7/1/2024

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal starts off with Daniel DiSalvo’s review of “Keeping the Republic: A Defense of American Constitutionalism,” a new book by scholars Dennis Hale and Marc Landy. DiSalvo writes that Hale and Landy refute arguments from critics who claim the Constitution is holding America back and needs to be jettisoned as nation's our governing charter. “The authors weave together political theory, institutional analysis, and policy history to offer a compelling case for preserving America’s constitutional democracy and republican ethos,” DiSalvo writes. One of the most important points Hale and Landy bring up is that none of the present-day arguments against the Constitution are new: all have their genesis in various detractors of the Constitution throughout American history. DiSalvo also contends that though we face serious constitutional problems today, Hale and Landy rightly “demonstrate that revitalizing the Framers’ wisdom remains a restorative exercise.” He concludes, “‘Keeping the Republic’ serves as a timely reminder that the Framers’ guiding principles of limited government, distributed sovereignty, and fundamental rights persist as invaluable safeguards to liberty—even amid the sound and fury of modernity.”

At Law & Liberty, Richard Samuelson looks at the important question of how America can survive corrupt presidents. He notes that a lack of virtue in private can have grave public consequences: “Above all else, though, an unvirtuous president would not care to make a good-faith effort to distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable uses of executive discretion.” Samuelson argues that one way the Constitution connects presidential ambition to the public good is that it binds the president to its strictures. In other words, it points the president toward working under the rule of law. But, on the other hand, Samuelson notes that “having a president who is regularly subject to personal lawsuits for actions that are legally questionable is a very real problem.” He points to John Adams, who noted that, under this condition, “every president will seem corrupt, even if he is, in fact, much better than average.” Ultimately, these crucial questions the American Founders wrestled with regarding the charachter of the republican executive have not gone away.