The late senator was the kind of man the Founders had in mind.

A long time ago, and for no particular religious reason, I decided the psalmist was right: “Put not your trust in princes.” The point the unknown author was making is that it’s God, not some son of man, in whom one should trust. But regardless, it has seemed to me eminently true that princes are not trustworthy. I especially like the term “princes” because it’s more encompassing than “kings” would be. It seems to evoke the totality of the class of politicians, from the time of the psalms unto this democratic age.

I have made one exception in the years since, and that was for John McCain. I never worked for the man, except as an informal and unpaid adviser on national security to his 2008 presidential campaign. Perhaps that contributed to my ability to trust him: I thereby avoided finding myself the object of one of his famous outbursts of temper. But maybe not, because not one of the dozens of people I know who worked for him, and who presumably were at one time or another on the receiving end of one of his tirades, had anything but love and loyalty for him. Continue reading →

Why the success of the Federalist Society is unlikely to be replicated.

With President Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court seat Justice Anthony Kennedy is vacating, the influence of the Federalist Society—the membership organization of conservative and libertarian lawyers, legal scholars, and law students—remains at the absolute peak it attained during the administration of George W. Bush with the nomination of Samuel Alito to the nation’s highest court.

Founded in 1982 by Lee Liberman Otis, Steven Calabresi, David McIntosh, and E. Spencer Abraham, the Federalist Society launched as a counterbalance to the leftward tilt among law school faculty nationwide. Part of the idea was to ensure that the progressive hegemony on campus met serious resistance at least at the level of intellectual debate, if not the numerical balance among faculties. But within 20 years of its establishment, the Federalist Society had also emerged as the premier vetting institution for Republican appointments to the federal judiciary, especially at the appellate level. Continue reading →

Trump may well prefer for Mueller to play out the string.

For much of the past year, speculation has swirled that President Trump will fire Robert Mueller, the independent counsel investigating supposed links between Russia and the Trump campaign. Interestingly, the likelihood that Trump fires Mueller is an area of rare bipartisan agreement in Washington—though of course, the speculated reasons why he might do so vary greatly.

Democrats think Trump may or will fire Mueller as a last-ditch attempt to derail an investigation closing in on him. Republican supporters of the president think Trump might or should fire Mueller because his probe has become exactly the “witch hunt” the president often tweets that it is.

Republican never-Trumpers and neutrals by and large take the view that the investigation must run its course even (or perhaps especially) if there was “no collusion” with Russia, as Trump insists on a regular basis. Disrupting the investigation would worsen the president’s position. But such is their generally low opinion of Trump that many of them, too, regard it as likely that the president will fire Mueller despite his own best interests in letting the investigation play out. Continue reading →