Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson When you were in civics class, you probably learned this formulation. The legislative branch makes laws; the executive branch carries out laws; and the judicial branch interprets laws. Justice Neil Gorsuch is using various Supreme Court opinions to return back to that constitutional order. Part of the problem is that various members of Congress have been willing to cede power to the executive branch. Sometimes that makes sense when bureaucrats need to have some discretion in how to…

Kerby Anderson Before the Supreme Court headed out of town, they ruled that federal judges cannot block gerrymandering. The term, as you may remember from my previous commentary, comes from Massachusetts Governor Gerry who signed a bill that changed the district lines for candidates. One of those contorted districts in the Boston area resembled the shape of a salamander. Thus, the term “gerrymander” was born. The 5-4 decision came because of Chief Justice John Roberts. In another case involving the…

Penna Dexter On January 20,1961 President John F. Kennedy ended his inaugural address with a challenge:  “And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” These words invigorated a new generation of Americans. The crowd of progressives currently running for president seem to be speaking a different language to a different America — one that ascribes to government the duty to do more for them. Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson…

Kerby Anderson Yesterday I talked about the Declaration of Independence. Since we are in the 4th of July weekend, I thought we could talk about the Constitution. The summer issue of the magazine for Williamsburg had an interesting article by Mitchell Reiss on “An Exercise in Revisionism.” He invited his readers to make suggestions on how they might amend this country’s founding document. As you might expect, many of the respondents wrote about the Electoral College. One respondent, for example, felt…

Kerby Anderson Today is the 4th of July, and I thought I would take a moment to talk about the origin of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson said that many of the ideas in the Declaration came from John Locke. Jefferson also gave credit to the writer Algernon Sidney, who in turn cites most prominently Aristotle, Plato, Roman republican writers, and the Old Testament. Legal scholar Gary Amos argues that Locke’s Two Treatises on Government is simply Samuel…

Kerby Anderson Yesterday, I talked about the progress of religious liberty in this country due to a recent Supreme Court ruling. Today I would like to put all of this in a larger context of the religious culture war. Fortunately, David French has already done much of the hard work on this in his commentary on this subject. Early on he explains his mission. Although the federal government should protect religious liberty and seek the common good, we Christians have…

Kerby Anderson When the Supreme Court ruled on the constitutionality of the memorial cross in Maryland, the lawyers with First Liberty Institute hoped that they would also dismiss what has been known as “the Lemon test.” Back in 1971, the justices created a three-part test in Lemon v. Kurzman that made it too easy to declare any religious symbol or action unconstitutional. The recent court ruling didn’t eliminate the test but essentially set it aside. In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence…

Kerby Anderson The current showdown with Iran brought lots of commentary. At times like this, lots of people become instant foreign policy experts. I don’t claim to be one of them, but I do know that some of the comments being made are off track. I have read pundits trying to argue that Iran is not our enemy and isn’t a threat to us. Some have argued that the principle reason for Iranian belligerence is due to the fact that…

Penna Dexter Proposals for single-payer healthcare depend upon deriving more productivity from a system that is already stretched thin. Medicare-for-All, which would nationalize the practice of medicine, already has 106 House co-sponsors. Under Medicare-for-All, doctors would be salaried government employees. Hospitals and other medical facilities would be expected to provide care for all their patients within an allotted budgeted dollar amount to be determined annually and capped to keep costs down. This pot of money will also have to cover…

Kerby Anderson Could it be that nearly everything we have been told about sexual orientation and gender identity is wrong? A report published in the journal, The New Atlantis, seems to challenge conventional secular perspectives on these issues. The paper by Dr. Lawrence Mayer and Dr. Paul McHugh surveys over 200 peer-reviewed studies done in various social science disciplines. Ryan Anderson, of the Heritage Foundation, summarizes the paper’s results. He says the major takeaway is that “some of the most…

Kerby Anderson Leave it to progressive corporate leaders to suggest that laws promoting abortion are the same as “equality.” After all, the use of the term “equality” worked to promote same-sex marriage. Why not bend the term to apply to abortion and reproductive rights? Executives from 180 corporations signed a joint statement with the deceptive title, “Don’t Ban Equality.” In a commentary by John Hirschauer, he aptly describes it as “a gratuitous assault on the English language.” Who exactly is…