April 17, 2025

WE ARE ALL GORSUCHIAN:

Make Congress Great Again: We need to unite around our Constitution, not be divided by party politics. (Mickey Edwards, Apr 17, 2025, American Purpose)


The real danger of this moment is not about any individual policy but the accretion of unchecked power in the hands of a single man. The essence of American constitutional government is twofold: the balance of powers between the federal government and the states; and the division of federal powers between equal and competitive branches, of which the greatest power—because it is most representative of the will of the people—rests in the people’s Congress. This power structure rests on both norms of behavior and a framework of institutions designed to ensure a continuing commitment to the nation’s foundational principles, including liberty, justice, security, and equality—all of which are currently under attack.

Breaching of due process (searches without warrants, arrests without charges, criminalization of speech, the elimination of Congress as a meaningful participant in government decisions) eliminates many of the core freedoms that lured our parents and grandparents to come to America, often at high risk—to be part of this land of promise, this land that men and women have died to protect on battlefields from Bunker Hill to Berlin.

Here is how we think outside the box.

First, recognize that the courts alone cannot stop the flood of constitutional breaches flowing from the White House: the judicial process is slow and limited in its powers. The one force equal to that of the presidency is the Congress of the United States. But both parties are executive-centric and focus their political strategies primarily on the election of a president who mirrors their own beliefs and goals. Members of both parties have long records of acquiescing to presidents of their own party and stretching the limits of constitutional permissibility to achieve a desired political goal. In the end, it is one party—its agenda, and its desire for political dominance—that supersedes the constitutional separation of powers that was designed to protect against exactly the kind of dictatorial threat we now face.

The primary focus now needs to be on reasserting Congress’s Article One role as maker of laws, decider of policies, distributor of funds, designer of taxation—and ensuring the election to Congress of men and women who recognize their constitutional obligations to check the ambitions of would-be kings.

Actually, that is the box.

THE ANGLOSPHERIC DIFFERENCE:

Dylan’s gospel songs make a fitting soundtrack to Holy Week (Kenneth Craycraft, April 15, 2025,, Our Sunday Visitor)


The title track of “Slow Train Coming” is a lyrical indictment of the moral and social pathology of American political life. It describes both various aspects of moral decadence and corruption, and the false gods and solutions invoked to address it. “Sometimes I feel so low-down and disgusted,” the narrator begins the song, setting the tone for a catalogue of various social and political maladies. The source of his disgust, however, is less the particular ills he describes than the assertion that we can save ourselves by our own effort. He asks of his companions, “Are they lost or are they found? / Have they counted the cost it’ll take to bring down / All their earthly principles they’re gonna have to abandon?”

Many people who hailed Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday fundamentally misunderstood the nature of his kingdom. Expecting a violent insurrection against imperial Roman rule, many welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem only as a political liberator. He was greeted not as the eternal savior, but rather as a political revolutionary. They reduced Jesus’ role to a this-worldly political hero who had come to replace one kind of coercive earthly politics with another. They sought a human solution to a divine problem.

CAIN ALWAYS BEATS ABEL:

The Fighting Temeraire: Why JMW Turner’s greatest painting is so misunderstood (Matt Wilson, 4/17/25, BBC)

In Constable’s iconic 1821 painting The Hay Wain, an archaic cart rolls gently away from the viewer into a bucolic English landscape. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire gives us the exact opposite, putting the spectator on a collision course with the unstoppable force of industry.


This reflected contemporary reality. At the time The Fighting Temeraire was painted, the Royal Navy was increasingly using steamboats for towing bigger vessels. Moves were already afoot to replace its sail-powered fleet with new steam frigates. But the demise of the Temeraire didn’t reflect a routine upgrade in armaments. This was a one-of-a-kind revolution in seafaring. Sailors around the world had relied on wind-and-sail or oar-propulsion for thousands of years. Now, steam engines could allow seafarers to overcome the vagaries of gusts, shallows and tidal patterns – to supersede nature itself. The future was steam-powered, but how this was going to affect the future of transport, trade and naval combat was still anybody’s guess in the 1830s. What Turner did know was that as far back as Homer’s Odyssey, sailing functioned as a profound symbol of the life journey in art and literature. And so, by hitching the old and the new so unforgettably in his painting, he shows us a compelling metamorphosis – the beginning of a new, post-industrial lifecycle in human history.

Turner was awake to the responsibility of artists in times of irreversible historical change. For him, the age-old skill of depicting wooden sailing ships, their rigging, sails and ornately carved figureheads was becoming obsolete. The challenge for every artist (and every member of society) in the modern age, he realised, was to discover beauty and significance in newness, and in artefacts that had not previously been depicted in art, like iron funnels, pistons, valves, and paddle wheels. In The Fighting Temeraire, his rise to this challenge is captured in a very memorable and uncompromising symbol.