The Brazilian Supreme Court delivered a very important decision related to compulsory vaccination to immunize the population against the coronavirus (Direct Actions of Unconstitutionality #6586/6587). During the judgment, Justice Lewandowski stated that “collective health cannot be harmed by people who deliberately refuse to be vaccinated, believing that they will still selfishly benefit from herd immunity”. [...]
Constitutions don’t always matter much in a coup. But the 2008 Constitution matters to Myanmar’s coup of 1 February. The military has created a constitutional fiction about the coup in a thin attempt to claim legality for its actions. I explain the legal disputes that the military claims are the pretext for exercising constitutional emergency [...]
“The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself’ is false and against nature.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man From time immemorial, world politics have been rooted in Realpolitik or power politics. Although such patterns of thinking are normally [...]
The House decision to strip Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) of committee assignments reflects a recent attempt to deal with a perceived failure in the marketplace of ideas. Oliver Wendell Holmes suggested in dissent over 100 years ago (Abrams v. United States (1919)) that the best way to arrive at the truth is by a “free [...]
The Electoral College has to go. Our convoluted system under which voters indirectly select Presidents is needlessly cumbersome, alienates voters, and undermines our democracy. Whatever virtues it may have once had, are a distant memory. We are saddled with the Electoral College because it is in the United States Constitution. Getting rid of it will [...]
Judging by much of the debate over the Senate filibuster rule, you’d think it was some honorable tradition worth keeping — “an elegant weapon of a more civilized age,” as Obi-Wan Kenobi described the lightsaber to Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars. Not so. The filibuster is a dangerous relic with a deeply destructive [...]
Since the attacks on the Capitol on January 6th, calls both for and against expanded domestic terrorism authorities have proliferated. Proponents argue that we have allowed bias and blindness to open us to a steadily expanding domestic terror threat and that we need the capabilities provided in the international context. Opponents have pointed out that [...]
Every Wednesday afternoon for years, Black Lives Matter activists and their partners chanted a simple demand outside the Los Angeles County Hall of Justice: “Jackie Lacey Must Go!” Elected in 2012, District Attorney Lacey presided over the largest prosecutorial office in the United States. These protests and the frustrations that fueled them helped propel George [...]
“The loftier the soul, the more it feels the unity that there is in us all.” – Rabbi Avraham Kook By any reasonable standard, the belligerent nationalism of Realpolitik or power politics makes no sense. After all, without exception, this zero-sum mantra of “everyone-for-himself” clearly undermines every country’s national security. Most perplexing, perhaps, is that [...]
It may be some time before we know everything that President Trump was up to between election day and January 6, 2021, when he urged his followers to go to the Capitol and derail the constitutional process of electoral vote certification. As well, there are likely to be long investigations into the security at the [...]
