Free Republic

Ladies and Gentlemen. This will be the biggest political matchup since the fall of Rome:In the red corner, weighing in at over 2,400 years old, with a record of more than 320 KOs, 0 TKOs, 0 split decisions, and 0 defeats, we have the Cycle of Civilization, the Destroyer of Republics, the Grim Reaper of Democracy, the undisputed champion of all political theory: Anacyclosis.In the blue corner, weighing in at over 230 years old, 27 amendments, and 1 civil war, we have the oldest national written constitution in the world, ranking in legal significance alongside Hammurabi’s Code, the Twelve Tables,...

Retired federal judge Janice Rogers Brown warned Tuesday about the perils of the mob that views politics as all important and ignores objective truth. President Donald Trump has had to contend with a fired-up “resistance” of political opposition that will not recognize his presidency as legitimate, Brown suggested. “Prior to the 2016 election, America had a cherished tradition of peacefully transferring power. No riots in the streets. No military coups. George Washington himself set the standard,” Brown said. “However, we now know elections have consequences only when the correct candidate is elected.” Brown, who served on the U.S. Court of...

There is no shortage of issues upon which Republicans and Democrats can respectfully disagree. We’re silly people sometimes though, and respect seems to come at quite a cost. There are a handful of issues, however, on which Democrats are so profoundly and dangerously wrong that I find myself incapable of empathy. Beto O’Rourke, Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Cory Booker, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and more have come out for eliminating the Electoral College. This is an unequivocal deal-breaker for me. It seems one of the only Democrats with any sense is the anti-establishment progressive, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who...

In the shallow world of modernity, we throw around a word like “democracy” as a stand-in for “things that I like.” Many in popular culture and elite institutions promote democracy as a cure for all that ails us—an unquestioned and unqualified blessing. Still others turn on a dime and hope for its demise as soon as it produces outcomes they don’t like. While democracy often plays a good and necessary role in a self-governing society, we have lost the healthy skepticism of its worst excesses that the Founding Fathers understood when they established the governing institutions of the United States....

The aftermath of the September 16, 1920 Wall Street bombing. Photo: Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper PhotographDescriptions of the event on Wall Street might seem eerily familiar. “It was a crush out of a blue sky—an unexpected, death-dealing bolt,” one witness observed, “which in a twinkling turned into a shambles the busiest corner of America’s financial center and sent scurrying to places of shelter hundreds of wounded, dumb-stricken, white-faced men and women—fleeing from an unknown danger.… Looking down Wall Street later I could see arising from the vicinity of the subtreasury building and the J.P....

Abstract: "The Irony of Populism: The Republican Shift and the Inevitability of American Aristocracy" analyzes the shift in the role of the Supreme Court following the movement towards a democratic Senate which culminated in the Seventeenth Amendment. The Supreme Court's shift is presented as the inevitable result of the system of mixed government that underlies the constitutional order, which orders American Government into democratic, aristocratic, and monarchical parts. While in the original conception of the constitution the Senate was the aristocratic part, the Senate would become part of the democratic part with the Seventeenth Amendment and prior procedural changes. Into...