As we move into the July 4th weekend, I wanted to make a bid for an appreciation of the liberationist impulse at the heart of the American Revolution and its radical character.
As I explained a few weeks ago, there is a strong argument for the deficiency of the first American Republic, which in this view is the constitutional order created in 1787 and reconstructed through war and constitutional revision in the late 1860s. But the constitution created in 1787 is not synonymous with the American Revolution. Indeed, in critical respects it was in tension with it. Some of the constitution’s greatest opponents viewed it as a betrayal of revolutionary tumult.
The Declaration of Independence is the work of the Continental Congress, a revolutionary and illegal body which managed the process of the disintegration of Britain’s American empire. The document was drafted by a committee made up of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston, with Jefferson, because of knack with words, writing a first draft.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is threading a weird needle.
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Kevin McCarthy overnight threatened to take committee assignments away from any member of his caucus who agreed to serve on the new Jan 6 select investigative committee. That’s the equivalent of the death penalty for a member of a political party. Liz Cheney has just agreed to join the committee at the invitation of Speaker Pelosi.
Pelosi just announced these members in a just released announcement.
A Republican lawmaker from Washington State wears a Star of David to an anti-masking, anti-vaccine event to protest the oppression of COVID dissidents.
CSPAN has its latest historians’ ratings of American Presidents out. There are some interesting conclusions.
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Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) has not publicly disclosed whether she intends to run for reelection after a decade-plus in the Senate.
JoinThe one upsmanship continues. Coming hot on the heels of South Dakota’s national guard deployment to protect the US southern border, Florida is now sending game wardens, presumably to crack down on Mexican lizards trying to run the border.
Tomorrow appears to be the day that The Trump Organization and Trump’s Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg will be charged by the Manhattan District Attorney for various tax crimes.
Josh Kovensky managed to get on the phone with Willis Johnson, the auto-salvage billionaire who is paying for the South Dakota state national guard – yes, a state that almost borders Canada – to go to the border with Mexico to patrol the situation.