RealClearPolitics Articles

America’s culture wars are typically fought at our universities and on our streets. Among the countless other venues for battle, the federal bureaucracy and commissions are places where conservatives, often outnumbered, face long odds.  The result is an increasing leftist bent.  I was reminded of this when I was recently cancelled from the Idaho Advisory Committee on Civil Rights.  The Idaho committee serves under the United States Commission on Civil Rights.  The USCCR produces several national reports on the status of civil rights in America, usually to fawning...

Although the Supreme Court has five Catholic justices, along with a sixth (Neil Gorsuch) who was raised Catholic -- and may soon have another if Donald Trump gets his way -- John F. Kennedy is still the only Roman Catholic ever elected president of the United States. Sixteen years ago, John Kerry sought to become the second. If Kerry had carried the Catholic vote, he probably would have achieved that goal. But George W. Bush won Kerry’s co-religionists by five percentage points, which was likely the difference in the 2004 election. In 2020, the Democrats have selected another pro-choice...

Consider this mind experiment. It is September 2016. Democrats control the United States Senate, 54-44, with two independents who caucus with the Democrats. In the upcoming election, 24 Democratic seats are in play, versus 10 Republican seats. Therefore, the Democrats' continued control over the Senate is anything but a foregone conclusion. The same, of course, is true about the presidency. Now imagine that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas suddenly dies some 50 days before the election, providing President Barack Obama with an opportunity to dramatically redirect the court by replacing a...

Here's a policing story with a happy ending: Deputies in Deltona, Florida, recently stopped a black jogger who fit the description of a burglary suspect. The jogger, Joseph Griffin, is a former military police officer and currently a registered nurse. Griffin knew to be calm and cooperative.  The deputy asked Griffin to bear with him. He said he had to detain him but added, "Buddy, you're not in trouble or anything." Griffin responded saying that with "everything going on, it's just a little bit scary." And the deputy politely replied, "See it through our eyes." The Volusia County...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump marveled at a rally this week about how important Supreme Court nominations are to voters. But Senate Republicans are with the voters on that. Despite Democratic cries of hypocrisy, they’re hoping the battle over replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg will help them keep their Senate majority as well as Trump’s job in the White House. Beyond the Nov. 3 elections, some feel the generational goal of a solidly conservative court is worth the potential blowback. “Most of us came to the Senate, ran for the Senate, in a lot...

Good morning, it’s Thursday, Sept. 24, 2020. On this date in 1896, in the upper Mississippi River state capital of St. Paul, an upper-middle-class couple with Irish roots welcomed a son into the world. The proud father was Maryland-born and Georgetown-educated Edward Fitzgerald. A boy when the Civil War broke out, Edward moved to the North as a young man for a fresh start and a change of scenery. He had his reasons: He was only 12 when his cousin Mary Surratt was hanged for her involvement in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Edward also wed a woman named Mary, although Mary...

The Second Amendment is hanging in the balance, and Trump’s Supreme Court nomination this Saturday will determine its fate. All of Trump’s likely nominees – 7th Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett, 11th Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa and 4th Circuit Judge Allison Jones Rushing – would likely be strong on this issue. But Barrett has the clearest record, having actually ruled on such cases. Barrett is also the most feared by liberals, some of whom concede that she has “a topnotch legal mind.” By a narrow, 5-to-4 majority, the Supreme Court has now twice ruled that...

At first, the protesters were polite. They filed quietly into the back of the hearing room, sat in the two dozen or so seats reserved for the public, and waited patiently. But then, one by one, they started yelling, and then, one by one, they were hauled away by Capitol Police. On the first day of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, 70 people were charged with disorderly conduct. It wasn’t any calmer outside the oak doors of the Judiciary Committee. Hundreds of anti-Kavanaugh demonstrators blocked hallways and chased senators into elevators and generally did their best...

Good morning, it’s Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020. On this the date in 1806, the Lewis and Clark expedition returned to St. Louis after three years in the wilderness. This is also a notable date in American law enforcement (Billy the Kid was arrested for the first time in 1875); in U.S. elective politics (Republican vice presidential nominee Richard Nixon saved his political career with his famous “Checkers Speech” in 1952); and in race relations (nine black students who had enrolled at Little Rock’s Central High School were forced to withdraw by a threatening white mob in...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Votes in hand, Senate Republicans are charging ahead with plans to confirm President Donald Trump’s pick to fill the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat before the Nov. 3 election, launching a divisive fight over Democratic objections before a nominee is even announced. Trump said Tuesday he will name his choice Saturday, confident of support. Democrats say it’s too close to the election, and the winner of the presidency should name the new justice. But under GOP planning, the Senate could vote Oct. 29. “I guess...

The death of the liberal icon Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, greatly admired even by her opponents, has wildly transformed the presidential campaign. It was once about Democrat Joe Biden and Republican President Donald Trump. But now, the rule of law is on the ballot. The Constitution is on the ballot. And Trump and Biden are merely the flawed personalities out front. The Democrats have come unhinged by tribal, political rage, as they were during the angry confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, continuing their pattern of character assassination of Republican judicial...

Just weeks from Election Day, President Trump logged what may have been his most offensive day ever, disrespecting not only 200,000 dead Americans lost to the coronavirus but the not-yet-mourned or buried Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her family. Monday morning started with the president in his happy place -- on television. During what is now his weekly call to “Fox & Friends,” Trump carried on exuberantly about the prospects of filling the seat of Ginsburg, who had died less than 72 hours earlier. When the show's anchors asked him about the dying wish she...

Though the death toll from COVID-19 just hit a staggering 200,000 in the U.S., we still don't know the origins of this killer virus. China, which has been praised by the World Health Organization, has blocked independent investigation. Worse, social media platforms are accomplices to the cover-up. Last week, Facebook and Twitter did their best to cancel a scientist, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, whose genetic analysis of the virus indicates it was deliberately engineered by the Chinese. The House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans released a report Monday exposing how China lied when the outbreak...

Last week, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died at the age of 87. Her death immediately initiated a political firestorm in Washington, D.C. -- one that threatens the very integrity of the republic. That's not because, as the media and Democrats would claim, some sort of institutional norm has been violated by a Republican president selecting a replacement for Ginsburg to be voted on by a Republican Senate. It's because Democrats have declared that so long as they are unable to replace Ginsburg with an activist left-wing judge willing to use the Constitution to cram down liberal...

Wake up. The "community organizers" of the left are in full wildebeest mode. Now is not the time for bending down, rolling over or playing nice. From now until Election Day (and likely until the end of the year), you can expect screaming banshees carrying identical, preprinted signs to turn up in the middle of the night at the private homes of elected politicians, Donald Trump campaign and administration officials, law enforcement officers, judges and conservative leaders. This is not conjecture. A nationwide agitation force milked the dead body of George Floyd to create the current...

In the late 1990s, as a graduate student in history, I had the good fortune of serving as a teacher’s assistant to Julian Bond. Bond was a gentlemanly presence in the history department at the University of Virginia. He was also an excellent teacher, and the class he taught every semester on the history of the civil rights movement was always popular. So popular that he always had three TAs — many or most of the American history grad students served in that capacity at some point. I happened to be assisting Bond (pictured in 2006) the year that an aide to Washington, D.C.’s...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death -- and Mitch McConnell’s situational ethics -- have revived calls for enlarging (“packing”) the Supreme Court to alter its potential conservative tilt. It’s a bad idea -- and there’s a better way to go. The better way is to restore the Senate rule that required a supermajority of 60 senators – – to approve a Supreme Court justice. A constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds majority (67 votes) would be even better, ensuring that all new justices would have bipartisan support. Democrats tempted by the...

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, like Justice Antonin Scalia’s death four-and-a-half years ago, will have profound effects on the fall general election, as well as the shape of constitutional law in the decades to come. While a move by the Republican Senate to confirm a potential Trump nominee would be well in line with historical precedent, there are good reasons -- practical, political, and constitutional -- for the Senate to forbear. We will hear a lot over the next few days and weeks about a “Biden rule,” a “Thurmond rule,” and the Senate’s...

The Democrats are rewriting history, celebrating the Obama record on the economy as if these were the salad days for America. In Washington parlance, that is called "misremembering." The reality is that the Obama tax-and-regulate agenda led to the weakest economic recovery from a recession since the Great Depression. This week, the Census Bureau released its economic report -- the gold standard of measuring the finances of American families. In President Donald Trump's first three years in office, real median family income for Americans rose by more than $6,400. In Obama's EIGHT years in...