Commentary: Trump Is Correct About Presidential Immunity

Trump Mount Rushmore

The media has driven itself into a tizzy in recent days, claiming that despite serving as president of the United States (and being poised to reclaim that office in less than a year’s time), Donald Trump should not be granted the same kinds of immunity and executive privilege that every other chief magistrate enjoyed before him. Showcasing their ignorance of both the Constitution and history, the mainstream media has framed the concept as something of a novel innovation for President Trump’s lawyers, who are advocating for “broad immunity,” implying that no other presidential officeholder has ever made that claim. Nothing could be further from the truth.

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Commentary: It’s Time to Rediscover Our Roots as a Nation Founded as a Giant Middle Finger to Tyranny

Growing up in our house, Election Night was like the Super Bowl. We would stay up late into the night watching the returns. The 2020 election was no different. That night, I watched Donald Trump take state after state with ease. Then I watched as votes started to fluctuate, barely trickled in, and then, with only a handful of states to go, I watched as counting was halted altogether. A sinking feeling crept over me as I witnessed things I had never seen in my life.

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Commentary: The War on Thomas Jefferson

Portrait of Jefferson in his late 50s with a full head of hair

The final decision, after years of debate, was made on Oct. 8 to remove from the New York City Council chambers the statue of the man we all know to have been a dreaded slaveholder—to the tune of 600 over his lifetime—Thomas Jefferson.

Despite that, writing at Bari Weiss’s Substack, political science professor Samuel Goldman, with whom I concur, is less than happy.

“The removal is disgraceful. Unlike monuments to Confederate leaders that display them in full military glory, Jefferson is depicted as a writer. Holding a quill pen in one hand and the Declaration of Independence in the other, he is clearly being honored for composing an immortal argument for liberty and equality.”

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Commentary: Targeting Citizens for Expressing Traditional Values is a Hallmark of Tyranny

All my life I’ve felt a bond with places and with people.

Growing up in Boonville, North Carolina, population then about 600, I went to elementary school and the Methodist church, knew many of the merchants in town—Harvey Smith, grocer and mayor for many years, Donald the barber, Mr. Weatherwax who owned the pharmacy and was kind enough to let me read comic books on the premises, and a dozen more adults—and relished my friends and their families. Boonville’s red clay and rolling hills are as much a part of me as any genetic code.

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Commentary: How Progressives Rewrote American History

America’s Founders understood that political change is inevitable. They thought it must come about through constitutional mechanisms, with the consent of the governed, and must never infringe on the natural rights of citizens. Progressives – rejecting the idea that any rights, including the right of consent to government, are natural – accept no such limits. Progressivism insists that the principled American constitutionalism of fixed natural rights and limited and dispersed powers must be overturned and replaced by an organic, evolutionary model of the Constitution. Historical progress should be facilitated by experts dedicated to the expansion of the public sphere and political control – especially at the national level. As progressivism has grown into modern liberalism, the commitment to extra-constitutional “progress” is broadly shared across elite political, academic, legal, and religious circles. Politics is thus increasingly identified with a mix of activism, expertise, and the desire for “change.”

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