president's confidence in her. The skeptics generally responded with the maxim "trust but verify," and suggested…
THE DISAPPOINTMENT many conservatives feel over the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court will not vanish unless and until Miers begins writing solid conservative Supreme Court opinions. In the absence of such opinions, there is little reason to believe that the Miers nomination fulfills…
GEORG HEGEL was a German philosopher of the early 19th century. Hegel believed that history unfolds through a "dialectical" process, in which each stage is the product of the contradictions inherent in the ideas that defined the preceding one. Within these tensions and contradictions, Hegel…
WHAT A PLEASURE it has been to read the excerpts from the Reagan-era memos of John Roberts served up by the mainstream media. First, they confirm Roberts' status as a solid conservative. Insisting, for example, that civil rights laws are about promoting a colorblind society, Roberts opposed racial…
STUART TAYLOR has argued that for all the debate over the Supreme Court's ideological, ethnic, and gender balance, the most salient imbalance on the current Court is the one in "the collective real-world experiences of its justices." Taylor and others bemoan the absence of justices who have held…
FOR LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE CRITICS of the Bush administration, it is an article of faith that neoconservatives have hijacked American foreign policy. The neocons accomplished this, the theory goes, by selling their half-baked ideology to a president too unschooled, dim-witted, or panicked to…
NO ISSUES have dominated recent political debate more than the fight over President Bush's judicial nominees and the controversy over U.S. treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism. The two issues will merge when the Senate considers the nomination of William James Haynes, general counsel of…
AS AN ADOLESCENT, I regularly watched professional wrestling on television. Showing early geek tendencies, I usually enjoyed the ring-side interviews more than the matches themselves. My favorite interviews were the ones where a villain with a thick foreign accent hurled invective at America,…
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY professor Alex Hinton has warned that our government's prosecution of the war on terror may be causing us to resemble the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal gang that once ran Cambodia. In a piece titled "Lessons from killing fields of Cambodia--30 years on," published in the Christian…
ABIGAIL THERNSTROM once described the American college campus as an island of repression in a sea of freedom. The report of Columbia University's ad hoc grievance committee suggests that Columbia is such an island. On its face, the report presents findings and recommendations concerning allegations…
LAST WEEK, the Senate voted 51-49 in favor of opening a small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to energy development. ANWR contains 5.7 to 16 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil, according to U.S. Geological Survey estimates cited by Ben Lieberman of the Heritage…
IN 1964, Richard Hofstadter wrote an essay called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." It traced the history of "angry minds" in our politics. Hofstadter meant "angry" in the strong sense. For him, the "paranoid style" is attained when a political movement posits the existence of a secret…
THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW PANEL which investigated CBS News's faked memos found no basis to accuse Dan Rather or Mary Mapes of political bias in connection with their roles in the offending 60 Minutes story about President Bush's National Guard service. In its report the Panel characterized the very…