Across Kentucky, a troubling pattern is emerging. Whether in healthcare, education, or non-profit organizations, board decisions are increasingly being questioned — not simply because difficult decisions are being made, but because stakeholders are asking how those decisions are being made. Recent events involving boards governing Fayette County Public Schools, the University of Kentucky, and the […]

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Scholarly surveys, discussions and polls have consistently revealed a clear consensus: the leadership capacity of the founding generation — Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton and Madison — is unrivaled by any subsequent coterie of American statesman. It is true that these same academic conversations reflect agreement that Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt stand atop the list of America’s greatest presidents, with founding chief executives such as Washington and Jefferson closely on their heels, but there is, it seems, no generation of political leaders across 250 years that is comparable to those who launched the American Revolution, drafted the Declaration of Independence and wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

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The evolution in America of rationales for the cascading growth of presidential power, which began in earnest in the post-war world and followed a trajectory through the expression of the Imperial Presidency before reaching new heights in President Donald Trump’s authoritarian pretensions, has long found traction in the misappropriation and misuse of Justice Robert H. Jackson’s famous aphorism, “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

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One of the grave consequences for American constitutionalism of the untrammeled concentration of power in the hands of President Donald Trump — the putative goal of Project 2025 — is his total control over the Department of Justice. There is no separation between President Trump and his Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, his former criminal defense lawyer, no independence between the White House and the DOJ. What Trump wants, Trump gets — the governing principle of authoritarianism.

Defense attorneys have coined the term “January 6 Jurisprudence” to describe the treatment received by the more than 1,200 defendants arrested so far in connection with the events of Jan. 6, 2021. This carve-out legal system involves the unprecedented and possibly unlawful use of a corporate evidence-tampering statute; excessive prison sentences and indefinite periods of pretrial incarceration; and the designation of nonviolent offenses as federal crimes of terrorism.