Sublime

WHEN RICHARD RUSSELL congratulated him on his victory over Leland Olds, Johnson replied: “I’m young and impressionable, so I just tried to do what the Old Master, the junior senator from Georgia, taught me to do.” And his note to the master included the most potent of code words: “Cloture is where you find it, sir, and this man Olds was an advocate

The greatest defense of the Constitution was a series of essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay under the collective pseudonym Publius and later collected as The Federalist.

Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of association is key in pluralizing the state and balancing the three branches of government, so that neither dominates the others.

He remains the foremost architect of political liberalism.

Pompey has a good claim to be called the first Roman emperor.

Thomas Jefferson wasn’t against expansion any more than George Washington was. It’s just that, like Washington, he envisioned it as a controlled process.

Five months earlier, Johnson had decreed that the Senate would not take up Brownell’s civil rights bill until after the House had passed it, and for months that bill, labelled H.R. 6127, had been blocked by the House Rules Committee. Johnson’s ally Rayburn could have intervened, but he had not done so. Now, suddenly, he did—with an unexpected serie

At Roosevelt’s direction, legislation had been drafted giving the federal government authority to regulate the issuance of securities for the protection of those who bought them. Rayburn, who had seen so many financially unsophisticated farmers invest the little spare cash they had been able to scrape together in worthless stocks or bonds, had foug

Locke’s breakthrough — unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas — was to combine the classical view of natural law with the concept of inalienable rights. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from the Scriptures, as well as from Cicero, to arg