These are the times that try men’s souls

It seems to be a perennial condition for the United States, with our experiment in liberty, limited government, and equality before the law.  Times that try men’s souls, so evocatively described by Thomas Paine in 1776, recur with us.

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

I submit that this is not because America is worse than other countries, as the modern Left’s agenda would too often have it, but because our experiment is better.  When we say “liberty,” we really mean liberty.

Lessons from the new century: What government must not have the power to do

It will be my endeavor to keep this brief and focused, because my main purpose is to introduce a way of thinking that is antithetical to what many people now assume government must be and do.  This is necessary because those assumptions fatally hinder us in all our attempts to throw off the juggernaut of the administrative state.

The central reason for proposing this way of thinking is to construct a framework for a new constitutional convention.  I have zero interest in using anyone’s current buzzwords or specific definitions for this process: I mean by it that a convention like the one that began in 1787 occurs again, and modifications are made to the existing U.S. Constitution.  The purpose of such modifications would be to impose restraints on government that have been gutted since 1789, or whose necessity was not foreseen when the Constitution was first written.

I don’t have specifically-crafted amendments to propose.  That would be putting the cart before the horse.

TOC Ready Room 30 March 2023: Trump; Saving Twitter; Missing piece from J6

Ham sandwich on the Manhattan court docket

The indictment for Donald Trump, which came down on Thursday 30 March, interrupts our regularly scheduled programming.

Constitutional law scholar Jonathan Turley on indictment of President Donald J. Trump:

“It’s rather outrageous. It’s legally pathetic.” pic.twitter.com/PwbpvV6Y7h

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) March 30, 2023

At the moment we’re hearing the number “34 counts,”

Three mindsets that need a reset if we want a return to constitutional governance

Fear not: this will be brief. I’ve actually written at considerable length on these topics before, but all I want to accomplish here is to lay down a few markers, as a season of what promises to be incredible silliness bears down on us.

We’ll need touchstones with which to think about what’s going off the rails.  The basic problem is always more fundamental than the details by which we tend to navigate.  We come up with shallow hypotheses and explanations, but they’re situational and ultimately unsatisfactory.  I don’t propose to dictate what people conclude about causes and effects here, so much as suggest ways to think about our problem that are more fruitful than what we usually do.

One of the good effects of this is to adjust our thinking to a level as profound as the one the American Founders operated on,

The American Spring will be forward, not back

A tweet caught my eye today, and stirred up a need to write about the American situation and where we ought to be heading.  The tweet promoted a Human Events opinion piece by Jane Coleman, which is well worth the time and easy to commend to your perusal.

"Why were we doing this in school, I wondered?" – @janebcoleman https://t.co/Xp7ocuW4tY…

— Ron Coleman (@RonColeman) June 16, 2022

It’s about CRT as it is manifested in America’s schools,