Month: March 2017

Let’s continue from Part l of this piece to look at both Impeachment and the 25th Amendment.

Now, much is made these days of understanding the original intent of the founders who drafted the Constitution. There is an entire school of legal and judicial thinking that comes out of an organization of hard right wing attorneys and legal thinkers called the Federalist Society. It  has grown since its founding in 1982 into an injector of new hard and far right  judges and Supreme Court justices into the federal judiciary. You might be surprised to know that, root and branch, it comes from the soil of the Yale and Harvard University Law Schools as well as the more likely source, the University of Chicago Law School.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia was in many ways godfather of the Federalist Society and its infection of the federal judiciary through the bacillus of the doctrine of original intent.  His presently  designated and nominated  successor, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Neal Gorsuch, has been a member of and is a faithful and ardent subscriber to Federalist Society thinking and doctrine, as are Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito. Justice William Kennedy, is too, albeit he is a more flexible man than these, which is why he holds the balance of power on the court. Continue reading “The 25th Amendment: Part II”

As the crisis in the American presidency alarms, expands and deepens every day, I thought it could be instructive to examine what the U.S. Constitution says about when, if and how a president can be removed from office.

Are we there yet? Not for me or you to say, though we are all speculating about it — of that I am certain.

Is the incumbent the most dangerously ignorant and — seemingly to us lay people without professional knowledge of psychiatry and mental illness — a deeply flawed and disturbed man? A man who, by the nature of the office he holds,  literally has the keys to more and greater power than anyone in recorded human history? Yes, objectively it seems so. It seems every day clearer within layman’s terms that he is, well, nuts. Continue reading “The 25th Amendment: Part I”

Hi if you’ve responded and many have, while I am working on the next current one, here is something I wrote and had published by a small paper in N.H. last year, The Keane Sentinel, circulation 14,000, whose readers I had the good fortune to share this with.

Well, I know this takes you back a year and a bit more — hard to believe isn’t it that a year ago we laughed our heads off at the impossible, beyond plausible chance this would happen to us, to our nation. But it did.

So, anyhow, not to digress, along about January 2016 I went back and looked at things Will Rogers had said about politics and stuff and I wrote this and The Sentinel published it. But since pretty much everyone I know is not a  Sentinel subscriber, I thought I’d share it with you now, while I work on the next current issue post. Hope you enjoy  it, I sure enjoyed writing it; and, re-reading it just now, discover it remains pertinent on a day when  the nearly incomparably ignorant Ben Carson confused the Middle Passage with immigration: Continue reading “What Would Will Say”

Like it says, this is about thinking out loud, just me thinking out loud, which I have been doing some of on FB except that a very good friend of mine said “If you are going to do this, you need a blog.”

I said, “I can’t figure out how to do that”, and Joel Dowshen said well that’s not a problem, because he knows how to do it. And so he helped me create it and here I am, for which I thank him.

And then I thought about one of my favorite quotes of all time, the one you see here from Will Rogers, that great American humorist and wisest of men; and it seemed to me that what this thinking out loud should be about is peeling the onion, just peeling and paring away all the stuff that gets in the way of a common sense understanding of politics, policy, government,  history — of how it all fits together with an understanding, as someone wrote once, of “life its own-self.”

Continue reading “About Thinking Out Loud”