With the 16th anniversary of the beginning of the Afghanistan War fast approaching, President Trump has announced that he has approved a new strategy in Afghanistan, which will require sending an additional 4,000 troops to the area. Having denounced the war while running for president last year, Trump has now decided to make America’s longest war his own with this new plan.
Starting at 9:00 AM (Central) on April 6, 2017, Jeffrey and I live blogged the Gorsuch cloture vote in the Senate. As we expected, Senate Republicans used a technique commonly referred to as the nuclear option to break a Democratic filibuster. For background, here are three posts that Jeffrey and I wrote on this subject:
With Senate Democrats vowing to filibuster Judge Neil Gorsuch's confirmation to the Supreme Court, the Republicans have also vowed to confirm Gorsuch by Friday night (April 7). It seems that for Gorsuch to be confirmed by this Friday, the nuclear option will have to be utilized. But what would be the result?
Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held confirmation hearings for President Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch. At the conclusion of the hearings, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) announced that he would support a filibuster against the Supreme Court nominee. This raised the question whether Republicans would use the so-called nuclear option to eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations to confirm Gorsuch. If so, they would be following in the footsteps of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who in 2013 used the nuclear option to eliminate the filibuster for all nominations other than to the Supreme Court.
My next three posts will discuss theories of federalism. The ultimate goal of these next posts is to establish an understanding of federalism before addressing the American Federal Republic. To accomplish that goal I will examine the federalist theories of Johannes Althusius, Niccolo Machiavelli and Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu. This first post will explore the political ideas of the Johannes Althusius book, Politica.
By now it is well known that the Trump administration has sent an additional 400 Marines to aid rebel groups in taking the city of Raqqa, Syria from ISIS (Daesh). One major problem is that there has not been any authorization from Congress for it.
For my inaugural post I wanted to do something that would be informative and fun. So I settled on writing out some of my political opinions, and then providing some of my favorite political memes. First, my political opinions. Feel free to skip to the memes, though.