The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States 603 US _ (2024) is a landmark ruling with far-reaching implications for the doctrine of Separation of Powers and the scope of presidential immunity. The case centered on former President Donald Trump’s claim that he should be immune from criminal prosecution for actions taken during his presidency.
We have just celebrated the 4th of July, with its parades, speeches, and fireworks announcing our pride, even conceit, that America’s Independence Day is the greatest of all Independence Days, as America is the greatest of all nations, offering its citizens the greatest of all governments. The complexities of that claim – and putting aside its apparent inadequacies, inconsistencies, incoherence, and disappointments – necessarily include a shortlist of what is critical to a view of America’s ascendant greatness. Democracy, prosperity, opportunity, and liberty are on the shortlist, and so is the rule of law.
The spectacle of a mass antizionist and antisemitic “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on Columbia University’s central quad and elsewhere has structural predecessors, to be sure, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, but parallels with mass antisemitism require comparison with earlier historical moments. The Occupy Wall Street movement was notably accompanied by a substantial body of theoretical work, whereas the Columbia occupation is supported by little more than a Manichean view of a world divided between oppressor and oppressed peoples.
Free speech is worse than messy. It is unruly, annoying, chaotic, unsightly, loud and intrusive. It is full of individuals who are uninformed or misinformed, full of statements of exaggeration and hyperbole, many crude and false, and taken together, too often bothersome, irritating, overblown, and endlessly repetitive.
The Oscar nominations are out, and the big winner is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist/mathematician who, in concert with a number of other scientist/mathematicians, worked on a killing device named ‘the atomic bomb’ that caused the death of 200,000 people, almost entirely civilians, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unlike other stories that have captivated Hollywood about 20th century mathematician/scientists – A Beautiful Mind about John Nash, The Theory of Everything about Stephen Hawking, The Man Who Knew Infinity about Srinivasa Ramanujan, or The Imitation Game about Alan Turing –
