The census?! Who cares? Boring! Well, if you think you know all about the census, you haven’t been paying attention. Enshrining this particular political tool in our Constitution marked a turning point in world history. Previously, censuses had been used to tax, confiscate property, or conscript male youth into military service. The visionary genius of our Founders lay in making this tool of government into a tool of political empowerment for the governed over their government. The plan was to count every person living in the newly created United States of America, and to use that count to determine representation in the Congress. Right now, it’s being manipulated to do just the opposite. But unlike the Postal Service, another fundamental American institution under siege, it isn’t garnering public support, although this is the first time the census has been conducted since the rise of social media, and the first time...
For the first time, a spacecraft has sent back pictures of the sky from so far away that some stars appear to be in different positions than we would see them from Earth. More than 4 billion miles from home and speeding toward interstellar space, NASA's New Horizons has traveled so far that it now has a unique view of the nearest stars, but it looks like an alien sky. The difference is due to parallax, the same effect you see if you hold up a finger and close one eye, then the other. It’s a shift in perspective, caused by New Horizons’ great distance from Earth. I love the concept of parallax. My latest novel is named for it. A shift in perspective changes . . . everything. But once you've dared experience it you might mourn the time you lost believing your previous perspective was the only one....
I became so incandescent yet inarticulate with rage on hearing Trump say flat-out, whether from arrogance or ignorance or both, that of course he would accept foreign interference in U.S. elections if that would permit him to retain power, that rather than stammer any comment in tongue-tied fury I thought it preferable to rely on my betters. Here are two startlingly applicable examples of my betters holding forth with their highly relevant views. The first is George Washington. The Framers were particularly and justifiably worried about foreign intervention into the fledgling nation, so that was not only the subject of the now-famous-because-so-violated-by-Trump Emoluments Clause in the Constitution but it also took up a substantial proportion of Washington’s great Farewell Address. Here is a small excerpt: As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, . . . attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do...
This week I want to focus on a small story that got insufficient coverage in the Trump glut of news, since it merely is about two of the most important founding principals of our Republic: freedom of speech and freedom of religion. You may have heard that on April 16, Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan announced that Fr. Patrick Conroy, a Jesuit priest and the House chaplain since 2011, would be stepping down. A day later, it turned out that Conroy was not leaving voluntarily but that the Speaker's chief of staff had told him to resign or be fired. Conroy duly tendered his letter of resignation, to take effect on May 24. But then in strode Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader and former Speaker herself, to Conroy's defense. Pelosi takes her Catholicism as seriously as her politics—yet she once endured a six-year estrangement from her mother, with...
