George F. Will: Most Recent Articles and Archives

Slipping the constitutional leash

George F. Will — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 01:48:00 GMT

In May 1918, with America embroiled in the First World War, Iowa Gov. William Lloyd Harding dealt a blow against Germany. His Babel Proclamation — that was its title; you cannot make this stuff up — decreed: “Conversation in public places, on trains and over the telephone should be in the English language.” The proscription included church services, funerals and pretty much everything else.

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Scowling face of the state

George F. Will — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 23:17:47 GMT

As soon as the Constitution permitted him to run for Congress, Al Salvi did. In 1986, just 26 and fresh from the University of Illinois law school, he sank $1,000 of his own money, which was most of his money, into his campaign to unseat an incumbent Democratic congressman. Salvi studied for the bar exam during meals at campaign dinners.

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Congress needs to stop subsidies to sugar farmers

George F. Will — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 00:28:00 GMT

The steamboat conveying Andrew Jackson up the Ohio River toward his tumultuous 1829 inauguration had brooms lashed to its bow, symbolizing Old Hickory’s vow to clean up Washington. But sweeping out Washington’s Augean stables, like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, is steady work, so steady it never ends. Neither do the policies that cosset sugar producers.

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Leahy and Paul plan on mandatory sentencing makes sense

George F. Will — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 23:23:00 GMT

Libertarians believe government should have a compelling reason before it restricts an individual’s liberty. Today’s liberals believe almost any reason will do, because liberty is less important than equality, fraternity, fighting obesity and many other aspirations. Now, however, one of the most senior and liberal U.S. senators and one of the most junior and libertarian have a proposal that could slow and even repair some of the fraying of society.

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A mandate that is off the rails

George F. Will — Fri, 31 May 2013 23:22:00 GMT

Texting while driving is dangerous, especially if you are driving a train. A commuter train engineer was texting on Sept. 12, 2008, near Los Angeles, when he missed a stop signal and crashed into a freight train. Twenty-five people died.

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Texas court limits lawyers in pet-related suits

George F. Will — Wed, 29 May 2013 23:23:00 GMT

Lord Byron was, according to one of his legion of lovers, “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” but he also loved dogs, which explains his cameo appearance in a recent Texas Supreme Court opinion. It answered an interesting question in a way that shows how courts can avoid creating opportunities for trial lawyers.

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‘Alice in Wonderland’ coercion

George F. Will — Sat, 25 May 2013 00:48:00 GMT

Barack Obama, vowing to elevate Washington to the level of his fastidiousness, came from Chicago, where the political machine inoculates itself from scandals by the proliferation of them: Many scandals mean merely cursory scrutiny of most. Now, notice the scant attention being given to an assault on civil liberties by the misconceived Education Department’s misnamed Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

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Appeals court limits labor board’s lawlessness

George F. Will — Wed, 22 May 2013 23:47:19 GMT

Early in an opinion issued recently by a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Judge A. Raymond Randolphsaid: “Although the parties have not raised it, one issue needs to be resolved before we turn to the merits of the case.” The issue he raised but could not resolve — that is up to the Supreme Court — illuminates the Obama administration’s George Wallace-like lawlessness. It also demonstrates the judiciary’s duty to restrain presidents who forget the oath they swear to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.”

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Obama’s tapped-out trust

George F. Will — Thu, 16 May 2013 20:21:22 GMT

Leaving aside the seriousness of lawlessness, and the corruption of our civic culture by the professionally pious, this past week has been amusing. There was the spectacle of advocates of an ever-larger regulatory government expressing shock about such government’s large capacity for misbehavior. And, entertainingly, the answer to the question “Will Barack Obama’s scandals derail his second-term agenda?” was a question: What agenda?

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In IRS scandal, echoes of Watergate

George F. Will — Mon, 13 May 2013 18:43:47 GMT

“He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavored to . . . cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.”

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On immigration, Charles Dickens matters

George F. Will — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:53:00 GMT

Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” is a gooey confection of seasonal sentiment. It also is an economic manifesto that Dickens hoped would hit with “twenty thousand times the force” of a political tract. It concerned a 19th-century debate that is pertinent to today’s argument about immigration.

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Obama’s false hopes for 2014 — and his legacy

George F. Will — Thu, 09 May 2013 01:05:02 GMT

Thirty-one months ago Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell affronted the media and other custodians of propriety by saying something common-sensical. On Oct. 23, 2010, he said: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” He meant that America needed conservative change from the statist course of Obama’s presidency (the stimulus, Obamacare, etc.), therefore America needed a president who would not veto such change.

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Muzzling free speech about taxes

George F. Will — Sun, 05 May 2013 04:00:00 GMT

“The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.”

— James Madison, Federalist 48

But under today’s regulatory state, which Madison could hardly have imagined, the legislature, although still a source of much mischief, is not the principal threat to liberty. Suppose a federal executive department flagrantly abused its regulatory powers for the unmistakable purpose of suppressing truthful speech that annoys the government. If you assume the Supreme Court would rectify this assault on the First Amendment’s core protection, you would be mistaken.

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Obama is right on Syria

George F. Will — Thu, 02 May 2013 04:00:00 GMT

People who talk incessantly often talk imprecisely, and Barack Obama, who is as loquacious as he is impressed with his verbal dexterity, has talked himself into a corner concerning Syria and chemical weapons. This is condign punishment for his rhetorical carelessness, but the nation’s credibility, not just his, will suffer. His policy is better than his description of it, and his description is convoluted because he lacks the courage of his sensible conviction that entanglement in Syria would be unwise.

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Courts and Congress give Obama adult supervision

George F. Will — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), chairman of the Financial Services Committee, has told Richard Cordray not to bother. This is part of the recent evidence that government is getting some adult supervision.

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Korematsu and the dangers of waiving constitutional rights

George F. Will — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 23:52:44 GMT

Two of the three most infamous Supreme Court decisions were erased by events. The Civil War and postwar constitutional amendments effectively overturned Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which held that blacks could never have rights that whites must respect. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld legally enforced segregation, was undone by court decisions and legislation.

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Justin Amash, one to watch from Michigan

George F. Will — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 01:01:34 GMT

America’s most interesting development since November is the Republican Party becoming more interesting. Consider the congressman from Grand Rapids, Mich., who occupies the seat once held by Gerald Ford, embodiment of vanilla Republicanism. Justin Amash, 33, may seek the Senate seat being vacated by six-term Democrat Carl Levin, who was elected in 1978, two years before Amash was born.

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What's behind the funding of the welfare state

George F. Will — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:18:44 GMT

The regulatory, administrative state, which progressives champion, is generally a servant of the strong, for two reasons. It responds to financially powerful and politically sophisticated factions. And it encourages rent-seekers to exploit opportunities for concentrated benefits and dispersed costs (e.g., agriculture subsidies confer sums on large agribusinesses by imposing small costs on 316 million Americans).

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‘Central Park Five’: Recalling a gross injustice

George F. Will — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:53:14 GMT

From Tom Paine’s “Common Sense” to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” American history is replete with examples of printed words accelerating social justice. Still, from Mathew Brady’s 1862 photo exhibit of “The Dead of Antietam” to the televised fire hoses and police dogs in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 to the cameras that brought Vietnam into American living rooms, graphic journalism has exercised unique power to open minds and hence shape history. It may do so Tuesday evening when PBS broadcasts “The Central Park Five,” a meticulous narrative of a gross miscarriage of justice.

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Margaret Thatcher’s vigorous virtues

George F. Will — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:21:21 GMT

She had the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe. So said Francois Mitterrand, the last serious socialist to lead a major European nation, speaking of Margaret Thatcher, who helped bury socialism as a doctrine of governance.

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Johns Hopkins’s and Planned Parenthood’s troubling extremism

George F. Will — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 23:58:00 GMT

We know Johns Hopkins University is devoted to diversity, because it says so. Its “Diversity and Inclusion Statement,” a classic of the genre, says the university is “committed to sharing values of diversity and inclusion . . . by recruiting and retaining a diverse group of students.” Hopkins has an Office of Institutional Equity and a “Diversity Leadership Council” that defines “inclusion” as “active, thoughtful and ongoing engagement with each other.” Unless you are a member of Voice for Life (VFL), an antiabortion group.

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Schools push a curriculum of propaganda

George F. Will — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:21:46 GMT

The real vocation of some people entrusted with delivering primary and secondary education is to validate this proposition: The three R’s — formerly reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic — now are racism, reproduction and recycling. Especially racism. Consider Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction. It evidently considers “instruction” synonymous with “propaganda,” which in the patois of progressivism is called “consciousness-raising.”

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A bipartisan abdication

George F. Will — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 23:06:55 GMT

“President Obama has arguably established the authority of the president to intervene militarily virtually anywhere without the consent or the approval of Congress, at his own discretion and for as long as he wishes.”

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The Republican ‘reformation’

George F. Will — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 00:11:07 GMT

Because of the grotesquely swollen place the presidency now occupies in the nation’s governance and consciousness, we are never not preoccupied with presidential campaigning. The Constitution’s Framers would be appalled.

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DOMA is an abuse of federalism

George F. Will — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 23:48:47 GMT

“[U]nder the Constitution, the regulation and control of marital and family relationships are reserved to the States.”

— U.S. Supreme Court,

Sherrer v. Sherrer (1948)

The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is an exception to the rule that a law’s title is as uninformative about the law’s purpose as the titles of Marx Brothers movies (“Duck Soup,” “Horse Feathers,” “Animal Crackers”) are about those movies’ contents. DOMA’s purpose is precisely what its title says. Which is why many conservatives and liberals should be uneasy Wednesday when the Supreme Court hears arguments about its constitutionality.

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