Character. The word seems antique in these rancorous times, as rare as truth. As rare as objectivity and nuance in our political discourse. I recently came across Thomas Jefferson’s reminiscence of his fellow Virginian and nation-builder, George Washington: “I think I knew General Washington intimately and thoroughly; and were I called on to delineate his […]
On July 15, the National Park Service hung new interpretive signs at the President’s House Site in Independence Park, where George Washington lived as president while Philadelphia was the nation’s capital. This is a major development in the battle between those who want to portray America’s history in a traditional manner and woke activists who depict our history as one of oppressors versus the oppressed, recasting most American heroes as oppressors.
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.
MOUNT VERNON, Virginia — KTBS and Collette are taking travelers on a journey through history as part of America 250 — visiting the places where the United States was born.
The Declaration of Independence is disappearing, and it has nothing to do with the country's current divides. The document at the center of the nation's 250th birthday has faded so badly over two and a half centuries that large sections of it read as blank parchment. The bold "In Congress, July 4, 1776" at the top still holds up, and John Hancock's signature is still there. Past that, a lot of the text disappears into the page.
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.”
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.
