Antonin Scalia and American Constitutionalism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward A. Purcell, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
The Political ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Warren Court ◽  
Interpretive Methods ◽  
Living Nature ◽  
Political Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The U.S

Antonin Scalia and American Constitutionalism is a critical study of Justice Antonin Scalia’s jurisprudence, his work on the U.S. Supreme Court, and his significance for an understanding of American constitutionalism. After tracing Scalia’s emergence as a hero of the political right and his opposition to many of the decisions of the Warren Court, this book examines his general jurisprudential theory of originalism and textualism, arguing that he failed to produce either the objective method he claimed or the “correct” constitutional results he promised. Focusing on his judicial performance over his thirty years on the Court, the book examines his opinions on virtually all of the constitutional issues he addressed, from fundamentals of structure to most major constitutional provisions. The book argues that Scalia applied his jurisprudential theories in inconsistent ways and often ignored, twisted, or abandoned the interpretive methods he proclaimed, in most cases reaching results that were consistent with “conservative” politics and the ideology of the post-Reagan Republican Party. Most broadly, it argues that Scalia’s jurisprudence and career are particularly significant because they exemplify—contrary to his own persistent claims—three paramount characteristics of American constitutionalism: the inherent inadequacy of “originalism” and other formal interpretive methodologies to produce “correct” answers to controverted constitutional questions; the relationship—particularly close in Scalia’s case—between constitutional interpretations on one hand and substantive personal and political goals on the other; and the truly and unavoidably “living” nature of American constitutionalism itself. As a historical matter, the book concludes, Scalia stands as a towering figure of irony because his judicial career disproved the central claims of his own jurisprudence.

The Politics of Evangelical Identity

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lydia Bean
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Evangelical Churches ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
Evangelical Identity ◽  
Moral Attitudes ◽  
The U.S

It is now a common refrain among liberals that Christian Right pastors and television pundits have hijacked evangelical Christianity for partisan gain. This book challenges this notion, arguing that the hijacking metaphor paints a fundamentally distorted picture of how evangelical churches have become politicized. The book reveals how the powerful coalition between evangelicals and the Republican Party is not merely a creation of political elites who have framed conservative issues in religious language, but is anchored in the lives of local congregations. Drawing on research at evangelical churches near the U.S. border with Canada, this book compares how American and Canadian evangelicals talk about politics in congregational settings. While Canadian evangelicals share the same theology and conservative moral attitudes as their American counterparts, their politics are quite different. On the U.S. side of the border, political conservatism is woven into the very fabric of everyday religious practice. The book shows how subtle partisan cues emerge in small group interactions as members define how “we Christians” should relate to others in the broader civic arena, while liberals are cast in the role of adversaries. It explains how the most explicit partisan cues come not from clergy but rather from lay opinion leaders who help their less politically engaged peers to link evangelical identity to conservative politics. This book demonstrates how deep the ties remain between political conservatism and evangelical Christianity in America.

Ideology and the Intellectuals

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Berry ◽  
Michael Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Karl Mannheim ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Political Right ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Recurrent Theme

The question of how intellectuals ought to relate to the ideological traditions of the political cultures of modern societies has been a recurrent theme of European social and political thought over the last two centuries. This chapter explores earlier traditions of European thinking, associated with the work of Karl Mannheim, Julien Benda, and Antonio Gramsci, which established the major lines of debate about the relationship of intellectuals to a sense of nationhood and the political traditions of the polities they inhabited. These ideas form the backdrop to the analysis of the drift towards post-national thinking among important groups of intellectual practitioners in the UK towards the end of the twentieth century. Cosmopolitan thinking, the article suggests, has tended to obscure the ideological character of the main lines of political thinking associated with globalization, and ensured that progressive intellectuals tended to abandon the ‘national-popular’ to their counterparts on the political right, with fateful consequences.

Trump-ing Foreign Affairs: Status Threat and Foreign Policy Preferences on the Right

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 737-755 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Marie Blum ◽  
Christopher Sebastian Parker
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Policy Preferences ◽  
The Political ◽  
Threat Model ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Right

President Trump is often at odds with the conservative establishment over a range of issues, not least of which is foreign policy. Yet it remains unclear whether supporting “Trumpism” is commensurate with coherent foreign policy views that are distinct from conventionally conservative positions. We evaluate whether the foreign policy views of Trump’s supporters, both in the voting public and among activists, differ from those of other Republicans. We use the 2016 ANES to examine Republican primary voters and the new 2016 State Convention Delegate Study to assess Republican activists. In doing so, we reveal systematic differences in foreign policy preferences between Trump supporters and more establishment conservatives. We demonstrate that the status-threat model need not be confined to domestic politics. Indeed, it may be extended to explain foreign policy preferences on the political right, that of Trump’s supporters in the present case. In doing so, we also find evidence that status threat may well be the source of fracture in the Republican Party.

Mormon Mobilization in Contemporary U.S. Politics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew R. Miles ◽  
Jason M. Adkins
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Mitt Romney ◽  
Religious Aspects ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Church ◽  
The U.S

In 2012, the Republican Party selected a Mormon, Mitt Romney, as their nominee for U.S. president. After decades of persecution and suspicion, many felt like the LDS Church was finally being accepted as a mainstream religion and an equal player on the national political stage. From a different perspective, the “acceptance” of the LDS Church by the U.S. government and the Republican Party has come at a tremendous cost. Unlike those who joined other religious denominations in America, 19th century converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gave everything they had to the church. The 19th-century LDS Church controlled not just the political, but the economic, social, and religious aspects of its members’ lives. The LDS Church has traded immense power over a few dedicated members for a weaker political voice in the lives of millions more members. From this perspective, the LDS Church has never been more politically weak than they were in the 2012 presidential election. Previous LDS Church presidents endorsed non-Mormon candidates Cleveland, Taft, and Nixon more enthusiastically than President Monson endorsed Mitt Romney—one of his own. In the 20th century, the power of the LDS Church over the lives of its members has waned considerably, significantly hindering the institutional church’s ability to politically mobilize its congregants. Even in Utah, only the most ardent LDS Church members are swayed by the political dictates of LDS Church leaders.

The Borders of Corruption

2016 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca R. Fiske
Keyword(s):  
Legal Order ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Executive Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
Politics And Law ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The U.S

The U.S. has been in a state of exception now for many years, and there appears to be no end in sight. There exists an entire generation who has know life under only this form of government, one that, as Giorgio Agamben explains, takes “a position at the limit between politics and law…an ambiguous, uncertain, borderline fringe, at the intersection of the legal and the political.” In the name of security, the characteristic limiting of constitutional rights, the sanctioning of torture, and the proliferating of NSA surveillance are fast becoming the norm. Recently, much has been written concerning the bio-political consequences of an endless state of exception in which the executive power trumps the judiciary, and a new legal order emerges. This chapter will consider the relationship between corruption and the permanent state of exception.

A Subjective Jurisprudence

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-92
Author(s):  
Edward A. Jr. Purcell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Judicial Power ◽  
Executive Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional Goals ◽  
Policy Goals ◽  
Power Limit ◽  
Political Right ◽  
The U.S

This chapter examines Justice Antonin Scalia’s jurisprudence dealing with the U.S. Constitution’s two structural axes, separation of powers and federalism. It argues that both constitutional principles are general, largely indeterminate, and easily manipulable and that Scalia construed them in light of his own subjective goals and values. He was determined to use them instrumentally to expand executive power, limit Congress, and severely restrict federal judicial power. The chapter argues that Scalia regarded separation of powers as more critical and important than federalism because it was better suited to serve his political and institutional goals and that, in joining the Rehnquist Court’s “federalism revolution” in the early twentieth century, he contradicted the position he had taken in his Senate confirmation hearing about the propriety of the Court giving special deference to Congress on federalism issues. Finally, the chapter shows that before he went on the Court, Scalia had made it clear that he viewed both separation of powers and federalism as principles that could and should be interpreted to serve the practical policy goals of the political right.

Starstruck in the Promised Land

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shalom Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
The United States ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
The Political ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
The Galaxy ◽  
Political Right ◽  
The Relationship

From the days of steamship travel to Palestine to today's evangelical Christian tours of Jesus’s birthplace, the relationship between the United States and the Holy Land has become one of the world’s most consequential international alliances. While the political side of U.S.-Israeli relations has long played out on the world stage, the relationship, as Shalom Goldman shows in this illuminating cultural history, has also played out on actual stages. Telling the stories of the American superstars of pop and high culture who journeyed to Israel to perform, lecture, and rivet fans, Goldman chronicles how the creative class has both expressed and influenced the American relationship with Israel. The galaxy of stars who have made headlines for their trips includes Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, Leonard Bernstein, James Baldwin, Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, Madonna, and Scarlett Johansson. While diverse socially and politically, they all served as prisms for the evolution of U.S.-Israeli relations, as Israel, the darling of the political and cultural Left in the 1950s and early 1960s, turned into the darling of the political Right from the late 1970s. Today, as relations between the two nations have only intensified, stars must consider highly fraught issues, such as cultural boycotts, in planning their itineraries.

Candidate Networks, Citizen Clusters, and Political Expression

2015 ◽  
Vol 659 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leticia Bode ◽  
Alexander Hanna ◽  
Junghwan Yang ◽  
Dhavan V. Shah
Keyword(s):  
Direct Method ◽  
Tea Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Election Cycle ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Left ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Political Right ◽  
A Direct Method ◽  
The U.S

Twitter provides a direct method for political actors to connect with citizens, and for those citizens to organize into online clusters through their use of hashtags (i.e., a word or phrase marked with # to identify an idea or topic and facilitate a search for it). We examine the political alignments and networking of Twitter users, analyzing 9 million tweets produced by more than 23,000 randomly selected followers of candidates for the U.S. House and Senate and governorships in 2010. We find that Twitter users in that election cycle did not align in a simple Right-Left division; rather, five unique clusters emerged within Twitter networks, three of them representing different conservative groupings. Going beyond discourses of fragmentation and polarization, certain clusters engaged in strategic expression such as “retweeting” (i.e., sharing someone else’s tweet with one’s followers) and “hashjacking” (i.e., co-opting the hashtags preferred by political adversaries). We find the Twitter alignments in the political Right were more nuanced than those on the political Left and discuss implications of this behavior in relation to the rise of the Tea Party during the 2010 elections.

scholarly journals The Coca Plant and Bolivian Identity

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Russo
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Global Community ◽  
Indigenous Identity ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Political Battle

The political battle rages between the U.S. government, the U.N. and the Bolivian President, Evo Morales, about his efforts to protect, legalize and preserve the symbol of the Andean indigenous identity: the coca plant. The human rights of indigenous populations are being violated by culturally insensitive governments in compliance with U.S. and U.N. law. The questions posed are: Is coca cocaine? What are the economic benefits of the production of coca and who benefits? What is the relationship between coca and Bolivian identity? What would be the impact in the global community if coca is eradicated permanently?

The Nature of American Constitutionalism

2020 ◽  
pp. 275-296
Author(s):  
Edward A. Jr. Purcell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fundamental Characteristic ◽  
Presidential Power ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The Third ◽  
Warren Court ◽  
Living Nature ◽  
Reagan Era

This chapter examines the third reason for Justice Antonin Scalia’s enduring historical significance for an understanding of American constitutionalism. The chapter argues that he was a man of his times, who adapted “conservative” politics and values to meet what he saw as the abuses of the Warren Court and twentieth-century liberalism. To counter broad assertions of federal legislative and judicial power, he developed doctrines to limit both of those branches, and to counter liberal attempts to limit presidential power after Watergate, he developed doctrines to expand the power of the executive. The chapter criticizes his embrace of positivism and his ideas about both law and the rule of law. It also argues that the nature of “conservatism” has evolved and changed over the decades and that Scalia’s jurisprudence broke with the conservative jurisprudence of the pre-Reagan era. The chapter concludes that Scalia’s jurisprudence and career demonstrate—contrary to his central jurisprudential claims—the third fundamental characteristic of American constitutionalism, its truly “living” nature.

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