Interpreting The Constitution In The Digital Era

GPS monitors can track your every movement. Brain scans can now see lies forming in your brain. And advancements in genetic engineering may soon allow parents to engineer what their children will look and be like.

These new technologies are “challenging our Constitutional categories in really dramatic ways,” says George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen. “And what’s so striking is that none of the existing amendments give clear answers to the most basic questions we’re having today.”

Listen to this episode of Fresh Air, where Rosen, the co-editor of the  Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change, details how technological changes that were unimaginable at the time of the Founding Fathers are challenging our notions of things like personal vs. private space, freedom of speech and our own individual autonomy.

Explaining The American Filibuster

If high-school government class taught us anything, it’s that getting bills passed through Congress is a game of numbers: The bill with the most votes wins.

Turns out it’s not that simple. These days, the polarized state of American politics means that major bills need at least 60 votes to avoid an inevitable filibuster by the opposition.

Political scientist Gregory Koger’s new book, Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate, addresses the institutionalization of the filibuster — and describes congressional loopholes by way of which fast thinking and hard work can beat the numbers. Koger teaches American politics at the University of Miami. He joins host Terry Gross for a conversation about what has happened to simple majority rule.

Listen to Koger discuss the filibuster in an interview with Terry Gross

Order v. Liberty: Reading and My Lecture

“You may think that the Constitution is your security it is nothing but a piece of paper. You may think that the statutes are your security but they are nothing but words in a book. You may think that elaborate mechanism of government is your security but it is nothing at all, unless you have sound and uncorrupted public opinion to give life to your Constitution, to give vitality to your statutes, to make efficient your government machinery.”

-Charles Evan Hughes, Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court, 1930-1941

Dr. Larry Gragg’s Article

Order v. Liberty Responses

Contemporary Connection…

My Lecture: Order v Liberty – An Enduring Theme in U.S. History

Time Magazine calls Alien & Sedition Acts the Patriot Act of the 18th Century

 

 

Age of Realism

Richard Hofstadter (1916 – 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual. Hofstadter, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University, became the “iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus”, largely because of his emphasis on ideas and political culture rather than the day-to-day doings of politicians. Among his most important works is The American Political Tradition (1948). Below is Chapter One of this critically acclaimed work.

Founding Fathers: An Age of Realism

Reading Responses