Marbury v. Madison and the Question of John Marshall's Judicial Activism - Starting Points
Did John Marshall Create Judicial Review? Early Americans thought otherwise.| Starting Points
Another Trump presidency may be right around the corner. Perhaps his primary economic policy point this campaign has been his favorite word: “tariffs.” According to Alan Rappeport, an economic policy reporter for The New York Times, Trump has considered instituting between 10 and 50 percent tariffs on all imported products, a 60 percent tariff on […] The post Taxing the Constitution: Are Trump’s Proposed Tariffs Legal? appeared first on Starting Points.| Starting Points
Amongst the general educated public in America, the eminent political theorist Hannah Arendt is probably best known for her concept of “the banality of evil,” which she discusses in her 1963 book about the trial of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. One indicator of just how famous the phrase “banality of evil” became is […] The post Hannah Arendt on Statesmanship appeared first on Starting Points.| Starting Points
Did John Marshall Create Judicial Review? Early Americans thought otherwise.| Starting Points
April 19 marked the anniversary of the American Revolution – specifically, the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The American Declaration of Independence justifies the rebellion by listing “a long train of abuses and usurpations [revealing] a design to reduce [the colonists] under absolute Despotism.” It explains the nature of these various abuses and usurpations as […]| Starting Points
As Americans prepare to head into one of the most contentious presidential election seasons in recent history, experts are looking 200 years into the past to the heated election between John Q. Adams and Andrew Jackson for insight and answers as to what may lie ahead. Several important questions concerning the similarity of the election […] The post What the “corrupt bargain” of America’s 1824 election can teach us about 2024 appeared first on Starting Points.| Starting Points
The election of 1856 was the most violent peacetime election in American history. For the first time, a national political party with a legitimate chance to win the presidency campaigned on an anti-slavery platform, putting a fright into Southern politicians, the slave owners they represented, and their Northern sympathizers. After decades of blustering about secession […] The post Slavery, Disunion, and the Violent Election of 1856 appeared first on Starting Points.| Starting Points
The following is a review of Dennis Hale and Marc Landy, Keeping the Republic: A Defense of American Constitutionalism (University Press of Kansas, 2024). In one of the less-noticed aspects of his State of the Union address, President Biden announced his elimination of the requirement that Federally-backed mortgages be accompanied by title insurance. Instead […] The post A Defense of American Constitutionalism appeared first on Starting Points.| Starting Points
Teaching college students today about the significance of the American principles of freedom, equality, and constitutionalism is an uphill battle against the rise of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) at the expense of the humanities and social sciences, the bureaucratization of the classroom with its plethora of non-pedagogical mandates, and — perhaps most difficult […] The post Teaching Beyond Ideology: How Voegelin and Strauss can save the American classroom appea...| Starting Points
“. . . I amused myself with reading seriously Plato’s republic. I am wrong however in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to go through a whole dialogue. while wading thro’ the […] The post Plato’s Legacy in Eighteenth-Century Western Politics appeared first on Starting Points.| Starting Points
“I want . . . salt, and pepper, for the old people.”— Red Cloud Kinship is an Indigenous cultural tradition. It is also a political practice. Indigenous societies and nations withstood colonization for centuries by wielding the political power of kinship. Inter-Tribal kinship alliances prevented the total annihilation of Indigenous peoples during the colonial and […] The post Durability and Duress: Inter-Tribal Kinship and Indian Gaming Capitalism appeared first on Starting Points.| Starting Points
