Did President Barack Obama's appointment of Richard Cordray to be director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without a Senate confirmation vote violate the Constitution? The answer is plainly yes. Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution says the president "shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall [...]

  To win just under 40 percent of the vote in a primary with five active candidates is pretty impressive, even for a candidate like Mitt Romney, who started off with significant advantages in New Hampshire. Yes, he is well-known there because he was governor of next-door Massachusetts, had run before and owns a house [...]

I do not pretend to know the intricate details of the Republican primary presidential race – reading about caucuses and the insane amounts of money spent on advertising leave me yearning for the simplicities of New Zealand’s intimate electoral system where every person gets two votes. (We see the slippery slope in action here – [...]

  Random thoughts on the passing scene: Talk show host Dennis Miller said, "I don't dig polo. It's like miniature golf meets the Kentucky Derby." Nothing illustrates the superficiality of our times better than the enthusiasm for electric cars, because they are supposed to greatly reduce air pollution. But the electricity that ultimately powers these [...]

  If Newt Gingrich were being nominated for sainthood, many of us would vote very differently from the way we would vote if he were being nominated for a political office. What the media call Gingrich's "baggage" concerns largely his personal life and the fact that he made a lot of money running a consulting [...]

  During his homily at the Mass pro eligendo Romano Pontifice [for the election of the Roman Pontiff] on April 18, 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger cautioned his fellow-cardinals that John Paul II’s successor would have to deal with an emerging “dictatorship of relativism” throughout the western world: the use of coercive state power to impose [...]

  Moving quietly under the cover of the presidential debates and the enormous publicity given to the Republican nomination race is a plan to change how U.S. presidents are elected. It would bypass the procedure spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, which has been used successfully for over two centuries. The Constitution prescribes how we [...]

  When he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, Paul Tsongas repeatedly made it clear: He loathed President George H.W. Bush's flip-flopping on abortion and his inattentiveness to what Tsongas perceived as the urgent need for global population control. And he won Mitt Romney's vote in the 1992 Massachusetts presidential primary. "This land, [...]

  Is a vote for the Republican Party in 2012 a vote for war? Is a vote for Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich a vote for yet another unfunded war of choice, this time with a nation, Iran, three times as large and populous as Iraq? Mitt says that if elected he will move carriers [...]

  On Tuesday, Nov. 8,  the voters of Mississippi will have a very rare privilege in today's America, so much of which is governed by unelected judges and unaccountable bureaucrats, where so many basic issues seem invulnerable to change: Those voters will have the chance to make an existential decision, to vote with a flip [...]

President Barack Obama obviously is scrambling in his attempt to win re-election. He has proclaimed himself the underdog and has given up his pretense of being a pragmatic centrist compromiser in favor of harsh class warfare rhetoric. But it's worth taking note of what he has squandered. In 2008, Obama won 53 percent of the [...]

Is Herman Cain a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination? It's a question no one in the pundit world was asking until the past week. Cain has never held public office. When he ran for the Senate in Georgia in 2004, he lost the primary by a 52 percent to 26 percent margin. He [...]

Those who consider themselves constitutional conservatives should take care to consider not only the powers that the Constitution confers on the different branches of government and reserves to the states and the people, but also the schedule that the Constitution sets up for sharp changes and reversals of public policy. The entire House of Representatives [...]

  There's little that's intelligent or informed about Time magazine editor Richard Stengel's article "One Document, Under Siege" (June 23, 2011). It contains many grossly ignorant statements about our Constitution. If I believed in conspiracies, I'd say Stengel's article is part of a leftist agenda to undermine respect for the founding values of our nation. [...]

  One of the interesting things about our country, the independence of which the Founders declared 235 years ago today, is that we have been a property-holders' democracy. This is not something the Founders originally advocated. While they protested taxation by a British parliament in which they were not represented, they did not think that [...]

What is the magisterial authority of Catholic Social Teaching (CST), and how is it applied to real world situations? Catholic Social Doctrine is simply the voice of the Church, starting with the Sacred Scripture and the Church Fathers, that lays out the principles of how justice and charity are to be lived out in the [...]

“When is our next meeting?” eleven-year-old Juliette harrumphed as she slouched on the couch beside me. "Because I have a grievance to air.” This isn’t just a melodramatic pre-teen talking; this is our family’s latest lingo. In our house, the “grievances” are real. And we air them at family meetings. A few months ago, it [...]

When a Roman general returned victorious from a war against an enemy of the Republic, he was typically granted a "triumph": a lavish, bloodthirsty, pagan version of a ticker-tape parade, which centered on long lines of enslaved captive enemies marching in chains behind his chariot, and climaxed with the butchery of their general before throngs [...]

Today the Maryland House of Delegates voted to kill a bill that would allow same-sex marriages. On a voice-vote motion, the House sent the bill back to the Judiciary Committee, with the understanding that it didn't have enough support to pass on the floor, even though it cleared the Senate two weeks ago (on a [...]