William Stuntz was a renowned legal scholar and professor at Harvard Law School, widely recognized for his work on criminal justice and constitutional law. He contributed essays to The Weekly Standard on topics including the Iraq War, politics, and law. He passed away in 2011.
A lot of ink has been spilled on what might be called the Roosevelt and Reagan models of the presidency. In the recent past, the conventional wisdom has been Reaganite: New presidents should focus on one or two clear objectives, as Ronald Reagan emphasized tax cuts and a defense buildup. Barack…
We live in strange times. The federal budget deficit is higher than at any time since World War II as a percentage of GDP, yet the president and Congress are not in budget-cutting mode. Rather, they are seeking to make that deficit even larger by spending sums that, before now, seemed beyond the…
If the pundit class is right, Americans are in for another era of big government: the New Deal on steroids. In presidential debates, hundreds of billions of dollars in proposed spending were tossed around the way mere billions once were. Within a year of our first half-trillion-dollar deficit, we…
Each party's base has two inconvenient truths it doesn't want to hear. For Republicans, those truths concern immigration and the culture war. Most of today's illegal immigrant population is here to stay (along with their descendants) and will pay no significant price for getting here outside the…
Don't throw good money after bad. When you're in a hole, stop digging. If you've been running in the wrong direction, the first thing to do is, turn around.
Thirty-eight years ago, American politics was rocked by another politically controversial war. Then, as now, liberal Democrats competed for the allegiance of an increasingly powerful antiwar left. Then, as now, that constituency flexed its muscles in a key Democratic primary that seemed to turn…