Opinions

Did Washington violate the First Amendment?

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Did George Washington in his first act as president violate the first principle soon to be enshrined in the First Amendment? Did the Congress that approved the First Amendment compel him to do so? On April 7, 1789, three weeks before Washington was inaugurated, the Journal of the Senate reported that the Senate had ordered “a committee ... to take under consideration the manner of electing Chaplains, and to confer thereupon with a committee of the House of Representatives.”

Conservatives have triumped this Supreme Court term

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This past week and a half has been truly remarkable. From a conservative perspective, and a legal conservative perspective more specifically, there has not been a condensed period of such consistent, meaningful winning in my entire adult lifetime.

Boston banned Christian flag but raised a communist banner

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Not long after al Qaeda terrorists flew commercial jets into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in northern Virginia, Major League Baseball teams started playing "God Bless America" in the seventh inning of their games. Many of these games were played in stadiums owned by local governments. Did that establish a religion? No.

Justice Thomas’ magnum opus

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On Thursday, the greatest living American used the occasion of his 74th birthday to remind us of his greatness. He did so by issuing the single piece of writing that, at least thus far, best encapsulates and defines his career as one of the most towering constitutionalists in the history of the republic.

What really happened to Justin Bieber?

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Everyone with a phone or computer has seen the mega-viral videos and photos of 28-year-old pop star Justin Bieber. “As you can see, this eye is not blinking,” he told his 241 million Instagram followers. Bieber’s face is drooping and lopsided; he “can’t smile,” his “nostril will not move,” and “there’s full paralysis” on the left side of his face.

Biden falsely accuses Trump of his own greatest offense

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As President Joe Biden was coming to the conclusion of his address at the AFL-CIO Convention last Tuesday, he made an inadvertently ironic observation. “We’re the most unique country in the world,” he said. “We’re organized on one notion. Every other country is organized based on ethnicity, religion, geography. But the United States is based on an idea, only country in the world based on an idea.

Democrats’ selective outrage over ‘insurrections’

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To listen to House Democrats’ -- and Liz Cheney’s and Adam Kinzinger’s, but I repeat myself -- shrieks of hysteria from the opening nights of the Jan. 6 House Select Committee dais is to hearken back to the Soviet-era show trials of yesteryear. Vladimir Lenin, as the veteran conservative commentator Roger Kimball reminds us, referred to them as “model trials,” wherein the “aim isn’t to discover the truth -- which was supposedly already known -- but to stage a propagandist exhibition.”