The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Burying Lindsey Graham Won’t Be Easy Karen Kwiatkowski Photo by Simone Pellegrini on Unsplash Long ago, great Senators existed. Resolute and accountable, they represented their governors and state legislatures and asserted those interests in Washington. They aspired to conduct themselves as statesmen; we the people expected statesmanship. We the people also hoped they would be better than we could be, while we agreed with the fundamental truth of Colonel Ludlow in Legends of the Fall . No longer. A regal Senate with a bold populist House of Representatives do not exist. What we call Senate and House do not make federal law, nor do they perform the small number of defined duties described in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. The making of law has become the work of lobbyists and the regulatory bureaucracy, while other Constitutional duties have become entirely too frightening to even consider, much less perform. The hydra-headed executive branch has become the permanen...

  The Assisted Suicide of the Nation Thoughts from the Shire Yes I know I am prone to exaggeration, that’s the fisherman in me. Yet the more I look around, not at one scandal, one policy, one migration wave, one economic betrayal, or one grotesque little episode of bureaucratic lunacy, but at the whole direction of travel that the UK/Ireland/Europe are on, the phrase begins to look less like exaggeration. The Assisted Suicide of the Nation Nations can die in many ways. They can be invaded, bankrupted, starved, conquered, corrupted, or simply exhausted by luxury, decadence and father time. But there is another kind of national death, stranger, and even more humiliating than all of the above: the death of a nation persuaded to cooperate in its own disappearance. Not beaten in a heroic last stand, not crushed beneath the boot of some foreign invader, but coaxed, shamed, bribed, distracted, indebted, censored, managed, and re-educated into believing that its own survival itself is vulg...