Mr. David Dudley Field, on behalf of Lamdin P. Milligan, argues, regarding the prerogative power of the president, that:

The oath of office cannot be considered as a grant of power.  Its effect is merely to superadd a religious sanction to what would otherwise be his official duty, and to bind his conscience against any attempt to usurp power or overthrow the Constitution (Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866)).

Civil Disobedience

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

-Thoreau, Henry David.  Walden and Civil Disobedience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company Riverside Editions, 1960), pg. 240.

"Clarity, Simplicity, Brevity, and Humanity"

Please read "Writing English as a Second Language" by William Zinsser at AmericanScholar.org.

Zinsser writes,

So what is good English—the language we’re here today to wrestle with? It’s not as musical as Spanish, or Italian, or French, or as ornamental as Arabic, or as vibrant as some of your native languages. But I’m hopelessly in love with English because it’s plain and it’s strong. It has a huge vocabulary of words that have precise shades of meaning; there’s no subject, however technical or complex, that can’t be made clear to any reader in good English—if it’s used right. Unfortunately, there are many ways of using it wrong. Those are the damaging habits I want to warn you about today.

In another national survey (Internet) just after the election itself, Sniderman and Stiglitz (2008) thoroughly explore racial prejudice and 2008 vote choice. They find that American voters do not hesitate “to make frankly derogatory comments about blacks.” For example, about one out of five whites surveyed described “most blacks” as “violent”; essentially the same fraction also described them as “boastful”; almost one out of three said they were “complaining.” Overall, the investigators ranked 10% of respondents as high scorers on a prejudice index (built from five items). Among Republicans, variation in this prejudice index does not significantly relate to declared votes for Obama. However, among Democrats, the effect is significant and strong; for those in the bottom third on the prejudice index, 95% voted Obama; but for those in the top third the percent drops to 62, for a difference of minus 33 points. This large defection appears partially offset by voters who view blacks with “esteem.” Considering those in the bottom third on this esteem index, 77% voted Obama; but for those in the top third the percentage rises to 96, for a difference of +19 points. (Relatedly, Craemer et al. [2009] report that some white voters may have come to a psychological closeness to Obama, enabling them to vote for him.)

Using these above differences, as reported in Sniderman and Stiglitz (2008), we go on to take the positive esteem number (+19) from the negative prejudice number (−33), implying a 14-point loss among Democrats. While that calculation suggests to us a substantial racial cost, translation of that number into a precise vote estimate remains uncertain, and the authors themselves do not offer any such calculation. However, that task is carried out by Aistrup, Kisangani, and Piri (2009) in their analysis of a pre-convention survey from the South. In a logistic regression model, with the dependent variable vote intention for McCain or Obama, and under extensive controls (e.g., ideology, party identification, SES), they find racial resentment has a strong impact. For example, among Democrats, when the race resentment index shifts upward one standard deviation, the probability of a McCain vote increases from about 40% to 58%. Unfortunately for our purposes, this survey confines itself to one part of the country.

-Lewis-Beck, Michael S, Charles Tien, and Richard Nadeau.  "Obama's Missed Landslide: A Racial Cost?" in PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 43. No. 1 (published online January 15, 2010).

Having had the filibuster wielded against them so effectively in the 103rd Congress, Democrats, now in the minority, made full use of their prerogatives under Senate rules; major legislation frequently encountered extended debate-related problems. The minority Democrats because increasingly adept at using extended debate and the Senate’s loose amending rules in combination to get their issues onto the Senate agenda. By threatening or actually offering their bills as often non-germane amendments to whatever legislation the majority leader brought to the floor and using extended debate to block a quick end to debate, Democrats forced Republicans to consider a number of issues they would rather have avoided–most prominently the minimum wage, tobacco taxes, campaign finance reform, and managed care (Sinclair, Unorthodox Lawmaking, 107)

Sinclair, Barbara.  Unorthodox Lawmaking: New Legislative Processes in the U.S. Congress (CQ Press: Washington, D.C.), 2000. 

Manual Labor

I am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one, but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to.  At a pitch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth rate farm hand.  But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-minter; the work would kill me in a few weeks (Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 32-33).

Four Texts on Socrates

If Socrates was right in holding that the desire for gain, for distinction, and for knowledge are inherent in human nature, then a Marxist regime will necessarily be at constant war with the most powerful as well as the most noble propensities of man.

-Four Texts on Socrates, ed. Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pg. 11.

Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers

Western institutional theorists have concerned themselves with the problem of ensuring that the exercise of government power, which is essential to the realization of the values of their societies, should be controlled in order that it should not itself be destructive of the values it was intended to promote.  The great theme of the advocates of constitutionalism, in contrast either to theorists of utopianism, or of absolutism, of the right or of the left, has been the frank acknowledgement of the role of government in society, linked with the determination to bring that government under control and to place limits on the exercise of its power

Ville, M. J. C., Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (Oxford, Clarendon Press: 1967), pg. 1.

Right to Obtain Happiness

CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION

ARTICLE 1 DECLARATION OF RIGHTS

SECTION 1. All people are by nature free and independent and have

inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and

liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing

and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.

Wonders abound.

"Believe It or Not"

I am not—honestly, I am not—simply being dismissive here. The utter inconsequentiality of contemporary atheism is a social and spiritual catastrophe. Something splendid and irreplaceable has taken leave of our culture—some great moral and intellectual capacity that once inspired the more heroic expressions of belief and unbelief alike. Skepticism and atheism are, at least in their highest manifestations, noble, precious, and even necessary traditions, and even the most fervent of believers should acknowledge that both are often inspired by a profound moral alarm at evil and suffering, at the corruption of religious institutions, at psychological terrorism, at injustices either prompted or abetted by religious doctrines, at arid dogmatisms and inane fideisms, and at worldly power wielded in the name of otherworldly goods. In the best kinds
of unbelief, there is something of the moral grandeur of the prophets—a deep and admirable abhorrence of those vicious idolatries that enslave minds and justify our worst cruelties.

But a true skeptic is also someone who understands that an attitude of critical suspicion is quite different from the glib abandonment of one vision of absolute truth for another—say, fundamentalist Christianity for fundamentalist materialism or something vaguely and inaccurately called “humanism...”

A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.

-"Believe It or Not" in First Things by David B. Hart.